POISONING IN PITY.
NOTHING more curious than the narrowness of the moral limits within which Englishmen instinctively and habitually seek for the motives to crime, except perhaps the convincing prac- tical evidence that, as a matter of fact, they are rarely indeed mistaken in not seeking for the motive beyond those limits. Yet there are twenty motives which no one would ever guess at, quite as certain, if pursued beyond a certain point, to end in crime, as that stereotyped set of passions, jealousy, revenge, the dread of shame, the force of avarice, or the unscrupulousness of ambition. Why are there not, for instance, a greater number of purely scientific medical experiments involving direct risk of death, if not certain death, to the subjects, made by physicians and surgeons, with no motive but the dominant scientific desire to solve a physiological problem, — a desire which might perhaps be excused to the criminal's own mind, on the utilitarian plea that an answer to a scientific question thus gained by the sacrifice of one life would enable him to save hundreds that would otherwise be lost? If such a motive—surely less ignoble than avarice—never leads to murder in Great Britain, it can only be that speculative impulses seldom attain with us the volume and force of selfish passions. Again, why should not the ethical feeling itself, the disinterested desire to strike down successful fraud, imposture, or hypocrisy, and to right the weak by arbitrary individual interference, oftener appear in cases of private, no less than in those of national and public, wrongs ? Moses in interfering to slay the Egyptian no doubt intended to give the signal for turning against the oppres- sor, and how rarely do we hear of similar high-handed actions having their origin only in the inequalities and injustices of private life, unsupported by that group of feelings which spring from the ties of race or nationality. One would suppose a priori that no motive would be more likely to lead to crime than the un- selfish imperiousness of a conscience dissatisfied with the actual number of moral Providences visible in the affairs of life, and ready to play the part of divine Judge on its own petty responsibility. Nor do these any way exhaust the conceivable cases of motives, intrinsic- ally of a noble type, leading to the worst class of crimes. TheKi" is the case, far more common than either of these, of abstract philanthiropy, in its zeal for the improvement of the race, sweeping obstructke individuals mercilessly out of its path. This was no doubt exem- plified on a great scale among the French terrorists. Finally, we have just had an example of a much rarer motive to crime, not abstract philanthropy, but individual compassion. A Swedish clergyman, thoroughly penetrated with the needless and hope- kw misery of some poor incurables among his people, interfered the other day solemnly,- and with an apparently profound sense of responsibility, to terminate their pangs. We refer of course to the very remarkable confession of the Swedish pastor Lindbach, who was found guilty of murdering some of the most miserable of his flock by mingling poison in the sacramental wine, and whose avowal of the motive which induced him to commit this horrible action seems to us to bear on it all the stamp of truth. Indeed it is not very seriously disputed. As far as we know his accusers only charged him with poisoning the unhappy creatures in order to diminish the poor-rates, a selfish motive of too slight a magni- tude to account for such a crime, and far less probable than the one he himself confesses: " I comprehended," he says, "the pastor's duty as a father's. I ordered notice to be given me every Sunday by appointed persons of where any poor sick person was to be found. After such inquiries I went round with food and medicine, and became witness of much misery and hopelessness. When one stands beside an incurably sick and dreadfully pained fellow-creature, one wishes, of all his heart, that he might be released from his heartrending misery. By those hungry, cold incurables in Silbodahl I have often stood, moved by the deepest pity, and thought, 'Were I in such a miserable plight I would bless him who hastened the end of my pain, and God would forgive that merciful one.' With every renewed visit to these poor people I was strengthened in this idea. I prepared separate wine, as help in trouble, when this, my misdirected charity, should urge me to it
In other words, the Pastor Lindbach reasoned concerning his suffering incurables exactly as ordinary men reason concerning incurable sufferers among the lower animals. He felt it a kindness to them to terminate their hopeless misery, and he was withheld by no mysterious compunction concerning the sacredness of human life. Not that such compunctions did not cross his mind, but that, when they did, he analyzed them away after a curious fashion of his own. He seems to have reasoned that there is no strictly speaking ' natural' term to human life, that it is sometimes shortened by accident, sometimes by the very means taken to pro- long it, sometimes through the absence of medical aid, sometimes by its faulty diagnosis of the disease, sometimes by faulty remedies, and hence he apparently inferred that what is permitted by God to happen through the blunders and shortsightedness of man, He could not condemn if brought about intentionally by any one fore- seeing the result and acting from a pure motive. He says :-
