C- ^ 
 
 •Research IDefence Society 
 
 (Founded January 27th, 1908) 
 
 EVIDENCE OF 
 
 Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton 
 
 BEFORE THE 
 
 Royal Commission on Vivisection 
 
 Wednesday, July 24th, 1807 
 
 ONE SHILLING NET 
 
 ISSUED BY 
 
 THE RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 21 LADBROKE SQUARE, LONDON, W. 
 
vu 
 
 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY. 
 
 This Society was founded in January, 1908, to make known 
 the facts as to experiments on animals in this country; the 
 immense importance to the welfare of mankind of such experi- 
 ments; and the great saving of human and animal life and 
 health already due to them. 
 
 President. 
 The Rt. Hon. Lord Lamington, G.C.M.G., G.C.I.E. 
 
 Hon. Treasurer— F. M. Sandwith, M.D., F.R.C.P., 31 Cavendish 
 Square, W. 
 
 Hon. Secretary — Stephen Paget, F.R.C.S., 21 Ladbroke Square, W. 
 
 Assistant Secretary — Miss D. Burgiss-Brown. 
 
 Auditors — Messrs. Barton, Mayhus & Co., Alderman's House, Bishops- 
 gate Without, E.C. 
 
 Bankers — Messrs. Coutts & Co., 440 Strand, W.C. 
 
 The Research Defence Society is not an association of men of 
 science or of medical men only. Its membership is drawn from 
 all departments of public life, and includes representatives of 
 every class of educated Englishmen and Englishwomen, many of 
 whom have taken an active part in the prevention of cruelty to 
 animals. This fact is in itself a remarkable protest against the 
 attacks which have been made on those researches which the 
 Society defends. 
 
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 expenses, but larger subscriptions and donations will be thank- 
 fully received. Undergraduates and students of medicine are 
 eligible for membership on payment of half-a-crown. There are 
 also associates who pay one shilling. 
 
 The Society publishes short quarterly reports, the subscription 
 for these reports is one shilling annually. 
 
 All members receive all the Society's publications. Associates 
 receive some of these publications. 
 
 The Annual General Meeting of the Society is held in London 
 in June. 
 
 All communications should be addressed, in the first instance, 
 
 to the Hon. Secretary, Research Defence Society, 21 
 Ladbroke Square, London, W. 
 
Royal Commission on Vivisection. 
 
 EVIDENCE OF 
 LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 
 
 ( Wednesday, 2Uh July, 1907). 
 
 The Rio-ht Hon. Sir John Fletcher Moulton, 
 called in ; and examined. 
 
 12691. [Chairman.) You are a Member of the 
 Privy Council, a Fellow of" the Royal Society, and a 
 Lord Justice of Appeal ? — I am. 
 
 12692. For many years you have taken an interest 
 in the progress of curative science ? — Yes, I have 
 taken a very keen interest in it both from the scientific 
 side and also from what is called the ethical side. 
 Having been a politician, and realising that the public 
 take to themselves the right and the duty of controlling 
 everything that goes on in the kingdom, I have 
 realised for many years that the question which this 
 Commission is directed to consider would come on in 
 some form or other in the way of an enquiry ; that, 
 in other words, the justification for scientific research 
 in connection with curative science would be examined. 
 As I have in many other things observed, the advance 
 
2 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 of science takes the workers in science more and more 
 beyond the ken of the ordinary public, and their work 
 grows to be a little understood, and much misunder- 
 stood ; and I have felt that, as in many other cases, 
 the need would come for interpreters between those 
 who are carrying on scientific research and the public, 
 in order to explain and justify their work. The con- 
 sequence is that I have considered the subject very 
 much from the very point of view from which this 
 Commission has to consider it. I have come, many 
 years ago, to a very deep conviction upon it, and 
 therefore I am glad to have the opportunity of putting 
 before this Commission the reason for the faith that 
 is in me. 
 
 12693. You say you have taken great interest in 
 the subject for a long time, and I believe you have 
 very closely watched what has been going on with 
 reference to it on both sides ? — Yes, I have watched it 
 very closely on both sides. Of course, you quite 
 understand that so far as the scientific side is concerned, 
 though I am qualified to judge of the scientific results 
 and of the evidence for them, I am as an outsider 
 immeasurably less qualified to speak with authority on 
 the scientific points themselves than are some of those 
 whom you have had before you ; but, on the 
 -other hand, I think that with regard to the scientific 
 methods, and with regard to the bearing and meaning 
 of the results upon the subject of this Commission, 
 I am, as a close observer from outside 
 
 12694. A highly qualified observer, I may say for 
 you ? — I am qualified to give some assistance to the 
 Commission. 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 3 
 
 12695. In your long experience at the Bar, before 
 you went on to the Bench, you were specially in- 
 terested and employed in matters that dealt with 
 questions of scientific investigations of all kinds ? — 
 Yes ; I have had, I think, unrivalled experience in 
 being what I have described as an interpreter between 
 those who are doing the pioneer work in science and 
 the people who have to judge of the results of their 
 work ; and it is, perhaps, more from that standpoint 
 than from any other that I desired to put my views 
 before the Commission with regard to this question. 
 
 12696. In your view, I understand, the real issue 
 raised by the agitation against experiments on animals 
 is, whether or not curative science shall be studied 
 experimentally or whether it shall become a purely 
 observational science ? — Yes. I think that in the 
 controversy a great deal has been lost by looking at 
 it in too narrow a light. It is not a question of 
 vivisection — that is to say, the performing of cutting 
 experiments on living animals ; that is a mere nick- 
 name, a mere catch phrase, which was originally 
 invented, I have not the slightest doubt, for purposes 
 of prejudice. I am not saying that with a desire to 
 find fault. One always likes to get a name which 
 expresses one's own point of view without further 
 explanation ; but it is a most imperfect representative 
 of the real issue. The real issue is whether curative 
 science is to be an observational science or whether it 
 is to be an experimental science, and, as I shall hope 
 to show this Commission, the importance of the 
 decision of that issue is impossible to be exaggerated. 
 But I shall deal with that a little later on, after I have 
 
4 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 dealt shortly with the grounds of the opposition to 
 its being an experimental science. 
 
 12697. You have something to say, I think, on how- 
 far the opposition is based on humanitarian grounds ? — 
 Yes ; the opposition purports to be based on the 
 principle that we are bound to regard the sufferings 
 of animals, and that the avoidance of the suffering- 
 of animals is a motive which ought to influence every 
 man with a conscience. It is a consequence, no doubt, 
 of a change which has come over the views of man- 
 kind decidedly in the right direction. Of old, cruelty 
 was thought nothing of, whether it was to men or 
 animals. You cannot read the history of the world 
 down to, say, the seventeenth century, without feeling 
 that there was an extraordinary callousness to suffering 
 of every kind. A great change from that time has 
 been passing over the world. First, there came the 
 regard for the sufferings of men, and cruelty towards 
 men gradually passed out of favour ; and now the 
 thought of human suffering and the desire to avoid it 
 is one of the most unquestioned and influential motives 
 that guide the action of mankind. Presently there 
 followed the extension of the feeling- to the sufferings 
 of animals, and there is no doubt that now, with the 
 best part of humanity, sympathy for the sufferings 
 of animals and the desire to lessen those sufferings are 
 most influential motives of action. Now that appears 
 to me all in the right direction, and so far as my 
 opinion goes it is not only not contested by either party 
 to this controversy, but both of them would in words 
 accept it as a duty to lessen so far as possible the 
 sufferings of animals as well as of men I do not 
 wish to be misunderstood when I talk about the 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOTJLTON 5 
 
 sufferings of animals in the same breath, as it were, 
 with the sufferings of men. I must therefore point out 
 a very broad distinction between the two, which must 
 be borne in mind if we are to come to right conclusions 
 in this matter. The suffering's of animals are 
 substantially physical only. The sufferings of men 
 are not solely physical. Almost as important a factor 
 in that suffering is mental suffering, arising partly from 
 a man's relations to society — that is to say, that 
 death or sickness will cause pain and suffering and 
 trouble and misery to those who are intimately 
 connected with the man — and partly in the individual 
 himself. He is capable of feeling anxiety, regret, 
 dread, and many other things which are of the most 
 serious importance in measuring human suffering, but 
 which are practically absent from animal suffering. I 
 do not say this in any way to detract from what I have 
 said about the importance of avoiding and preventing, 
 so far as we can, animal suffering ; it is only that we 
 may keep true our ideas of what suffering is, and to 
 do that, one must bear in mind the broad distinction I 
 have just mentioned. 
 
 12698. You mean that if a man and an animal have 
 each to be subjected to a serious operation under 
 anaesthetics, the whole of the pain and suffering that 
 the animal experiences after it is properly anaesthetised 
 and dies under the anaesthetic is covered by the 
 anaesthetic ? — Yes. 
 
 12699. And it has not suffering before or after? — No. 
 
 12700. But in the case of a man, he has the 
 suffering of anticipation, thinking of the future, of 
 those who belong to him, and if he dies he has the 
 
6 EESEAECH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 suffering of his family. If he survives, he has suffering* 
 from that again, which may amount also to disablement 
 and loss of some of his functions ? — Yes, that is a 
 very striking example of the difference, and it brings 
 out one other point which you must also bear in mind, 
 and that is, our responsibility with regard to mankind 
 as compared with our responsibility to animals. In 
 the case of an animal, if the future is to be a future 
 of pain, we unhesitatingly kill it. No matter how 
 certainly the future must be a future of pain in a man, 
 we must by universal acceptance keep him alive. 
 Therefore, in deciding on our duty to men and animals, 
 we have to realise that, no matter what be the con- 
 sequences, we have no right to decide with regard to 
 man as to whether it is better to terminate his 
 sufferings or not. If you take the case of a man with 
 some terrible disease over him which may perhaps be 
 cured by an operation, he has the terror of the 
 uncertainty of the cure. The operation is fortunately 
 under anaesthetics, and he does not feel it, but after- 
 wards there may come an only partial cure, and a 
 painful life ahead of it. Not one of these elements 
 exists in the case of the animal. The animal, if the 
 pain is going to be greater than the value of life, is put 
 out of the way painlessly. So that we must remember 
 that distinction, because it is not permissible in a serious- 
 enquiry like this to shut our eyes to any truth. 
 There is no safe side on which one may lean in the way 
 of exaggeration in the examination of a question like 
 this ; and although you are going to be loyal to the 
 duty of lessening the pain of animals, you must not 
 mistake the relative position of pain with them and 
 pain with us. 
 
 12701. You admit that there is a responsibility on 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 7 
 
 everyone who operates on animals to avoid unnecessary 
 pain ? — Oh, yes. In fact, I go further, and I think that 
 one ought to admit as a fundamental principle that it 
 is the duty of all men to work for diminishing pain. 
 The diminution of the totality of pain in animals and 
 in men ought, I think, to be a guiding motive and 
 a prominent motive in the case of people in the 
 position of those who are working in curative science, 
 and also in the position of people in ordinary life ; 
 and in my opinion it is just as operative, and, if I 
 might give my private opinion, it is far more operative 
 in those who are connected with the curative sciences 
 than in the people who attack them so bitterly. And 
 it is for this reason : Because those who are dealing 
 with the curative sciences are perpetually brought in 
 face of pain, and it is a point of honour with them to 
 conquer that pain and relieve it, till that aim becomes 
 to them a kind of second nature — a kind of all- 
 pervading motive. 
 
 12702. You are speaking rather, are you not, of the 
 practising physician or surgeon than of one who devotes 
 himself entirely to research ? — I am ; but the reason 
 why I cite that is this, that there is an almost 
 unanimous opinion, among those who are engaged in 
 the practical work of the curative sciences, in favour 
 of experimental research in connection with them. 
 That support has been discounted by people saying : 
 " Oh, those who are enofaoed in curative science get 
 callous to pain." Now, in my opinion, they are more 
 sensitive to pain, because it is perpetually appealing 
 to them, and if I might say so, it is the lifelong foe 
 which they are engaged in fighting. I mentioned 
 therefore the extent to which the desire to diminish 
 
8 BESEAKCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 pain was present to those who are engaged in it, not so 
 much as dealing, as you say, with those who are 
 engaged in research, as with those who, with a full 
 knowledge of the matter, give them their support, in 
 •order to point out that that support has the very high 
 sanction of coming from people who all their lives 
 are fighting pain, and fighting it often at very great 
 personal discomfort and self-sacrifice, till it has become 
 to them, as I say, an almost all-dominant motive. 
 The difference between the two schools is this : Those 
 with whom I range myself, who are desirous of extending 
 and supporting experimental research in the curative 
 sciences, consider not only the pain that is inflicted, 
 but they consider the pain that might be prevented, 
 and they hold themselves responsible for permitting 
 pain which they could stop, just as much as for 
 inflicting pain deliberately — they look at the two 
 together. The other school consider only inflicted 
 pain. They think it their duty to prevent pain being 
 inflicted, even though the infliction of pain may lead 
 to the prevention of many times that much pain in 
 the future. 
 
 12703. Of course, your argument, if carried out — 
 I am not disputing it, or offering any opinion about 
 it — would lead to this, that if anaesthetics had never- 
 been invented, you would still be justified in carrying 
 out experiments on living animals, and inflicting the 
 necessary pain upon them, for the sake of the 
 knowledge that would be acquired in the saving of 
 pain in the future ? — It would ; but if you will allow 
 me I will put my practical conclusions latest. I want 
 first of all to lay down the foundation of the decision. 
 I want to get before the Commission the fundamental 
 principles as I view them, and to establish them, and 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 9 
 
 then I propose to take the practical conclusions, when I 
 will deal with such a matter as you have referred to. 
 
 12704. But, of course, the actual fact that anaes- 
 thetics and their use have been discovered now 
 does not render the argument I was putting a very 
 practical one. It is rather a logical consequence than a 
 practical one ? — Certainly ; I quite understand that. 
 Now I want the Commission to allow me to take what I 
 may call a simile or an illustration. I am going to take 
 a case which in my opinion exactly represents the 
 attitude of the two rival schools ; it is not connected 
 with experiments on animals at all, and that is one 
 of the reasons why I have chosen it. I want the 
 Commission to understand that I take it as explaining 
 my views, and I shall trust to bring the question which 
 is before this Commission up to the level of this 
 illustration. I will suppose that a ship which is 
 plague-stricken, and has got rats on board, arrives at a 
 port. A man with a sense of his responsibility, knowing 
 that there is a high probability that rats convey the 
 plague, would unhesitatingly extirpate those rats, even 
 though his only method of doing so was by putting 
 them to a painful death, whether it was by poisoning 
 them with phosphorus or by stifling them, or by 
 even more painful methods. He would not hesitate ; 
 he would feel it his duty to extirpate them. Now, 
 supposing that a person were to come and say, " I 
 could not bear to see those poor creatures running 
 for their lives and in danger, trying to save themselves 
 from their relentless pursuers, and so I let as many 
 as I could escape," I have no doubt that the person 
 who did that would think that he acted from humane 
 motives. But what would be the consequence ? It 
 might communicate plague not only to a town, but to 
 
10 EESEAECH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 a whole nation. It might bring positively measureless 
 misery. The first man would be right, because he 
 would look at the inflicted pain which would be to the 
 bad side of the ledger. No one would have a right 
 to inflict that suffering merely capriciously. But he 
 would see beyond that pain he was inflicting — that in 
 acting thus he was preventing an amount of pain 
 which was beyond all measure greater than that which 
 he was inflicting ; and if he was a man to whom pain 
 appealed, who had a heart which felt keenly suffering 
 whether in men or animals, he would do it all the more 
 unhesitatingly. The other man would think only of 
 the inflicted pain, and say, " I am too tender-hearted 
 to inflict it." He would not consider that by not doing 
 it he was causing preventible pain on such an enormous 
 scale. That is typical of the struggle between the two 
 parties. I have chosen that example, not because it is 
 an exaggerated one, or because it is an unfair one. 
 I have chosen it because in that case there is no veil 
 between the act and its consequences. One can see 
 plainly that the letting free of those infected rats might 
 produce those consequences. But now just let me take 
 a hypothesis. I will suppose that, instead of bringing 
 a plague, the killing of those rats would lead to the 
 discovery of the antiseptic treatment. That antiseptic 
 treatment put an end — substantially, of course, I 
 mean — to an amount of human misery that we can 
 scarcely realise. The suppuration of wounds, accidents 
 leading to months of painful sickness and a recovery 
 which was only partial and left the people maimed, the 
 horrors of war doubled, the deaths in war enormously 
 increased, were all consequences of sepsis — it was just 
 as bad as a plague. Now if, instead of it being a 
 question of "either you extirpate the rats or you have 
 the plague," it has been " either you extirpate the rats 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 11 
 
 or the antiseptic method will not be discovered, and the 
 suppuration of wounds and all the horrors which follow 
 from that must remain in the world," you see at once 
 that to the thoughtful man the argument in the two 
 cases is precisely the same — ' ; If I do not inflict this 
 pain I permit an unmeasured amount of pain which I 
 could prevent." In my opinion, when you once see 
 clearly the causal connection between the pain you 
 inflict and the diminution of pain which follows from 
 it, it makes no difference in what way it follows. Your 
 duty is to take that line which produces the minimum 
 total pain, and whether the pain is inflicted pain, or 
 whether it is preventible pain which is not prevented, 
 is in my opinion one and the same thing. 
 
