Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/102

92 ; life is a thing for use, and is to be used freely and sacrificed freely, whenever good is to be won or evil avoided by such sacrifice or use; the man who is ever ready to face death for others' sakes, to save others from grinding pain, has always been reckoned a hero; and what is heroic if done for another, is surely permissible, at least, if done for one's self; the man who could voluntarily give up his life to save another from months of slow torture, would win everybody's good word: why should he be debarred from taking a like step when the person to be rescued is himself?"

It is furthermore urged that the sacredness of life is violated by existing medical practice, where, in cases of extreme and hopeless suffering, physicians administer drugs which give present relief, at the expense of shortening the patient's life.

To the objection that submission to the will of Providence forbids the shortening of pain in this way, the writer replies that "by the same principle we should submit to the will of Providence, and not seek to escape any pain. Not submission to surrounding circumstances—another term for God's will—but successful effort to bend them to his purposes, is man's chief business here; and every useful thing he does is a successful attempt to change, for his own or others' benefit, some of the conditions of life which surround him."

And thus the author of "Euthanasia" goes on attacking current ideas, and taking his own view of the economy of the world. Nature is to him not a mighty, beneficent mother, any more than she is a dread and relentless power—

"Death by disease is always death by torture, and the wit of man has never devised torture more cruel than are some of Nature's methods of putting her victims to death.

"One of the main facts, then, that men have to make familiar to their thoughts and to adjust their lives to, is, that they are born into a world on the painful riddle of which speculation can throw no light, but the facts of which press hard against them on every hand; and from these facts the truth stands out clear and harsh, that not enjoyment, but, in the main, struggle and suffering, is what they have to look for, and that, to bring this suffering into bearable proportions, should be one of the chief aims of their lives."

The publication of this essay made but little stir at first. But it was separated from the volume, and published in a pamphlet with preface by Rose Mary Crawshay, and in this shape went to the third edition. The subject has been lately taken up in the Fortnightly Review, by Mr. Tollemache, under the title of "A New Cure for Incurables." Planting himself on Mr. Williams's ground, he reproduces his chief arguments, and adds others, with a view of strengthening the case. To illustrate how far pain reconciles us to death, he says: