to all. But to try your hazardous medicaments on unfortunate artisans,
for whom the hospital is the sole refuge when sickness overtakes them;
to try a treatment, perhaps fatal, on people whom poverty confides to
you, trusting and powerless; to you, their only hope; to you, who will
only answer for their life to God--do you know that this is to push the
love of science to inhumanity, sir? How! the poorer classes already
people the workshops, the field, the army; in this world they only know
misery and privations; and when, at the end of their sufferings and
fatigues, they fall exhausted--half-dead--sickness even does not preserve
them from a last and sacrilegious "experiment!" I ask your heart, sir,
would not this be unjust and cruel?"

Alas! Dr. Griffon would have been touched, perhaps, by these severe words,
but not convinced. Man is made the creature of circumstances. The captain
thus accustoms himself to consider his soldiers as nothing more than the
pawns of the bloody game called battle. And it is because man is thus made,
that society ought to protect those whom fate exposes to the action of
these "humane necessities." Now the character of Dr. Griffon once admitted
(and it can be admitted without much hyperbole), the inmates of this
hospital had then no guarantee, no recourse against the scientific
barbarity of his experiments; for there exists a grievous hiatus in the
organization of the civil hospitals. We will point it out here, so that we
may be understood. Military hospitals are each day visited by a superior
officer charged to receive the complaints of the sick soldiers, and to
attend to them if they appear reasonable. This oversight completely
distinct from the government of the hospital, is excellent--it has always
produced the best results. It is, besides, impossible to see establishments
better kept than the military hospitals; the soldiers are nursed with much
care, and treated, we would say, almost with respectful commiseration. Why
not have a similar superintendence established in the civil hospitals, by