Foreign Affairs, and Brinkmann, Staël's successor in Paris, who is well known to the readers of Gentz and Rahel Varnhagen, give indeed another reason for the conduct of the Duke Regent and of Reuterholm. They assert that they had documentary evidence to prove that the Regent and Reuterholm had claimed large sums of money from France in payment for their good wishes, that Staël had made himself personally responsible for this money, and promised that he would obtain it for them. When, however, only one instalment was paid, and then nothing more, the Duke and his Councillor turned against their Ambassador.

Staël succeeded in obtaining from France a modification of the treaty, and all conditions were eliminated which might involve his country in war with England and Russia. His Government accepted it in this new form, but soon after the Convention was replaced by the Directory, and Sweden turned towards Russia. A marriage was now contemplated between the young Gustavus IV. and Alexandra, the grand-daughter of Catherine II. It was well known in Paris that these matrimonial negotiations were carried on by a French émigrée, Madame de St. Priest, and that the primary condition of the Empress was the rupture with France. Everything seemed arranged, when the marriage was broken off, on the morning of the wedding-day, by the folly of the Russian diplomacy. This was in the autumn of 1796. In the summer the Directory had recalled its representative, Le Hoc, from Stockholm, and, at the same time, Staël received his letters of recall. This was looked upon in Paris as almost a declaration of war, and now the insubordinate diplomat surpassed himself. He not only remained at his post, but he actually induced the Directory to refuse to receive Baron Rehausen, who had been appointed Chargé d'Affaires in his place. This was more than they could stand at Stockholm. Peremptory orders were sent to Staël to quit Paris within thirty-six hours, and an unambiguous declaration to the French Government that, if Rehausen were not received at once, the recognition of the Republic by Sweden would be cancelled and his passports sent to M. Perrochel, the French Chargé d'Affaires. This brought them to their senses at Paris. The Directory tried to conciliate the Regent by appointing General Pichegru as French Ambassador at his Court, Staël retired to Coppet, and spent the next two years in private life, partly there and partly in Paris.

He was once more summoned to the public service. In 1798, after two years of estrangement, the Court of Sweden endeavoured to resume relations with France, and at the beginning of 1799 Staël was sent to Paris to reconstruct the alliance of which he was the representative. He did not succeed. In May he asked for leave of absence, and was replaced by Brinkmann. Gustavus IV. now

became a more consistent enemy of France than even his father had been, and the public life of Staël came to a close.

He did not long survive his retirement, but died at Coppet in the summer of 1802, just as revolutionary despotism began to take the definite shape of the rule of Bonaparte. "Robespierre à cheval,” this, then, was the awakening from the nightmare of the Terror, the final expression of the movement with which Stael had so keenly sympathized, and which he so obstinately defended. His wife nursed him in his last illness, but the Dix Années d'Exil preserve absolute silence about him. The year of his death was signalized by the appearance of Delphine, the defiance by a woman of public opinion, which she had offended, and which had taken its revenge. This book, according to Madame de Staël herself, marks the moment in her life when the impetuosity of youth and the craving for happiness sought satisfaction in eloquent words and impassioned creations. That happiness, however, which could not be obtained, she had learned to renounce, when summing up the results of her life, she said, "J'ai toujours été la même, vive et triste: j'ai aimé Dieu, mon père, et la liberté."

Life and history have this in common, that the storms of passion must be spent before it is possible to come back to an unprejudiced appreciation of human affairs. Those who wrote on the Revolution during the Restoration and the Monarchy of July rarely struck the balance between invective and panegyric. It has been reserved for our time to aim at a more impartial judgment. With what success may be estimated from the fact that the results of recent investigations are confirmed by the posthumous depositions of the witnesses of the Revolution, and thus, after the lapse of nearly a century, the links of the historical chain are joined.

C. BLENNERHASSETT.

A CHAPTER IN THE ETHICS OF PAIN.

THE International Medical Congress of last summer fanned the fires of a controversy which, to do it justice, has never of late years been anywhere near the smouldering point. The Vivisection Act of 1876, which it was hoped would be a final settlement, has been a mere incident in the fray. The one side has continued to pour in its steady small shot of preachings and pamphlets, which the other has met from time to time by a round of heavy artillery, when some scientific anniversary or the unveiling of a discoverer's statue gave suitable vantage ground; while occasional skirmishes in the general press have shown that each has a considerable hold on public opinion, and feels the duty of extending it to the utmost. It can be but seldom that a practical moral question, comprising so considerable a class of actions, is thus in debate in a community. Similarity of conduct survives the widest speculative differences; and two educated persons of the same society, whatever their ethical or religious stand-points, might seek far for circumstances of ordinary or professional life where they would seriously differ as to right and wrong. That duty to animals should form an exception in England at the present day is due to a combination of two causes. First, the very existence of any such duty is a quite modern discovery: marks of affection to animals in the past, in cases where the relation was agreeable to human beings, avail little against the evidence of average public opinion which history and literature supply. And then side by side with this latest product of civilisation, while it is still uncertain of its ground and rather an instinct than a principle, circumstances have chanced to arise of a nature to try it to the utmost; I mean of course the enormous and increasing development of scientific and medical activity which has claimed live animals as its material. A new and doubtfully formulated principle, and a new and complicated extension of the need for its application, have made their appearance together. No wonder then that the issues of the problem, while more or less. acknowledged as moral ones, should refuse to fit with immediate certainty into any acknowledged moral scheme, and that the powerful instincts concerned should be found hard to reconcile; no wonder either that the resulting strife should present a peculiar bitterness and misdirection of attack, and a peculiar mixture on both sides of good and bad arguments. My aim is to do something towards disentangling the issues from this unnecessary confusion. Not that I for a moment hope to make all plain: the very clearing away of untenable and inconsistent arguments will bring out inherent

