much of them. Doctors! pah! ghouls! who remind us that we are nothing but a network of veins, muscles, and nervous fibre! Cynics of the dissectingroom, whose eyes are sold to the contemplation of sickening things, whose minds are made up in the mould of a harsh materialism! Doctors! nightmares of mankind, which endures them with a groan only because each man, as an antidote to prejudice, carries in him a strong dose of superstition, and believes, when his body begins to plague him, that his dear life is in the hands of the leech.

So the doctor is a despot after all, and rules by the fear of death. But society revenges itself. Despotism against despotism.

Let the doctor dare only so much as lift his eyes, in the hope and love of a man's heart, on the daughter of the noble house whose life he has just snatched from the opening grave with an energy and a skill unknown perhaps to science without love, and frigidly you ask for his bill, and sublimely you ring the bell, and honestly you feel that rather to the arms of Death than to the arms of a doctor would you confide the rescued treasure.

I have much considered this.

In exaggeration itself the true measure can be found, since there it must be, otherwise how should it be exceeded?

Something of error I find on either side.

"There must be division of classes and distinction between ranks," says the World. The World says well. He is a fool that would gainsay it; and whoever fights against Prejudice must expect to be worst

ed; for the odds are all to one. However hard this may appear, it is just.

I have seen in how cruel a dilemma those unhappy ones are placed who, yielding to an impulse not otherwise than noble, have outraged the prejudice of class, and overleaped the barriers which it raised between two hearts. In the lives thus violently united. I have detected an irremediable schism. And even there, where shame and pride suppressed the groan of conscious failure, to my eyes, accustomed to trace them, a thousand symptoms have revealed the presence of the hidden worm, whose morose tooth, made more intolerable by the necessity of concealing the wound on which it worked, was gnawing disappointed hearts.

True, I have also examined cases wherein all the world's exactest requirements had been obediently fulfilled, ay, even to the precise satisfaction of its highest pretension—cases of failure wherein, nevertheless, rank, name, fortune, age, bodily and mental advantages, all reciprocities in short, were in unison to a degree that might sustain the quantitative analysis of Lavoisier. The temple was accurately built, but within the walls of it no divinity abode.

Of all cases, these are the most puzzling.

One easily understands that disobedience to a law should entail unhappiness, if by obedience to the same law happiness is secured.

The Law of God, for instance, is entitled by all laws of logic to avenge the infraction of it. For fools may murmur as they will, but let any man loyally obey that law, and I will defy him to be unhappy.

But where this is not the case, where the strictest obedience to the law does not, as a necessary consequence, insure that happiness which disobedience forfeits, surely there must be "something rotten in the state of Denmark."

Let us not fear to say it: 'tis the law itself that is

rotten.

In what? Perhaps in this:

Cease to be personages only, and become men, if you will not forego the prerogatives of man. Cease to live by convention in the narrow pride of position, and begin to live naturally in the large pride of humanity, if you would enforce Nature's warrant to search life for human joy. But take heed-do not deceive yourselves. If you are conscious that Nature is not in you, that men you are not and never can become, then in God's name stick to your ranks and conventions, and thank Heaven that these, at least, enable you to be something.*

All things are easier to us than to become fully and integrally that which we originally and naturally are. And if the dog-philosopher who, two thousand years ago, went about in the world with lantern lighted at midday to look for a man, were now again among us, perhaps he would no longer be at the pains even to

* Had my friend ever read the poems of Charles Churchill, he might have found in the following verses something like an anticipation of this thought:

"Twas Nature's first intent,

Before their rank became their punishment,

They should have pass'd for men, nor blushed to prize

The blessing she bestow'd," etc.

CHURCHILL-Independence.

search at all, but would blow out his lantern and keep contentedly kenneled in his tub.

"Vix sunt homines hoc nomine digni."

But Diogenes was a cur. The noble mastiff is not to be roused by the snarling of a mongrel. To nothing less than man's sympathy for man can man's worth reveal itself.

Between Christianity and Socialism there is all the difference in the world. Christianity says to the rich, Give. Socialism says to the poor, Take. A notable distinction! Let us seek, not to equalize, but to harmonize ranks and classes.

"And who is better qualified to do this," I said to myself, "than the Physician-he whose subject and whose object are man ?”

To find man in the Patient by showing to the patient man in the Physician-this was my purpose. Patient and Physician. Do not these represent the two most salient sides of humanity?

The sufferer: deserving love, because most needing love.

The healer, the restorer: deserving love, because most competent to love.

After all (may the ghost of Galen forgive me for saying it!), Medicine, if it be a science, is the science of guess-work and divination. The physician's business is to guess what Nature needs. All that books can teach is to him no more than the flight of the birds, or the hue of the entrails to the augur-mere aids to intuition. Sympathy is the sole source of divination, for only sympathy can interpret the unknown. Sympathy is revelation.

Love one another, and help one another. You may write a thousand volumes upon ethics, but you will not add a jot to the divinity of this doctrine.

Well, this was the road that led me from the Quai St. Michel to the Rue de la Paix.

I say there are faults on both sides.

My duty thenceforth was to combat mutual prejudice.

The faults of the Physician, as a class, I knew. To emancipate myself from these needed only a strong will and strict adherence to a few simple principles deduced from personal experience. But from the faults of other classes to emancipate the patient? Of this I knew nothing, and felt that I never should know any thing so long as I suffered myself to see in my patients nothing more than so many scientific "subjects." Certain ills there are which are only consequent to the manners and customs of a class.

How should the Physician cure these?

Submit to a medical regimen the many ways of living of the many classes of society?

You can not do it.

Prevent young countesses from going to balls, prevent old gentlemen from drinking too much generous wine at sumptuous tables, prevent young gentlemen from passing their nights in playing at cards and drinking Champagne, by all means. If you can do this, Napoleon, by the side of you, was a tyro in the art of government.

But if the enemy is not to be banished by this or any other means, then let us study more narrowly his. mode of warfare, that at least we may diminish his force and resist his attacks.