than my left one, which had never given me any trouble. Soon after we parted. I returned to Odessa, and never feeling any pain in that arm from that date to this New Year's Day-i.e., during four and a half years, I very soon lost every remembrance of my past suffering. "But lo, and behold! On January 1st, 1889, I suddenly felt with dismay that my right arm was paining me once more. At first I paid no great attention to it, thinking it would soon pass over. But the pain remained; my arm began once more to feel half-paralyzed, when finally I found it in just the same condition as it had been nearly five years before. Still, I hoped that it was but a slight cold, which would disappear in time. It did not, however, but became worse. My disillusion as to the potency of magnetism was a complete and very disagreeable one, I assure you. I had labored under the impression that magnetism cured once for all, and found to my bitter regret that in my case it had lasted only four and a half years! . . 66 I Thus I went on suffering till the end of the month, when one fine day I received the January number of the Revue Spirite, which I go on subscribing for now, as I did before. began to look it through, when suddenly, under the title of Obituary Notices, my eye caught these lines:‘Le 15 Janvier courant, on portait en terre la depouille mortelle de M. Henri Evette, magnétiseur puissant.' (On January 15th were buried the mortal remains of Mr. Henry Evette, a powerful mesmerizer.) I felt sorry for the good old man, evidently the same that we had known, when suddenly a thought struck me. January 15th new style, means with us January 3d in Russia. If he was buried on that date, then he must have died on January 1st or thereabouts, since in France, as elsewhere, people are rarely buried before the third day after their death. He must have died, then, on New Year's Day, precisely on that day when the long-forgotten pain had returned into the arm he had so successfully cured some years before? What an extraordinary occurrence! I thought. I was thunderstruck, as it could never be a simple coincidence. How shall we explain this? Would it not mean that the mesmeric passes had left in my arm some invisible particles of a curative fluid which had prevented the return of pain, and had been, in short, conducive to a healthy circulation in it, hence of a healthy state, so far? But that on the very day of the mesmerizer's death-who knows? perhaps at the very hour-these mysterious particles suddenly left me! Whither have they gone? Have they returned to him and their now lifeless sister-particles? Have they run away like deserters, or simply disappeared because the vital power which had fixed them into my arm was broken? Who can tell? I would if I could have some experienced mesmerizer, or those who know all about it, answer me and suggest some explanations. Does any one know of cases where the death of the mesmerizer causes the diseases cured by him to return in their former shape to the patients who survive him, or whether it is an unheard-of case? Is it a common law or an exceptional event? It does seem to me that this case with my arm is a very remarkable and suggestive one in the domain of magnetic cures." SMALL-POX AND VACCINATION IN BELGIUM.— In Belgium there is no law compelling parents to have their children vaccinated; and though children before admission to school, and workmen sometimes before being employed on public works, are usually obliged to show a certificate of having been vaccinated, there is a very large number of totally unvaccinated persons in the country-more, probably, than in most other European countries. Besides, revaccination is rather the exception than the rule, and primary vaccination is too often very in. efficiently performed, so that when an epidemic of small-pox comes it claims a great many victims. Dr. Titeca has recently been endeavoring to stir up professional opinion on the subject of the sadly unprotected state of his fellow-countrymen; and Dr. Dejace has just written an article in the Scalpel in which he mentions what occurred in his own locality when there was an epidemic. There were one hundred and seven cases among non-vaccinated and sixty-eight among vaccinated. Of the first mentioned series, however, more than eighty per cent were serious, and among the second, or more or less protected cases, there were under fourteen per cent of grave cases. Again, in the Belgian army, where vaccination and revaccination are required, there is a minimum of small-pox. There is, it seems, an anti-vaccination league, but this body finds little need to carry on an active propaganda, as indifferentism, which is peculiarly rife in Belgium, seems to answer its purpose. ical men are attempting to influence public opinion in favor of a compulsory law, but it is very doubtful if they will get many people to listen to good advice.-Lancet. Med "Tout ce que je vois, jette les semences d'une révolution qui arrivera immanquablement. . . . Les Français arrivent tard à tout, mais enfin ils arrivent. . . Alors, ce sera un beau tapage. Les jeunes gens sont bien heureux; ils verront de belles choses."