PRE-REQUISITES OF CANDIDATES. 913 



of the career and for other disturbing causes, we may look upon all 

 as likely, in a few months, to come into positions in which the lives 

 of fellow-creatures of their own species will be largely dependent 

 upon their decisions — i. e., upon the knowledge they have stored up, 

 the power of applying it which they have gained, and the resolu- 

 tion they may h^ve for duly using both. Some of those now 

 present may be fortunate enough to come into their responsibilities 

 in or upon areas not destitute of professional colleagues, of whose 

 counsel and advice they may be glad to avail themselves. Some, 

 however, may have to be the sole and unsupported representatives 

 of medical and surgical science in some isolated country locality. 

 These are large powers and large responsibilities : it is but com- 

 monplace to say that a consideration of their magnitude, as it looms 

 out in the future, should make the opportunities and the ex h7/pothesi 

 irreplaceable advantages of the present seem doubly valuable. This 

 is, I say, a commonplace remark ; but it is as well to repeat it, for 

 all that. It is not difficult to imagine, indeed it is easy to bring 

 proof, that the deepest regret, and, more, the most lasting remorse, 

 may be produced by the thought that a little more attention to 

 some particular line of practice, to some particular set of cases, to 

 some new or some old modes of a curative kind, might have enabled 

 a man to save a life which has slipped away for the want and in the 

 absence of the knowledge and the power which might have been 

 obtained thus, but has not been. Such considerations will readily 

 suggest themselves to every private conscience in greater detail 

 than it is well for me to attempt. Public opinion, in English- 

 speaking countries at least, on both sides of the Atlantic and in 

 that newer Southern world, attaches what certain eminent though 

 anonymous publicists are wont to write of as an exaggerated, but 

 what I should speak of as a due and proper, value to human life and 

 human suffering. And upon private conscience more or less en- 

 lightened, and public opinion when properly awakened, morality 

 and its sanctions rest securely. I say, 'public opinion when 

 properly awakened;' for though systematic writers, in these latter 

 days, lay abundant weight upon the indispensability of the exist- 

 ence of activity in public opinion to the sustentation of morality, I 

 am not clear that the teaching of philosophers has as yet begun to 

 exercise all the influence in this direction which there is no doubt, 

 and which it is much to be desired, it will do shortly. I have often 



3N 



