Filial Love

To kill his mother at her own pleadings, or to let a painful cancer kill her, was the problem put to one Richard Corbett, intelligent young Englishman. The two, since his father's death, had lived together in southern France. Last November Mrs. Corbett's cancer became unmanageable.

Last February doctors decided that radium, X-rays or other measures could neither cure her or give her surcease from her terrific pain. The son nursed her, heard her cries, watched the wrinkles of agony deepen in her face. She lacked strength and means for suicide. She begged his pity to kill her. She reasoned with him. Her death was certain. He could but bring it to her sooner, and far more mercifully than the cancer was doing. He pondered.

In France 40,000 people die each year from cancer, he learned.* Almost half of them kill themselves to end their pain. Should not the state "through pity put an end to the sufferings of those incurables who ask it of us?" he asked himself. Of course, human life is inviolable. Yet the state executes criminals. And of course religion forbids good-intentioned murder as well as offensive murder and suicide. But religion is a personal matter. Step by step he puzzled out the logic of his ethical problem: "Has the state, for reasons which are at bottom religious, the right to refuse to incurables the pity which they demand? Has not the individual the right to his liberty? So long as the law is not amended the law throws onto individuals the responsibility of the solution of the problem."

Richard Corbett assumed the responsibility. He gave his suffering mother a narcotic. Then he shot her through the head. Next he shot himself, but lived. Last week he was in the hospital at Hyeres, reluctantly alive and detachedly wondering what state and social judgment would be on his matricide. He wrote a long letter to Le Matin, outstanding Paris daily, explaining his deed, admitting his "guilt," urging that, come what might to him, the law be changed. "I regret nothing," he said.

*The U. S. annual number is 115,000.