pulation. No works of
charity, no expression of love or of pity, has ever been able to do so
much. Science has shown us that those works which were called
"charitable," and were looked upon merely as a moral virtue,
represented the first step, although a restricted and insufficient
one, towards the real salvation of the health of humanity. It was that
which had to be done in order to fight against death. But, in order to
reach the goal, such work should be universal, and should constitute a
"reformation" of society. Then it becomes "social progress," when
there will be no benefactors or benefited, but merely humanity which
has increased its own well-being. This principle: All men are
brothers; let them love and help one another, and let not the right
hand know what the left hand doeth, will have been translated into
practise.

In sentimental times, poverty was a stimulus to which the rich man
reacted. The poor did not really tend to educate the rich man's
feelings. If, in those times, the poor man had said, "Give me
necessities, or thou shalt die," the rich man would have been
indignant. He was very far from realizing that the poor man was his
brother, with whom he shared his rights, as well as the danger of
death.

To-day science has put things on a different footing. It has
"realized" that charity benefits both rich and poor, and has
constituted a principle of civilization that which formerly was a
"moral principle" entrusted to sentiment.

In the case of morals, too, hygiene has penetrated, and has given
individual rules of life. It is through hygiene that debauchery has
become less common, that those epicurean feasts which were celebrated
in ancient times are replaced to-day by hygienic meals, the value of
which consists in the wise proportion between the needs of the body
and the food which is prepared. Wine and alcohol are rejected by the
rich more than by the poor. We eat in order to keep ourselves in good
health, and therefore without excess and without poison. This is what
the ancient morality preached when it fought against the vice of
gluttony and proclaimed fasting and abstinence to be virtues. No one
in those times could have imagined that the day would come when
millionaires would voluntarily substitute lemonade for wine, and that
great banquets would disappear entirely, leaving only the accounts of
them as a "curiosity" of the past. Nay, more: none of these modern
ascetics are proud of their virtue,