Thus life will come to a painless end. Is not everything preferable to the terror inspired by death? Everything? Not quite. Certain doctors think that we may well allow a poor old man to die who is of no use to anyone, without telling him; but when they think of the head of a great business or of one of those capitalists who manage some huge concern, they are quite out of countenance. You see, the case becomes serious. What is to happen to all this vast business? What is to be the future of all this capital? Must we not “assure the interests of the heirs”? Yes, the importance of such material things justifies torturing the dying man. In his last moment he must pay for the importance he has enjoyed on earth. They will make him understand that he alone has no right to die quietly and is doomed to be worried till he has made his will, divided his goods, settled the fate of his business. Afterwards they may give him some hope, on condition that he does not use it to destroy what he has just done. But who is really deceived? What is this comedy that they pretend to play round deathbeds? Do we not know, that some day we must die? Does not this certainty of death impart to life a peculiar significance? Can this be destroyed by not thinking about it? “Really,” M. Brunetière wrote recently, dealing with the subject of the “Falsehood of Universal Peace,” “life is not the greatest good if the foundation of all morality is that many things must be preferred to life; and really death is not the greatest evil, if we are men, so to speak, only in so fair as we rise above the fear of death.”