 12705. Supposing that you have not got an imme- 
 diate prospect of preventing pain or of preventing 
 septic conditions, but are pursuing these experiments 
 for the purpose of acquiring knowledge that you do not 
 possess, with the hope and belief that it will lead to 
 some good, how do you deal with that ? — You have 
 anticipated the very next step which, in my opinion, 
 we have to take in the examination of the subject. 
 The reason why I gave this illustration was that I 
 wanted to put before you by an example the criterion 
 which I say every humane man ought to follow. It is 
 that he ought to take that line which before his con- 
 science he thinks will lead to the diminution of total 
 pain, and if he is satisfied that the infliction of a certain 
 amount of pain is the right way to diminish the total 
 pain he is bound, from his very feelings of humanity, to 
 take it. And now you say — and, if I might respectfully 
 say so, quite rightly — if that is going to guide you in a 
 matter of this kind, you must be satisfied that a man 
 ought to realise that the practice of the experimental 
 
12 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 method is the wisest way to work for the diminution of 
 the totality of pain. If I have brought the question to 
 this point, it is all I want to bring out of the example 
 which I have taken. I admit that those who claim 
 that they should inflict pain are bound to show that it 
 is the wisest thing to do with the view to reduce the 
 totality of pain. But I want to point out one other 
 thing, and that is this — that a man would be bound to 
 take the same course with regard to the rats if there 
 was not a certainty, but a reasonable ground for think- 
 ing, that plague would follow. He would have no right 
 to say, " It is not demonstrated ; I will risk it." 
 
 12706. There is a case, of course, beyond that, where 
 a man is making experiments upon a living animal 
 with a view to ascertain precisely what the action of 
 certain parts of the body is — what their functions are ? 
 —Yes. 
 
 12707. Not that he can point to any particular sav- 
 ing of pain or good that can be done by it, but he is 
 doing it to acquire knowledge which he does not pos- 
 sess, with a philosophic belief that it will lead to the 
 good of reducing pain ? — It is a real pleasure to me to 
 have such points put to me, for this reason — it con- 
 vinces me, as indeed I knew before, that I have the 
 honour of speaking before those who have thought very 
 seriously over this matter, and realise the various points 
 which arise. You will find that I shall take that point 
 up in its proper place ; because, in my opinion, it is of 
 the greatest importance that we should face specific 
 questions of that kind. You cannot, in this matter, 
 come to a wise conclusion by simply dealing in vague 
 generalities. But if you will allow me, I will take it up 
 later, and you will find, I think, that I have put it in 
 its logical position. Now, I said that I took that 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 13 
 
 example of the plague-stricken ship, not because it was 
 exaggerated, but because there was an obvious connec- 
 tion between the act and its consequences, and then I 
 pointed out that if you could get an equally obvious 
 connection between pain inflicted and a great discovery 
 it would be the same thing. I said that the parallel I 
 have taken was not unfair to either of the two parties, 
 and I want to digress for a moment to show that I am 
 justified in saying so. I think if you were to ask 
 a man who had given thought to the matter, who, 
 of all living men, had been privileged to do most to 
 reduce pain, the answer would, almost without excep- 
 tion, be "Lord Lister," who introduced the antiseptic 
 method, which has been followed now by the various 
 aseptic and antiseptic methods which obtain all over 
 the world. Yet I saw the other day in a paper that at 
 an anti-vivisection meeting Lord Lister's name was 
 mentioned, and it was greeted with shouts of " Brute." 
 They called a " brute" the man who had done most of 
 all living men to lessen pain. And that was. if I might 
 say so, perfectly consistent. They knew that he had 
 voluntarily inflicted pain in his experiments, and that 
 was all that they looked to ; and they did not realise 
 that if their real motive, the thing which was the real 
 spring of their action, was the desire to lessen pain, 
 Lord Lister's name should have been the most highly 
 honoured of all. Now, I am not speaking bitterly at 
 all of these people, though I oppose their action so 
 much ; I only want to point out that they are acting 
 according to the effect on the emotions of their contem- 
 plation of pain ; not according to the pain itself. The 
 prevented pain, which has made Lord Lister's name so 
 esteemed, is not present to their minds. The inflicted 
 pain strikes their imagination, and the consequence is 
 that they, with the best of motives, denounce him 
 
14 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 because he is willing- to inflict pain, without realising 
 that he, who is the most capable, at any rate one of the 
 most capable, of all men to know the ultimate result 
 of his actions, has been doing it for the purposes of 
 reducing suffering, and has succeeded beyond all hope. 
 So that I am not treating those who oppose me un- 
 fairly in pointing out that they do not regard the more 
 distant consequences of their action — they only regard 
 the question of the immediately inflicted pain. 
 
 Now, I want to go on to what the Chairman has put 
 to me, viz., that I must establish that experimental 
 research is the wise mode of action if we wish to 
 diminish pain. I start from the following fundamental 
 facts. I say that if you look round the world, the 
 only way in which we can diminish pain is by human 
 action. Animals go on regardless of the pain they 
 cause to one another. In fact, the universe is built 
 on pain. Whole races of animals live simply by killing 
 other races, and killing them without the slightest 
 regard to suffering. So that we must look to human 
 action alone to diminish pain. Now, what is it that 
 prevents our diminishing pain in the world ? One feels 
 at once that it is not the absence of desire to do it. I 
 believe that desire is very prominently present. It is 
 because we do not know how to do it ; it is our 
 ignorance. Take the case of doctors. Doctors are as 
 desirous as they can possibly be of lessening suffering 
 in the world, and yet how often they stand by the bed- 
 side and the patient goes on suffering and they can do 
 nothing. Now, the absence of our power of diminishing 
 pain is due to ignorance, to our not understanding two 
 things. First, not understanding the causes which ex- 
 cite pain ; and, secondly, not understanding the action 
 of those causes on the organism — that is to say, how it 
 is that those morbid causes, if I might use the phrase, 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHEB MOULTON 15 
 
 produce pain. I call the first one (simply to distin- 
 guish it) the pathological factor— that is to say, what 
 are the springs of disease ; and the other is the physio- 
 logical factor — that is to say, how those springs of 
 disease cause pain in the organism ; that is just a 
 division, for convenience, of the knowledge which we 
 must possess in order to be able to lessen and control 
 pain. Let me give an example of the way in which lack 
 of knowledge increases suffering. The discovery that 
 the organism could, by means of anaesthetics, pass into 
 unconsciousness without passing into death, and that 
 all the living operations could go on equally vigorously 
 while consciousness — that is to say, the possibility of 
 pain — was entirely suppressed, led to the use of anaes- 
 thetics, and, as a consequence, to the diminution of 
 suffering, both directly during operations, and in- 
 directly in increasing the possibilities of surgery. 
 Without the knowledge obtained from that discovery 
 men were obliged to perform operations in the brutal 
 method of the old surgeons, because there was no other 
 alternative. This is only an example of the way in 
 which our power is limited by our knowledge. And I 
 wish to point out with regard to this point, that here 
 again we have no difference of opinion. Not only the 
 whole medical profession, but the whole public agree 
 that doctors ought to be armed with all the knowledge 
 of the time. There is no difference of view as to this. 
 Every attempt is made to increase the efficiency of the 
 education of the doctor ; because we feel that by arming 
 the doctor with the knowledge of the time we arm him 
 as best we can with the means of diminishing pain. 
 That, of course, is true with regard to the knowledge 
 that has been attained during the last, let me take it, 
 forty years — the only years as to which I can speak ; 
 and that knowledge has been mainly due to experi- 
 
1G RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 mental research. Therefore all must feel that this 
 knowledge which has been obtained by experimental 
 research is useful for the purpose of lessening pain, 
 because we try our very best to make all those who are 
 engaged in practical curative work masters of it. I do 
 not think I need point out to this Commission further 
 how all-important knowledge is where you are dealing 
 with organisms, and you want to stop suffering. 
 
 There is one other thing I want to say, and that is 
 this. That our inability to stop suffering, owing to 
 absence of knowledge, is not only to be found in the 
 case of obscure diseases. They afford striking in- 
 stances of it, no doubt, and are by no means rare. I 
 should think there are very few of us who have not seen 
 those near to them suffer from diseases which have 
 baffled the doctors, and whether or not they could 
 be eased or saved was decided by whether or not the 
 doctors could read what was the cause of the trouble. 
 A friend of mind has just died, apparently of a painful 
 disease which the doctors could not touch. A post- 
 mortem showed that it was only because they did 
 not realise what the true cause of the disease was ; 
 it was one which might almost with certainty have 
 been relieved. Such diseases may have marked 
 symptoms, but the doctors are unable to read from 
 those symptoms what is the cause, and therefore they 
 cannot fight the cause. But, although these cases are 
 striking instances of the principle, they are nothing 
 like the most important ; the most important are 
 diseases which are quite common, of which we cannot 
 yet find the cause, and not finding the cause all we can 
 do is to deal with the symptoms. 
 
 12708. I think we all agree that there is a very vast 
 field of medical knowledge yet ; I think every medical 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 17 
 
 man would agree to that, as well as ourselves. But 
 really, the question is how far the knowledge can only 
 be found in experiments upon animals ? — Precisely. 
 That, I think you will find from the 'precis, is the next 
 point I want to mention. But I wished to put in the 
 forefront that it is want of knowledge which prevents 
 our diminishing suffering, because I shall trust to 
 show to this Commission that the pole-star by which 
 we steer is knowledge. It is ignorance that hampers 
 us. I am using the term ignorance in a sense that 
 will not, I trust, be misunderstood. I am aware of 
 the gigantic amount of knowledge that the present 
 and past members of the medical profession, and those 
 who have been engaged in research, have already 
 accumulated, but what I mean by ignorance is the 
 vast field of what yet may be known, but is not at 
 present known. I desire to impress upon the 
 Commission that that is the real cause of our impo- 
 tence. Now, let me take the question of how we are 
 to get rid of this ignorance — and here we are on firm 
 ground. No man who knows anything of science has 
 any doubt whatever that the right way to advance 
 knowledge is by experiment. You can take the whole 
 range of the sciences, and I would challenge an oppo- 
 nent to name one in which advance, if it has been 
 rapid and striking, has not been through experiment. 
 Where we are reduced to observation science crawls. 
 Where and in proportion as you can use experiment, 
 the science advances rapidly. I could take any science 
 to show that ; it is much easier to show that experi- 
 ment has led to advance than to find a case in which 
 advance has been made purely by observation ; 
 because a scientific man rushes at once to experiment 
 if he can do so. He adds, of course, the testimony 
 of observation — that is extremely valuable for the 
 
18 EESEAUCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 purpose of guiding and starting his experiment ; but 
 everybody knows that each observation becomes only 
 the nucleus, or, rather, the basis, from which you 
 start your experiment I was puzzling to think of some 
 branch of science where there was only observation, and 
 the only thing I could think of was the case of vol- 
 canoes. Now, there is not anything that has attracted 
 human attention more, or fascinated it more, or has 
 been on a bigger scale or more open to observation, 
 than volcanoes ; and yet we are almost in the same 
 state of ignorance of the origin and the modus operandi 
 of volcanoes as Pliny was. 
 
 12709. The difficulty is just as great now as then 
 for anybody to go down a volcano when it is in erup- 
 tion ? — Precisely. In no way can you bring experiment 
 to bear upon it. As soon as you can bring experiment 
 to bear upon a subject you are free ; but as long as 
 you can merely observe, your progress is very slow. 
 The reason is that experiment is like cross-examination. 
 You can put the question you want, and Nature always 
 answers it. She does not answer the question you 
 meant to put ; she answers the question you actually 
 did put. She swears by the card in the most shocking 
 manner. She does not care in the least what you 
 meant to ask, but she does care what you asked, 
 and she answers it with perfect truthfulness. And 
 the consequence is, that when you adopt experiment, 
 the great experimenter can put a question, the answer 
 to which lets the whole secret out. I am going to 
 give an example that I remember impressed me 
 very deeply. I cannot tell how many years ago, but 
 it was just about the time when it was first discovered 
 that guinea-pigs were susceptible to tuberculosis. I 
 heard from a friend that a doctor of his acquaintance, 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 19 
 
 a practising physician, I suppose, had been troubled 
 as to whether consumption was a communicable disease 
 or not ; I should say that the vast preponderance 
 of opinion at that date was that it was hereditary. I 
 remember, as all of us remember when we were 
 young, the way in which consumption would, as it 
 was called, go through a family, and it was thought 
 that this was because it was in the strain. Then some 
 bold people suggested that it was possible it might 
 be due to its being communicable, although probably to 
 the ideas of that time it looked about as likely to be 
 communicable as spinal disease. What that doctor 
 did was this : he took a dozen guinea-pigs, divided 
 them into two sixes, and he let one six have the run of 
 the wards of a consumption hospital, and the other six 
 have the run of the wards of another hospital, just 
 about in the same conditions of temperature ; he left 
 them there for the requisite number of weeks, whatever 
 it was, and then he killed the whole dozen, and he 
 found that the six which had been running- in the 
 consumption hospital had tuberculosis, and that the 
 six that had been running in the other hospital had no 
 trace of it. 
 
 12710. (Chairman.) The other was not a consumption 
 hospital ? — No, it was not. 
 
 12711. (Sir William Collins.) Whose experiments 
 were those ? — I cannot tell you the name of the doctor, 
 because it was not given me, but I heard it long ago, 
 in the early days of research upon tuberculosis, and 
 I believe it to be true. But if it was not actually 
 performed, it would still serve as a typical example 
 of experiment. I have no reason to doubt that this 
 experiment was actually performed, because the man 
 who told me was a most intelligent man, and he told 
 
20 BESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 it to me at the time as having been done quite privately, 
 by a doctor whom he knew, in order that the doctor 
 mig-ht settle the doubt in his own mind. 
 
 12712. [Chairman.) You would say that it is rather 
 an illustration than a typical example, if it is not 
 given us at first hand in some way ? — You may take 
 it simply as an illustration, although the very thing 
 has been done, I know, by other people. Klein did 
 it. If you remember, Klein put guinea-pigs into an 
 air shaft which led from the wards of a consumption 
 hospital, and found that they developed tuberculosis. 
 But we will take it merely as an illustration. I am 
 not basing anything on the fact. What I want to point 
 out is this, that such an experiment would settle the 
 question more than would twenty years of observation, 
 — I might say a century of observation — for this reason, 
 that you had placed these similar animals under en- 
 tirely similar circumstances, with the exception that 
 in the one case, but not in the other, there were pre- 
 sent in the immediate neighbourhood persons who were 
 sick of the disease, and you will find as a result that 
 in the one case they become sick, and in the other 
 they do not. There is no question of heredity, and 
 there is no question of the acquired disease being 
 the consequence of different circumstances of living, 
 of different circumstances of nutrition, or anything 
 of that kind. The only thing that is present as a 
 cause is the neighbourhood of the sick people in one 
 case and not in the other. In the result, the differ- 
 ence is disease in the one and not in the other. 
 
 12713. What was the fact that it was wanted to 
 discover there — whether guinea-pigs could take the 
 complaint ? — No, whether the disease was communicable 
 from one person to another. 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 21 
 
 12714. But there are plenty of examples of people 
 who have not tuberculosis daily frequenting hospitals 
 and not acquiring it, are there not ? — Oh, yes ; but the 
 point of the experiment was not under what circum- 
 stances was the disease communicable, but whether 
 it was communicable at all. Just take the case of 
 persons who are ill of spinal disease. 
 
 12715. I follow you. — Their relatives go freely 
 among them, attend to them, and try to make their 
 sickness as easily borne as possible. And so it undoubt- 
 edly used to be when members of a family were sick of 
 tuberculosis. Everyone thought it was only kindness 
 that the brothers and sisters should attend to their sick 
 sister and nobody thought that there was danger. But 
 when you had found that this was a communicable 
 disease, your duty with regard to children and other 
 people in the presence of the disease became very differ- 
 ent, and it was only to find out this that the experi- 
 ment was tried. The experiment showed affirmatively 
 it was communicable. That was only, of course, the 
 first of a necessary series of experiments to show how it 
 was communicable ; but from that moment the doctor 
 knew how great was the responsibility of allowing people 
 to attend or be in intimate contact with one who was 
 affected by consumption. Just try and see how you 
 could get an equal degree of certainty from observation. 
 You take a case where it has run through a family. 
 Yes ; but it might be that it was hereditary in the family. 
 Then you find that in a particular place it is very largely 
 prevalent. Yes ; but that may be because, as compared 
 with other places, the climate or soil of that place 
 produces a predisposition to it. Neither group of cases 
 points necessarily to communicability. Some people will 
 be struck in one way with a series of these cases, others 
 
22 KESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 will be struck in another way, and there will be a 
 perpetual conflict as to which is the true explanation. 
 But when you take such an experiment, there is not a 
 doubt ; you cannot explain it, except that the disease 
 is communicable. And the consequence is that you 
 commence your further examination with the conscious- 
 ness that it has been demonstrated that it can pass from 
 the sick to the well. Now I was very much struck — as 
 illustrating the impossibility of arriving at these things 
 by observation — by a piece of cross-examination by Sir 
 William Collins of one of the witnesses before the Com- 
 mission; it illustrated it in the most striking way. He 
 was dealing with the result of the serum treatment of 
 diphtheria. An appeal was made to the statistics of 
 diphtheria hospitals in London, and the witness said : 
 "Oh, the serum treatment is being demonstrated as 
 being a great success, because you have here the same 
 hospital in the same place dealing for a consecutive 
 number of years with the same population, and the 
 statistics show a great diminution of the percentage of 
 deaths after the introduction of the serum treatment." 
 Sir William Collins, if I might say so, quite justifiably 
 cross-examined on that. He will know whether I am 
 fairly representing him, but as I remember it, he asked, 
 Are we now getting the cases earlier ; is it not true that 
 we have made such advances in the diagnosis that we 
 know better what is diphtheria and what is not ? And 
 he went on pointing to differences in the circumstances 
 of the earlier years and the later years as taking away 
 from the conclusiveness of the statistics. 
 
 1271(3. (Sir William Collins.) As an element that 
 required consideration. — Exactly, as an element that 
 required consideration. That is perfectly fair. Statis- 
 tics that are got in that way must be rightly open to 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 23 
 
 that criticism. And this is the reason : You dare not 
 let the children wait in the later years so as to make the 
 time at which they are taken up for the purpose of treat- 
 ment comparable with what it was in the earlier years,, 
 because you are bound to do for every child the best 
 thing that you can, and the consequence is that you 
 dare not make your experiment scientifically more 
 perfect, because there is the paramount duty towards 
 human life. Now, you could not have had a stronger 
 case, i.e., one in which the observational method was 
 working under greater advantages. You had hospitals 
 devoted to this disease alone, dealing, as I have said, 
 with the same population, in the same place, under, as 
 far as possible, the same circumstances ; but you could 
 not, and you dare not, and you ought not to, make the 
 circumstances identical, because of your duty to the 
 individual. Compare that with the case I was putting* 
 forward of the guinea-pigs ; I could give another and 
 more striking example, which is the classical experiment 
 in connection with anthrax, in which, after Pasteur had 
 worked out the treatment by inoculation against 
 anthrax, he took 50 sheep for his experiment ; 25 of 
 them were inoculated and 25 were left uninoculated. 
 Then the whole of the 50 were inoculated with virulent 
 anthrax, and within four or five days every one of the 
 25 that had not been inoculated died, while of the 
 others 24 were alive, and one was shown to have died 
 from things unconnected with anthrax. You see by 
 these examples how in experimental research you can 
 make the circumstances identical, and one experiment 
 of that kind (properly repeated, so as to eliminate error) 
 gives you a certainty that years of observation could 
 not give. And all those years of observation have paid 
 their toll in suffering. It is no use saying, Well, we 
 shall learn in a few years hence, instead of learning it 
 
24 BESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 now. All that time there has been preventible pain, 
 which has not been prevented because you have not 
 known how. 
 
 What, therefore, I want to point out is that we know 
 that the way to acquire knowledge with certainty is by 
 experiment ; it follows from its very nature, and from 
 our universal experience in all sciences, that this is the 
 way in which you best acquire knowledge, because you 
 can make each experiment answer some critical question. 
 You can arrange matters so that you have two cases 
 precisely similar in all respects, save that one is without 
 that cause present, and the other is with that cause 
 present, and the contrast gives you a light which you 
 could not get from observing instances where you cannot 
 eliminate other causes. The more complex the subject is, 
 the more factors there are at work, the more essential the 
 experimental method is ; and the most complex of all 
 phenomena are those that relate to living beings. I am 
 sure there are those here who have made experiments 
 in connection with life, and know from experience the 
 truth of what I say. The number of factors at work 
 is so large, the difficulty of isolating them is so great, 
 that it often takes very much longer to realise how you 
 can put the question to Nature than it does to put it, 
 and to draw your conclusions from it when you get the 
 answer. But the more complex the subject is, I say the 
 more are you driven away from observation, which only 
 gives you the total result of many causes which are 
 varyingly present in all cases, to something which will 
 enable you to isolate several of the causes and determine 
 separately their effects. 
 
 12717. [Chairman.) That brings you, I think, to 
 the question I was putting to you about pure experi- 
 mentation, and the justification of experiments on 
 
LOED JUSTICE ELETCHEE MOULTON 25 
 
 animals where you have no specific disease in view ? — 
 Yes. Many will think me a heretic on this point, but 
 I have a strong view that, when you have once realised 
 that experiment is the right way to acquire the 
 necessary knowledge, it is a bad thing to work too 
 directly and too consciously for practical results. 
 
 12718. When you call that a heresy, of whom are 
 you speaking as the orthodox ?— Most people say that 
 you should only make such experiments with the direct 
 view of some practical application for the benefit of 
 mankind. 
 
 12719. We have had a good many witnesses before 
 us who take what you call the heretical view. — I am 
 delighted to find that I am not alone. 
 
 12720. As well as those who take the other view ; 
 and others who would say that you do not go far 
 enough. — I am glad to find that I have got my 
 comrades. You must not misunderstand me. I think 
 that the object and the reward and the ultimate justifi- 
 cation of research is the benefit it confers. But what I 
 wish to urge is, that it is unwholesome to keep that 
 before your mind when you are working, at all events 
 in the earlier stages. May I give a parallel which I 
 think explains and justifies this view ? I take the 
 history of alchemy. For centuries men of the highest 
 intellectual attainments — for there can be no doubt of 
 the ability of the men who worked at these subjects — 
 worked hard at the transmutation of metals, and the 
 result of those centuries has only been snippets of 
 knowledge, if I might use such a phrase. I do not under- 
 value them ; they gave us, I believe, some very valuable 
 reagents, but that is practically all. And the reason was 
 that they did not commence by working so as to get to 
 
26 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 know the nature and properties of the things on which 
 they were working ; they worked straight for a result. 
 
 12721. For an impossible result, was it not ? — It may 
 have been an impossible result. But whether it was 
 impossible or possible would have made very little 
 difference if they had commenced by laying the founda- 
 tion in knowledge, because, although we should not 
 have obtained the transmutation of metals, we should 
 have had modern chemistry some three centuries earlier 
 than we did. But they only worked for a result. 
 
 12722. They did not care about chemistry. Their 
 researches were not chemical researches ? — Well, trans- 
 mutation of metals was intended to be a chemical 
 triumph. If I might take a parallel in curative 
 science, this work was like the shots at specific cures- 
 for cancer — violet leaves and all that sort of thing — 
 made by people working straight for a nostrum that 
 will cure a disease like that, the nature of which is- 
 shrouded in such mystery. 
 
 12723. I only meant those people were fighting a 
 particular disease which they had before them, and 
 which was evident under their eyes, and they were 
 seeking remedies blindly ? — Yes. 
 
 12724. The other people were seeking something in 
 the clouds altogether ; they were not pursuing what 
 you would call chemical research, although they used 
 certain chemical experiments ? — But if they had only 
 laid a basis ; if they had only worked at it as you try 
 to reduce a fortress, by parallels, where each parallel 
 brings you nearer to the fortress. If you attempt to* 
 take it by a rush and fail, you are no further than you 
 were before ; but if you make your parallels you are so 
 much nearer, and that is a permanent advance. Just 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 27 
 
 in the same way I think that if I were to ask any 
 scientific man of position in the medical profession, 
 " Where do you look for the solution of the great 
 problem of cancer?" he would say, "I look to a 
 gradual acquisition of knowledge about it, and the 
 breaking up of the obstinate silence of the disease which 
 will tell us nothing, neither its preferences nor the 
 things it dislikes, nor its origin, nor anything." Such 
 men do not give much heed to the investigations aimed 
 directly at its cure, because they do not believe they 
 will succeed. They believe that we shall have to know 
 a great deal more about the disease itself before we 
 know in what direction success can come. But what they 
 do think is this, that by gradually acquiring knowledge 
 of it, knowledge acquired quite independently of 
 whether it is a thing- we could use or not, the disease 
 will gradually cease to be a mystery, and when it has 
 ceased to be a mystery we shall find some weak point in 
 its armour. Therefore I am satisfied that the wisest 
 thing to do is to realise broadlv that our 
 ignorance of the springs of disease and the nature of 
 the organism that suffers are the cause of our power- 
 lessness, and that all research which is intended to 
 lessen our ignorance is in the right direction, and that 
 it is in vain for us beforehand to say which will 
 soonest lead to a beneficial result. I feel, therefore, 
 strongly that this is the principle which, with proper 
 regulations and restrictions, we ought to accept ; and 
 that we ought to fix our eyes on knowledge and not on 
 immediate promise — immediate promise is likely to be 
 delusive — and when I come to the instances by which 
 I trust to justify the serviceability of experimental 
 research, I think I shall be able to show that those 
 things have sometimes reaped the richest harvest in 
 which the promise came quite late. 
 
28 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 12725. You think, to sum up that part of your 
 evidence, that the experimental method is justifiable 
 even though you have no immediate practical object in 
 view beyond the acquiring knowledge and the hope and 
 belief that it will lead to some ultimate useful purpose ? 
 — Yes, you have the hope and belief that it will, and 
 you have the certainty that it is the right way to work 
 for it. Where you are ignorant of the evil and ignorant 
 of how it operates, you are like a hunter who is not yet 
 on the trail of the fox. He has to cast about in order 
 to come upon it. Similarly, it takes a very great deal 
 of experiment to know in which direction practical 
 success may be looked for. 
 
 I want to say one more thing before I go to the 
 examination of whether, as a matter of fact, the experi- 
 mental method has shown itself to be of this great 
 practical value, has thus justified its use. So strongly 
 do I hold that what we ought to fix our eyes upon is 
 the acquisition of knowledge and the removal of ignor- 
 ance, that if I was here without being able to show a 
 single practical result of experimental research in 
 curative science I should give evidence in the same 
 direction, and so far as I personally am concerned with 
 the same confidence, for this reason : Supposing I 
 was to go back, say, 40 years (I am not suggesting for 
 a moment that prior to 40 years ago there was not a 
 great deal done in research, but I take that period as 
 including the great outburst of experimental research, 
 beginning with the early sixties and since then), I 
 should have all my data. I should have the fact that 
 ignorance was vast, vaster even than now, that ignor- 
 ance paralysed our power of preventing suffering, and 
 that the right way to get rid of that ignorance was by 
 the experimental method ; and therefore, even though 
 I could not show that we had obtained any practical 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOTJLTON 29 
 
 results, I should say to this Commission, if it were 
 sitting in the early sixties, that it was their duty to 
 take care that experimental research was not hindered. 
 The idea that you do not justify experimental research 
 unless you can show that it has already produced 
 practical results would make it never justifiable to 
 commence it, and, in my eyes, it would be just about as 
 ridiculous as to revile winter sowing because in April 
 there were no crops. The moment when the practical 
 results come depends upon the nature of the subject. 
 You cannot foresee it ; they may come at a burst. 
 After long investigation which apparently leads to 
 nothing you may suddenly find your reward. 
 
 12726. It miofht not have been unreasonable in 
 Adam, but since his day there has been a very long 
 experience of winter-sown crops ? — There has been a 
 long experience of winter crops, but what I mean is,, 
 that a man has got no business to say that because 
 the crop has not yet come last winter's sowing has- 
 failed. 
 
 12727. It would have been an unreasonable thing* 
 in Adam ? — I agree with you ; but, if I may say so, I 
 should use that in my favour ; because I should say 
 that if you look at any science you will find that 
 theoretical investigation has always led ultimately to 
 practical power. I could give examples in industries, 
 but they will occur to most of those present. Investi- 
 gations which have been purely scientific have almost 
 always led to practical results, because the knowledge 
 has been able to be used, and it has produced great 
 results. So that, just as since Adam we have had 
 great experience in winter sowing, so I should say 
 that since the days of Bacon or Newton we have 
 had great experience in this — that you never can 
 
30 RESEAECH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 have an increase of knowledge in any subject bearing 
 on practical life without its leading to increased practical 
 power. 
 
 I want now to deal with the justification of the use 
 of the experimental method by what it has actually 
 performed, and I am going to ask you to allow me to 
 confine myself to the work of the last 40 years, because 
 that is theperiod which has fallen under my direct notice. 
 I shall group it in a way I group it in my own mind 
 in order to make out this justification. As I have said, 
 to my mind this direct appeal to practical results is not 
 necessary, though it is immensely helpful, to enable 
 one to make up one's mind as to what is the right course 
 to pursue ; but it is all-important in dealing with the 
 many well-meaning persons who do not go along with 
 me in their views with regard to it. The difference 
 is not, I think, because there is a difference of funda- 
 mental principle — -they are as loyal, probably, according 
 to their lights, to the doctrine that we ought to do our 
 best to lessen suffering, as T am ; but they have to learn 
 that which scientific training easily teaches those who 
 have had much to do with it, that the right way 
 to do so is to make full use of the experimental method. 
 1 wish, therefore, to take the results of experimental 
 work in the last 40 years, and point out how it has 
 removed ignorance — that is to say, how it has given us 
 knowledge, and how that knowledge has become of 
 practical value in reducing suffering. 
 
 12728. If ' you please. — Of course the first example 
 which one must take is that of sepsis and the 
 antiseptic method. If you look at the books of 40 
 years ago you will find that the idea that sepsis in the 
 case of open wounds was due to organisms derived from 
 outside was rarely held ; I doubt whether it was held 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 31 
 
 by any ; it was certainly held by very few, and it was 
 not put into practice in any way. And the work of 
 those who demonstrated that sepsis was in all cases due 
 to organisms, and where access was possible, it was almost 
 always due to organisms coming from outside the animal 
 •attacked, gave rise to the antiseptic treatment, the 
 value of which it is quite unnecessary to dwell upon. 
 It was purely the result of experimental research, and 
 it is a triumph the practical value of which puts it at 
 the head of all the changes in the last 40 years. But I 
 am not going to deal with that any further than just 
 to refer to it, because I am sure that its value and its 
 origin are present to the mind of everyone here. 
 
