rise up in a vast crowd to protest that conscience, honour, love, self-devotion, are more precious to the race than is the life of the individual. Life is sacred, but it may be laid down in a noble cause; life is sacred, but it must bend before the holier sacredness of principle; life which, though sacred, can be destroyed, is as nothing before the indestructible ideals which claim from every noble soul the sacrifice of personal happiness, of personal greatness, yea, of personal life.* * The word "life" is here used in the sense of "personal existence in this world." It is, of course, not intended to be asserted that life is really destructible, but only that personal existence, or identity, may be destroyed. And further, no opinion is given on the possibility of life otherwhere than on this globe; nothing is spoken of except life on earth, under the conditions of human existence. It will be conceded, then, on all hands, that the proposition that life is sacred must be accepted with many limitations: the proposition, in fact, amounts only to this, that life must not be voluntarily laid down without grave and sufficient cause. What we have to consider is, whether there are present, in any proposed euthanasia, such conditions as overbear considerations for the acknowledged sanctity of life. We contend that in the cases in which it is proposed that death should be hastened, these conditions do exist. We will not touch here on the question of the endurance of pain as a duty, for we will examine that further on. But is it a matter of no importance that a sufferer should condemn his attendants to a prolonged drain on their health and strength, in order to cling to a life which is useless to others, and a burden to himself? The nurse who tends, perhaps for weeks, a bed of agony, for which there is no cure but death--whose senses are strained by intense watchfulness--whose nerves are racked by witnessing torture which she is powerless to alleviate--is, by her self-devotion, sowing in her own constitution the seeds of ill-health--that is to say, she is deliberately shortening her own life. We have seen that we have a right to shorten life in obedience to a call of duty, and it will at once be said that the nurse is obeying such a call. But has the nurse a right to sacrifice her own life--and an injury to health is a sacrifice of life--for an obviously unequivalent advantage? We are apt to forget, because the injury is partially veiled to us, that we touch the sacredness of life whenever we touch health: every case of over-work, of over-strain, of over-exertion, is, so to speak, a modified case of euthanasia. To poison the spring of life is as real a tampering with the sacredness of life as it is to check its course. The nurse is really committing a slow euthanasia. Either the patient or the nurse must commit an heroic suicide for the sake of the other--which shall it be? Shall the life be sacrificed, which is torture