But science, as we know, has revealed the horrors as well as the wonders of earth. It troubles us; man has shed rivers of needless blood, but we shrink from recognising Nature as she is, "red in tooth and claw." It did not trouble the ancient Greeks; their gods, developing from the rough deities of place or tribe into the embodiments of the natural forces of matter or of mind, were outside human ethic, although they were cast in human form. They might take the shape of mortals, but only Euripides and a few other hypersensitive moralists thought of blaming the gods when, as often happened, they fell below the standards of human conduct. But we are creatures of another era; and man, criticising and even condemning the Powers that rule his little day, has, for good or ill, reached out to a level that is above the gods, whose plaything he still remains. And there is another change. Man--_some_ men, that is to say--have taken the animals into their protection and fellowship: and M. Clemenceau is truly one of these. Not only those charming, kindly essays, _La Main et la Patte_ and _Les Parents Pauvres_, in _Le Grand Pan_, but the history of the two pigeons in the _Embuscades de la Vie_, and a hundred little touches and incidents throughout Clemenceau's books show him to be a man of most generous sympathies, looking at animal life from a far higher and finer point of view than the majority of his countrymen. There is much else in _Le Grand Pan_ that it would be pleasant to dwell upon: a delicate classic spirit, a certain ironic grace, humour and mockery, but everywhere and above all keen indignation at needless human suffering and a sympathy which is poles apart from sentiment, for human pain. M. Clemenceau might well be called "a soldier of pity," as, in one of the Near Eastern languages, the members of his first profession, the doctors, are termed. But I must pass on. _Le Grand Pan_ is, as it deserves to be, the best known of M. Clemenceau's books, and no one who has overlooked it can form a complete idea of this remarkable man.