It is difficult to understand how anyone, contemplating the course of nature, can regard it as the expression of a Divine will, which man has no right to improve upon. Natural law is essentially unreasoning and unmoral: gigantic forces clash around us on every side unintelligent, and unvarying in their action. With equal impassiveness these blind forces produce vast benefits and work vast catastrophes. The benefits are ours, if we are able to grasp them; but nature troubles itself not, whether we take them or leave them alone. The catastrophes may rightly be averted, if we can avert them; but nature stays not its grinding wheel for our moans. Even allowing that a Supreme Intelligence gave these forces their being, it is manifest that he never intended man to be their plaything, or to do them homage; for man is dowered with reason to calculate, and with genius to foresee; and into man's hands is given the realm of nature (in this world) to cultivate, to govern, to improve. So long as men believed that a god wielded the thunderbolt, so long would a lightning-conductor be an outrage on Jove; so long as a god guided each force of nature, so long would it be impiety to resist, or to endeavour to regulate the divine volitions. Only as experience gradually proved that no evil consequences followed each amendment of nature, were natural forces withdrawn, one by one, from the sphere of the unknown and the divine. Now, even pain, that used to be God's scourge, is soothed by chloroform, and death alone is left for nature to inflict, with what lingering agony it may. But why should death, any more than other ills, be left entirely to the clumsy, unassisted processes of nature?--why, after struggling against nature all our lives, should we let it reign unopposed in death? There are some natural evils that we cannot avert. Pain and death are of these; but we can dull pain by dulling feeling, and we can ease by shortening its pangs. Nature kills by slow and protracted torture; we can defy it by choosing a rapid and painless end. It is only the remains of the old superstition that makes men think that to take life is the special prerogative of the gods. With marvellous inconsistency, however, the opponents of euthanasia do not scruple to "interfere with the course of nature" on the one hand, while they forbid us to interfere on the other. It is right to prolong pain by art, although it is wrong to shorten it. When a person is smitten down with some fearful and incurable disease, they do not leave him to nature; on the contrary, they check and thwart nature in every possible way; they cherish the life that nature has blasted; they nourish the strength that nature is undermining; they delay each process of decay which nature sows in the disordered frame; they contest every inch of ground with nature to preserve life; and then, when life means torture, and we ask permission to step in and quench it, they cry out that we are interfering with nature.