Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/525

Rh mine could afford the smallest pretext for the amount of manslaughter of which that man would be guilty, I should be grieved indeed. Mr. Spencer could not have chosen a better illustration of the gulf fixed between his way of thinking and mine. Whenever physiology (including pathology), pharmacy, and hygiene are perfect sciences, I have no doubt that the practice of medicine will be deducible from the first principles of these sciences. That happy day has not arrived yet, and I fancy it is not likely to arrive for some time. But, until it comes, no practitioner who is sensible of the profound responsibility which attaches to his office, or, I may say, is sane, will dream of treating cholera or small-pox by deduction from such mere physiological principles as are at present well established. And if this is so, what is to be said of the publicist, who, undertaking to preserve the health and heal the diseases of an organism vastly more complicated than the human body, seeks guidance, not from the safe, however limited, inductions based on careful observation and experience, but puts his faith in long chains of deduction from abstract ethical assumptions, hardly any link of which can be tested experimentally?

No doubt a great many foolish laws are passed. Also a great many foolish prescriptions are written; but the latter fact is not evidence in favor of "absolute physiological medicine," any more than the former testifies to the value of "absolute political ethics."

To the Editor of "The Times":

I more than suspect that my friend Mr. Greenwood can not have escaped a few moments' quiet amusement the other morning when he read his own letter in "The Times." Mr. Spencer, after many years, slowly and cautiously modifies a view formed earlier in life, and Mr. Greenwood thereupon addresses to the whole body of philosophers, to make use of his own words, "a heavy lesson." When, currente calamo, he took the philosophers under his charge for the purposes of instruction, did it never occur to him to ask himself how many oracles of his own it is the fate of the most careful editor—be he who he may—in the course of even one short year of political warfare to recall and silently replace by their opposites? The philosophers may have their faults, but I am afraid they are hardly to be convicted of them by any one who has, closely or remotely, independently or subserviently, followed the zigzags of political life.

And now as regards the question itself. There are some of us who have been watching for years with great pleasure the growing change in Mr. Spencer's views about land, and have only wished