 I wish chiefly to deal with the case of microbic 
 diseases, which, for reasons that will appear, I shall 
 •divide into infectious diseases and diseases commu- 
 nicable otherwise than by what is ordinarily called 
 infection. If you go back 40 years you will find that 
 these diseases were complete mysteries ; they were, 
 alas 1 recognised as facts, because they could not be 
 otherwise; they were ever present with us. They were 
 known as things which ran through a certain course, 
 their symptoms were studied, and the doctors of that 
 time did their best to alleviate them, no doubt, by 
 inursing and treatment. A great number, no doubt, 
 tried to do so also by drugs, which, I think, most 
 authorities to-day would say were practically of little 
 use. But the diseases themselves were, so far as their 
 ■causation is concerned, perfect mysteries. Now experi- 
 ment has changed that from top to bottom. The bulk 
 of these diseases are known now to be the result of an 
 invasion of the system by specific organisms which 
 multiply in the system, and the disease is due to 
 the presence and action of these foreign organisms. 
 In fact, I do not think that I should be giving an 
 
32 EESEAECH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 incorrect idea of the result of the work of these 40 
 years, if I was to say that it has revealed the fact that 
 we live not as isolated living organisms, but that we 
 are surrounded by and penetrated by infinitely small 
 living things of very varied descriptions — that we are, 
 as it were, bathed within and without in a sea of 
 microbic life ; I am using the word microbic in its 
 broadest sense. Within us we have them permanently 
 and probably normally ; in fact, if you include the 
 organisms which live in the blood, certainly normally. 
 We are surrounded by them, and instead of diseases 
 of this kind having to be looked at as due to defects or 
 failure in normal action in the organism itself, we have 
 grown to realise that they are the result of attacks 
 upon the organism by external foes. 
 
 12729. Do you regard all this state of things which 
 you have been describing as wholly due to experiments 
 on animals ? — Absolutely. It is absolutely due to them. 
 
 12730. We have had a good deal of evidence from 
 other witnesses on the subject, and we need not trouble 
 you to describe the instances — Quite so. It is difficult 
 for me to say which is the earliest case in which this 
 was established ; but I will take one of them, because 
 I wish to show how baseless is the idea that the work 
 which has been done in this respect is work which has 
 only led to doubtful or hypothetical results. I wish to 
 show the actual and certain advance of knowledge. 
 Then I wish to show next the way in which that is due 
 to experimental methods. Then I wish to show the 
 •practical methods to which it has led. I will take a 
 single example — any one will do — but I will take the 
 example of anthrax. When Pasteur took up anthrax, 
 it was only known as a terrible disease among cattle, 
 leading to a vast proportion of deaths. He ascertained 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 33 
 
 that it was due to an invasion of a particular microbe, 
 which is known as the microbe of anthrax, which 
 multiplied with infinite rapidity, and which ultimately 
 led to the death of the animal. He then found out a 
 method of inoculation (I am not going to deal with the 
 details of his method for a moment) against it, and in 
 the classical experiment to which I have referred he 
 exposed to anthrax the 25 sheep which were inoculated 
 and the 25 which were not inoculated. He might have 
 done it by putting them in company with diseased 
 animals. As a matter of fact, he took the severer 
 test of deliberately inoculating them with the disease. 
 The result was that those which were treated with his 
 process did not die, and the others did. Now, that is 
 a scientific result as certain as the action of nitric acid 
 would be on iron ; I mean that it was a definite experi- 
 ment, capable of being repeated, and showing conclu- 
 sively that there was a way of defeating this disease, 
 a way which might, or might not, be availed of by 
 mankind, according as the importance of warding off 
 the disease was great or was not. There w r as nothing 
 hypothetical in it ; it was a fact which was just as 
 much demonstrated as any fact that has been demon- 
 strated in chemistry or in any other science. I have 
 there taken a case which relates solely to animals. I 
 have not approached the question of the applicability 
 of the process to mankind, because, fortunately, anthrax 
 is very rare among mankind. But if you confine 
 yourself to the consideration of it as a disease of 
 animals, you see the advance that has been made. 
 First of all, there is the knowledge of the cause — that 
 is to say, that it is due to the presence of microbes. 
 Then (as I shall presently point out) the fact that it 
 was due to the presence of microbes led to the discovery 
 of the method of combating it ; and that led to the 
 
34 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 practical application of that method, and, if you choose 
 to avail yourself of that method, the disease is con- 
 quered. The whole is based upon the discovery of the 
 origin of the disease. It was the knowledge that it 
 was due to microbes which led to the whole of that 
 discovery. Persons might say : " What good does it 
 do to mankind to know that this which they call a 
 disease is really a consequence of a particular type of 
 small life which has trot into the organism and multi- 
 plies there ? It does not alter the nature of the 
 disease ; people die of it all the same." And you 
 would think that the pure theoretical knowledge, that 
 it was due to this particular cause, left the practical 
 problem where it was. May I point out how that piece 
 of knowledge did not leave the problem where it was, 
 but put it in a totally different position, and necessarily 
 led to its solution ? You can see it in this way. It 
 instantly put the phenomenon of recovery in a new 
 position. When an animal was healthy, and there were 
 only a few microbes put in it, when you would say it 
 was best calculated to repel invasion, they multiplied 
 furiously. At the moment when it was weakest, when 
 the microbes were strongest, most numerous, and the 
 animal was most exhausted (if it was a case of recovery), 
 the tide turned, and the enfeebled organism was able to 
 fight the strengthened assailants successfully. That 
 necessarily led to the conclusion that there must have 
 been a change in the organism during that period, 
 which entirely altered the relative strength of the two 
 forces ; and that was the beginning of the realisation 
 that in these diseases there comes some protective 
 change in the organism that is attacked, which brings 
 recovery at the time when you would least expect it. 
 This led to the enquiry : What is that change ? It must 
 be something that survives the disease, because we 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 35 
 
 know that when a man is recovering- from an infectious 
 disease he can give it to other people. Yet although 
 he is more exposed to infection from himself than any 
 other person could possibly be, he is not infected. 
 Therefore it must be something 1 that survives the disease. 
 Then the question came : If it survives the disease, is 
 it possible to produce it under circumstances so that it 
 may be present in the organism independently of the 
 disease ? In fact, men came to realise that recovery 
 in a case of microbic disease means the " turn of the 
 tide " in a process where, on the one hand, the in- 
 vading microbes are multiplying, and on the other 
 hand these protective forces are multiplying, and re- 
 covery or death means whether the turn of the tide 
 comes too late or not. The moment you see that that 
 is so, the whole question becomes — Can you antedate 
 this turn of the tide ? Can you contrive that this 
 protective condition shall be produced earlier, before 
 the mischief is done ? It is no use putting a fire out 
 when all that is valuable in the house is burnt. From 
 these ideas there sprang almost immediately the two 
 main methods of treatment. The one seeks to produce 
 this protective state during the period of the disease, 
 and it is a treatment of this type which succeeded in 
 rabies ; the other seeks to produce the protective state 
 before the disease comes, and is the method that was 
 illustrated in anthrax. Finally, they led to the third 
 line of discovery. Is it possible to get the protective 
 substance from somewhere else, and introduce it during- 
 the disease, in order to antedate the time when the 
 system will become strong enough to repel the attacks 
 of these foreign invaders ? Now, if you think of all 
 those three lines of discovery, which have respectively 
 led up to the treatment of rabies, to the prophylactic 
 methods which are used in the case of anthrax, pneu- 
 
36 BESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 monia, and other diseases, and to the serum treatment 
 of diphtheria, you will find that they all came from 
 the knowledge that the cause of the disease was a 
 foreign organism, capable of multiplication, and that 
 Nature defeated it by a change in the organism which 
 made it more capable of resisting. These practical 
 applications were the direct outcome of those two facts, 
 which were pure pieces of scientific knowledge. So 
 long as the disease was considered merely as a disease 
 which ran its course, which was due to an unknown 
 cause, whose consequences were only known by its 
 symptoms, no one of those things could possibly be 
 discovered. Their discovery was solely due to the 
 experimental examination of natural processes. I was 
 much amused by some evidence given by one of the 
 lady witnesses who have given evidence before you. 
 She seemed to be very much disgusted with the conse- 
 quences of all this knowledge, and, if I might para- 
 phrase what she said, it was : " Nature has made such 
 nice drugs and put them in the plants all around us. 
 Why should we not use these, and not go to such messy 
 things as serum ? " Those are not her words, but they 
 express the eifect of them. Nature has put all kinds 
 of useful drugs in plants, but she never dreams of 
 using them for curative purposes. Her method of 
 curing is entirely by means of the messy things with 
 which the researches of the last 40 years have led us to 
 work. We are now, thanks to the theoretical know- 
 ledge that we have acquired of the cause of these 
 diseases, working to help Nature along the very lines 
 which she has from the foundation of the world herself 
 taken in fighting these diseases ; and therefore, in my 
 opinion, if we are to be guided in our action by our 
 respect for what Nature has so kindly done for us, our 
 course would be to pay very little attention to drugs, 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 37 
 
 and to pay very much attention to those lines of treat- 
 ment which are based on the study of the two closely 
 analogous phenomena of recovery and immunity. 
 
 12731. Assisting our natural friends in fighting our 
 natural enemies inside us ? — Yes, fighting our natural 
 enemies by those means which, in the cases in which 
 we do beat them, are the weapons which we use. 
 
 12732. [Chairman.) I think you were going to deal 
 with the question of the influence of experiment on 
 communicable disease ? — -I have been pointing out that 
 the whole modern conception of the nature of these 
 diseases, and the mode of their cure, arise from discov- 
 eries which have been arrived at purely by experimental 
 methods, including necessarily experiments on living 
 animals, namely, the discovery that they were due to 
 foreign organisms that entered and multiplied in the 
 system, and the discovery that the changes in the 
 system which unquestionably produce recovery are 
 closely allied to those which also produce immunity 
 after recovery. So far I have only spoken of our 
 attempts to effect a cure by introducing those pro- 
 tective substances which Nature, when there is need, 
 produces in some strange manner. But it looks at this 
 present moment as if we were going to combat some 
 microbic diseases still more successfully by stimu- 
 lating other agencies by which she effects her cure. I 
 do not know whether Sir Almroth Wright is to give 
 evidence before this Commission, but if so he will 
 point out how he has devised a method of stimulating 
 the action whereby the white blood corpuscles actually 
 destroy physically the organisms themselves, so that 
 we are gradually utilising both of Nature's methods 
 of cure (and utilising them exactly as Nature does) for 
 the purpose of antedating what I have called the turn 
 
38 BESEABCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 of the tide, that is, strengthening the resistance of the 
 organism that is attacked more than Nature would do 
 merely by her methods of reaction. I now want to 
 pass from these to another class of diseases in which 
 equally we have been studying during the last forty 
 years the cause of the disease and its action on the 
 organism, but where research has led to a totally 
 different method of fighting them — I refer to the com- 
 municable diseases which cannot be called infectious. 
 Take the case of malaria, the tsetse in animals, and 
 Malta fever. 
 
 12733. And rabies ? — Rabies belongs to the first set, 
 because we fight it by generating in the body a pro- 
 tective substance. The way in which we fight it is, we 
 have got a method of giving an attack of rabies which 
 is very quick but very slight, and the consequence is 
 that it produces very swiftly a small amount of protec- 
 tive substances. We then give another one which is 
 also quick, but is stronger, but which can be borne by 
 reason of the presence of the protective substance, and 
 continue doing so while the main body of the attack 
 is moving up. We have thus gradually accumulated a 
 body of protective material, which, when the main 
 attack comes, which would have been inevitably fatal, 
 enables the system to resist it. 
 
 12734. I merely thought that the gnat was serving 
 the same purpose and function that the mad dog 
 was ; therefore I thought it was really in the same 
 class of disease ? — May I apologise ? You are quite 
 right. It is not infectious, but is communicable in a 
 different way, and ought to be in the second class. The 
 reason I already mentioned it with the first class was, 
 because we there use the method of cure of which I 
 have spoken — that is to say, we attempt to produce a 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 39 
 
 protective substance. It was I that was wrong. I 
 want now to pass to cases where we cannot imitate the 
 method of cure, but because we know the cause of the 
 disease and its method of communication we are able 
 to intercept it. Take the case of malaria. I do not 
 know that our methods of curing 1 malaria have ad- 
 vanced substantially, but we now- know the cause of 
 malaria, and we are destroying the possibility of 
 communication. The work that has been done at 
 Ismailia is an example of this. They have got rid 
 almost entirely of the mosquito, which communicates 
 the disease by its bite, and have thus almost got rid 
 of the disease. 
 
 12735. Would you say that that was discovered by 
 experiments on animals ? — Certainly. They had first 
 to discover in what way this disease was communi- 
 cated. As soon as they had discovered in what way 
 it was communicated, the destruction of the communi- 
 cating animal presented itself at once as a method of 
 preventing the disease. A similar case is that of the 
 tsetse, which is absolutely fatal to cows in districts 
 where the tsetse fly is found. They find that it inocu- 
 lates an organism which produces death. I do not think 
 they have made any advances in fighting the disease 
 when the disease is once communicated ; but knowing 
 that it is communicated in that way, our attention is at 
 once turned to discovering how one can fight the tsetse 
 fly, or how one can prevent the tsetse fly itself getting 
 the organism into it which it passes into the animal 
 that it bites. In certain places in England, where 
 there used to be ague, ague is now stopped. It is quite 
 possible that that ague was communicated by the bite 
 of an insect that derived the organism which is the 
 cause of ague from biting some affected animal. We 
 
40 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 have drained the country ; the insect probably exists, 
 but in far smaller numbers, and there are fewer people 
 there, if any, who are affected with ague from whom it 
 can get the infection. The consequence is that the 
 insect is harmless, because it cannot communicate the 
 poison, or rather the poisoning organism, because it 
 cannot get it. And, similarly, we can, when we know 
 the cause of the disease, set to work to prevent the 
 occurrence of those circumstances which enable it to 
 be communicated. This is now being done with yellow 
 fever and many other diseases. It may be that the 
 disease is so bad that the only method we have of 
 fighting its spread is to kill the animal. Take the case 
 of glanders. Now that we thoroughly understand what 
 glanders are, when we thoroughly understand the 
 method of testing" whether an animal is suffering from 
 glanders, the animal may be killed at once and that 
 stops the propagation of the disease. Without that 
 knowledge we could not ascertain so soon what animals 
 we ought to kill, and they would be left as centres of 
 contagion. So that it may be equally effective from 
 the point of practical utility whether we find out the 
 means of communication and stop it, or whether we 
 attack the disease when it is communicated. In both 
 cases it is the knowledge of the cause of the disease, 
 and the knowledge of the way that that cause comes 
 to operate on the organism, which enable us to devise 
 these practical methods. And all that knowledge has 
 been derived entirely from research work, conducted 
 for the purpose of acquiring knowledge, and from the 
 knowledge has come the power. I do not suppose the 
 investigation of the cause of these diseases was carried 
 on upon the lines of any direct idea of a protective 
 method, but the object was to find out the real nature 
 and operation of that against which protection was 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 41 
 
 necessary. When this is done, the step to practical 
 utility always comes sooner or later. 
 
