EUTHANASIA.

I HAVE already related to you with what care they look after their

sick, so that nothing is left undone which may contribute either to

their health or ease. And as for those who are afflicted with incurable

disorders, they use all possible means of cherishing them, and of making

their lives as comfortable as possible; they visit them often, and take

great pains to make their time pass easily. But if any have torturing,

lingering pain, without hope of recovery or ease, the priests and

magistrates repair to them and exhort them, since they are unable to

proceed with the business of life, are become a burden to themselves and

all about them, and have in reality outlived themselves, they should no

longer cherish a rooted disease, but choose to die since they cannot but

live in great misery; being persuaded, if they thus deliver themselves

from torture, or allow others to do it, they shall be happy after death.

Since they forfeit none of the pleasures, but only the troubles of life

by this, they think they not only act reasonably, but consistently with

religion; for they follow the advice of their priests, the expounders

of God's will. Those who are wrought upon by these persuasions, either

starve themselves or take laudanum. But no one is compelled to end his

life thus; and if they cannot be persuaded to it, the former care and

attendance on it is continued. And though they esteem a voluntary death,

when chosen on such authority, to be very honourable, on the contrary,

if any one commit suicide without the concurrence of the priest and

senate, they honour not the body with a decent funeral, but throw into a

ditch.*

* Memoirs. A translation of the Utopia, &c, of Sir Thomas

Moore, Lord High Chancellor of England. By A. Cayley the

Younger, pp. 102,103. (Edition of 1808.)

In pleading for the morality of Euthanasia, it seems not unwise to

show that so thoroughly religious a man as Sir Thomas Moore deemed that

practice so consonant with a sound morality as to make it one of the

customs of his ideal state, and to place it under the sanction of the

priesthood. As a devout Roman Catholic, the great Chancellor would

naturally imagine that any beneficial innovation would be sure to obtain

the support of the priesthood; and although we may differ from him on

this head, since our daily experience teaches _us_ that the priest may

be counted upon as the steady opponent of all reform, it is yet

not uninstructive to note that the deep religious feeling which

distinguished this truly good man, did not shrink from this idea of

euthanasia as from a breach of morality, nor did he apparently dream

that any opposition would (or could) be offered to it on religious

grounds. The last sentence of the extract is specially important; in

discussing the morality of euthanasia we are not discussing the moral

lawfulness or unlawfulness of suicide in general; we may protest against

suicide, and yet uphold euthanasia, and we may even protest against the

one and uphold the other, on exactly the same principle, as we shall see

further on. As the greater includes the less, those who consider that a

man has a right to choose whether he will live or not, and who therefore

regard all suicide as lawful, will, of course, approve of euthanasia;

but it is by no means necessary to hold this doctrine because we contend

for the other. _On the general question of the morality of suicide, this

paper expresses no opinion whatever_. This is not the point, and we do

not deal with it here. This essay is simply and solely directed to prove

that there are circumstances under which a human being has a moral right

to hasten the inevitable approach of death. The subject is one which is

surrounded by a thick fog of popular prejudice, and the arguments in

its favour are generally dismissed unheard. I would therefore crave the

reader's generous patience, while laying before him the reasons

which dispose many religious and social reformers to regard it as of

importance that euthanasia should be legalised.

In the fourth Edition of an essay on Euthanasia, by P. D. Williams,

jun.,--an essay which powerfully sums up what is to be said for and

against the practice in question, and which treats the whole subject

exhaustively--we find the proposition for which we contend laid down in

the following explicit terms:

"That in all cases of hopeless and painful illness, it should be the

recognised duty of the medical attendant, whenever so desired by the

patient, to administer chloroform, or such other anaesthetic as may

by-and-by supersede chloroform, so as to destroy consciousness at once,

and to put the sufferer to a quick and painless death; all needful

precautions being adopted to prevent any abuse of such duty; and means

being taken to establish, beyond the possibility of doubt or question,

that the remedy was applied at the express wish of the patient."

