EUTHANASIA.
IT is reported in the telegrams from the Continent that a Deputy in the Saxon Parliament recently introduced a Bill permitting doctors to pnt patients whose recovery was hopeless to death at their own request. The Bill was, of course, snuffed out with some promptitude, for the Saxons are not faddists; but the incident is very significant of the twentieth century. Opinion for many years past has been softening or rotting on the subject of suicide, and especially of that form of the offence, suicide to avoid incurable physical suffering, which, in our secret sympathy with it, we term euthanasia. The feeling of civilised mankind has always been more or less divided on the subject, many Christians holding suicide to be only a form of murder, which it clearly is not, murder implying malignity; many more thinking that if the future life is certain the right of the soul to exchange its lodging is at all events main- tainable; and the • majority holding that, while mani- festly an offence, the degree of the condemnation it deserves must depend almost. wholly upon the attendant circumstances. The Curtius who leaps into the gulf to save his country, or even his family, is rarely sincerely condemned. Even this last opinion, charitable as it is, is ceasing to embody itself in law, and we are not aware of any State upon the Continent in which attempt at suicide is now treated by Magistrates as a crime. Even in England, 'where it was awe regarded with abhorrence, and the corpse of the suicide refused burial in consecrated ground as something too deeply tainted for the forgiveness even of Christ, the same relaxation of opinion is apparent, though it is chiefly dis- played iu the illogical way natural to our people when reluctant to condemn a theory in which, nevertheless, they hay e ceased to believe. Juries will not pronounce suicide in any case justifiable homicide, but usually feign to believe that it is always the result of temporary insanity, and so, in fact, class it among the results of disease, and not among acts which must necessarily be either approved or condemned. The verdict of fete de se—self-murder—is considered too harsh, and is reserved almost exclusively for. the murderer who to avoid justice has executed sentence on himself. Suicide still discredits a family, but rather as presumptive widence of a mental lesion which may be hereditary than for any other reason ; while as regards euthanasia sentiment is even more lenient or more weak. A feeling has sprung up that God cannot have intended the useless torture of any human being, and that accordingly to make death easy when it would be exquisitely painful must., at least for the sufferer himself, be justifiable. Why, it is said, should he endure agonies which can have only one end, and can, so far as human eye can discern, be of no profit, material of spiritual? They may even diminish, and no doubt occasionally do diminish, his capacity of faith in the mercy of God. The thesis is seldom maintained in print, though Mrs. Oliphant, who was a strong believer, openly defended it in " Carittl " in eases of cancer; but it is believed by thousands who upon all other subjects agree with the teachers of Christianity, and argued over in almost every society intimate enough to touch Bach questions at all, the conclusion usually being, "I hope I may never be tempted."
We believe the present leniency of opinion upon the whole subject to be an error based upon a very natural recoil. The old judgment was too harsh. To confuse suicide with murder—always excepting the suicide which is intended to facilitate :muter by making.rettibution in this world im- possible—is to confuse all thinking about mime. The atoVing impulses, the condition of mind, the consequences to the offender are all different. The murderer is usually actuated either by malignity, or by greed, or by fear, or very frequently indeed, as was once before argued in these columns; by a strange kind of wounded pride, and desire to prove that, however despised, he is not, as a source
of terror, despicable. That, not jealousy, is the secret of half the murders of lovers by lovera of which the records,
of inquests are so full. The suicide cannot feel malignity, towards himself. He can gain nothing tangible by his own death. Pride is not in him, and the fear is fear of a con-
dition, not of a person other than himself whose removal would smooth his path. His one governing impulse is flight, instant flight, final escape from a situation which he finds intolerable. It is not a cowardly flight from an enemy—the ancient world was, we fancy, more just about that than the modern one, which cries "Coward" after the suicide as the most convenient way of ex- pressing disapproval —so much as flight before the irresistible, before an earthquake or a tornado. The true reason why that flight is wicked is, we conceive, that its impulse is mutiny, revolt against the will of the Most High. That will is painful, harsh, unbearable, therefore I will not yield to it, but will escape, finally and at once,'—that must be the governing thought of the sane suicide, and that thought is altogether evil. It does not matter that it is also irrational, for many irrational impulses are evil,— revenge, for example, is nine times out of ten irrational as well as bad. Nothing can justify rebellion against God, and if the impulse of the deliberate suicide is not rebellion, what is it? And if suicide', is morally indefensible, what is the case for euthanasia, except that the motive of flight, intoler- ance of pain, and especially of incurable pain, is one common to all humanity, and in some so powerful that although it may not wreck reason, it overwhelms the resisting power, the love of life, without which the human race would lose its greatest source at once of energy and of safety ? The ultimate key to labour is love of life, and on that much of the coherence of society depends. Why guard with a thousand expensive pre- cautions that which is valueless ? As well place police to protect mushrooms. We can see no special argument for euthanasia, and regard the extreme tolerance with which the opinion for it is discussed as one of the many illogical resulta of the pity for pain which has become such a passion in our Western world.
Of the further step in the argument which the Saxon Deputy is said to have urged—viz., the law protecting the doctors if they arranged a euthanasia—we have no fear whatever. The world seldom makes mistakes when its self- protection is concerned, and to give such power to a whole profession would distinctly lessen its security. As a rule, with few exceptions, doctors are good people; but there are many of them, and some must be bad. To give all a legal right to administer poison on demand without responsibility would be to arm every profligate heir with a most dangerous weapon. Who is to tell after death whether the patient has consented to his own departure, or whether the last ray of hope had really disappeared or not? It would be bad enough if such things were suspected, as they would be by the suspicious; but the suspicion might be justified once, and that once would destroy a confidence which does much to diminish in households the miserable impact of disease. Every patient with wealth would ask himself if there could be any one with an interest in putting him away. Kings and great leaders of parties would have special reason for fear, and what the great apprehend the little soon believe to be a possibility, ride the whole history of the Middle Ages, when all who were great expected assassination, and all who werellittle if the great died incon- veniently howled out charges of poison. It is not well, fox the sake of the class itself, to trust the power of life and death to any class which must of necessity exercise it in secret. It may be said that the power is trusted now, and so it is, but with the usual guarantees, and this additional one, that the rule of the profession is to preserve life while they can. They have a right when suffering threatens life to risk life by the use of sedatives sufficient to prevent that threat, and no doubt occasionally the sedatives constitute a danger of their own— it is so in many cases of bad burns—but they act under the restraint of professional opinion, of relatives, and of the lava To remove the last check would be to constitute doctors a separate caste with rights different from those of the rest of the community,—never a safe position. The immediate effect would be to create a new professional impression that their business was not so much to avert death as to secure pleasant
death, euthanasia, and the question at what point it should be secured would admit of widely different interpretations. The law is much better as it is, and would be even if the world were convinced that the incurable sufferer from an agonising disease had., a right to demand his own execution. He has no such right; but if he had, or if the world were arranged, as it apparently hopes one day to be arranged, with a single eye to its continuous comfort, it would still be wiser to maintain the rule that none, whatever their motives, may wilfully take life. They may risk it, gravely risk it, for good reason, as is done every day in some operations, but to allow it to be taken deliberately under full shelter of law by one profession is to give that profession, which needs every safeguard against callousness, a reason for callousness which, hiunan nature being what it is, would soon begin to operate. The world, we feel sure, even if- it ever accepts euthanasia as allowable, will prefer doctors whose respect for its life can be trusted, as now, under all circumstances. .
Previous page
