Doctors, vaccination, and utilitarianism / by H. Strickland Constable.

  • Constable, H. Strickland (Henry Strickland), 1821-1909
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Doctors, vaccination, and utilitarianism / by H. Strickland Constable. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    249/256
    V. Harcourts speech. I had been reading it, I need not say, with great interest; fur it related to people in my position, and 1 am always trying to gain instruction fi-oni the words of emijient men. What then was 1 to do ? Was 1 to leave the })oor woman where she was, to die, in accordance, as it seemed to me, with the teaching 1 had just been receiving, or was 1 to sin against the gospel of social equality and remove her ? Perhaps I ought to be ashamed to confess that at last 1 decided upon the latter alternative, and did not leave her to die. On the contrary, shutting my eyes to the truth as it is in Utopia, following the custom of my class, giving A\ay weakly to the degrading instincts of my narrow-minded scpiire progenitors, 1 just ordered a mattress to l)e rigged up in my omnibus and sent the woman olf. Still the (piestion remains, was this a justifiable jnoceeding on my part, or was it not a justifiable ])roceeding ? To be serious, 1 look upon Mr. Harcourt’s enunciation upon this subject to be as eccentric as anything one evei' hears from that most eccentric of all sects, the sect of communists. How are we to account for this eccentricity ? We all know that politicians often profess strange and extreme views, and that they do so from a great variety of motives; but when any individual instance comes before me 1 always try to attribute the best motives 1 can think of In a case like the jn-esent then, 1 can well suppose it possible for a great intelligence to be, for a time, swamped by an overflow of philanthropic sensibilities