 I have been dealing thus far with the causes of disease. 
 I will now turn to another matter which I see has 
 formed the subject of a great deal of evidence, and that 
 is the study of the organism on which these diseases 
 operate. A vast amount of experimental work of 
 the last 40 years has been directed to discover the 
 physiological actions which are going on in man. Mere 
 anatomy, mere structure, will not tell you physiological 
 action ; the knowledge of physiological actions must 
 be obtained by experiment from a living creature, 
 because, as a rule, as soon as death comes they cease. 
 The importance of this work is just as great as is the 
 importance of the investigation of the causes of disease. 
 Take, as an example, that which I see has been the 
 subject of evidence before this Commission — the localisa- 
 tion of function in the brain — the discovery from the 
 symptoms of paralysis, or epilepsy, of the place where 
 the interference with the nervous system is taking place. 
 It would be quite impossible to ascertain the laws which 
 govern this excepting by experiments on a working 
 animal — that is to say, a living animal. In many cases 
 it need not be a sentient animal ; the experiments may 
 be done when consciousness has ceased ; but it is 
 absolutely impossible to ascertain them unless you make 
 experiments on an animal that is still living. But there 
 are similarly important experiments which go to blood 
 pressure, to digestion, to the function of the great 
 organs, such as the liver, or the pancreas, or the kidney, 
 or the suprarenal capsules, in which it may be necessary 
 to trace out consequences which do not occur immedi- 
 ately. In that case you must perform them on animals 
 which are not only living at the time of the experiment 
 but which are allowed to live afterwards. The examples 
 
42 KESEABCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 which have been given you, I submit, show how all- 
 important such investigations are for several reasons. 
 One of the reasons is that without the knowledge so 
 acquired you cannot read causes from symptoms. I 
 should define the great change between curative science, 
 as it exists now, and curative science as it used to exist 
 many years ago, as being that now we try to fight 
 causes, and then they only tried, or mainly tried, to 
 fight symptoms, Fighting symptoms may be an 
 extremely dangerous thing. A man who, not knowing 
 anything about an engine and finding an over-driven 
 boiler blow off, should fight the symptoms by screwing 
 down the safety valve, would come to serious trouble. 
 And in the same way, if in the case of a symptom — say 
 the symptom of the rise of temperature going up — you 
 say, "The disease makes the temperature go up; very 
 well, then, we will help the organism by putting it down," 
 you may get into serious trouble supposing it should turn 
 out that the rise of temperature, by lessening the resist- 
 ance to the circulation, eases the heart and makes its work 
 less onerous ; it may be that the fast-beating heart has 
 been able to do its work without injury only because the 
 temperature has risen and its work is lighter. If, now, 
 you put the temperature down without removing the 
 cause of fast- beating, it may be that you overstrain the 
 heart — do mischief just as the man who screws down the 
 safety valve. I am not saying that this is so. That is 
 not a matter on which I can speak. All I want to point 
 out is that it is only by intimate knowledge of the 
 organism that we know how far it is safe to fight 
 symptoms. But, more than that, it is only by such 
 intimate knowledge that we are able to diagnose causes. 
 You get a headache ; it is a mere symptom which may 
 come from many different causes. Unless we have 
 perfect knowledge of the organism we may imagine that 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTOK" 43 
 
 a tiling which has been successful for one headache is 
 useful for another, whereas it may positively aggravate 
 it instead of doing it good. The aim of all this in- 
 vestigation into physiological action, which is so varied 
 in its character, and relates to every different part of 
 the organism, is to put the medical man of to-day in the 
 position of a man who knows the construction and 
 operation of the engine he is working, who knows what 
 is the meaning of every symptom of irregular action ; 
 and the increase of his power of alleviating suffering and 
 staving off death is enormously increased by this increase 
 of his knowledge and power of diagnosing, which has 
 arisen from these experimental researches. As I have 
 said, these experiments must be experiments carried on 
 upon living animals, because their object is to ascertain 
 what is the mode of working of each particular organ, 
 and what is the effect of any particular interference 
 with that organ. Sometimes these experiments have 
 resulted in curative methods. You could not have a 
 better example than that which was put before the 
 Commission, namely, the relation of the thyroid gland 
 to myxoedema and cretinism, where, I think, to the 
 surprise of evei^body, it was discovered that we have 
 glands within us which are producing protective 
 substances for the normal life, just as Nature will, when 
 there is an attack of a microbic disease, produce pro hdc 
 vice a protective substance against the foreign invader. 
 When you take away the thyroid gland, and there is not 
 this protective substance, which is no longer formed, 
 then you find the body gets out of order because that 
 is no longer present which was necessary in order to 
 keep down the inherent forces of dissolution. Then it 
 was discovered that, if you supplied artificially that which 
 this gland produced, you could keep down this form of 
 disease just in the same way as you can stop the effects of 
 
44 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 diphtheria, if you put in from another animal that which 
 Nature would produce in order to repel the microbic 
 attack. Just as in diphtheria you get recovery, so you 
 find in myxoedema that when you supply this substance 
 which the body has ceased to have the power of pro- 
 ducing, you get this remarkable recovery. And this 
 appears to be only the commencement of a series of 
 analogous successes. But, apart from the question of 
 direct curative methods so arrived at, the power of 
 diminishing suffering that is given through increased 
 knowledge of the organism is so great that it is difficult 
 to over-estimate it. I do not think it is necessary to 
 give further instances to this Commission. I only want 
 to put these forward to show that there is abundant 
 justification for saying that knowledge which, from its 
 very nature, must be obtained by experiment has 
 already been of the very widest benefit to mankind. I 
 will go on to the question whether experiment is per- 
 missible for the purpose of acquiring such knowledge. 
 Here I must go back for one moment to the example 
 which I gave, as a typical one, of preventing plague 
 getting into a town by killing all the animals which 
 could convey it. Tn my view,w T e are just as much bound 
 to prevent suffering due to ignorance, and just as much 
 justified in inflicting such pain as is necessary for the 
 purpose of doing so, as we should be in killing noxious 
 animals. I have pointed out that this necessary know- 
 ledge has in the past been and must be obtained by ex- 
 periment. It must be done by experiment, it can only be 
 done by experiment on men or by experiment on animals. 
 I unhesitatingly say that our right to experiment on 
 men is extremely limited. In the first place, we have no 
 right, voluntarily, to allow death to occur, even though 
 the man would be willing to permit it. Nor do I think 
 we have any right, voluntarily, to allow serious damage 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 45 
 
 to occur, unless it perhaps may be where it is directly 
 for the purpose of saving life. So I do not think, in 
 view of mankind's power of anticipation, of memory, and 
 the possibility of future suffering, we ought to take the 
 responsibility of allowing experiments which might 
 produce serious consequences to be made on man. Let 
 me give an example. I do not think that we should 
 have the right for experimental purposes to allow a man 
 to infect himself under special circumstances, even 
 though they would assist science, with a disease like 
 syphilis, in order to add to knowledge. It is too serious 
 a responsibility to take to allow that to be done, 
 considering that that man will live for years afterwards, 
 and cannot divest himself from social relations. 
 
 12736. Supposing he was sacrificing himself in that 
 way, and by his sacrifice he could make probable the 
 saving of a great many lives in future, why should you 
 prevent him on the principle that you have to look 
 forward to ultimate results of torture or sacrifice? — 
 Well, it should be the last resource. But I will tell you 
 what, in my opinion, I think constitutes the real 
 difference. I do not think that you ought to lessen 
 in any way the feeling of sanctity of human life, be- 
 cause the consequences are so very widespread. To 
 let a man in a moment of enthusiasm, do a thing 
 which might, or perhaps must, have permanent evil 
 effects throughout all his life, approaches in my mind 
 very close to an infringement of the great principles 
 Avhich make us refuse to consider whether it would be 
 a benefit that one man's life should be taken. Everyone 
 of us knows men whom it would be a blessing- to man- 
 kind to remove, whose lives are a curse to those around 
 them, but, however much we feel that this is the case, 
 we do not allow ourselves to act upon it, because if we 
 
46 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 were once to commence to act in that way towards men, 
 the consequences that would follow would be so far- 
 reaching that we have found it best to lay it down as 
 a rule that it has been, except in special cases 
 prescribed by law, not permissible under any circum- 
 stances for an individual to take human life or to 
 permit a man to die if he can prevent it ; and you will 
 iind that doctors will not only work as hard for a bad 
 man as they would for a good man, but they will 
 actually bring a man back from the doors of death, 
 although they know that he is going to be hanged for 
 what he has done ; because we find it is absolutely 
 necessary to take as an unchallengeable principle that 
 human life is sacred. Therefore I think that, although 
 in small matters you may use experiment on man, and 
 for the very last stage of experiment you probably 
 must do so, you ought to stop there. 
 
 12737. (Sir Mackenzie Chalmers.) You mean with 
 the consent of the man himself? — Yes, even with the 
 consent of the man himself. Where you have 
 established a well-founded scientific probability that the 
 thing is safe, then I think you are justified, but before 
 you attempt to experiment on man, you must have 
 done everything to prepare for it, and you must know 
 with fair scientific certainty what will happen. And 
 that is the reason why I do not think that experiments 
 on man are to be considered at all when you are think- 
 ing of the enormous amount of work that has to be 
 done in scientific research. The necessary work must 
 be done otherwise. Now, I turn to the question of 
 whether we should use animals for the purpose of 
 research. In my opinion, unquestionably, it is not 
 only permitted to us, but it is our duty to try to 
 remove ignorance by, if necessary, experiments on 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTOT 47 
 
 animals ; and I want to give the Commission the 
 principal reasons which make me have such a confident 
 opinion on this point. The first reason is the over- 
 whelming- preponderance of the prevention of suffering 
 by this method. The great bulk of the necessary 
 experiments, as you know, can be made without any 
 pain to the animals at all, because the animal never 
 need be conscious, and therefore no pain is caused at 
 all. But taking the others, the amount of experiment, 
 if properly done, which causes pain is incredibly small 
 compared with the results of the knowledge obtained, 
 even if they be measured by what has already been 
 achieved. Just look at the complete change that there 
 is in our knowledge of ail those great groups of diseases 
 which I have called infectious or communicable. We 
 are no longer fighting them blindly ; we are no longer 
 striking in the dark ; we know what they are. This 
 very knowledge enables us to avail ourselves of 
 experiments which are not painful for the purpose of 
 assisting us in the task, and every man who feels his 
 responsibility does all he can without occasioning pain. 
 But what is done, is done with a knowledge of the 
 enemy we are fighting, so that the experiments grow 
 more telling. The number of painful experiments, as 
 is shown by looking at the actual experiments which 
 have been made, is quite infinitesimal. I read the 
 description of the experiments done under license in 
 England, where excellent research work is done, and 
 most carefully done too ; I read through the list of 
 those which were thus done in a year, and I very much 
 doubt whether the total amount of suffering caused by 
 those experiments would be much greater than would 
 be caused in a single fairly large shooting party, where 
 there were one or two bad shots. If you consider the 
 amount of suffering that is caused in the world, not 
 
48 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 only thoughtlessly, but even deliberately done by 
 people who are ordinary normal men, and may be able 
 to show a reasonable defence for what they do, it 
 dwarfs so utterly the amount that is requisite to 
 produce this useful knowledge, that if the matter was 
 not so serious it would be almost ludicrous to think 
 that there was this organised opposition to the pain 
 caused in scientific research in proper hands. Why, what 
 is attacked here is the only bit of fruitful pain in the 
 world. The greater part of pain had better not be. A 
 man suffers and dies, or suffers and gets well, and all 
 the pain he has suffered has benefited nobody. And in 
 the case of animals there is all this vast mass of pain 
 which is inflicted or permitted, and people tolerate it 
 and say nothing about it, and look upon it as an 
 ordinary thing ; but there is one little bit which brings 
 return in lessening the sufferings of the world, and the 
 people are to be found to organise themselves against 
 it, and throw the whole of their strength into 
 denouncing and preventing it. In my opinion, if you 
 look at the medical science of to-day and the medical 
 science of 40 years ago, and realise that the advance has 
 been caused by physiological research, which is largely 
 carried on under the very Acts which restrict, which 
 regulate, but which distinctly permit painful experi- 
 ments, and then consider on the one hand how much 
 pain that has caused and how completely it has 
 changed our power of dealing with disease and of 
 alleviating suffering, it is really incomprehensible that 
 anybody who sees the totality of misery in the world 
 should think that the small amount of pain that has 
 produced that gigantic result is the first that ought to 
 be stopped. That brings me to the next point, and 
 that is this. Mankind not only claims, but perpetually 
 exercises and properly exercises the right to cause or 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 49^ 
 
 permit suffering in animals when needful or desirable. 
 It requires considerable thought to realise the extent 
 to which that is admitted by all, and is, indeed, 
 unchallengeable. Take the case which I gave of the 
 rats on board the ship. I pointed out that it was 
 right to kill those rats in order to prevent the possi- 
 bility of their spreading the plague, but no such 
 serious reason is necessary to justify killing them. I 
 do not suppose there is anyone who would challenge 
 the right of the captain to do it if they would injure 
 the cargo, if they would produce a small pecuniary 
 loss ; under these circumstances it would be considered 
 that it was perfectly right for him to do it. We 
 unhesitatingly kill vermin — we kill things that do 
 pecuniary harm, and no one dreams that it is a thing 
 which a man of high principle will not do. So that 
 nobody ever dreams of questioning the right of 
 causing pain for the purpose of a useful result, when 
 that useful result is merely pecuniary. But when 
 instead of the result being pecuniary, it means dimin- 
 ishing the suffering of the world for all time and for 
 all the world, forsooth, it is challenged. Take the 
 case, for instance, of a herd of cattle attacked by 
 some painful disease, from which, we will say, 50 per 
 cent, of those attacked survive. A man would be 
 considered perfectly justified in allowing them all to 
 go through the disease. The 50 per cent, that would 
 die would die, the rest would have the pain of the 
 disease and get better ; and he would say, " Well, 
 but I could not afford to sacrifice the 50 per cent, 
 that would survive — it would be too big a loss to 
 me." For the £10 apiece that they were worth he 
 would have permitted them to be killed on the spot ; 
 but he considers that he has a just and perfect right 
 to allow them to suffer all that pain in order to save 
 
50 EESEAECH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 himself from the loss of the 50 per cent, that survive. 
 And I do not say he is wrong, because the comfort of 
 his family and other things of importance to him may 
 depend upon the question of how great is the loss 
 inflicted on him pecuniarily by this attack. But if 
 it is allowable to permit the whole of that suffering 
 in order to avoid a pecuniary loss, the question as 
 to whether it is right to increase by a little the 
 suffering by well-designed scientific experiment to 
 secure a return, not in money, but in the power 
 of stopping suffering, seems to me literally to permit 
 of only one answer. No man could consider the 
 matter without realising that such infliction of pain 
 was justified, if he would do what I hold he ought 
 to do : add inflicted and preventible pain together. 
 The moment you take as your guiding principle that' 
 you are responsible for pain which you could prevent, 
 and that this and the pain which you inflict must 
 be taken together in order to guide your action, it 
 appears to me that there is no painful treatment of 
 animals which is nearly so completely justified as that 
 which leads to knowledge. Nobody, so far as I know, 
 would hesitate to overdrive a horse in order to save 
 a life or to bring assistance to a life that was in 
 danger, and yet that would be suffering inflicted for 
 the purpose of benefit to a single individual. The 
 people that are engaged in scientific research are work- 
 ing for something which will benefit not one single 
 individual, but will benefit the race for all time. 
 
 I feel myself that the justification for the necessary 
 use of even painful experiments, where they are 
 required for the purpose of obtaining knowledge, 
 can only be questioned by shutting the eyes to the 
 further consequences of our action — putting a veil be- 
 tween our action and what it ultimately leads to. And 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 51 
 
 I cannot help thinking that the people who lead the 
 movement on the other side must be aware of this, 
 because they deal so persistently in misrepresentation. 
 It is very easy to misrepresent the work of those who 
 are a long distance in advance from the ordinary man. 
 I have known this illustrated again and again in manu- 
 facture. Processes have been stigmatised as adultera- 
 tion, as falsification, and everything that was bad, 
 whereas if people had followed out the advance of 
 science they would have known that they were simply 
 better methods for doing the same thing as earlier 
 processes, and doing it with greater certainty and with 
 greater cheapness. But they had not followed it out, 
 and, because the new processes were different, a con- 
 trast to the old ways, and people thought that there- 
 fore they were something to be stigmatised, so it is 
 here. If we could get people to learn what science is 
 and what it has done, they would never attack those 
 who are at work on it. And it is to keep them from 
 learning, that there is this frightful misrepresentation. 
 I remember, and I think the Chairman of the Com- 
 mission probably remembers, how in the seventies the 
 walls of London were placarded with a poster repre- 
 senting a rabbit in the process of being roasted alive. 
 
 12738. [Chairman.) I do not remember it, but we 
 have been reminded of it ; we have heard about the 
 Toasted rabbit. — I remember it well, because I wrote 
 about it to the late Sir Michael Foster, and I asked 
 him, What is the lethal temperature ? because I re- 
 cognised at once that the experiment which was thus 
 misrepresented must have been one to find out when 
 "temperature alone would suffice to occasion death. 
 