"I thought also, what none can deny, that very few human beings pass to the other world in the course of nature, i. e., when the powers of soul and body are worn out by age. Some external cause occurs, which God, though He does not advance it, yet does not prevent, in virtue of the freedom He granted, the understanding He gave. How many in the prime of life, in their full vigour, are their own murderers involuntarily, yet through misuse of their understanding? How many have fallen out of the bands of the most skilful physician into the grave? The patient's
statement is not always properly comprehended (yet the statement de- termines the prescription, and the prescription determines.life or death),
without God's either helping or hindering, and neither doctor nor patient are thought to have any share in the death. How many an ill- ness which in the beginning might easily have been cured has, through delay in seeking help, precipitated its victim into the grave? From these incontrovertible facts, and the many such examples which I have partly heard described, partly witnessed myself, I have come to the conclusion and belief that science as well as ignorance often bears the most decisive part, and that pions faith is often wrong in saying the hour had come.' I therefore believed that the merciful God would not condemn me if I shortened the sufferings of a miserable fellow-creature. This action is certainly to outward appearance against all law, but in reality it rests upon grounds of compassion. My God, before whom I shall finally answer, knows this, and with deep contrition I feel myself worthy of the sore punishment of the civil law, for the sinful compassion exercised towards the dead persons in the case."
If we understand this abstract reasoning aright, it is a very subtle reply in the Pastor Lindbach's mind to the argument for the divine sacredness of life which the rapid enlargement of medical science and the healing art might suggest. The Swedish clergyman had asked himself why God gives us from age to age so many new and powerful cures for disease, if He does not mean us to attaebrilke
utmost sacredness to the healing art, and to regard bodily healing as Christ regarded it—as part of our religion. He had thought to himself Perhaps that there is no trace of our Lord's ever having ex- tinguished the Sufferings of any mortal by putting an end to his life,—and that since our Lord's time the miraculous power which he alone had, has almost been made up to man by the natural discoveries in the great art of medicine. Would not this seem to show, he had probably asked himself, that the Great Physician does not mean us ever to employ our power to extinguish suffering by extinguish- ing life, but only by restoring it to its natural vigour? To this difficulty in his path Lindbach replies to himself by remarking that " science as well as ignorance often bears the most decisive part " in terminating life,—that lives are cut off in consequence of the advance of medical science,—though perhaps fewer lives than before,—which might have been saved if we had not known so much. Thus a cure for one disorder is discovered which is abso- lutely fatal to a closely analogous disorder very difficult to dis- tinguish from it. Or, a man takes chloroform to diminish the pain and inflammation of a difficult surgical operation, and it stops altogether the action of a weak heart. Here is a case, then, where the very advance of medical science substitutes new though fewer dangers for those which it overcomes. Might he not argue, then, that though it is God's purpose no doubt to increase the reverence for healing, where healing is pos- sible, yet He also intends to show us that even the most beneficent remedies, while they often work by restoring life, sometimes work by extinguishing it,—and this for the most part in those cases in which the life, if restored, would still have been burdensome and miserable. The diseased heart whose beating is stilled for ever by chloroform would have embarrassed and darkened the patient's whole existence, even if he had recovered from the specific surgical disease ; and so it may fairly be said that the new science acted beneficently in his case no less than when it is what is called successful, by liberating him from a life of paralyzed energy or restless languor. If, then, the beneficent new• science blots out, without any intention on the part of its students, some unhappy lives which in the darker epoch of medical ignorance might have been preserved, might not conscious human beneficence with full knowledge copy its method in those extreme cases in which there is absolutely no hope except for prolonged misery interspersed with occasional agony? Something of this kind is evidently the meaning of the great stress which this strange man lays on "science as well as ignorance often bearing the most decisive part" in terminating human life. And the mode in which he gave effect to his solitary ponderings is worthy of their unnatural subtlety.
