Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/627

Rh real sacrifice of religion in its highest sense. One piece of recent history enables us to answer this question. The Second Empire in France had its head in Napoleon III, a noted Voltairean. At the climax of his power he determined to erect an Academy of Music, which should be the noblest building of its kind in the world. It was projected on a scale never before known, at least in modern times, and carried on for years, millions being lavished upon it. But at the same time the emperor determined to rebuild the Hôtel-Dieu, the great Paris hospital; this, too, was projected on a greater scale than anything of the kind ever before known, and also required millions. In the erection of these two buildings the emperor's determination was distinctly made known, that with the highest provision for intellectual enjoyment there should be a similar provision, and moving on parallel lines with it, for the relief of human suffering. This plan was carried out to the letter; the Palace of the Opera and the Hôtel-Dieu went on with equal steps, and the former was not allowed to be finished before the latter. Among all the "most Christian kings" of the house of Bourbon who had preceded him for five hundred years, history shows no such obedience to the religious and moral sense of the nation. Catharine de' Medici and her sons, plunging the nation into the great wars of religion, never showed any such feeling; Louis XIV, revoking the edict of Nantes for the glory of God, and bringing the nation to sorrow for hundreds of years, never dreamed of making the construction of his palaces and public buildings wait upon the demands of charity; Louis XV, so subservient to the Church in all things, never betrayed the slightest consciousness that while making enormous expenditures to gratify his own and the national vanity, he ought to carry on works, pari passu, for charity. Nor did the French nation, at those periods when it was most largely under the control of theological considerations, seem to have any inkling of the idea that nation or monarch should make provision for relief from human suffering, to justify provision for the sumptuous enjoyment of art: it was reserved for the second half of the nineteenth century to develop this feeling so strongly, though quietly, that Napoleon III, notoriously an unbeliever in all orthodoxy, was obliged to recognize it and to set this great example.

Nor has the recent history of the United States been less fruitful in lessons. Yellow fever, which formerly swept not only Southern cities but even New York and Philadelphia, has now been almost entirely warded off. Such epidemics as that in Memphis a few years since, and the immunity of the city from such visitations since its sanitary condition was changed by Mr. Waring, are a most striking object-lesson to the whole country. Cholera, which again and again swept the country, has ceased to