It is very important, at the outset, to lay down clearly the limitations

of the proposed medical reform. It is, sometimes, thoughtlessly stated

that the supporters of euthanasia propose to put to death all persons

suffering from incurable disorders; no assertion can be more inaccurate

or more calculated to mislead. We propose only, that where an incurable

disorder is accompanied with extreme pain--pain, which nothing can

alleviate except death--pain, which only grows worse as the inevitable

doom approaches--pain, which drives almost to madness, and which must

end in the intensified torture in the death agony--that pain should be

at once soothed by the administration of an anaesthetic, which should

not only produce unconsciousness, but should be sufficiently powerful

to end a life, in which the renewal of consciousness can only be

simultaneous with the renewal of pain. So long as life has some

sweetness left in it, so long the offered mercy is not needed;

euthanasia is a relief from unendurable agony, not an enforced

extinguisher of a still desired existence. Besides, no one proposes to

make it obligatory on anybody; it is only urged that where the patient

asks for the mercy of a speedy death, instead of a protracted one, his

prayer may be granted without any danger of the penalties of murder or

manslaughter being inflicted on the doctors and nurses in attendance. I

will lay before the reader a case which is within my own knowledge,--and

which can be probably supplemented by the sad experience of almost every

individual,--in which the legality of euthanasia would have been a boon

equally to the sufferer and to her family. A widow lady was suffering

from cancer in the breast, and as the case was too far advanced for the

ordinary remedy of the knife, and as the leading London surgeons refused

to risk an operation which might hasten, but could not retard, death,

she resolved, for the sake of her orphan children, to allow a medical

practitioner to perform a terrible operation, whereby he hoped to

prolong her life for some years. Its details are too-painful to enter

into unnecessarily; it will suffice to say that it was performed by

means of quick-lime, and that the use of chloroform was impossible.

When the operation, which extended over days, was but half over,

the sufferer's strength gave way, and the doctor was compelled to

acknowledge that even a prolongation of life was impossible, and that

to complete the operation could only hasten death. So the patient had to

linger on in almost unimaginable torture, knowing that the pain could

only end in death, seeing her relatives worn out by watching, and

agonised at the sight of her sufferings, and yet compelled to live on

from hour to hour, till at last the anguish culminated in death. Is it

possible for any one to believe that it would have been wrong to have

hastened the inevitable end, and thus to have shortened the agony of

the sufferer herself, and to have also-spared her nurses months of

subsequent ill-health. It is in such cases as this that euthanasia would

be useful. It is, however, probable that all will agree that the benefit

conferred by the legalisation of euthanasia would, in many instances, be

very great; but many feel that the objections to it, on moral grounds,

are so weighty, that no physical benefit could countervail the moral

wrong. These objections, so far as I can gather them, are as follows:--

Life is the gift of God, and is therefore sacred, and must only be taken

back by the giver of life.*

* We, of course, here, have no concern with theological

questions touching the existence or non-existence of Deity,

and express no opinion about them.

Euthanasia is an interference with the course of nature, and is

therefore an act of rebellion against God.

Pain is a spiritual remedial agent inflicted by God, and should

therefore be patiently endured.

_Life is the gift of God, and is therefore sacred, and must only

be taken back by the Giver of life_. This objection is one of those

high-sounding phrases which impose on the careless and thoughtless

hearer, by catching up a form of words which is generally accepted as an

unquestionable axiom, and by hanging thereupon an unfair corollary.