-VOL TAIRE THE movement known as the Revolution of 1789 was a transformation-not a convulsion; it was constructive even more than destructive; and if it was in outward manifestation a chaotic revolution, in its inner spirit it was an organic evolution. It was a movement in no sense local, accidental, temporary, or partial; it was not simply, nor even mainly, a political movement. It was an intellectual and religious, a moral, social, and economic movement, before it was a political movement, and even more than it was a political movement. If it is French in form, it is European 10 in essence. It belongs to modern history as a whole quite as much as to the eighteenth century in France. Its germs began centuries earlier than the generation of 1789, and its activity will long outlast the generation of 1889. It is not an episode of frenzy in the life of a single nation. In all its deeper elements it is a condensation of the history of mankind, a repertory of all social and political problems, the latest and most complex of all the great crises through which our race has passed. Let us avoid misunderstanding of what we are now speaking. Most assuredly the close of the eighteenth century in France displayed a convulsion, a frenzy, a chaos such as the world's history has not often equalled. There was folly, crime, waste, destruction, confusion, and horror of stupendous proportions, and of all imaginable forms. There was the Terror, the Festi val of Reason, the Reaction, and all the delirium, the orgy, the extravagance, which give brilliancy to small historians and serve as rhetoric to petty politicians. Assuredly the revolution closed in with most ghastly surprises to the philanthropists and philosophers who entered on it in 1789 with so light a heart. Assuredly it has bequeathed to the statesmen and the people of 1889 problems of portentous difficulty and number. But we are speaking now neither of '93 nor of '95, nor of '99, of no local or special incident, of no single event, nor of political forms. We are in this essay dealing exclusively with the ideas of '89," with the movement which at Versailles, on 5th May, 1789, took outward and visible shape. And we are about to deal with it in its deeper, social, permanent, and human side, not in its transitory and material side. The Seine, the Loire, and the Rhone have washed away the blood which once defiled their streams, the havoc caused by the orgies of anarchy has been effaced, years make fainter the memory of crimes and follies, of revenge and jealousy. But the course of generations still deepens the meaning of the ideas of '89," of the social, intellectual, economic New Birth which then received official recognition, opening in a conscious and popular form the reformation that, in a spontaneous form, had long been brooding in so many generous hearts and profound brains. No reading of merely French history, no study of the reign of Louis. XVI. by itself, can explain this great movement no political history, no narrative of events, no account of any special institution. Neither the degeneration of the monarchy, nor the corruption of the nobility, nor the disorder of the administration, nor the barbarism of the fedual law, nor the decay of the Church, nor the vices of society, nor the teaching of any school, nor all of these together-are adequate to explain the revolution. They are enough to account for the confusion, waste, conflict, and fury of the contest-i.e., for the cxplosion. But they do not explain how it is that hardly anything was set up in France between 1789 and 1799 which had not been previously discussed and prepared, that between 1789 and 1799 an immense body of new institutions and reformed methods of social life were firmly planted in such a way that they have borne fruit far and wide in France and through Europe. Nor do any of these special causes just enumerated suffice to explain the passion, the contagious faith, the almost religious fanaticism which was the inner strength of the revolution and the source of its inexhaustible activity. What we call the French Revolution of 1789, was really a new phase of civilization announcing its advent in form. It had the character of religious zeal because it was a movement of the human race toward a completer humanity. Rhetoricians, poets, and preachers have accustomed us too long to dwell on the lurid side of the movement, on its follies, crimes and failures; they have overrated the relative importance of the catastrophe, and by profuse pictures of the horrors, they have drawn off attention from its solid and enduring fruits. In the midst of the agony it was natural that Burke, in the sunset of his judgment, should denounce it. But it was a misfortune for the last generation that the purple mantle of Burke should have fallen on a prophet, who was not a statesman but a man of letters, who, with all Burke's passion and prejudice, had but little of his philosophic power, none of his practical sagacity, none of the great Whig's experience of affairs and of men. The "universal bonfire" theory, the "grand