And when that day shall come, 0 my brother-man, you who claim for yourself and for me so proud an ancestry—tracing our pedigree through the anthropomorphoid ape up to the primeval zoophyte—what potent spell have you in store to win exemption from the common doom ? Will you represent to that grim spectre, as he gloats over you, scalpel in hand, the inalienable rights of man ? He will tell you that this is merely a question of relative expediency,—that, with so feeble a physique as yours, you have only to be thankful that natural selection has spared you so long. Will you reproach him with the needless torture he proposes to inflict upon you ? He will smilingly assure you that the hyperæsthesia, which he hopes to induce, is in itself a most interesting phenomenon, deserving much patient study. Will you then, gathering up all your strength for one last desperate appeal, plead with him as with a fellow-man, and with an agonized cry for “Mercy !” seek to rouse some dormant spark of pity in that icy breast ? Ask it rather of the nether mill-stone.
The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) (1832-1898), English author, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. “Some Popular Fallacies About Vivisection” serialised on The Grumpy Vegan and available in full at the Animal Rights Library.