The ordinary man or woman, on hearing this assertion, would probably

answer--"Life sacred? Yes, of course; on the sacredness of life depends

the safety of society; anything which tampers with this principle must

be both wrong and dangerous." And yet, such is the inconsistency of the

thoughtless, that, five minutes afterwards, the same person will glow

with passionate admiration at some noble deed, in which the sacredness

of life has been cast to the winds at the call of honour or of humanity,

or will utter words ot indignant contempt at the baseness which counted

life more sacred than duty or principle. That life is sacred is an

undeniable proposition; every natural gift is sacred, _i e._, is

valuable, and is not to be lightly destroyed; life, as summing up all

natural gifts, and as containing within itself all possibilities of

usefulness and happiness, is the most sacred physical possession which

we own. But it is _not_ the most sacred thing on earth. Martyrs slain

for the sake of principles which they could not truthfully deny;

patriots who have died for their country; heroes who have sacrificed

themselves for others' good;--the very flower and glory of humanity

rise up in a vast crowd to protest that conscience, honour, love,

self-devotion, are more precious to the race than is the life of the

individual. Life is sacred, but it may be laid down in a noble cause;

life is sacred, but it must bend before the holier sacredness of

principle; life which, though sacred, can be destroyed, is as nothing

before the indestructible ideals which claim from every noble soul the

sacrifice of personal happiness, of personal greatness, yea, of personal

life.*

* The word "life" is here used in the sense of "personal

existence in this world." It is, of course, not intended to

be asserted that life is really destructible, but only that

personal existence, or identity, may be destroyed. And

further, no opinion is given on the possibility of life

otherwhere than on this globe; nothing is spoken of except

life on earth, under the conditions of human existence.

It will be conceded, then, on all hands, that the proposition that life

is sacred must be accepted with many limitations: the proposition, in

fact, amounts only to this, that life must not be voluntarily laid down

without grave and sufficient cause. What we have to consider is, whether

there are present, in any proposed euthanasia, such conditions as

overbear considerations for the acknowledged sanctity of life. We

contend that in the cases in which it is proposed that death should be

hastened, these conditions do exist.

We will not touch here on the question of the endurance of pain as a

duty, for we will examine that further on. But is it a matter of no

importance that a sufferer should condemn his attendants to a prolonged

drain on their health and strength, in order to cling to a life which is

useless to others, and a burden to himself? The nurse who tends, perhaps

for weeks, a bed of agony, for which there is no cure but death--whose

senses are strained by intense watchfulness--whose nerves are racked

by witnessing torture which she is powerless to alleviate--is, by

her self-devotion, sowing in her own constitution the seeds of

ill-health--that is to say, she is deliberately shortening her own life.

We have seen that we have a right to shorten life in obedience to a call

of duty, and it will at once be said that the nurse is obeying such a

call. But has the nurse a right to sacrifice her own life--and an

injury to health is a sacrifice of life--for an obviously unequivalent

advantage? We are apt to forget, because the injury is partially veiled

to us, that we touch the sacredness of life whenever we touch health:

every case of over-work, of over-strain, of over-exertion, is, so to

speak, a modified case of euthanasia. To poison the spring of life is

as real a tampering with the sacredness of life as it is to check its

course. The nurse is really committing a slow euthanasia. Either the

patient or the nurse must commit an heroic suicide for the sake of the

other--which shall it be? Shall the life be sacrificed, which is torture

to its possessor, useless to society, and whose bounds are already

clearly marked? or shall a strong and healthy life, with all its future

possibilities, be undermined and sacrificed _in addition to that which

is already doomed?_ But, granting that the sublime generosity of the

nurse stays not to balance the gain with the loss, but counts herself as

nothing in the face of a human need, then surely it is time to urge then

to permit this self-sacrifice is an error, and that to accept it is a

crime. If it be granted that the throwing away of life for a manifestly

unequivalent gain is wrong, that we ought not to blind ourselves to the

fact, that to sacrifice a healthy life in order to lengthen by a few

short weeks a doomed life, is a grave moral error, however much it may

be redeemed in the individual by the glory of a noble self-devotion.

Allowing to the full the honour due to the heroism of the nurse, what

are we to say to the patient who accepts the sacrifice? What are we to

think of the morality of a human being who, in order to preserve the

miserable remnant of life left to him, allows another to shorten life?