suicide" view, the 66 chaos-come-again" of a former generation, are seen to be ridiculous in ours. The movement of 1789 was far less the final crash of an effete system than it was the new birth of a greater system, or rather of the irresistible germs of a greater system. The contemporaries of Tacitus, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius, could see nothing but ruin in the superstition of the Galileans, just as the contemporaries of Decius, Julian, and Justinian saw nothing but barbarism in the Goths, the Franks, and the Arabs. The year 1789, more definitely than any other date marks any other transition, marks the close of a society which had existed for some thousands of years as a consistent whole, a society more or less based upon military force, intensely imbued with the spirit of hereditary right, bound up with ideas of theological sanction, sustained by a scheme of supramundane authority; a society based upon caste, on class, on local distinctions and personal privilege, rooted in inequality, political, social, material, and moral; a society of which the hope of salvation was the maintenance of the status quo, and of which the Ten Commandments were privilege. And the same year, 1789, saw the official installation of a society which was essentially based on peace, the creed of which was industry, equality, progress; a society where change was the evidence of life, the end of which was social welfare, and the means social co-operation and human equity. Union, communion, equality, equity, merit, labor, justice, consolidation, fraternity-such were the devices and symbols of the new era. It is therefore with justice that modern Europe regards the date 1789 as a date that marks a greater evolution in human history more distinctly than, perhaps, any other single date which could be named between the reign of the first Pharaoh and the reign of Victoria. One of the cardinal pivots in human his tory we call this epoch, and not at all a French local crisis. The proof of this is complete. All the nations of Europe, and indeed the people of America, contributed their share to the movement, and more or less partook in the movement themselves. It was hailed as a new dispensation by men of various race; and each nation in turn more or less added to the movement and adopted some element of the movement. The intellectual and social upheaval, which for generations had been preparing the movement, was common to the enlightened spirits of Europe and also to the Transatlantic Continent. The effects of the movement have been shared by all Europe, and the distant consequences of its action are visible in Europe to the third and the fourth generations. And lastly, all the cardinal features of the movement of 1789 are in no sense locally French, or of special national value. They are equally applicable to Europe, and indeed to advanced human societies every where. They appeal to men primarily, and to Frenchmen secondarily. They relate to the general society of Europe, and not to specific national institutions. They concern the transformation of a feudal, hereditary, privileged, authoritative society, based on antique right into a republican, industrial, equalized, humanized society, based on a scientific view of the Common Weal. But this is not a national idea, a French conception of local application. It is European, or rather human. And thus, however disastrous to France may have been the travail of the movement officially proclaimed in 1789, from a European and a human point of view it has abiding and pregnant issues. May we profit by its good while we are spared its evil. Obviously, the salient form of the revolution was French, ultra French; entirely unique and of inimitable peculiarity in some of its worst as well as its best sides. The delirium, the extravagances, the hysterics, and the brutalities which succeeded one another in a series of strange tragicomic tableaux from 1789 till 1795, were most intensely French, though even they, from Caps of Liberty to Festival of Pikes, have had a singular fascination for the revolutionists of every race. But the picturesque and melodramatic accessories of the revolution have been so copiously over-colored by the scene-painters and stage-carpenters of history, that we are too often apt to forget how essentially European the Revolution was in all its deeper meanings. A dozen kings and statesmen throughout Europe were, in a way, endeavoring to enter on the same path as Louis XVI. with Turgot and Necker. In spite of the contrast between the government of England and the Government of France, between the condition of English industry and that of France, Walpole and Pitt offer many striking points of analogy with Turgot and Necker. The intellectual commerce between England and France from (let us say) 1725 to 1790 is one of the most memorable episodes in the history of the human mind. The two generations which followed the visit of Voltaire to England formed an intellectual alliance between the leading spirits of our two nations: an alliance of amity, offensive and defensive, scientific, economic, philosophical, social, and political, such as had not been seen since the days of the GrecoRoman education or the cosmopolitan fellowship of medieval universities. