To the Editor of the "Nortn-Cuiwa Datty News."
Smm—It ig. with greatest satis. faction that 1 observe your cultured correspondents smiting hip and thigh the prevailing Oriental idea regarding the ethics of self-destruction. It is nice to have one of the subjects which have been in-suing lofty minds since the hey-of the Greeks definitely and irrevocably settled through the onslaughts of your It must be a great comfort to the Oriental condemned to death by torture, brought about by a lack of adroitness at a critical moment, to know that the Sehoolmen over" in Europe decided a few centuries ago that it would be wrong for him to take his own life, And think of the soothing calm ° engendered in woman dying of cancer when it is brought home to her that a loving. Father has decided that it will be for the good of her soul to suffer a few more months or years on this planet in order to save mons of purgatory Inter on. If she happens to have read any of the reflections of Holbach, Aurelius, Schopenhauer and Voltaire, we will hope that their' lack of com jed possession of a personality fter death to be blessed or tormented will not turn her from the straight and marrow path. The pleasing vistas opened out are endless, of your corres-individual is permissible, is wrong, the conclusion, that self-destruction Jof a nation is permissible, is also wrong. As he has begun with the premise I may be permitted to start is a horse of a different a later letter if it seems called for, although your correspondents have dealt' more ably with the conclusion than with the premise, The bland way in which the writers of these letters take it for granted that because a certain act is illegal in various Christian countries it is immoral, and that since tion -I suppose to being illegal, all countries, has been a source of Jconsiderable delight to me. I can't remember the line of verse which points the difference between morals in Manchester and Timbuctoo, but little elementary study of the growth and decay of manners morals throughout the ages would indicate that laws and even morals are not fixed and immutable, To be more specific, it was quite the thing for knights of the Crusades to fall swords to preserve their
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.