EUTHANASIA. 95 



powers. Suppose it were permitted, as Mr. Tollemache wishes, that, 

 on receiving the testimony of two or three physicians that a man's 

 case is hopeless, he might, if he chose, elect to die, and that popular 

 feeling came to sanction that choice as the right choice ; what can be 

 clearer than that, in the absence of any relations to whom such pa- 

 tients were dear, and who took pleasure therefore in prolonging their 

 life, there would spring up a tone of habitual displeasure and irritation 

 toward all who chose to go on giving unnecessary trouble to the 

 world, and that veiy soon the standard of ' unnecessary ' trouble 

 would begin inevitably to become lower and lower, so that all the 

 organized charity which now expresses itself in our hospital system 

 would gradually suffer ' a sea-change ' into something by no means 

 ' rich or strange ' a sort of moral pressure, on poor invalids with any 

 thing like a prospect of long-continued helplessness, to demand the 

 right of ridding the world of themselves ? We say that it is in this 

 reflex effect of the new code of feeling upon our thoughts of disease, 

 in the transformation it would certainly make of pure pity into impa- 

 tience and something like reproachful displeasure, that the extreme 

 danger of arguing out this sort of question, on the superficial consider- 

 ations of the balance of pain and pleasure for each individual case, is 

 best seen." 



In a letter to the same paper, Mr. F. A. Channing says : " It is odd 

 that men whose thought is mainly an outcome of modern science should 

 fail to apply what is, perhaps, the most striking conception of modern 

 science that of time in relation to growth to questions such as this 

 of Euthanasia. If the central human instincts on which morality rests 

 are the slowly-won product of ages of moral growth, a practice out of 

 harmony with the most fundamental of those instincts, however spec- 

 ulatively excellent, could not be introduced without mischief. It would 

 sacrifice too much of human feeling before it had time to put itself on 

 a rational footing. Even in the individual philosopher it may be 

 doubted whether reason could remodel instinct so as to make the 

 sense of duty in such a case really complete. In most men the over- 

 ridden instincts would merely be replaced by selfishness and cruelty to 

 the helpless. They would lose the gentleness of strength, without 

 gaining the least glimpse of the new morality. 



" In Euthanasia we are offered a refined copy of the customs of some 

 savage tribes, among whom life is more difficult to maintain, and so 

 less valuable. But, then, their instincts are on the level of their cus- 

 toms. There is no jar between calculation and sentiment, such as we 

 should have. Such a jar would make the practice, if adopted among 

 us, spring from an estimate of personal advantages, and not from the 

 half-thought-out sense of what is best, which is duty to most men. 

 And, where such imperative instincts as the desire to keep life for our- 

 selves and our friends at all costs are directly repressed in forming and 

 acting on this estimate, the result must be moral loss to all except the 



