The Emperor Maximianus, who shipped a cargo of beggars out to sea and drowned them, was still more complete in this economy of suffering. Disease and misery, decrepitude and helpless infancy, have each in turn become the object of such elimination, which ignores tenderness toward the individual; but the process has never stopped where it might have been justified, in a manner, by the substitution of healthier and stronger or more perfect, for less perfect individuals among the representative types of the species. No; the same spirit that sacrificed the feeblest, revelled in the destruction of the strongest men in its gladiatorial arenas. Even in the restricted sense of patriotism, which had contributed so many devotions on the altar of the country, in the heroic days of Greece and Rome, solidarity had ceased to be matter of practical conscience in the pagan world of the great empire. The Hebrews had developed it only as a tribal and family principle. Where has it ever been a social life-truth, unless in the fold of Christ's disciples? and where has this been practically organized, except by its religious orders? {45} The inconsistencies of war excepted, we see life and personal liberty becoming more sacred from age to age, even amid the corruptions of advanced civilization in Christendom; whereas, on the contrary, in pagan civilizations "the springs of humane feeling in every ancient nation, like the waters of the fountain of the sun, were warm at dawn of morning, but chilled gradually as the day advanced, till at noon they became excessively cold." When the development of intelligence in civilized communities renders them conscious of needs and of resources outlying the circles of family providence; one of their first Christian movements is to care for their disabled members, stricken by disease or wounds from the army of the working poor. In our monster cities, the hospital acquires gigantic proportions, and political economy meets humanity in the research for a system which shall afford the greatest mitigation of inevitable suffering and the best chances of restoring the sufferers to social uses. In this research, charity has anticipated experimental science, and to the religious orders belongs the honor of fulfilling the highest ideal of this sacred function. The organization of hospitals contains for modern civilization and for cosmopolite New York problems of the highest practical import, which especially interest the Christian church.