Page:Chesterton - Eugenics and Other Evils (Cassell, 1922).djvu/53

 Feeble-Minded Bill. The doctor can say, "Tobacco is death to you," because the dislike of death can be taken for granted, being a highly democratic institution; and it is the same with the dislike of the indubitable exception called madness. The doctor can say, "Jones has that twitch in the nerves, and he may burn down the house." But it is not the medical detail we fear, but the moral upshot. We should say, "Let him twitch, as long as he doesn't burn down the house." The doctor may say, "He has that look in the eyes, and he may take the hatchet and brain you all." But we do not object to the look in the eyes as such; we object to consequences which, once come, we should all call insane if there were no doctors in the world. We should say, "Let him look how he likes; as long as he does not look for the hatchet."

Now, that specialists are valuable for this particular and practical purpose, of predicting the approach of enormous and admitted human calamities, nobody but a fool would deny. But that does not bring us one inch nearer to allowing them the right to define what is a calamity; or to call things calamities which common sense does not call calamities. We call in the doctor to save us from death; and, death being admittedly an evil, he has the right to administer the queerest and most recondite pill which he may think is a cure for all such menaces of death. He has not the right to administer death, as the cure for all human ills. And as he has no moral authority to enforce a new conception of happiness, so he has no