The path of M. Pasteur’s investigations is strewed with gifts of vast monetary value to the silk trades, the brewer, and the wine merchant.  And this being so, it might well be a proper and graceful act on the part of the representatives of trade and commerce in its greatest centre to make some public recognition of M. Pasteur’s services, even if there were nothing further to be said about them.  But there is much more to be said.  M. Pasteur’s direct and indirect contributions to our knowledge of the causes of diseased states, and of the means of preventing their recurrence, are not measurable by money values, but by those of healthy life and diminished suffering to men.  Medicine, surgery, and hygiene have all been powerfully affected by M. Pasteur’s work, which has culminated in his method of treating hydrophobia.  I cannot conceive that any competently instructed person can consider M. Pasteur’s labours in this direction without arriving at the conclusion that, if any man has earned the praise and honour of his fellows, he has.  I find it no less difficult to imagine that our wealthy country should be other than ashamed to continue to allow its citizens to profit by the treatment freely given at the Institute without contributing to its support.  Opposition to the proposals which your Lordship sanctions would be equally inconceivable if it arose out of nothing but the facts of the case thus presented.  But the opposition which, as I see from the English papers, is threatened has really for the most part nothing to do either with M. Pasteur’s merits or with the efficacy of his method of treating hydrophobia.  It proceeds partly from the fanatics of laissez faire, who think it better to rot and die than to be kept whole and lively by State interference, partly from the blind opponents of properly conducted physiological experimentation, who prefer that men should suffer than rabbits or dogs, and partly from those who for other but not less powerful motives hate everything which contributes to prove the value of strictly scientific methods of enquiry in all those questions which affect the welfare of society.  I sincerely trust that the good sense of the meeting over which your Lordship will preside will preserve it from being influenced by those unworthy antagonisms, and that the just and benevolent enterprise you have undertaken may have a happy issue.

I am, my Lord Mayor, your obedient servant,

T.H.  Huxley.

Hotel Kursaal, Maloja, Haute Engadine, July 8, 1889.

My dear Lankester,

Many thanks for your letter.  I was rather anxious as to the result of the meeting, knowing the malice and subtlety of the Philistines, but as it turned out they were effectually snubbed.  I was glad to see your allusion to Coleridge’s impertinences.  It will teach him to think twice before he abuses his position again.  I do not understand Stead’s position in the Pall Mall.  He snarls but does not bite.