Just so do we find a crowd of petty vivisectionists daily committing atrocities and stupidities, because it is the custom to do so.  Vivisection is customary as part of the routine of preparing lectures in medical schools.  For instance, there are two ways of making the action of the heart visible to students.  One, a barbarous, ignorant, and thoughtless way, is to stick little flags into a rabbit’s heart and let the students see the flags jump.  The other, an elegant, ingenious, well-informed, and instructive way, is to put a sphygmograph on the student’s wrist and let him see a record of his heart’s action traced by a needle on a slip of smoked paper.  But it has become the custom for lecturers to teach from the rabbit; and the lecturers are not original enough to get out of their groove.  Then there are the demonstrations which are made by cutting up frogs with scissors.  The most humane man, however repugnant the operation may be to him at first, cannot do it at lecture after lecture for months without finally—­and that very soon—­feeling no more for the frog than if he were cutting up pieces of paper.  Such clumsy and lazy ways of teaching are based on the cheapness of frogs and rabbits.  If machines were as cheap as frogs, engineers would not only be taught the anatomy of machines and the functions of their parts:  they would also have machines misused and wrecked before them so that they might learn as much as possible by using their eyes, and as little as possible by using their brains and imaginations.  Thus we have, as part of the routine of teaching, a routine of vivisection which soon produces complete indifference to it on the part even of those who are naturally humane.  If they pass on from the routine of lecture preparation, not into general practice, but into research work, they carry this acquired indifference with them into the laboratory, where any atrocity is possible, because all atrocities satisfy curiosity.  The routine man is in the majority in his profession always:  consequently the moment his practice is tracked down to its source in human passion there is a great and quite sincere poohpoohing from himself, from the mass of the profession, and from the mass of the public, which sees that the average doctor is much too commonplace and decent a person to be capable of passionate wickedness of any kind.

Here then, we have in vivisection, as in all the other tolerated and instituted cruelties, this anti-climax:  that only a negligible percentage of those who practise and consequently defend it get any satisfaction out of it.  As in Mr. Galsworthy’s play Justice the useless and detestable torture of solitary imprisonment is shown at its worst without the introduction of a single cruel person into the drama, so it would be possible to represent all the torments of vivisection dramatically without introducing a single vivisector who had not felt sick at his first experience in the laboratory.  Not that this can exonerate any vivisector