CANCER-THE ANARCHIST.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 28 October 1924, Page 8

CANCER-THE ANARCHIST.

'IHE LAW OF THE 80-DY ANI> ITS CONSEQUENCES. The student of cancer finds himself, before his studies have advanced very far, contemplating a state of matters which bears at least a superficial resemblance to some of the political and economic developments of the present day (says the Edinburgh Review). He is confronted on the one hand' by a vast and complicated organisation more or lees perfectly adapted to certain very large purposes; on the other by groups of individuals who have forsaken the larger purposes and are concerned only with themselves. The cancer cell is the supreme example of an Anarchist. Like most Anarchists, it lives in a complicated society, eveiy member of which depends for its existence on all the other members. Though it was born to citizenship and the duties as well as the privileges of citizenship, it has become a law to itself, and so an enemy to its neighbours. Theft, assault, and murder are among its crimes. The analogy is in no danger of being pushed too far. It is so complete that it is actually impossible to say anything of human society and the various ways in which human society can be disrupted which is not also true of cancer. Man has built his civilisation® •'*ter the pattern of his own frame; the greatest evil which threatens them is likewise the greatest evil by which that is assailed. For the human body is a kind of coral island. It is made up not of “bricks,” which are inanimate material, hut of living and most active individuals. We speak of “a man” as wC speak of “an egg,” hut whereas the egg is a single living thing, a man is many things—a whole empire of living creatures, a vast agglomeration of millions and millions of separate “specks of life,” each with its own existence, : its own sensitiveness, its own dim qualities of body, and even of spirit. The cell is the maorooasm nF the mw. So much so, indeed, that without stretching the parallel too far we may speak of the “mind of the cell” and even of it\s ethic. Indeed, we must so speak, for lust as a State possesses in some envious way an indiyidualitv which is without., yet not entirely distinct from that of any of its citizens, so the man possesses a vision whmh the cell cannot possess, vet which belongs in a mpa.sure to the cell ateo. Tf the meaning of cancer as a. fact of life is to be grasped this tmth must needs be apprehended. The ethic of the cell is boU> tt>e origin of the law of the body and its consequence.