“But if it goes ahead by forcing; sensitive creatures; with ... sensitive nervous systems, to bear fear and pain ... we shall lose more morally than we shall gain scientifically even if we gain scientifically and we don’t because nearly everyone is ill.”
“You consider knahludg can be bought at too high a price.”
“Well; look at the continental luminaries; where there are no restrictions; they don’t even care about their patients, only diseases interest them, and in general, not only in science, they don’t really know anything, the Germans and the French, you have only to look at them. They are brutal.”
“That’s a large statement. If you’ll pardon me I should say there’s a certain amount of insular prejudice in that.”
“I have not a scrap of insular prejudice. I like foreigners. They are more intelligent than Englishmen. But there’s something they don’t know that makes them all alike. I once heard a wealthy old Jew say that he’d go to Germany for diagnosis and to England for treatment, and he’d had operations and illnesses all over the world. That expresses it.”
“You infer that the English have more humanity.”
“They don’t regard the patient as a case in the way continentals do.”
“Well I guess when we’re sick we all like to go home.”
“You mean the Jew had no home. But he chose the English to go home to when he was ill.”
“That’s true in more senses than one. This country’s been a home for the Jews right away back.”