I do not think he ever addressed a public, or even private, meeting in his life, and that may have left the unlettered world unaware of his deep loathing of the cruelties of the laboratories; but he was one of the earliest Englishmen of unquestioned distinction to join the anti-vivisection movement and to accept the office of Vice-President of our Society. I venture to think that in aftertimes his sanguine advocacy in this great cause will not be the least of his claims to the gratitude of his fellow men. CHAPTER V: LORD COLERIDGE CHIEF JUSTICE OF ENGLAND VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY [Picture: Lord Coleridge, Chief Justice of England] I hope that my inclusion of my father in these articles on the first supporters of the anti-vivisection movement will not be thought unbecoming. I see no reason why I should not testify in these pages to the unswerving adhesion he brought to the cause of humaneness both towards men and women as well as towards animals, and the wise counsel he afforded to the pioneers of the fight against vivisection. It is perhaps now long forgotten that he initiated, drafted and carried through the House of Commons when he sat in that assembly as member for Exeter a Bill emancipating married women from the cruel conditions of servitude whereby their own earnings could legally be taken from them by their husbands. This was the first of a series of wide-minded Acts of Parliament which established the position of women as no longer the mere chattels of their male relatives. Cruelty to animals of any kind roused in him a deep and abiding anger: he never allowed a bearing rein to be inflicted upon his horses either in London or the country, nor was there ever a tied-up dog in his stables. Lord Coleridge assisted in the efforts to get the Anti-Vivisection Bill of 1876 passed without the wrecking amendments that were at the last minute added to it; after the Bill was passed in its mutilated state Miss Cobbe with a not unnatural impatience wrote to him and others saying that "the supporters of vivisection having refused to accept a reasonable compromise or to permit any line to be drawn between morally justifiable painless experiments and those which are heinously cruel and involve the torture of the most sensitive animals" she intended to endeavour to induce the Society "to condemn the practice altogether as inseparably bound up with criminal abuses"; and henceforth to adopt "the principle of uncompromising hostility to vivisection," and she asked him to let her know whether he would give his support to her proposals. His reply was what might have been expected from one who could not permit his irritation at the fate of the Bill to influence his parliamentary attitude.