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.  What then, you ask, would I do with these unholy ones?  To save the State would I pierce them with a sword, or leave them to the slow throes of their agonies?  Ah, do not expect me to answer that question—­I do not know what to answer.  The whole spirit of the present is one of a broad and beautiful, if quite thoughtless, humanism, and I, a child of the present, cannot but be borne along by it, coerced into sympathy with it.  “Beautiful” I say:  for if anywhere in the world you have seen a sight more beautiful than a group of hospital savants bending with endless scrupulousness over a little pauper child, concentering upon its frailty the whole human skill and wisdom of ages, so have not I. Here have you the full realisation of a parable diviner than that of the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.  Beautiful then; with at least surface beauty, like the serpent lachesis mutus; but, like many beautiful things, deadly too, inhuman.  And, on the whole, an answer will have to be found.  As for me, it is a doubt which has often agitated me, whether the central dogma of Judaism and Christianity alike can, after all, be really one of the inner verities of this our earthly being—­the dogma, that by the shedding of the innocent blood, and by that alone, shall the race of man find cleansing and salvation.  Will no agony of reluctance overcome the necessity that one man die, “so that the whole people perish not”?  Can it be true that by nothing less than the “three days of pestilence” shall the land be purged of its stain, and is this old divine alternative about to confront us in new, modern form?  Does the inscrutable Artemis indeed demand offerings of human blood to suage her anger?  Most sad that man should ever need, should ever have needed, to foul his hand in the [Greek:  musaron aima] of his own veins!  But what is, is.  And can it be fated that the most advanced civilisation of the future shall needs have in it, as the first and chief element of its glory, the most barbarous of all the rituals of barbarism—­the immolation of hecatombs which wail a muling human wail?  Is it indeed part of man’s strange destiny through the deeps of Time that he one day bow his back to