We conceive him to have made up his mind that in the ab- stract where the only prospect for a patient is unlimited suffering, it is humane to terminate it,—and to have had one of those strange _minds which can act in vacua on its own solitary judgments, without needing the sanction of either general opinion or in- dividual sympathy. Doubtless he asked himself whether it would not be right to consult the sufferers themselves ; but then, in the case of some at least, he replied to himself that they were the victims of the superstition he had succeeded in overcoming in his :own mind,—that, if the temptation were too great to acquiesce in the proposal, they would perhaps be guilty of yielding, without a .convinced conscience, to a mere selfish yearning to be rid of pain, whereas in him the act would be done for their benefit, not his 1own, and therefore be quite unselfish. This probably determined him not to ask their consent. Possibly he had often heard them wish for a "happy release" in God's own time, and had ssked himself whether his own self-questionings on this subject might not prove to be God's providential instrument in shortening that time. This perhaps with respect to some of them. A sen- tence in his confession seems to point to some real discussion be- tween himself and one of the victims on the subject, and to imply perhaps that in his case there was pre-arranged agreement :—" Re- specting Lysen," he says, "men will likely reject my assertion of mercy, and call it selfishness in its grossest form, but those who knew his dreadful sufferings and our written agreements will admit my motives of pity." However this may have been, the mode of administering the poison was curiously characteristic of the whole process of thought by which the man had arrived at the conviction .that it was right. He no doubt said to himself that if right at all, it was an act of solemn import, which he ought to perform in the sight of God, and as a religious service. The very fact that he was .able to poison by means of the sacramental wine would almost con- vince him that it could not be an act of evil, that he was really doing it solemnly in God's sight, and with God's sanction. There is a power in most men's minds of comforting themselves in doing what they know—deep down in their hearts—to be wrong, by stating
very explicitly to themselves that they are not ashamed of it, that they can speak of it in their prayers, confess it to themselves in their most solemn acts of thought, and, in short, act with regard to it precisely as if it were their noblest secret heroism. No doubt this was so with Lindbach. In administering this fatal sacrament his mind was probably trembling with the excitement of half keeping up, half affecting to keep up, a secret understanding with God on the subject of this compassionate murder, and justifying itself every moment to itself by the religious solemnity of the man.: ner in which the deed was done.
Perhaps the most curious thing about the whole transaction is, that when discovered and found guilty Lindbach's sense of right gave way, and that he confessed to deep guilt, though guilt originating in an unselfish motive. But this is no doubt due to the returning health of mind caused by being rid of the burden of the awful secret. The mere excitement of having a private morality known to God and himself alone on the subject of murder, would be quite sufficient to keep up a sort of diseased faith in the accuracy of his intellectual conclusions—a faith likely enough to disappear when- ever the electric insulation of his thought was disturbed by hear- ing the common sentiments of all around him on what he had done.
That the sin was a great one every one instinctively feels, but in what did it consist? Was it in the act itself, or in the attitude of mind towards his fellow-men at large in which he must have placed himself in order to commit the act,—in the arrogance of that intellectual and moral insulation, that secret contempt for the common instincts of mankind, that desire to cut out a new code of ethics on the subject, and act secretly upon it? We rather think the latter. How often beside a dying bed do we hear the exhorta- tion not to trouble the sufferer with remedies which can only prolong his or her existence a few troubled hours of pain,—and what distinc- tion in the external act alone is there between the ceasing to employ remedies which may prolong mortal pain a few hours, and the em- ployment of means to prevent all mortal pain during those few hours? The difference is not, we take it, in the external act at all. To cease to give brandy a few hours before death, may in many cases be precisely the same in external effect as to give adeadly drug. The difference is in the very different clam of feelings with which men regard the two acts, and arises from the positive duty which lies upon us in the case of all those mysterious instincts which we cannot explain, but which we share with all our fellow-men, of following, even without intelligible or explicable grounds, the impulse of all solemn natural instincts, and not attempting to put ourselves in a moral and intellectual insulation, where we can feel no longer the waves of ordinary human sympathy vibrating between ourselves and the beings amongst whom we are placed.
Previous page
