as their own health, strength, and patience are exploited by
selfish hypochondriacs. They must do all these things or else run
pecuniary risks that no man can fairly be asked to run. And the
healthier the world becomes, the more they are compelled to live
by imposture and the less by that really helpful activity of
which all doctors get enough to preserve them from utter
corruption. For even the most hardened humbug who ever prescribed
ether tonics to ladies whose need for tonics is of precisely the
same character as the need of poorer women for a glass of gin,
has to help a mother through child-bearing often enough to feel
that he is not living wholly in vain.


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-RESPECT IN SURGEONS

The surgeon, though often more unscrupulous than the general
practitioner, retains his self-respect more easily. The human
conscience can subsist on very questionable food. No man who is
occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well,
ever loses his self-respect. The shirk, the duffer, the
malingerer, the coward, the weakling, may be put out of
countenance by his own failures and frauds; but the man who does
evil skilfully, energetically, masterfully, grows prouder and
bolder at every crime. The common man may have to found his self-
respect on sobriety, honesty and industry; but a Napoleon needs
no such props for his sense of dignity. If Nelson's conscience
whispered to him at all in the silent watches of the night, you
may depend on it it whispered about the Baltic and the Nile and
Cape St. Vincent, and not about his unfaithfulness to his wife. A
man who robs little children when no one is looking can hardly