If we honour the man who sacrifices himself to defend his family, or

risks his own life to save theirs, we must surely blame him who, on the

contrary, sacrifices those he ought to value most, in order to prolong

his own now useless existence. The measure of our admiration for the

one, must be the measure of our pity for the weakness and selfishness of

the other. If it be true that the man who dies for his dear ones on the

battlefield is a hero, he who voluntarily dies for them on his bed of

sickness is a hero no less brave. But it is urged that _life is the gift

of God, and must only be taken back by the Giver of life_, I suppose

that in any sense in which it can be supposed true that life is the gift

of God, it can only be taken back by the giver--that is to say, that

just as life is produced in accordance with certain laws, so it can

only be destroyed in accordance with certain other laws. Life is not the

direct gift of a superior power: it is the gift of man to man and

animal to animal, produced by the voluntary agent, and not by God, under

physical conditions, on the fulfilment of which alone the production of

life depends. The physical conditions must be observed if we desire to

produce life, and so must they be if we desire to destroy life. In

both cases man is the voluntary agent, in both law is the means of his

action. If life-giving is God's doing, then life-destroying is his doing

too. But this is not what is intended by the proposers of this aphorism.

If they will pardon me for translating their somewhat vague proposition

into more precise language, they say that they find themselves in

possession of a certain thing called life, which must have come from

_somewhere_; and as in popular language the unknown is always the

divine, it must have come from God: therefore this life must only be

taken from them by a cause that also proceeds from _somewhere_--i e.,

from an unknown cause--i e., from the Divine will. Chloroform comes from

a visible agent, from the doctor or nurse, or at least from a bottle,

which can be taken up or left alone at our own choice. If we swallow

this, the cause of death is known, and is evidently not divine; but if

we go into a house where scarlet fever is raging, although we are in

that case voluntarily running the chance of taking poison quite as truly

as if we swallow a dose of chloroform, yet if we die from the infection,

we can imagine the illness to be sent from God. Wherever we think the

element of chance comes in, there we are able to imagine that God rules

directly. We quite overlook the fact that there is no such thing as

chance. There is only our ignorance of law, not a break in natural

order. If our constitution be susceptible of the particular poison

to which we expose it, we take the disease. If we knew the laws of

infection as accurately as we know the laws affecting chloroform,

we should be able to foresee with like certainty the inevitable

consequence; and our ignorance does not make the action of either set of

laws less unchangeable or more divine. But in the "happy-go-lucky" style

of thought peculiar to ignorance, the Christian disregards the fact

that infection is ruled by definite laws, and believes that health and

sickness are the direct expressions of the will of his God, and not the

invariable consequence of obscure but probably discoverable antecedents;

so he boldly goes into the back slums of London to nurse a family

stricken down with fever, and knowingly and deliberately runs "the

chance" of infection--i e., knowingly and deliberately runs the chance

of taking poison, or rather of having poison poured into his frame.

This he does, trusting that the nobility of his motive will make the

act right in God's sight. Is it more noble to relieve the sufferings of

strangers, than to relieve the sufferings of his family? or is it more

heroic to die of voluntarily-contracted fever, than of voluntarily-taken

chloroform?

The argument that _life must only be taken back by the life-giver_,

would, if thoroughly carried out, entirely prevent all dangerous

operations. In the treatment of some diseases there are operations that

will either kill or cure: the disease must certainly be fatal if left

alone; while the proposed operation may save life, it may equally

destroy it, and thus may take life some time before the giver of life

wanted to take it back. Evidently, then, such operations should not

be performed, since there is risked so grave an interference with the

desires of the life-giver. Again, doctors act very wrongly when they

allow certain soothing medicines to be taken when all hope is gone,

which they refuse so long as a chance of recovery remains: what

right have they to _compel_ the life-giver to follow out his apparent

intentions? In some cases of painful disease, it is now usual to produce

partial or total unconsciousness by the injection of morphia, or by the

use of some other anaesthetic. Thus, I have known a patient subjected to

this kind of treatment, when dying from a tumour in the aesophagus; he

was consequently for some weeks before his death, kept in a state

of almost complete unconsciousness, for if he were allowed to become

conscious, his agony was so unendurable as to drive him wild. He was

thus, although breathing, practically dead for weeks before his death.