 12739. You may take it for granted that we know 
 .all about it ; we have had it explained by Sir Lauder 
 
52 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 Brunton. — Very well. It turned out that the tem- 
 perature was something like 109 or 111 degrees. 
 
 12740. (Sir Mackenzie Chalmers.) 114 to be exact. 
 — It differs very much, of course, in different animals. 
 
 12741. {Chairman.) That was the outside tempera- 
 ture, not the blood temperature.— I was giving the 
 temperature of the blood. Anyone would realise, of 
 course, that the object was to do it under such circum- 
 stances that no reaction should be set up — that there 
 was simply an increase of temperature, and that there- 
 fore there must be no disturbance of the organism, and 
 that the poster was absolutely false. Yet that placard 
 was all over London. It is not surprising that a great 
 number of people join this organisation, because they 
 get their ideas from these very serious misrepresenta- 
 tions. They believe themselves to be humane, but 
 when one realises the evil that ignorance does, and that 
 the only way in which ignorance can be removed is by 
 the experimental method, and the enormous advantages 
 in the way of saving pain that these results have 
 produced, one must feel that the truly humane men are 
 the people who are defending scientific research. 
 
 Nowl should like to turn to thepractical conclusions to 
 which I have come with regard to this subject. You see 
 that the good basis of all these movements is the desire 
 of saving pain in animals and men. Now if that is so, 
 the whole motive ceases with the conscious life of the 
 animal. As soon as it has finally passed out of the 
 conscious life the whole ratio agendi ceases. It is as 
 absurd to object to an experiment on an animal that has 
 ceased to be conscious and will never aa-ain be conscious 
 as it would be to object to the dissection of a dead 
 animal. The only motive is the desire to save sufferings 
 and suffering then is as impossible as if death had 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHEE MOULTON 53 
 
 actually occurred. Now what is the consequence of 
 that ? Hence there ought to be no interference with 
 experiments on animals which are in anaesthesia, except 
 that they should be permitted only to persons who can 
 and will take care that the anaesthesia is complete, and 
 that the animal is killed before it comes out. There is 
 no other principle on which any interference could 
 justifiably take place. There must be somebody in 
 charge of or superintending - the experiment who, from his 
 character and position, can be trusted with the respon- 
 sibility of seeing that there is what I may call permanent 
 and effective anaesthesia. Therefore, with regard to such 
 experiments, it is not only not necessary to interfere 
 with their being used for educational purposes, but if 
 the Commission may trust my experience they will 
 indicate that in their opinion it is most important 
 that they should be so used. For there is no com- 
 parison between the living effect of an experiment that 
 you have seen and one that you have merely read of. 
 May I give my own experience ? I have many and 
 many a time read over carefully-described processes, and 
 have imagined that I understood them ; but I knew of 
 ■old what that meant, and used generally, in cases of 
 any difficulty, to insist on what we call " having a view." 
 I used to go down and insist on being- taken, not 
 necessarily by an educated person— I much preferred a 
 workman — right through the whole process, and seeing 
 it done before my eyes. I went back with a knowledge 
 of the case, with a power of handling it, and with a 
 power of drawing conclusions as to the processes, which 
 were quite new-born. So it is with the man whom you 
 are educating for this serious duty of fighting disease. 
 If he has actually seen an experiment, it lives in his 
 memory. But that is not the only thing — it remains 
 in his memory as a living thing, and when he acquires 
 
54 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 new experience or new knowledge connected with it, he 
 will find that it will make the old experiment mean 
 more than it did to him even at the moment when he 
 saw it ; because he sees the whole thing before his 
 mind's eye, and not only reads a description which, after 
 all, only states certain results. And, as there is no 
 ground, therefore, from the side of humanity to interfere 
 with these experiments which cause no pain, I think 
 they should be largely used educationally. Medical 
 education is of prime importance to the community. 
 The greatest difficulty in the wav of giving- to the world 
 the full benefit of all the accumulated knowledge of this 
 last 40 years is that you have to educate your practical 
 men up to the level of it. Just as in war it is of no use 
 having medical appliances at the base if you cannot get 
 them up to the front of the army, so it is of no use to 
 have this accumulated knowledge unless the power of 
 using it to prevent suffering is in the hands of those 
 whom you train. Therefore the efficacy of our methods 
 of tuition ought not to be looked upon as a matter of 
 little importance — it is a matter of the very gravest 
 importance ; and I should put no restrictions upon the 
 use of painless experiments in connection with it, 
 excepting that the experiments must be under the 
 supervision of someone possessing a certificate such as I 
 have indicated, which should be a certificate granted to 
 persons who could be trusted with regard to anaesthesia. 
 And whether you have reports of those experiments or 
 not I do not think is of the slightest importance, 
 provided it is thoroughly understood that it is the duty 
 of those possessing the certificates to see that the 
 anaesthesia never ceases, and they are held responsible 
 for so doing. 
 
 I turn now to the more difficult question, a question 
 which requires more careful examination — namely, that 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 55 
 
 of experiments that are in themselves painful. There, 
 I think, you should divide the certificates into two 
 classes. Certain men of acknowledged capacity in 
 research, who have shown that they are not only 
 capable of serious research, but have already done it, 
 should have general certificates entitling 1 them to per- 
 form such experiments, subject only to one thing, and 
 that is that they should report fully every experiment. 
 They are immeasurably better able to judge what is 
 worth doing than any body of men that you could put 
 over them. They are the people who are working at 
 the subject itself, and they are, as a rule, men of such 
 high position and high character in England that 
 there can be no ground for being afraid of trusting 
 them with this power. But I am satisfied that, both 
 for the satisfaction of those who desire to proceed 
 cautiously, and for the good of mankind, and also to 
 prevent any possible abuse, they ought to report all 
 that they have done. I do not think that a painful 
 experiment should be allowed to pass into oblivion. 
 It is made, in my opinion, for the benefit of the race and 
 for the increase of knowledge ; therefore I think such 
 reports should be made, and I do not think that any- 
 body concerned would really object to that being done. 
 
 12742. Do you mean that that report should be made 
 by the inspector or by the operator ? — By the operator. 
 
 12743. Sent into the Home Office? — Sent into the 
 Home Office. I think he ought to do that. I would 
 put him under no restriction as to the character of 
 his experiments ; I would not put him under any re- 
 striction as to the place in which they are done ; but 
 I would have a full report sent into the Home Office. 
 Of course, a certificate of that kind would be given 
 only in recognition of an acquired position and high 
 
•56 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 ■worth in research. You can only do harm by interfer- 
 ing 1 with men of that class. There is no danger of 
 «uch men developing recklessness. I have not ex- 
 amined anything excepting the experiments that have 
 been done in England, and I am therefore speaking 
 only with regard to them. I have never, in the years 
 that I have followed the matter, found anything which 
 from this point of view I call recklessness of suffering 
 in any experiment made for research. 
 
 12744. Have you found levity ? We have heard 
 accusations of levity on the part of those who see ex- 
 periments. — I feel very strongly that such an accusa- 
 tion is unfair even in the case of students. I do not 
 find that the medical student of to-day is a man of the 
 Bob Sawyer type. I think they work extremely hard. 
 Those who see them in their classes can give you better 
 information on this point, but certainly those I have 
 come across are hard workers and are not guilty of 
 any levity. 
 
 12745. (Mr. Ram.) Would you have any inspection 
 •of these experiments ? — I would have no inspection of 
 the first-class certificates. 
 
 12746. (Chairman.) You do not mean the first-class 
 certificates described in the Act ? — No; I mean my first 
 •class. Just let me give an example. Supposing it 
 was a question of giving a general certificate to Sir 
 Lauder Brunton. The idea of controlling what he 
 should do with it would, in my opinion, be nothing 
 but a blunder. But he would have to report all that 
 he did ; and if, by some accident, a mistake was made 
 in any case, if a person developed levity, or even reck- 
 lessness or cruelty, his reports would show it, and his 
 •certificate might be withdrawn by reason of it. He 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTOX 57 
 
 might then be relegated to the second class, which I. 
 ;ani going to describe. 
 
 12747. (Sir Mackenzie Chalmers.) How do you sug- 
 gest that a man should get into the first class ? You 
 are imposing a new duty upon the Home Office. — I 
 know it 
 
 12748. (Chairman.) You begin by supposing that he 
 is a first-class man? — Yes. I am quite prepared to 
 sav how I think the Home Office oug;ht to decide. I 
 think it ought to decide by the opinion of the leaders 
 •of the medical sciences, because I am satisfied that 
 they possess, to an equal degree with any other body 
 of men in the world, the moral qualities necessary to 
 enable them to advise ; and beyond question they 
 possess, better than anybody else, the intellectual 
 qualities and the qualities of knowledge which would 
 •enable them to do so efficiently; and a certificate of 
 this kind should only be given where there was a con- 
 sensus among the advisory body that the person held 
 such a position in medical science that he might have 
 this general certificate. I now pass to those who have 
 not attained to that position — which, as I have said, 
 would be an exceptional position, although I am happy 
 to say that there are many men in England who would 
 merit it. I think that in the case of younger men, 
 or men who had not yet attained to the commanding 
 position of those to whom I would give this general 
 certificate, the lines of the present Act are the right 
 lines. I think it is reasonable to expect them to 
 accept specific limitation of the type of experiment, of 
 the scope of the research, and of the place where the 
 experiment is to be performed, in order that there 
 might be the security of the supervision of those who 
 are over the laboratory, if there be any such persons, 
 
58 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 and also the security of inspection. Limitation of this- 
 kind, which the people would be bound to respect, and 
 I believe would respect, should prevent all danger of 
 abuse, which, though I think it would rarely become a 
 reality, is more possible to occur than it would be in 
 the case of the exceptional men to whom I have before 
 referred. I see no reason why those restrictions should 
 not be put on ; and, as before, full and complete reports 
 should always be ^ade, so that a record of all these 
 experiments and their results should be preserved. The 
 line, then, that I should advise, would be as follows : 
 — Certificates with regard to non- painful experiments 
 — that is to say, experiments where the animal was- 
 kept under anaesthetics and not allowed to survive — 
 should be quite general, but should only be issued to 
 persons who would perform or supervise those experi- 
 ments, and could be trusted to see that the anaesthesia 
 was complete and permanent. For painful experi- 
 ments there should be a small but select class who- 
 should have ofeneral certificates. The other class 
 should have special certificates, specifying the nature of 
 the research, the nature of the experiment, and the 
 place where it was to be done ; and there should be full 
 and adequate inspection of those places while the experi- 
 ments were going on. 
 
 12749. Strangers you would not have present, I 
 understand? — I would not have strangers present,first of 
 all, because, in my opinion, it would not assist the experi- 
 ment, and, secondly, I do not think it would be a good 
 thing for unqualified persons to see these things. They 
 are the serious work of research, and persons who are not 
 trained by medical or physiological study would gain no 
 good from witnessing them. But I would encourage 
 students being associated with this research. It is the 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHEE MOULTON 59 
 
 finest training- that they can have. So far as it can be 
 done without interfering- with research work, it is a 
 mistake to keep people out who are capable of learning 
 from it ; but that the public should be admitted would, 
 I think, be a still greater mistake. In my opinion, they 
 have no business there, and it is much better to exclude 
 them wholly. 
 
 12750. (Sir Mackenzie Chalmers.) You mean that 
 the public would go there in the same spirit that the 
 public used to go to an execution ? — Exactly. Now I 
 hope that I shall be forgiven if I say one or two words 
 about the two restrictions which have been recently 
 suggested to the Home Office. 
 
 12751. (Chairman.) Yes, we should like to hear your 
 suggestion about that. — I thoroughly disapprove of 
 them. The first relates to foreign savants who are not 
 naturalised Englishmen. There is no possible reason, 
 why they should be put at a disadvantage as compared 
 with British subjects. Of course, for the first class 
 of certificates under the system recommended, they 
 must have a recommendation from English people 
 of the proper position, to show that they deserved 
 the privilege ; but I am not talking about that for 
 the moment. I am talking about the existing system. 
 Foreign universities and foreign men of science 
 have been extremely good to our students. They 
 permit them to take part in their courses ; they permit 
 them to use their laboratories, and without good 
 reason I would not show any want of reciprocal 
 kindness towards foreigners. No reason is put for- 
 ward for thus placing them at a disadvantage, if they 
 possess the qualifications which would justify the 
 certificate being granted to an Englishman, except- 
 ing that it is suggested that you cannot enforce 
 
60 RESEAKCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 the performance of the conditions. That is quite a 
 mistake. The only difficulty in the way of enforc- 
 ing 1 the performance of the conditions is that they 
 are capable of changing their residence ; but an 
 Englishman who wants to break the conditions is 
 equally capable of changing his residence. The true 
 remedy in both those cases is to have a responsible 
 head of the laboratory, who has to see that the con- 
 ditions are duly performed, step by step as the work 
 goes on, and, in my opinion, there would be no 
 greater difficulty in assuring this being done in the 
 •case of a foreigner than there would be in the case of 
 an Englishman. 
 
 12752. That would be so in the case of a foreign 
 •doctor working in an English laboratory ; but supposing 
 that he wanted a laboratory of his own, and hired a 
 laboratory of his own, and started it for the work for 
 a year in England, would you have a supervisor over 
 him then ? — I think that you might quite fairly require 
 that there should be some person, resident in England, 
 responsible for the observance of the conditions — that 
 there should be somebody, such as the head of the la- 
 boratory, to whom Government can look to see that the 
 conditions are performed, not in a lump, but pari 
 'passu with the work done. You are justified in recog- 
 nising a difference in the case of foreigners to that ex- 
 tent, but no further. 
 
 12753. Do you not think that if he took a laboratory 
 by the year, we will say, the country has got just as 
 much hold upon him as upon any Englishman who 
 took it ? — Yes. There are a great many foreigners in 
 England who should be trusted to the same extent as 
 an English person who is well known in England. But 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 61 
 
 if there is any question about it, you must have some- 
 body in England responsible. 
 
 12754. (Sir Mackenzie Chalmers.) The difficulty is 
 that they may be well known to scientific men in Eng- 
 land, but not known to the public ? — Yes ; but I think 
 the action of the Home Office should be regulated by 
 the knowledge of scientific men. These public reputa- 
 tions are apt to be misleading in both directions. You 
 will find, if you take the public estimate of men, that 
 the best lecturer is considered to be the greatest man 
 in research. My experience is by no means so. There 
 are men with a magnificent power of exposition, who 
 are thereby so well known to the public that they are 
 supposed to be the leaders of science, whereas in truth 
 they are merely bearers of good news from the front, 
 and are in no sense the leading workers. May I pass 
 to the second restriction recently suggested to the 
 Home Office ? 
 
 12755. (Chairman.) If you please. — The second is- 
 that a medical diploma should be required. In my 
 opinion, specialisation has gone so far that the distinc- 
 tion between people who actually work practically at 
 the curative sciences, and those who devote their lives- 
 to research in those sciences, is becoming marked. A 
 man who is actively employed in practice, as a first- 
 rate man ought to be, has not usually the time for 
 consecutive research ; he has to get his time in frag- 
 ments just when he can. On the other hand there are 
 many men who are so devoted to research that they 
 give up medical practice as a method of earning their 
 livelihood, and devote themselves entirely to research. 
 The wide diffusion of wealth in this country facilitates- 
 this. England has always been noted in science for 
 the numbers of its first-class amateurs. Cavendish was. 
 
€2 BESEABCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 ■an amateur, and I could mention many other great 
 names of men who have had the wherewithal to devote 
 themselves to research, and have made it their life's 
 work without seeking- any remuneration for their labour. 
 What should guide the Home Office entirely is, whether 
 or not the applicants for certificates or licenses are 
 suitable for research. Whether or not they have taken 
 out a medical diploma which gives them the nominal 
 right to practise, when they have no intention to do so, 
 ■but mean to devote their whole time to research, is a 
 matter which should be quite immaterial. I am quite 
 satisfied that there are now, and there will be yet more 
 such in the future, men in the very first rank of 
 research work, who do nothing in the way of the practice 
 ■of medicine, and deliberately abstain from it, because 
 it would interfere with their scientific research by taking 
 their time and their attention. Those people ought to 
 be encouraged rather than discouraged. Therefore 
 this proposed restriction would, in my opinion, be a 
 retrograde step. So that I should strongly advise that 
 neither of those two things should be adopted as a 
 principle. 
 
