GEORGE BKUCE HALSTED — SCIENCE ON CONDUCT OE LIFE. 103 
Why are the dervishes just now at a discount? Answer: the portable 
steamboats made in sections and to draw not over three feet of water. 
Science will be the great missionary to abolish the slavery of compul- 
sory military service, because the time is coming when a few assistants 
from the chemical and physical laboratories of the universities will be 
able to annihilate an army of prize-drilled companies. 
Good bye to the soldier, and good riddance! 
. But even more surely has Science undermined the reign of obedience 
and punishment in the theory of this world and the world to come. 
Some think that a law is an enactment, of some legislative body wise 
or otherwise, and that if you do not obey it you deserve the decreed pun- 
ishment. But the laws of science can neither be obeyed nor disobeyed. 
Take as typical the law of gravity, which is that every particle of matter 
attracts every other particle directly as the mass and inversely as the 
square of the distance. You can not obey this law. You can not disobey 
it. It is simply a statement of how your material particles act, and noth- 
ing can help them or hinder them for a single moment from so acting. 
As the man of science sees once for all that no one can disobey the 
laws of nature, he questions the grounds on which he has been exhorted 
to obey the fallible laws of man and the warranty for the terrible punish- 
ments here and hereafter which he has been declared to deserve. 
If man is the result of evolution in accordance with natural laws, 
there was no fall of man, and he scarcely deserved eternal conscious 
punishment for not hurrying his ascent. 
Laws that can be disobeyed can be only advice on the conduct of life. 
Each must be the judge when this advice is inapplicable or should be 
rejected. The commandment to keep the seventh day, the sabbath, Sat- 
urday, the early church thought best to modify by substituting for a 
breaking of this command a keeping of a new command to keep the first 
day, Sunday. 
Most primitive, most obvious is that absolute commandment: Thou 
shalt not kill. 
It has already been brought to your attention that the governments 
are paying eight million dollars a day to keep in readiness for wholesale 
killing of men. 
A startling instance of a single man taking this commandment as ad- 
vice to be weighed, accepted, or rejected, was the surgeon hurrying 
through the mass of shattered, wounded humanity on a great war ship 
in the late Chinese war. Armed with a powerful atomizer charged with 
Prussic acid — instant death, his adverse decision on the advisability of 
attempting treatment was one quick jet in the face, and the shattered 
masses of agony, that had been men, strained toward him, stretching 
their distorted faces toward the instant death. Was the surgeon right? 