We cannot but wonder, in view of such a case as his, what it is that

people mean when they talk of "life." Life includes, surely, not only

the involuntary animal functions, such as the movements of heart and

lungs; but consciousness, thought, feeling, emotion. Of the various

constituents of human life, surely those are not the most "sacred" which

we share with the brute, however necessary these may be as the basis on

which the rest are built. It is thought, then, that we may rightfully

destroy all that constitutes the beauty and nobility of human life, we

may kill thought, slay consciousness, deaden emotion, stop feeling,

we may do all this, and leave lying on the bed before us a breathing

figure, from which we have taken all the nobler possibilities of life;

but we may not touch the purely animal existence; we may rightly

check the action of the nerves and the brain, but we must not dare to

outrage-the Deity by checking the action of the heart and the lungs.

We ask, then, for the legalisation of euthanasia, because it is in

accordance with the highest morality yet known, that which teaches the

duty of self sacrifice for the greater good of others, because it is

sanctioned in principle by every service performed at personal danger

and injury, and because-it is already partially practised by modern

improvements in medical science.

_Euthanasia is an interference with the course of nature, and its

herefore an act of rebellion against God_. In considering this

objection, we are placed in difficulty by not being told what sense our

opponents attach to the word "nature"; and we are obliged once more

to ask pardon for forcing these vague and high-flown arguments into a

humiliating precision of meaning. Nature, in the widest sense of the

word, includes all natural laws: and in this sense it is of course

impossible to interfere with nature at all. We live, and move, and have

our being in nature; and we can no more get outside it than we can get

outside everything. With this-nature we cannot interfere: we can study

its laws, and learn how to balance one law against another, so as to

modify results; but this can only be done by and through nature itself.

The "interference with the course of nature" which is intended in the

above objection does not of course mean this impossible proceeding; and

it can then only mean an interference with things which would proceed

in one course without human agency meddling with them, but which are

susceptible of being turned into another course by human agency. If

interference with nature's course be a rebellion against God, we are

rebelling against God every day of our lives. Every achievement of

civilisation is an interference with nature. Every artificial comfort we

enjoy is an improvement on nature. Everybody professes to approve and

admire many great triumphs of art over nature: the junction by bridges

of shores which nature had made separate, the draining of nature's

marshes, the excavation of her wells, the dragging to light of what

she has buried at immense depths in the earth, the turning away of her

thunderbolts by lightning-rods, of her inundations by embankments, of

her ocean by breakwaters. But to commend these and similar feats, is

to acknowledge that the ways of nature are to be conquered, not obeyed;

that her powers are often towards man in the position of enemies, from

whom he must wrest, by force and ingenuity, what little he can for his

own use, and deserves to be applauded when that little is rather more

than might be expected from his physical weakness in comparison to those

gigantic powers. All praise of civilisation, or art, or contrivance, is

so much dispraise of nature; an admission of imperfection, which it

is man's business, and merit, to be always endeavouring to correct or

mitigate.*

* "Essay on Nature," by John Stuart Mill.

It is difficult to understand how anyone, contemplating the course of

nature, can regard it as the expression of a Divine will, which man has

no right to improve upon. Natural law is essentially unreasoning and

unmoral: gigantic forces clash around us on every side unintelligent,

and unvarying in their action. With equal impassiveness these blind

forces produce vast benefits and work vast catastrophes. The benefits

are ours, if we are able to grasp them; but nature troubles itself not,

whether we take them or leave them alone. The catastrophes may rightly

be averted, if we can avert them; but nature stays not its grinding

wheel for our moans. Even allowing that a Supreme Intelligence gave

these forces their being, it is manifest that he never intended man to

be their plaything, or to do them homage; for man is dowered with reason

to calculate, and with genius to foresee; and into man's hands is given

the realm of nature (in this world) to cultivate, to govern, to improve.

