“You mean that the survival of the fittest is checkmated,” remarked a young journalist travelling in the interest of a New York daily, “that civilization should practise artificial selection, as it were?”
The alienist shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly. “My dear sir,” he protested, “I mean nothing. It is the question that means something.”
“Well, as I was saying,” began the Englishman again, reaching for the salt and upsetting a spoonful, “the question seems to be whether or not, in any circumstances, the saving of a human life may become positively immoral.”
“Upon that point—” began the alienist; but a young woman, in a white dress, who was seated on the Captain’s right interrupted him.
“How could it?” she asked. “At least I don’t see how it could. Do you, Captain?”
“There is no doubt,” remarked the journalist, looking up from a conversation he had drifted into with a lawyer from one of the Western States, “that the more humane spirit pervading modern civilization has not worked wholly for good in the development of the species. Probably, for instance, if we had followed the Spartan practice of exposing unhealthy infants, we should have retained something of the Spartan hardihood. Certainly if we had been content to remain barbarians both our digestions and our nerves would have been the better for it, and melancholia would perhaps have been unknown. But, at the same time, the loss of a number of the more heroic virtues is overbalanced by an increase of the softer ones. Notably, human life has never before been regarded so sacredly.”
“On the other side,” observed the lawyer, lifting his hand to adjust his eyeglasses, and pausing to brush a crumb from his coat, “though it is all very well to be philanthropic to the point of pauperizing half a community and of growing squeamish about capital punishment, the whole thing sometimes takes a disgustingly morbid turn. Why, it seems as if criminals were the real American heroes! Only last week I visited a man sentenced to death for the murder of his two wives, and, by Jove, the place was literally besieged by women sympathizers. I counted six bunches of roses in his cell, and at least fifty notes.”
“Oh, but that is a form of nervous hysteria!” said the girl in black, “and must be considered separately. Every sentiment has its fanatics, philanthropy as well as religion. But we can’t judge a movement by a few over-wrought disciples.”
“Why not?” asked the Englishman, quietly. He was a middle-aged man, with an optimistic expression and a build of comfortable solidity. “But to return to the original proposition. I suppose we all accept as a self-evident truth the axiom that the highest civilization is the one in which the highest value is placed upon individual life.”
“And happiness,” added the girl in black.