e done less to extend
and preserve our Oriental empire than English veracity," says Lord
Macaulay. "All that we could have gained by imitating the doublings,
the evasions, the fictions, the perjuries, which have been employed
against us, is as nothing when compared with what we have gained by
being the one power in India on whose word reliance can be placed.
No oath which superstition can devise, no hostage however precious,
inspires a hundredth part of the confidence which is produced by the
'yea, yea,' and the 'nay, nay,' of a British envoy." Therefore it is
that Lord Macaulay is sure that "looking at the question of expediency
in the lowest sense of the word, and using no arguments but such as
Machiavelli might have employed in his conferences with Borgia, we
are convinced that Clive was altogether in the wrong, and that he
committed, not merely a crime but a blunder."[1]

[Footnote 1: Macaulay's _Essay on Lord Clive_.]

So again when an English vessel of war made signals of distress,
off the coast of France, during the war with Napoleon, and thereby
deceived men from the enemy into coming to its relief, and then held
them as prisoners, the act was condemned by the moral sense of the
world. As Woolsey says, in his "International Law:"[1] "Breach of
faith between enemies has always been strongly condemned, and that
vindication of it is worthless which maintains that, without an
express or tacit promise to our enemy, we are not bound to keep faith
with him."

[Footnote 1: Sect. 133, p. 213.]

The theologian who assumes that the duty of veracity is suspended
between enemies in war time is ignorant of the very theory of
civilized warfare; or else he fails to distinguish between justifiable
concealment, by the aid of methods of mystifying, and falsehood which
is never justifiable. And that commander who should attempt to justify
falsehood and bad faith in warfare on the ground that it is held
justifiable in certain works on Christian ethics, would incur the
scorn of the civilized world for his credulity; and he would be told
that it is absurd to claim that because he is entitled to kill a man
in warfare it must be fair to lie to him.

In the treatment of the medical profession, many writers on ethics
have been as unfair, as in their misrepresentation of the general
moral sense with reference to warfare. They have spoken as if "the
ethics of the medical profession" had a recognized place for falsehood
in the treatme