So long as men believed that a god wielded the thunderbolt, so long

would a lightning-conductor be an outrage on Jove; so long as a god

guided each force of nature, so long would it be impiety to resist,

or to endeavour to regulate the divine volitions. Only as experience

gradually proved that no evil consequences followed each amendment of

nature, were natural forces withdrawn, one by one, from the sphere

of the unknown and the divine. Now, even pain, that used to be God's

scourge, is soothed by chloroform, and death alone is left for nature

to inflict, with what lingering agony it may. But why should death,

any more than other ills, be left entirely to the clumsy, unassisted

processes of nature?--why, after struggling against nature all our

lives, should we let it reign unopposed in death? There are some natural

evils that we cannot avert. Pain and death are of these; but we can dull

pain by dulling feeling, and we can ease by shortening its pangs. Nature

kills by slow and protracted torture; we can defy it by choosing a rapid

and painless end. It is only the remains of the old superstition that

makes men think that to take life is the special prerogative of

the gods. With marvellous inconsistency, however, the opponents of

euthanasia do not scruple to "interfere with the course of nature" on

the one hand, while they forbid us to interfere on the other. It is

right to prolong pain by art, although it is wrong to shorten it. When a

person is smitten down with some fearful and incurable disease, they do

not leave him to nature; on the contrary, they check and thwart nature

in every possible way; they cherish the life that nature has blasted;

they nourish the strength that nature is undermining; they delay each

process of decay which nature sows in the disordered frame; they contest

every inch of ground with nature to preserve life; and then, when life

means torture, and we ask permission to step in and quench it, they cry

out that we are interfering with nature. If they would leave nature to

itself, the disease would generally kill with tolerable rapidity; but

they will not do this. They will only admit the force of their own

argument when it tells on the side of what they choose to consider

right. "Against nature," is the cry with which many a modern improvement

has been howled at; and it will continue to be raised, until it is

generally acknowledged that happiness, and not nature, is the true guide

to morality, and until men recognises that nature is to be harnessed to

his car of triumph, and to bend its mighty forces to fulfil the human

will.

_Pain is a spiritual remedial agent, inflicted by God, and should

therefore be patiently endured._ Does anyone, except a self-torturing

ascetic, endure any pain which he can get rid of? This might be deemed

a sufficient answer to this objection, for common sense always bids

us avoid all possible pain, and daily experience tells us that people

invariably evade pain, wherever such evasion is possible. The objection

ought to run: "pain is a spiritual remedial agent, inflicted by God,

which is to be got rid of as soon as possible, but ought to be patiently

endured when unavoidable." Pain as pain has no recommendations,

spiritual or otherwise; nor is there the smallest merit in a voluntary

and needless submission to pain. As to its remedial and educational

advantages, it as often as not sours the temper and hardens the heart;