difficulties in the main question which have been much overlooked. But even this will be an advantage, since it is through regarding the question itself as an easy instead of a hard one that each side has regarded the position of the other as simply and culpably perverse. Before approaching the main issue, we may conveniently get rid of a few surrounding arguments and assumptions whose chief result is to conceal it, and to make either case, at any rate in the rhetoric of the other, look as weak as its weakest point. Of these outposts two are of special importance: the relation of torture to killing, and the well-worn theme of sport. On the former subject, Professor Virchow made some typical remarks in his address at the late Congress. Starting with the fact that killing is the offence most severely punished by law, he thence infers that killing is the extremest injury one man can inflict on another; from this very questionable inference he deduces with much emphasis the general law that "killing is more than torturing;" and so arrives at the desired conclusion that it is absurd to think more of the torture of animals than of the painless killing of them, and that every opponent of vivisection is bound to be a vegetarian. Because society reserves its highest penalty for the crime which most tends to its dissolution, therefore the annulling of sensation, which in the case of an animal is what is meant by painless death, is more, i.e. is a thing to be more dreaded by or for the animal, than the maximum of intolerable sensation, which is what is meant by torture, and shooting a sea-gull is worse than plucking it alive. I may spare my readers the platitudes which an explicit refutation would entail; merely asking what would be the natural idea of a cause which needs such support?

Next, as to cruelty inflicted in sport, and in the treatment of animals for various purposes of luxury and convenience. This topic, if put forward by vivisectionists as a plea of extenuation, would clearly be quite beside the mark; for the question whether their actions are right or wrong can have no relation to the actions of quite independent sets of people. Still more hopeless is the plea when used with the implication that cruelty in other pursuits may be right or defensible; as when Virchow tries to reduce the extreme anti-vivisection case ad absurdum (a thing so easy to do that it is really irritating to see an able man completely fail in doing it) by saying that at that rate those who "make use of torturing methods" in the training of dogs and other domestic animals "would easily be in danger," and calling this most desirable result "a strange conclusion." When put forward to show the absurdity of attacking one evil while others much more glaring are condoned, the argument has doubtless more weight; but even here the other side may fairly reply that, while recognising abuses all round, they must concentrate their attack

somewhere; and that there is a reasonableness in beginning with a compact class, of large recent development, who are articulate, who work in private, and who take a special departure on philosophical and praiseworthy motives, rather than with a diffused body who make no professions, and merely go on doing in the full light of public opinion what their fathers have done before them for centuries. When, however, we leave the motive of the argument, and merely look at the facts alleged, the physiologists certainly seem in this country to have very much the best of it one wishes it could be otherwise, and that, of the two, the suffering were the more prominent on the side of the events which are infinitely the less frequent. Taking the most severe of recent experiments, those made on the biliary secretion by means of fistula, I certainly should not hesitate to choose that amount of suffering for my last hours, rather than the night-long torment of many a trapped rabbit or broken-legged bird. As regards the greater length to which the suffering extends when a process has to be induced and watched, it must of course not be ignored in the reckoning. But, as far as the actual wound is concerned, all evidence goes to show that, after cessation of the wounding process, an animal's pain is extremely slight; and for what remains, the wretchedness of severe illness, not only must every one recognise its difference from torture, but it is just that form of distress which may reasonably be supposed to be much mitigated in the case of animals. Superior intelligence has been represented as an aid in surmounting physical distress, and when directed to religious or other objects extraneous to the physical condition it may, no doubt, so act; but when directed to the distress itself, as it normally must be in case of severe distress, I should say just the reverse. The sense of rebellion, the helpless beating about of the intellect, the counting of time and vivid sense that the next moment will be like the last, the demand ever urgent and ever baffled to find a meaning for such experience, more than all the sense of wrong that comes from comparison, the consciousness of self as an exception, of clueless isolation, of being marked off from normal sentient life by an intolerable something which none can share-all this points to the close relation of suffering to intelligence; and the consequent difference between man and brute would presumably be at its maximum in cases of protracted suffering below the agony-point where intellect is too blinded to be active.

But if comparisons of pains are hard to test, not so another favourite argument in which the respective mental attitudes of the sportsman and physiologist towards the sufferings they cause are compared, much to the disadvantage of the latter. Thus Mr. H. N. Oxenham, in a widely circulated pamphlet, explains that in hunting