er products {58} aside, etc."[4]
We cannot suppose that, if he had lived, he would have been content to
have left the argument thus. That the end justifies the means, is
scarcely a doctrine which can be accepted as the last word of an
ethical defence of the constitution of the world.

No doubt there were further pleas to be put in, and we shall do well to
give them their full value. There is the contention that the pleasures
of life as a whole outweigh the sum of its evils. This was maintained,
and we need not hesitate to say successfully maintained, by Lord
Avebury, and not by him alone. Indeed Darwin had emphatically said,
"According to my judgment happiness decidedly prevails."[5] Then there
has always been urged the undoubted fact that pain, if an evil, is yet
the minister of good. Browning's optimism may have carried him too far
when he laid it down that "when pain ends gain ends," but it is not to
be questioned that men have profited by sufferings, and that they have
had to thank their pains, if only because these have served to protect
them from yet greater misfortunes. There is a true wisdom in the moral
of the old fable of the blacksmith, who prayed to heaven that the fire
might not burn his fingers, to discover that as {59} a result it had
charred his hand to the bone. Medical science has had much to say with
regard to the salutary office of pain. It has gone so far as to assert
that, "the symptoms of disease are marked by purpose, and the purpose
is beneficent." Nay more, "the processes of disease aim not at the
destruction of life, but at the saving of it."[6] None the less, with
what might seem a splendid inconsistency, the medical profession
devotes itself untiringly to the alleviation of the symptoms and to the
eradication of disease.

Again, we may be thankful to be assured that, whatever be the case with
man, the lower organisms feel pain less than he does, and much less
than he is often wont to imagine that they feel it. This has been
argued again and again by the veteran naturalist Wallace, whose right
to speak on the subject no one is likely to dispute. In his recently
published book, _The World of Life_, he has devoted a whole chapter to
answering the question, "Is Nature cruel?" and it is due to him, as
well as to the importance of the problem, that we should carefully note
what he has said. The following quotations may be taken as
sufficiently indicating his position.

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