Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, October 18th, 1899 (IA b24975941).pdf/30

 estates, are being crippled by the burden of local taxation, much of which is levied with the express object of carrying fertilising matter to the sea.

Great as are the positive gains of research, the negative advantages are scarcely less important. When a question is moved from the region of conjecture to the region of fact, we not only increase the sum of knowledge but we diminish the stock of error. The need of controversy vanishes, and we cut the ground from beneath the fect of the quack. Those who now "fall into the hands of the physician," are at least not subjected to treatment which has been proved to be useless. This is a negative gain. I do not claim for medicine any monopoly of quackery. That would not be correct. The money-changers are ever in the Temple, and false prophets abound. There are plenty of theo- logical quacks, political quacks, legal quacks, and commercial quacks. There is no quack more dangerous to the Commonwealth than the enthusiastic politician posturing as a philanthropist, ever eager to incorporate each new scientific fledgling in an Act of Parliament, and who forgets that the authority of the law may check progress, as surely as did the authority of medieval theology. We used to say "De minimis non curat lex," but this maxim is scarcely applicable to modern legislation, much of which leads mainly to wasteful litigation, the infliction of trumpery fines and considerable costs, and the maintenance of social parasites.