Brain-evolution--and favouring airs--and the ripening
time--and the silent Will of God, of God--all these in conspiracy seem
to be behind, urging the whole ship's company of us to some undreamable
luxury of glory--when lo, this check, artificial, evitable. Less death,
more disease--that is the sad, the unnatural record; children
especially--so sensitive to the physician's art--living on by hundreds
of thousands, bearing within them the germs of wide-spreading sorrow,
who in former times would have died. And if you consider that the
proper function of the doctor is the strictly limited one of curing the
curable, rather than of self-gloriously perpetuating the incurable, you
may find it difficult to give a quite rational answer to this simple
question: _why?_ Nothing is so sure as that to the unit it is a
cruelty; nothing so certain as that to humanity it is a wrong; to say
that such and such an one was sent by the All Wise, and must
_therefore_ be not merely permitted, but elaborately coaxed and forced,
to live, is to utter a blasphemy against Man at which even the ribald
tongue of a priest might falter; and as a matter of fact, society, in
just contempt for this species of argument, never hesitates to hang,
for its own imagined good, its heaven-sent catholics, protestants,
sheep, sheep-stealers, etc.
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