"Therefore, I repeat that the two cases are analogous; and if, as remarked by Justice Coleridge, murder was committed in the first instance, so is murder committed in the analogue. So, we see, the principal points of the opinion enunciated by the learned judge, and the principles therein laid down, can, with equal force, be applied to the non-justification of craniotomy, by which the life of a defenceless child is sacrificed to save the mother. "Notice also that two of the perpetrators of the deed claimed that they had families, and that their lives were more valuable than that of the murdered boy. By craniotomists this reason or excuse is frequently given with much sentimentality to justify the killing of the child. The child, they say, has no social value, the mother is the idol of her husband, the pride of the household, often an ornament to society, the mother of living or possible children. Therefore, her life is more valuable than that of the unborn child. But who is to be the judge of the value of life? Were not Scipio Africanus, Manlius, was not Cæsar, from whom the very name of the operation, delivered by section from their mother's womb? The operation was familiarly known to Shakespeare, who tells us: 'Macduff was from his mother's womb untimely ripped.' "There can never be a necessity for killing--except an unjust aggressor and in self-defence--unless the killing can be justified by some recognized excuse admitted by the law. In the case of the murdered sailor-boy, there was not such an excuse, unless the killing was justified by what has been called necessity. But, as stated above, there never is an excuse for killing an innocent aggressor, and the temptation to the act and its expediency is not what the law has ever called necessity. Nor is this to be regretted; for if in this case the temptation to murder and the expediency of the deed had been held by law as absolute defence of the deed, there would have been no guilt in the case. Happily this is not so. The plea of necessity once admitted might be made the legal cloak for unbridled passions and atrocious crimes, such as the producing of abortion, etc. "As in the case of this young sailor, so in the killing of an unborn child, no such excuse can be pleaded; the unborn child cannot be the aggressor, no more so than the defenceless sailor-boy was. "To preserve one's life is, generally speaking, a duty: but it may be the plainest duty, the highest duty, to sacrifice one's life. War is full of such instances in which it is not man's duty to live, but to die. The Greek and Latin authors contain many examples in which the duty of dying for others is laid down in most glowing and eloquent language. "'_Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_,' says Horace. Such was heathen ethics, and it is enough in a Christian country to teach that there is not always an absolute and unqualified necessity to preserve one's life.