if a person endures great physical or mental pain with unruffled

patience, and comes out of it with uninjured tenderness and sweetness,

we may rest assured that we have come across a rare and beautiful nature

of exceptional strength. As a general rule, pain, especially if it be

mental, hardens and roughens the character. The use of anaesthetics is

utterly indefensible, if physical pain is to be regarded as a special

tool whereby God cultivates the human soul. If God is directly acting on

the sufferer's body, and is educating his soul by racking his nerves,

by what right does the doctor step between with his impious anaesthetic,

and by reducing the patient to unconsciousness, deprive God of his

pupil, and man of his lesson? If pain be a sacred ark, over which hovers

the divine glory, surely it must be a sinful act to touch the holy

thing. We may be inflicting incalculable spiritual damage by frustrating

the divine plan of education, which was corporeal agony as a spiritual

agent. Therefore, if this argument be good for anything at all, we

must from henceforth eschew all anaesthetics, we must take no steps

to alleviate human agony, we must not venture to interfere with this

beneficent agent, but must leave nature to torture us it will. But we

utterly deny that the unnecessary endurance of pain is even a merit,

much less a duty; on the contrary, we believe that it is our duty to

war against pain as much as possible, to alleviate it wherever we cannot

stop it entirely; and, where continuous and frightful agony can only end

in death, then to give to the sufferer the relief he craves for, in

the sleep which is mercy. "It is a mercy God has taken him," is an

expression often heard when the racked frame at last lies quiet, and the

writhed features settle slowly into the peaceful smile of the dead. That

mercy we plead that man should be allowed to give to man, when human

skill and human tenderness have done their best, and when they have left

within their reach no greater boon than a speedy and painless death.

We are not aware that any objection, which may not be classed under one

or other of these three heads, has been levelled against the proposition

that euthanasia should be legalised. It has, indeed, been suggested that

to put into-a doctor's hands this "power of life and death," would be

to offer a dangerous temptation to those who have any special object to

gain by putting a troublesome person quietly out of the way. But this

objection overlooks the fact that the patient himself must _ask_ for the

draught, that stringent precautions can be taken to render euthanasia

impossible except at the patient's earnestly, or even repeatedly,

expressed wish, that any doctor or attendant, neglecting to take these

precautions, would then, as now, be liable to all the penalties for

murder or for manslaughter; and that an ordinary doctor would no more

be ready to face these penalties then, than he is now, although he

undoubtedly has now the power of putting the patient to death with but

little chance of discovery. Euthanasia would not render murder less

dangerous than it is at present, since no one asks that a nurse may be

empowered to give a patient a dose which would ensure death, or that she

might be allowed to shield herself from punishment on the plea that the

patient desired it. If our opponents would take the trouble to find out

what we do ask, before they condemn our propositions, it would greatly

simplify public discussion, not alone in this case, but in many proposed

reforms.

It may be well, also, to point out the wide line of demarcation which

separated euthanasia from what is ordinarily called suicide. Euthanasia,

like suicide, is a voluntarily chosen death, but there is a radical

difference between the motives which prompt the similar act. Those who

commit suicide thereby render themselves useless to society for the

future; they deprive society of their services, and selfishly evade

the duties which ought to fall to their share; therefore, the social

feelings rightly condemn suicide as a crime against society. I do not

say that under no stress of circumstances is suicide justifiable; that

is not the question; but I wish to point out that it is justly regarded

as a social offence. But the very motive which restrains from suicide,

prompts to euthanasia. The sufferer who knows that he is lost to

society, that he can never again serve his fellow-men; who knows, also,

that he is depriving society of the services of those who uselessly

exhaust themselves for him, and is further injuring it by undermining

the health of its healthy members, feels urged by the very social

instincts which would prevent him from committing suicide while in

health, to yield a last service to society by relieving it from a

useless burden. Hence it is that Sir Thomas Moore, in the quotation with

which he began this essay, makes the _social authorities_ of his ideal

state urge euthanasia as the duty of a faithful citizen, while they

yet consistently reprobate ordinary suicide as a _lese-majeste_ a

crime against the State. The life of the individual is, in a sense, the

property of society. The infant is nurtured, the child is educated,

the man is protected by others; and, in return for the life thus given,

developed, preserved, society has a right to demand from its members a

loyal, self-forgetting devotion to the common weal. To serve humanity,

to raise the race from which we spring, to dedicate every talent, every

power, every energy, to the improvement of, and to the increase of

happiness in, society, this is the duty of each individual man and

woman. And, when we have given all we can, when strength is sinking,

and life is failing, when pain racks our bodies, and the worse agony of

seeing our dear ones suffer in our anguish tortures our enfeebled minds,

when the only service we can render man is to relieve him of a useless

and injurious burden, then we ask that we may be permitted to die

voluntarily and painlessly, and so to crown a noble life with the laurel

wreath of a self-sacrificing death.