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith, Franklin, Turgot, Quesnay, Diderot, Condorcet, d'Argenson, Gibbon, Washington, Priestley, Bentham-even Rousseau, Mabli, Mirabeau, and Jefferson-belonged to a Republic of Ideas, where national character and local idiosyncrasy could indeed be traced in each, but where the essential patriotism of humanity is dominant and supreme. In England, Pitt; in Prussia, Frederick; in Austria, Joseph; in Tuscany, Leopold; in Portugal, Pombal; in Spain, d'Aranda; all labored to an end, essentially similar, in reforming the incoherent, unequal, and obsolete state of the law; in rectifying abuses in finance; in bringing some order into administration, in abolishing some of the burdens and chains on industry; in improving the material condition of their states; in curbing the more monstrous abuses of privilege; and in founding, at least the germs, of what we call modern civilized government. Some of these things were done ill, some well, most of them tentatively and with a naïve ignorance of the tremendous forces they were handling, with a strange childishness of conception, and in all cases without a trace of suspicion that they were changing the sources of power and their political constitution. And in all this the rulers were led and inspired by a crowd of economical and social reformers who eagerly proclaimed Utopia at hand, and who mistook generous ideals for scientific knowledge. For special causes the great social evolution concentrated itself in France toward the latter half of the eighteenth century; but there was nothing about it exclusively French. Socially and economically viewed, it was almost more English and Anglo-American than French; intellectually and morally viewed, it was hardly more French than it was English. Hume, Adam Smith, Burke, and Priestley are as potent in the realm of thought as Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Condorcet. And in the realm of social reform, Europe owes as much to Bentham, Howard, Clarkson, Franklin, Washington, Pitt, and Frederick, as it does to Turgot, Mirabeau, Girondins, Cordeliers, or Jacobins. The "ideas of '89" were the ideas of the best brains and most humane spirits in the advanced nations of mankind. All nations bore their share in the labor, and all have shared in the fruits. But if the Revolution were so general in its preparation, why was the active manifestation of it concentrated in France? and why was France speedily attacked by all the nations of Europe? These two questions may be answered in two words. In France only were the old and the new ele ments ranged face to face without intermixture or contact, with nothing between them but a decrepit and demoralized autocracy. And no sooner had the inevitable collision begun, than the governments of Europe were seized with panic as they witnessed the fury of the revolutionary forces. In England the Reformation, the Civil War, the Revolution of 1689, and the Hanoverian dynasty, had transferred the power of the monarchy to a wealthy, energetic, popular aristocracy, which had largely abandoned its feudal privileges, and had closely allied itself with the interests of wealth. During two centuries of continual struggle and partial reform, a compromise had been effected in Church and in State, wherein the claims of king, priest, noble, and merchant had been fused into a tolerable modus vivendi. In France the contrary was the case. During two centuries the monarchy had steadily asserted itself as the incarnation of the public, claiming for itself all public rights, and undertaking (in theory) all public duties; crushing out the feudal authorities from all national duties, but guaranteeing to them intact the whole of their personal privileges. As it had dealt with the aristocracy so it dealt with the Church; making both its tool, filling both with corruption, and giving them in exchange nothing but license to exploit the lay commonalty. The lay commonalty naturally expanded in rooted hostility to the privileged orders, and to the religious and hereditary ideas on which privilege rested. It grew stronger every day, having no admixture with the old orders, no points of contact, having no outlet for its activity, harassed, insulted, pillaged, and rebuffed at every turn, twenty-six millions strong against two hundred thousand; all distinctions, rivalries, and authority, as among this tiers état, uniformly crushed by the superincumbent weight of Monarchy, Church, and Privilege. The vast mass of the people thus grew consolidated, without a single public outlet for its energies, or the smallest opportunity for experience in affairs; the whole ability of the nation for politics, administration, law, or war, forced into abstract speculation and social discussion; conscious that it was the real force and possessed the real wealth of the nation; increasing its resources day by day, amid frightful extortion and incredible barbarism, which it was bound to en |