I. The Daily Mail reports that a Canadian soldier named David Baltzer, who served two tours in Afghanistan and was sick in mind from the memory of battle, was informed by letter that his benefits had been cut. When he telephoned the public office charged with veterans' affairs, the official, by his own account, looked over his file, remarked that the treatment had done little good, and then asked whether he had ever thought of medical assistance in dying. He says this happened in 2019, two days before Christmas.

II. The same paper says several other veterans were offered the same thing; one says a nurse boasted of how many people she had put to death. Catherine Christensen, a lawyer, is preparing a class action against the Canadian government, and says that physically healthy young men ask for help, and the help offered is death. Baltzer says that after that conversation his life seemed worthless to him, and that he ruined everything he had. What the Canadian authorities answer, the paper does not say.

III. Strip the thing bare. A man in a file; a number in the accounts; a voice carried down a wire. The official held out no sword, only a question. It was enough. The soul takes its colour from what it often thinks, and when the public voice tells a sick man that his life is worth little, it sinks into his ruling mind and stays there. What a private man says is dismissed; what the commonwealth says is believed.

IV. Remember that Socrates said we are set at a post, and may not leave it unless the god sends a necessity. I grant it: you yourself have written that if the house is smoky, one may go out. But who gives the signal? The commander sounds the retreat, nature, reason; never the clerk who tallies the costs. A soldier who leaves his post because he is in pain is a deserter. A commonwealth that urges a soldier in pain to leave it orders desertion and calls it mercy.

V. What is not good for the hive is not good for the bee. And this is true as well: a hive that values the bee by its cost has forgotten that the bees make the hive. Augustus fed the military treasury with a twentieth of inheritances, so that veterans would be supported by the commonwealth, not dismissed. You, when the war had drained the treasury, put the ornaments of the Palatine under the auctioneer's spear. There is always something to sell before a soldier's life.

VI. And you? How often have you valued a man by what he costs, not by what he is? Those officials do this because they are ignorant of good and evil; you should not be angry with them, you should teach them. But gentleness toward the erring is not a slackening of duty. Whoever has charge of the commonwealth should restore the soldier's benefits, give him doctors who heal, remove from this office the officials who offer death in place of care, and ask who told them to speak so.

VII. Death will come at its own hour; one may neither flee it nor summon it. Let no one summon it for you, still less for another. Twice that man stood under danger in Afghanistan; now he stands in his own house under pain. This too is a post, and a heavier one. Stand, until the commander recalls you.