CAPTAIN OATES’ HEROISM.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXV, Issue 87, 19 April 1913, Page 3

CAPTAIN OATES’ HEROISM.

A LIFE GIVEN UP. . The March issue of “The Month” has the following: “To commit srucide,” says the writer, “is to compass one’s own death directly and design nedly, which is as morally wrong as to kill another in the same way. In order, then, to constitute the crime of self-murder, two things must coincide ' —the object sought must be selfdestruction, the means chosen must he directly productive of that object. Now the main intention of Captain Oates was to relieve his companions of a burden. His death, though it would have had that effect, was in no ways essential to it; had he by some miraculous chance managed to save himself apart, his aim would have been equally well attained. And he took no positive moans to kill himself, as, for instance, shooting himself j with a revolver: he gave up his life rather than took it. A few illustrations will make the case still clearer. That man, then, is a hero like Captain Oates, and not a suicide, who, in a shipwreck, gives his lifebelt to another and allows himself to drown, or who leaps from a sledge closely pursued by wolves so that its other occupants may escape, or who cuts the rope above his head which would otherwise drag his companion-climbers with him into the abyss. In none of these cases is the means chosen of its own nature productive of death, although in the circumstances death may ho inevitable ; in none is the death of the hero a necessity for the accomplishment ofhis object, although he knows,, as a matter of fact, that such is the price ho will have to pay. It is the highest act of charity to give your life for your friend; it is an offence against God to take your own life for whatever object. To the man in the street this distinction may seem to he mere casuistry, and to the man in an emergency it would probably not occur, but it is necessary if we would rightly appreciate the objective moral value of such deeds.”