“English valor and English intelligence have done less to extend and preserve our Oriental empire than English veracity,” says Lord Macaulay.  “All that we could have gained by imitating the doublings, the evasions, the fictions, the perjuries, which have been employed against us, is as nothing when compared with what we have gained by being the one power in India on whose word reliance can be placed.  No oath which superstition can devise, no hostage however precious, inspires a hundredth part of the confidence which is produced by the ‘yea, yea,’ and the ‘nay, nay,’ of a British envoy.”  Therefore it is that Lord Macaulay is sure that “looking at the question of expediency in the lowest sense of the word, and using no arguments but such as Machiavelli might have employed in his conferences with Borgia, we are convinced that Clive was altogether in the wrong, and that he committed, not merely a crime but a blunder."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Macaulay’s Essay on Lord Clive.]

So again when an English vessel of war made signals of distress, off the coast of France, during the war with Napoleon, and thereby deceived men from the enemy into coming to its relief, and then held them as prisoners, the act was condemned by the moral sense of the world.  As Woolsey says, in his “International Law:"[1] “Breach of faith between enemies has always been strongly condemned, and that vindication of it is worthless which maintains that, without an express or tacit promise to our enemy, we are not bound to keep faith with him.”

[Footnote 1:  Sect. 133, p. 213.]

The theologian who assumes that the duty of veracity is suspended between enemies in war time is ignorant of the very theory of civilized warfare; or else he fails to distinguish between justifiable concealment, by the aid of methods of mystifying, and falsehood which is never justifiable.  And that commander who should attempt to justify falsehood and bad faith in warfare on the ground that it is held justifiable in certain works on Christian ethics, would incur the scorn of the civilized world for his credulity; and he would be told that it is absurd to claim that because he is entitled to kill a man in warfare it must be fair to lie to him.

In the treatment of the medical profession, many writers on ethics have been as unfair, as in their misrepresentation of the general moral sense with reference to warfare.  They have spoken as if “the ethics of the medical profession” had a recognized place for falsehood in the treatment of the sick.  But this assumption is only an assumption.  There are physicians who will lie, and there are physicians who will not lie; and in each case the individual physician acts in this matter on his own responsibility:  he has no code of professional ethics justifying a lie on his part as a physician, when it would not be justifiable in a layman.