 12756. Have you studied the Act with a view to 
 suggesting amendments ? — You see, I agree with a great 
 deal of it, excepting that I think there are a certain 
 class of men who should have these unrestricted powers 
 of experiment, and that the practice of the Home Office 
 with regard to non-painful experiments should not 
 have regard to the nature of the experiment, but 
 simply to the reliability of the person on whom is 
 placed the responsibility of the anaesthesia. With these 
 .modifications I do not quarrel with the Act, because 
 I do not think that the real worker, if he is not really 
 .hampered in his research, chafes against these restric- 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 63 
 
 tions, which are, after all, only a recognition of what 
 T might call the fundamental principle of his action. 
 He is working that pain may be lessened. He is a 
 person whom I have always found extremely sensitive 
 to the cry of suffering, and he has no wish to protest 
 against this Act, which does homage to that principle, 
 provided that it does not hamper him. I have not 
 specially considered the provisions of the Act, because 
 I thought it had been dealt with so much by people 
 who knew its working, and are so much more qualified 
 to deal with it than I am ; but I doubt whether my con- 
 clusions clash very much with the Act as it at present 
 stands. 
 
 12757. (Sir William Church.) I should like to ask 
 •one question with regard to those to whom you would 
 grant these first-class certificates. Of course, you 
 consider that any person who is placed in the position 
 of head of a laboratory connected with a University or 
 a, public institution approaching in importance to a 
 University would necessarily be a person of sufficiently 
 good repute ? — May I put it another way ? I should 
 hope that a University would never choose a man for 
 the position who did not deserve it. 
 
 12758. Then, besides persons in charge of labora- 
 tories, you would grant these what you call first-class 
 certificates to such men of repute ; and in their case I 
 understood you to say they should not be necessarily 
 restricted to working in licensed laboratories ? — No ; I 
 should leave them perfectly free, subject to report. 
 
 12759. So that they might work either in their own 
 rooms or wherever was most convenient for their work 
 to be done ?— Yes, certainly. 
 
 12760. Then, with regard to all others who hold 
 
64 EESEAECH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 licenses, 1 presume that you look forward to their all 
 working in licensed laboratories? — Certainly. Of course,. 
 I should trust that the best of those who commenced 
 with a license would pass in time to the higher degree;, 
 but, as long as they only had a license, they would 
 work in proper laboratories subject to inspection. 
 
 12761. So that, even as you propose, it would not 
 be possible for a research student, whether holding a. 
 medical diploma or not, to perform experiments on 
 living animals even in a licensed laboratory, excepting 
 if he held a license himself ? — No; not painful experi- 
 ments. He could not perform painful experiments. 
 
 12762. And, of course,, all those who held what you 
 call first-class licenses would be enabled to perform the 
 experiments which are now performed under Certificate 
 B without having to get anything further than their 
 license ? — Yes, certainly. 
 
 12763. {Sir Mackenzie Chalmers.) I should like to> 
 take first the two points that you have raised about the 
 Home Office practice. I suppose you agree that, apart, 
 from the wording of the Act, the Home Secretary 
 is bound to have regard to public opinion to some 
 extent — that there is a real danger of the powers being 
 lost if suddenly public excitement were got up against 
 them ? — He is bound to have regard, I should say, to 
 the Act. I think that he has no need to regard public 
 feeling beyond the extent to which it is expressed in 
 the Act. 
 
 12764. You think that his sole duty is to administer 
 the Act, without regard to whether he is imperilling 
 the existence of the Act or not ? — I think that the 
 safest w r ay to maintain the Act is to administer it in the 
 way in which it is best for research. The real defence of 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHEK MOULTON 65 
 
 research will come from the good that it has done; and 
 I think it would be an unwise thing to administer the 
 Act in a niggardly way, in the hope that it would 
 lessen the possibility of a popular storm. I do not 
 myself fear very much of the popular storm. I know 
 perfectly well the power of a certain small number of 
 determined people to prejudice the minds of the 
 public, and I appreciate that it is considerable; but the 
 more that the public has experience of the good results 
 of research, the safer it is in the hands of the public. 
 
 12765. Of course, as regards the foreigner himself, 
 the man who is temporarily over here, he is to some 
 extent free from the law. He performs certain experi- 
 ments, and the results of those experiments are not 
 published, probably, until he has returned ; and then 
 the Home Secretary may be blamed for allowing the 
 law to be broken by a man over whom he had not 
 effective control. You recognise that difficulty, do you 
 not ? — He ouodit to have effective control, and I think 
 that this would be best obtained by requiring that the 
 reports should be sent in from time to time, and that 
 there should be some responsible person to see this 
 is done. 
 
 12766. Would you go so far as this, that supposing 
 a foreigner w T ere authorised to experiment, say, at 
 University College, you would make the head of the 
 laboratory there surety for him ? — Yes ; I would make 
 him see that the thing is done. And if the man is not 
 performing his duty, it is the duty of the head of the 
 laboratory to report to the Home Office that the ex- 
 periments are being carried out without due observa- 
 tion of the conditions. 
 
 12767. But what practical power of enforcing it have 
 we ? Would you withdraw the license of the head 
 
66 BESEAECH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 of the laboratory if there were any contravention of 
 the conditions by a foreigner working in his laboratory? 
 — Not unless he connived at it. But, in my opinion, 
 the report of an experiment should be written out 
 as nearly as possible at the time ; and if he neglects 
 to see that this is done, it appears to me that he is 
 responsible for the breach. 
 
 12768. Now, coming to medical diplomas, is there 
 not this difficulty ; that when once you get away from 
 the medical diploma, you have no guarantee whatever 
 as to a man ? If he belongs to the medical profession, 
 he has been trained up in a profession whose sole object 
 is, as you say, to diminish pain. When once you 
 get outside that, where are you to get your information 
 from as to the qualifications, moral and scientific, of a 
 person who is to have this license ? — Would you say 
 that we had no knowledge of the qualifications of Frank 
 Balfour, before he was killed so unfortunately, years 
 ago ? You will remember that he started a biological 
 school at Cambridge which was full of the greatest 
 promise ? Do you think that the addition of a medical 
 diploma would have made Frank Balfour a more reliable 
 man ? 
 
 12769. Personally I do not. But then, you must 
 take the case of a good many persons who are not 
 known to the public, and you must remember that 
 public opinion is nervous on the question. — I should 
 require the most exceptional testimony in the case of 
 a man who had not done scientific study at a University 
 and under proper training; but that it should have taken 
 the form of medical study seems to me unnecessary. 
 You must understand that the scientific degrees, 
 though they are often taken by medical men, and 
 ought to be taken by them are in themselves in- 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 67 
 
 dependent. They may not qualify for a diploma, 
 but they connote an amount of knowledge which would 
 quite warrant your recognising the bearers as fit men, 
 if they were duly recommended by those who advise 
 the Home Office. Of course, you will occasionally meet 
 with a man who without any scientific study in a re- 
 cognised University is a man of pre-eminent value. 
 Michael Faraday had had, I think, no University train- 
 ing at all. But those cases are extraordinarily rare, 
 and would only be dealt with when vouched for in a 
 way which was quite unexceptional. So that, gener- 
 ally, you would have the security of University recog- 
 nition that the applicant was properly qualified. 
 
 12770. Do you think that the existing certifying 
 authorities, which are mainly medical authorities, under 
 the Act, would be able to deal with the case of the 
 people you refer to without medical qualification ? — I 
 think so. 
 
 12771. Or ought the advised body to be enlarged? 
 — Those who examine up at the Universities usually 
 possess medical degrees, and a great many of them 
 possess also science degrees. I do not know whether 
 Sir Michael Foster had a medical decree. 
 
 12772. (Dr. Gaskell.) Yes, he had, and practised. — 
 I did not know that. But you can easily imagine that 
 there may be some who have not. 
 
 12773. (Dr. Wilson.) Pasteur had not ; he was a 
 chemist. — No, Pasteur had not ; that is a good ex- 
 ample. 
 
 12774. And Metchnikoff was a chemist ? — Yes. 
 
 12775. (Sir Mackenzie Chalmers.) Then I should 
 like to ask your opinion upon this. It has been sug- 
 
68 RESEAECH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 jested to us by Mr. Coleridge, whose evidence, perhaps, 
 you have not seen ? — I have not. 
 
 12776. It has been suggested that a certificate of 
 humaneness should be required before a license was 
 given. What is your opinion on that ? He suggested, 
 I think, that a certificate should be given by one Jus- 
 tice of the Peace and one minister of religion. Perhaps 
 you would rather not express an opinion? — It is not 
 enough to say that it is unnecessary. It would be 
 an absolute insult to the people whom you would 
 be consulting. The suggestion that the heads of the 
 medical profession are not judges of humanity, of 
 humaneness, I ought to say, is a piece of the most in- 
 tolerable insolence. It is shocking when you consider 
 the way in which, as a rule, medical men disregard 
 their own comfort, and put themselves to any amount 
 of trouble and discomfort for the purpose of helping 
 people who are sick, very often when it does not bring 
 to them the slightest kudos or the slightest pecuniary 
 return. To suggest that such people do not know 
 what humaneness is and are not moved by suffering is 
 intolerable. 
 
 12777. I think the suggestion rather was, from the 
 evidence that we have had, that the present certifying 
 authorities regard only scientific ends and qualifications 
 and do not consider as within their province the 
 question of humanity. — So far as Englishmen are con- 
 cerned (of whom I can alone speak from personal 
 experience) the question as to whether they are likely 
 to use power properly from the point of view of regard 
 for suffering is from my knowledge of the people who 
 are likely to take out licenses practically settled 
 before the application is made. But the certifying 
 authorities have to advise that licenses should be 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHEE MOULTON 69 
 
 granted to the applicants, and if they think that par 
 exception they are people who have not got any care 
 for suffering, and will make a recklessly painful use 
 of their powers, they are bound to say that they are 
 not fit persons to receive licenses. 
 
 12778. Do you think that ought to be expressed in 
 the Act or the rules in any way ? — I should say " fit 
 and proper." 
 
 12779. You think that would cover it?— I think that 
 Avould cover it. 
 
 12780. Now, coming to the ethical side of the ques- 
 tion ; may I rightly sum up your statement in this 
 way — I want to know if I have understood it — that all 
 pain is an evil, perhaps the supreme evil ? — Yes. 
 
 12781. And that we are justified in the present in- 
 fliction of a lesser evil when there is a reasonable 
 prospect in the future of avoiding a very much greater 
 evil ? — Yes, quite so. 
 
 12782. That would be the test and the touchstone 
 which we should apply to all animal experiments ? — 
 Yes, that is the touchstone. And in applying that 
 touchstone we must conscientiously use the whole of 
 the teaching that the history of science and the history 
 of medicine have given us. The particulars I have 
 given were in order to show that where there is serious 
 research there is an overwhelming probability that the 
 answer will be in the affirmative. 
 
 12783. Of course, as you know, by other ethical wit- 
 nesses, we have had other tests suggested. For in- 
 stance, one of the witnesses suggested to us that the 
 
 * ©O 
 
 test would be the conscience of a progressive people. 
 I must say it did not convey very much information to 
 
70 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 my mind. — It conveys none to my mind. I feel satis- 
 fied that that is an extremely bad definition. " Con- 
 science " is too often used where the true expression 
 should be " emotion." Emotion may be a good motive 
 power, but it is a bad guide, and, in my opinion, there is 
 a very great deal of force in the phrase which somebody 
 has used : "If you want to do good in a particular way, 
 and want to know how you can do it effectively, give 
 your heart a rest and your brains a chance." The only 
 thing that can safely guide you is your reason. Your 
 emotions may give you a motive, just as I say that the 
 motive which should dominate the whole of this 
 question is the desire for the suppression of pain. 
 When you have got that motive and desire to obey it, 
 it is your reasoning power which ought to tell what 
 you ought to do. 
 
 12784. What is pressed upon us continually is this : 
 Admitted that pain is an evil, you have no right to 
 inflict a definite voluntary amount of pain when the 
 future saving of pain is absolutely problematical. What 
 do you say to that argument ? — It is simply because the 
 people have not studied the question that they talk 
 about its being absolutely problematical. What you 
 have to do in life is to act on probabilities. It is 
 quite impossible to prophesy exactly what will 
 happen in the future, but when you see from the 
 teaching which the past has given us that there is 
 an overwhelming probability in favour of a thing hap- 
 pening you are bound to act upon that probability. 
 Would a person refuse to take a medicine because it 
 had not always cured people ? It would be a doctor's 
 duty to give it if there was a probability that it would 
 do so. 
 
 12785. Then passing from what I call first principles 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHER MOTJLTON 71 
 
 to the secondary principles, if I have understood your 
 evidence, you say that at any rate we have no right 
 to prevent experiment for the purpose of increasing 
 knowledge and controlling pain and disease while we 
 allow the infliction of death and pain in sport for 
 the purpose of providing food for mankind, and for 
 a mere commercial purpose, such as spaying sows and 
 castrating horses ?— Yes, and in infinitely more cases 
 than those — cases in which, as I have said, you inflict 
 pain for the purpose of preventing pecuniary loss. If 
 you have a valuable dog you see it through the dis- 
 temper. If it is not valuable you kill it to begin 
 with. Yet you might be perfectly willing to sell that 
 dog in any case. That is simply permitting suffering 
 for the purpose of avoiding pecuniary loss. Other- 
 wise, I really do not understand why people consider 
 it right to kill beetles. Beetles will only destroy a 
 certain amount of their food, and yet they extirpate 
 them, just as they extirpate mice and they extirpate 
 rats, and consider that they are justified in doing so, 
 because they say that such animals do harm. That 
 harm is really pecuniary harm. 
 
 12786. Perhaps the fairest way of putting some of 
 these ethical points that have been put before us is to 
 call your attention to a little publication I have just 
 received from Mr. John Page Hopps, who has given 
 evidence here. May I ask you to look at the second 
 paragraph on page 3, beginning with the word " But " ? 
 May I divide it into paragraphs and ask you whether 
 you have any comments to make upon it ? May I read 
 the first words that I want to ask you about : " But 
 when all is said on the score of results and the artist 
 in vivisection has done his best to convince us that he 
 is the apostle of mercy, many grave considerations 
 
72 EESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 ' give us pause.' For instance, what law of God or 
 Nature justifies this treatment of our poor relations ? 
 Who gave to this amazing enthusiast the right to say 
 off-hand that he was at liberty to exploit ' the lower 
 animals ' for experiments ? " May I point out what 
 it is that gives the whole force of that to the people 
 he is talking to ? It is the use of the word " experi- 
 ments." They do not know what it means : they do 
 not know its importance. Supposing I was to put, 
 instead of " experiments," ' : saving life or stopping 
 suffering," the whole appeal would fall to the ground. 
 "Experiment" to an uneducated person does not con- 
 note what it does to persons who are acquainted with 
 the nature and results of research. If you read it 
 in that way : " Who gave to this amazing enthusiast 
 the right to say off-hand that he was at liberty to 
 exploit 'the lower animals' for saving human life?" 
 the answer would be " Why not ? " 
 
 12787. As regards that expression of his, "What 
 law of God or Nature justifies this treatment of our 
 poor relations ? " what is your comment ? — It is all 
 based on this want of appreciation of the meaning and 
 effect of scientific research. Supposing I was to put it, 
 for instance, " What law of God or Nature justifies our 
 killing things, or permitting them to suffer, in order to 
 save us from pecuniary loss ? " Yet we do this, and 
 must do it, every day. A beetle is a poor relation, or 
 a mouse is a poor relation, just in the same way as a 
 guinea-pig is ; and yet we treat our poor relations in 
 the shape of mice and beetles with phosphorus, and let 
 them die in pain, because we say we must keep them 
 down. 
 
