Let me now turn to another and still more gruesome form of torture. It is fitting, perhaps, that the twin tyrannies of Flogging and Vivisection should be linked together as Lawson Tait saw them, for they are indeed kindred expressions of one barbarous spirit. I use, for the sake of brevity and convenience, the customary term “vivisection,” though there is force in the objection raised against it by certain humanitarian writers, that the Latin word somewhat conceals the vileness of the practice, and though the phrase suggested by Mr. Howard Williams, “experimental torture,” is more strictly appropriate to the nameless thing for which a name has to be found. Here, at any rate, in the twentieth century of our barbarism, is torture in its most naked form--the rack, not indeed “without any of its intellectual reasons,” as was said of the lash, but torture as surely as the boot and the thumbscrew were torture. As for the intellectual reasons alleged in excuse of the practice, it was pointed out in _Animals’ Rights_ that before holding vivisection justified on the strength of its utility, a wise man will take into consideration the other, the _moral_ side of the question, “the hideous injustice of torturing a sentient animal, and the wrong thereby done to the humane sense of the community.” This contention was quoted and corroborated in an unexpected quarter, viz. in a book published in 1901 by a Russian doctor, V. Veresaeff,[33] who, though himself justifying vivisection, did not conceal his misgivings as to the ethical aspect of the practice. “The question,” he said, in reference to the passage in _Animals’ Rights_, “is plainly put, and there can be no room for any equivocation. I repeat that we ought not to ridicule the pretensions of the anti-vivisectionists--the sufferings of animals are truly horrible; and sympathy with them is not sentimentality.” In view of that admission, I will waste no words in discussing the pretence that anæsthetics have relieved the vivisected animals of their “truly horrible” sufferings. It is not so, even in this country, where the legal restrictions are a farce; and if it were so here, the rest of the world would be open to experimentation unlicensed and unlimited.