"Goodbye"

"I sent my wife to the garden, then I locked the back door, shut the windows and placed Jessie in the corner by the gas copper. I gave her a piece of chocolate to suck. I laid my Home Guard respirator beside me and turned on the gas. I played with Jessie and kissed her goodbye. Then I had to put on my respirator. She closed her eyes and then went limp."

Thus 46-year-old paper-mill worker Gordon Richard Long last week described to the Maidstone police how he killed his seven-year-old daughter because she was deformed and imbecile. "I loved my daughter very much," he said, "more so than if she had been normal--bringing about her death is the hardest thing I have ever done."

Was he guilty? Humanitarians and moralists have argued over such cases as Long's for years.* But in spite of the well-intentioned uproar in favor of euthanasia, no civilized country distinguishes in law between "mercy killing" and murder.

(The Nazis in 1933 legalized compulsory sterilization of idiots, imbeciles and irredeemable criminals.) When Long pleaded guilty last week in a Maidstone court, he was aware that under British law he would be hanged, unless the Crown's mercy intervened.

* For some recent discussion of euthanasia, see TIME, Nov. 18.

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