 12788. If his argument was right, as a logical 
 conclusion we should have no right to keep a cat who 
 
LOED JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 73 
 
 destroys mice by a cruel and lingering death ? — 
 Certainly not. We should first kill all the birds of 
 prey, and then kill the birds they prey on, because they 
 prey on insects ; and then we should kill the greater 
 part of those insects because they live, many of them, 
 on still smaller things. You get back to the state of 
 the Hindoo. Nobody ever dreams of doing that. It is 
 only when it is applied to scientific research, the ad- 
 vantage of which they do not know, that these qualms 
 come in. 
 
 12789. They do not believe in scientific research and 
 its results. They honestly do not believe in it ? — They 
 do not believe in it; but that is entirely due to their not 
 having studied and mastered the subject ; otherwise 
 language such as that would not have any effect. 
 
 12790. And Nature herself nearly always provides a 
 cruel and lingering death for every wild animal ? — Yes, 
 it is terrible. I think it is Seton Thompson who says: 
 " The end of every wild animal's life is a tragedy." And 
 it is perfectly true. 
 
 12791. Now may I take you to the next sentence : 
 " For laboratory purposes, his spectacles would not be 
 safe in the streets ; and if he put his proposal into 
 effect, and got his babies on the dissecting table, the 
 very costermongers would raid his laboratory, and even 
 medical students might help them. Why ? The 
 cutting-up of one baby might save the lives of thou- 
 sands of other babies ; and the torture of one for an 
 hour might save thousands from suffering for years. 
 Why object ? " — I object because you ought to get that 
 knowledge in other ways. Everybody who has studied 
 the subject realises that the knowledge can be ob- 
 tained in other ways. The analogy between living 
 
74 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 creatures is so marvellously close that you can, without 
 any experiments on mankind (excepting that you ulti- 
 mately apply to them the methods which you have 
 worked out scientifically), acquire all the knowledge 
 that is necessary. 
 
 12792. It has been suggested to us that if we en- 
 courage experiments on living animals, it per se will 
 tend to encourage experiments on human beings. 
 What do you say to that argument ? — It is the alterna- 
 tive of it. I remember a discussion in society on the 
 subject of these experiments, and a lady at last put 
 this question to the anti-vivisector : " Would you 
 prefer an experiment to be tried on a cat or a baby ? " 
 And the person replied, " I would have no experiment 
 tried at all," not seeing that when you have not got 
 knowledge, when you are working blindly, all you do is 
 one long series of experiments on mankind. You are 
 just as really trying experiments ; you are not trying 
 experiments under such circumstances that they en- 
 lighten you, and the consequence is that the result of 
 what you do is to add very little to our knowledge. 
 
 12793. You mean that as long as you are treating 
 disease empirically in mankind, you are experiment- 
 ing ? — Purely experimenting. You are either just 
 sticking to ignorance, or, if you are trying anything 
 new, you are experimenting on mankind. 
 
 12794. Pressing Mr. Hopps' argument to its logical 
 conclusion, it would come to this, I suppose : If ex- 
 periments on animals lead to experiment on babies, 
 the eating of animals for food would lead to eating 
 human beings for food ? — You are honouring his argu- 
 ment by attempting to follow it out. That is what it 
 would naturally lead to. But, in the case of experi- 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 75 
 
 ments, it is because we will not try the experiments on 
 babies that we do them on animals. 
 
 12795. Would you kindly look at the last paragraph 
 on page 35, and the first paragraph on page 36 ? I 
 think you have really dealt with that question. Mr. 
 Page Hopps says, talking of voluntarily incurred ex- 
 periments : " There is a splendid opportunity here for 
 the suicide. Instead of a coward in retreat, let him 
 be a hero as an offering. ' The world,' he says, ' is full 
 of misery — sordid, diseased and despairing. I will get 
 out of it.' He is full of pity for mankind, and is dis- 
 gusted at its lot ; so he decides to give it no help, but 
 to go. What a lame and impotent conclusion ! What 
 an opportunity for heroism lost ! " Does that strike 
 you as somewhat unpractical ? — I have dealt with that. 
 It is not only impossible, but to my mind it is immoral 
 in the highest degree, and it shows an absolutely crass 
 ignorance of the nature of scientific research, to think 
 that by a few suicides you could replace the experi- 
 ments on animals which, in a complicated matter like 
 this, must be numerous, but need rarely be painful, 
 and which, if they are painful, can, in the great 
 majority of cases, be stopped by inflicting death. 
 
 12796. I suppose another difficulty would be that 
 you would not get any scientific man to experiment on 
 the would-be suicide ? — If he did, he would probably 
 be saved the trouble of suicide himself. 
 
 12797. Then Mr. Page Hopps, at page 36, makes 
 another suggestion as regards minor experiments, as 
 he calls them : " Or might it not be possible to connect 
 some minor forms of vivisection with crime ? Here is 
 a criminal who has earned his fourteen years of penal 
 servitude. Let him commute it for six months in the 
 
76 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 hands of a reliable vivisectionist, within limits. And 
 so throughout the whole scale of penalties ?" — I think 
 that is loathsome levity ; that is all I can say. 
 
 12798. Then, leaving that and coming to what you 
 have said yourself, you thought that a man is not 
 justified in experimenting on himself when there is any 
 prospect of real danger ? — Yes, I think so, unless he is 
 obliged to do it — and 1 think he rarely is. 
 
 12799. Take a well-known instance. Haffkine in- 
 vented a prophylactic serum, or injection rather, for 
 plague, as you know ? — Yes. 
 
 12800. The first person he tried it on was himself. 
 Was he justified or not? — Certainly he was justified if 
 he had scientifically worked it out till he had a well- 
 grounded right to expect that it would not lead to evil 
 consequences. At that stage a man may justifiably, and 
 to the great benefit of the human race, experiment 
 upon himself. 
 
 12801: Either on himself or any other person who 
 thoroughly knows what he is doing and consents ? — 
 
 Yes. 
 
 12802. [Chairman.) It is very like Columbus taking 
 out his ship to discover America ? — Yes, except that 
 Columbus oug-ht to have made a few more observations 
 before he did it. 
 
 12803. He had good reason for believing that there 
 was land out there ? — No doubt. 
 
 12804. {Sir Mackenzie, Chalmers.) Would you justify 
 the course of experiments of Dr. Leonard Hill and his 
 assistant experimenting on themselves in the way of 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 77 
 
 testing how many atmospheres they could subject them- 
 selves to ? — Yes. That is a most interesting instance. 
 He had worked at the subject until he felt clear that 
 he had got, if I might use the phrase, the rule of 
 danger, and having worked it out he had the confidence 
 to submit himself to it, and in that way he enormously 
 assisted the acceptance of his methods. I think he was 
 right. But he would have been perfectly wrong to 
 go trying one method after another upon himself before 
 he had worked his method out to that high degree of 
 scientific probability. 
 
 12805. I think the only difficulty that I feel is this : 
 where do you draw the distinction between the man 
 who, for a scientific purpose, submits himself to a 
 dangerous experiment, and a doctor who goes into a 
 hospital reeking with typhus at the imminent risk of 
 his life to carry on the ordinary work of his profes- 
 sion ? — I said that I made an exception when it was 
 necessary to save human life. You see, if a doctor 
 knows that if he does not do that, many lives in that 
 hospital will certainly be lost, I think then that he is 
 perfectly right to say, Well, I will risk my life in order 
 to save those lives. But in the other case, I think 
 that he is a bad scientific man if he does not find a 
 way of working it out, without exposing his life, up 
 to a point when he is justified in doing so. That is 
 my feeling. In giving this evidence, I have in my 
 mind all the time what science is. Science is not the 
 bungling, haphazard sort of thing that the world out- 
 side believes it to be. It is organised common sense 
 enlightened by appeals to actual fact, which are framed 
 for the express purpose of giving you the information 
 which is necessary for your common sense to act upon. 
 And when you realise this, you feel that the man who is 
 
78 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 content to follow scientific methods is not driven to 
 these heroic steps ; he can, with the minimum of suffer- 
 ing to animals and without endangering human life, 
 work out the problems which are before him. If he is 
 impatient he would like, perhaps, to experiment upon 
 himself or on men, but if he is patient he need not do 
 so. And I want the scientific man to be patient in that 
 way. 
 
 12806. There is only one other question that I want 
 to ask you. You urge the importance of painless ex- 
 periments before students ? — Yes. 
 
 12807. On the old principle Segnius irritant animos 
 demissa per aures ? — Yes. 
 
 12808. But what we have been told is that the per- 
 formance of these experiments tends to demoralise 
 students, tends to create a morbid curiosity as to pain 
 in their minds. What is your opinion as to that ? — 
 My opinion is that that fear is entirely bred in the 
 minds of the people who express it. I do not believe 
 there is the slightest justification for it. We compel 
 students to be present at operations on living men and 
 living women because we feel that we must do so, and 
 no one would listen to the suggestion that they ought 
 not to be present there. How in the world can it have 
 a bad effect when they see operations on animals if it 
 does not when they see them performed on man ? I 
 do not believe that there is the slightest justification 
 for the fear, and, as a rule, I do not like or attach any 
 importance to suspicions as to impurity in other people 
 without adequate evidence. 
 
 12809. (Mr. Tomkinson.) All your evidence, I think 
 is pretty well based upon the assumption that practic- 
 
LORD JUSTICE FLETCHER MOULTON 79 
 
 ally perfect anaesthesia can be and is maintained in 
 these physiological experiments ? — Yes. 
 
 12810. And you have no qualms about it as to the 
 possibility of perfect and continued anaesthesia in 
 operations ? — I have no doubt whatever about it. Some 
 one expressed it to you in a way which I think exactly 
 represents the truth, viz., that consciousness is the 
 first thing to go and the last thing to come back. 
 
 12811. [Dr. Gashell.) Consciousness of pain ? — Yes; 
 consciousness of pain, I mean, is the first thing to go 
 and the last thing to come back. We have the experi- 
 ence of people who have had the most serious and long- 
 continued operations performed upon them, and have 
 come back to consciousness, and their universal testi- 
 mony is to absolute unconsciousness of pain. 
 
 12812. (Mr. Tomkinson.) Then that being the case, 
 and anaesthetics being an established fact, there is no 
 reason for me to ask you how far you would press your 
 theory of the justifiableness of inflicting pain, even in- 
 tense pain upon individual creatures in order to pre- 
 vent a much larger amount of suffering spread over a 
 vast number of individuals ; in other words, the in- 
 fliction of vicarious sacrifices ? — You ought only to do 
 that where it is necessary for you to get the knowledo-e 
 which will enable you to prevent pain in future, just 
 in the same way as in my simile of the plao-ue- 
 stricken ship. I think the man ought to take the most 
 painless method that is applicable to kill those rats, 
 but he must kill them even though it should be 
 painful. 
 
 12813. But then that is to avoid and prevent a 
 gigantic danger ? — Yes. 
 
80 RESEARCH DEFENCE SOCIETY 
 
 12814. That would hardly be on all fours with a very 
 painful experiment — an awfully painful experiment, 
 say — upon an animal for a possibility of discovery ? — 
 That is just the point. There have been many painful 
 experiments in discovering the true nature of disease 
 which, as I say, makes us think so differently about 
 all these microbic diseases that we cannot put our- 
 selves back into the ignorance of fifty years ago ; but 
 they have been for the purpose of ascertaining the 
 nature of these diseases in order that we might fight 
 them. The number of very painful experiments is 
 very few — extremely few. The greater number of 
 the experiments have been inoculations, and as 
 soon as the' disease has developed itself the animal is 
 killed, because what the experimenters have wanted 
 to find out was aye or no, would the disease be taken 
 under such circumstances ? The number of cases 
 in which you have to allow really painful experiments 
 is confined to these — that is, the cases where you 
 are examining the distant effects of certain lesions 
 of the nerves, of interference with the digestive organs, 
 in order that when you see symptoms which are so 
 produced you may know where the evil is. They are 
 never, I think, performed casually ; the very painful 
 ones would almost always, I should think, in the 
 history of English research in physiology, be performed 
 for some very definite object, in order to give us this 
 very essential knowledge. 
 
 12815. And as a matter of fact, with regard to the 
 destruction of dangerous or destructive animals, the 
 common way of trapping them is about as cruel as can 
 be adopted ? — Quite so. 
 
 12816. And yet it is recognised? — Quite so. 
 
liORD JUSTICE FLETCHEK MOULTON 81 
 
 12817. You probably would agree with me that some 
 more stringent law in the direction of prevention of 
 cruelty to animals would be very desirable in those 
 regards ?— Yes, I agree. That is just what I feel. I 
 feel that this infliction of pain for the purpose of know- 
 ledge is the last thing you ought to touch. I should 
 be very strongly in favour of legislation for lessening 
 pain, if such a thing were possible ; but I am happy 
 to say that the need grows less. I think that there is 
 a growing of increased sensitiveness towards suffering 
 which would help legislation of the kind that you 
 speak of, and which is even rendering such legislation 
 unnecessary. I see it everywhere. 
 
 12818. Another instance : that entirely misleading 
 statement of baking rabbits prompts the question of 
 the boiling of lobsters ? — Yes. There may be much 
 that one might advantageously inquire into there. 
 
 printed and published by 
 William hodoe and company, iso fleet street, London, e.c. 
 
Statement by the Home Secretary. 
 
 House of Commons, June 10, 1912. 
 (See the Times, June 11, 1912.) 
 
 Sir Philip Magnus asked the Home Secretary whether his 
 attention had been called to a shop in Piccadilly and to one 
 recently opened in Oxford Street, in which were exhibited stuffed 
 animals tied down for an imaginary operation, and suggesting 
 that animals were tortured by vivisection ; and whether, having 
 regard to the congestion of passenger traffic due to the nature of 
 such exhibits, and the bad effects thereby produced on sensitive 
 and uninformed people, he would take steps to prevent the 
 public display of such shows. 
 
 Mr. M'Kenna— My attention has been drawn to these shops, 
 but the Police report that they have not caused any congestion of 
 
 traffic. I regret that I have no power to prevent such 
 
 displays. The persons responsible for them can only damage 
 their cause by adopting methods which are calculated to spread 
 the false belief that in this country cutting operations are 
 allowed to be performed on animals without anaesthetics. The 
 recent Report of the Royal Commission condemned this method 
 of propaganda. 
 
 Statement by the Royal Commission. 
 
 (Fined Report of the Commission, page 20.) 
 " We desire to state that the harrowing descriptions and 
 illustrations of operations inflicted on animals, which are freely 
 circulated by post, advertisement or otherwise, are in many cases 
 Calculated tO mislead the public, so far as they suggest that 
 the animals in question were not under an anaesthetic. To 
 represent that animals subjected to experiments in this country 
 are wantonly tortured would, in our opinion, be absolutely 
 
 false." 
 
 The International Medical Congress in 
 
 London, at a General Meeting in the Albert Hall, August 12th, 
 
 1913, unanimously approved the following resolution : — 
 
 "That this Congress records its conviction that experiments on living 
 animals have proved of the utmost service to medicine in the past, and 
 Are indispensable to its future progress. That accordingly, while strongly 
 deprecating the infliction of unnecessary pain, it is of opinion, alike in 
 the interest of man and of animals, that it is not desirable to restrict 
 competent persons in the performance of such experiments." 
 
The Research Defence Society has more than 5000 Members 
 and Associates, and many Branches. It has nothing to do with 
 the actual making of experiments on animals, nor with the. 
 administration of the Act, nor does it ask for the abolition of 
 the Regulations with regard to these experiments in this Country. 
 Its only business is to set the facts of the case clearly and 
 steadily before the public so that all people may judge for theni-^ 
 selves. It gives addresses and lantern lectures, publishes and 
 distributes literature, opens stalls or bureaux where they may 
 be wanted for a time, and supplies information to all enquirers. 
 
 It has already done much to bring about a better under- 
 standing of the value and necessity of research in physiology 
 and pathology, but there is plenty of work waiting to be done. 
 
 The Hon. Secretary of the Society and the Hon. Secretaries 
 of the Branch Societies are always glad to supply literature, to 
 make arrangements for lectures, and to receive applications for 
 Membership and Associateship. 
 
 The Society's official address is 21 Ladbroke Square, 
 London, W.