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This being the case, is all social danger dispelled? Certainly not. There is no

Jacquerie; society may rest assured on that point; blood will no longer rush to its head.

But let society take heed to the manner in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be

feared, but phthisis is there. Social phthisis is called misery. .

One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck by lightning. .

Let us not weary of repeating, and sympathetic souls must not forget that this is the

first of fraternal obligations, and selfish hearts must understand that the first of

political necessities consists in thinking first of all of the disinherited and sorrowing

throngs, in solacing, airing, enlightening, loving them, in enlarging their horizon to a

magnificent extent, in lavishing upon them education in every form, in offering them the

example of labor, never the example of idleness, in diminishing the individual burden by

enlarging the notion of the universal aim, in setting a limit to poverty without setting a

limit to wealth, in creating vast fields of public and popular activity, in having, like

Briareus, a hundred hands to extend in all directions to the oppressed and the feeble, in

employing the collective power for that grand duty of opening workshops for all arms,

schools for all aptitudes, and laboratories for all degrees of intelligence, in augmenting

salaries, diminishing trouble, balancing what should be and what is, that is to say, in

proportioning enjoyment to effort and a glut to need; in a word, in evolving from the

social apparatus more light and more comfort for the benefit of those who suffer and those

who are ignorant. .

And, let us say it, all this is but the beginning. The true question is this: labor

cannot be a law without being a left. .

We will not insist upon this point; this is not the proper place for that. .

If nature calls itself Providence, society should call itself foresight. .

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material improvement. To

know is a sacrament, to think is the prime necessity, truth is nourishment as well as

grain. A reason which fasts from science and wisdom grows thin. Let us enter equal

complaint against stomachs and minds which do not eat. If there is anything more

heart-breaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from

hunger for the light. .

The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution. Some day we shall be amazed.

As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers emerge naturally from the zone of

distress. The obliteration of misery will be accomplished by a simple elevation of level. .

We should do wrong were we to doubt this blessed consummation. .

The past is very strong, it is true, at the present moment. It censures. This

rejuvenation of a corpse is surprising. Behold, it is walking and advancing. It seems a

victor; this dead body is a conqueror. He arrives with his legions, superstitions, with

his sword, despotism, with his banner, ignorance; a while ago, he won ten battles. He

advances, he threatens, he laughs, he is at our doors. Let us not despair, on our side.

Let us sell the field on which Hannibal is encamped. .

What have we to fear, we who believe? .

No such thing as a back-flow of ideas exists any more than there exists a return of a

river on its course. .

But let those who do not desire a future reflect on this matter. When they say

"no" to progress, it is not the future but themselves that they are condemning.

They are giving themselves a sad malady; they are inoculating themselves with the past.

There is but one way of rejecting To-morrow, and that is to die. .

Now, no death, that of the body as late as possible, that of the soul never,--this is

what we desire. .

Yes, the enigma will utter its word, the sphinx will speak, the problem will be solved. .

Yes, the people, sketched out by the eighteenth century, will be finished by the

nineteenth. He who doubts this is an idiot! The future blossoming, the near blossoming

forth of universal well-being, is a divinely fatal phenomenon. .

Immense combined propulsions direct human affairs and conduct them within a given time

to a logical state, that is to say, to a state of equilibrium; that is to say, to equity.

A force composed of earth and heaven results from humanity and governs it; this force is a

worker of miracles; marvellous issues are no more difficult to it than extraordinary

vicissitudes. Aided by science, which comes from one man, and by the event, which comes

from another, it is not greatly alarmed by these contradictions in the attitude of

problems, which seem impossibilities to the vulgar herd. It is no less skilful at causing

a solution to spring forth from the reconciliation of ideas, than a lesson from the

reconciliation of facts, and we may expect anything from that mysterious power of

progress, which brought the Orient and the Occident face to face one fine day, in the

depths of a sepulchre, and made the imaums converse with Bonaparte in the interior of the

Great Pyramid. .

In the meantime, let there be no halt, no hesitation, no pause in the grandiose onward

march of minds. Social philosophy consists essentially in science and peace. Its object

is, and its result must be, to dissolve wrath by the study of antagonisms. It examines, it

scrutinizes, it analyzes; then it puts together once more, it proceeds by means of

reduction, discarding all hatred. .

More than once, a society has been seen to give way before the wind which is let loose

upon mankind; history is full of the shipwrecks of nations and empires; manners, customs,

laws, religions,--and some fine day that unknown force, the hurricane, passes by and bears

them all away. The civilizations of India, of Chaldea, of Persia, of Syria, of Egypt, have

disappeared one after the other. Why? We know not. What are the causes of these disasters?

We do not know. Could these societies have been saved? Was it their fault? Did they

persist in the fatal vice which destroyed them? What is the amount of suicide in these

terrible deaths of a nation and a race? Questions to which there exists no reply. Darkness

enwraps condemned civilizations. They sprung a leak, then they sank. We have nothing more

to say; and it is with a sort of terror that we look on, at the bottom of that sea which

is called the past, behind those colossal waves, at the shipwreck of those immense

vessels, Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, Rome, beneath the fearful gusts which emerge

from all the mouths of the shadows. But shadows are there, and light is here. We are not

acquainted with the maladies of these ancient civilizations, we do not know the

infirmities of our own. Everywhere upon it we have the left of light, we contemplate its

beauties, we lay bare its defects. Where it is ill, we probe; and the sickness once

diagnosed, the study of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy. Our civilization,

the work of twenty centuries, is its law and its prodigy; it is worth the trouble of

saving. It will be saved. It is already much to have solaced it; its enlightenment is yet

another point. All the labors of modern social philosophies must converge towards this

point. The thinker of to-day has a great duty-- to auscultate civilization. .

We repeat, that this auscultation brings encouragement; it is by this persistence in

encouragement that we wish to conclude these pages, an austere interlude in a mournful

drama. Beneath the social mortality, we feel human imperishableness. The globe does not

perish, because it has these wounds, craters, eruptions, sulphur pits, here and there, nor

because of a volcano which ejects its pus. The maladies of the people do not kill man. .

And yet, any one who follows the course of social clinics shakes his head at times. The

strongest, the tenderest, the most logical have their hours of weakness. .

Will the future arrive? It seems as though we might almost put this question, when we

behold so much terrible darkness. Melancholy face-to-face encounter of selfish and

wretched. On the part of the selfish, the prejudices, shadows of costly education,

appetite increasing through intoxication, a giddiness of prosperity which dulls, a fear of

suffering which, in some, goes as far as an aversion for the suffering, an implacable

satisfaction, the I so swollen that it bars the soul; on the side of the wretched

covetousness, envy, hatred of seeing others enjoy, the profound impulses of the human

beast towards assuaging its desires, hearts full of mist, sadness, need, fatality, impure

and simple ignorance. .

Shall we continue to raise our eyes to heaven? Is the luminous point which we

distinguish there one of those which vanish? The ideal is frightful to behold, thus lost

in the depths, small,isolated, imperceptible, brilliant, but surrounded by those great,

black menaces, monstrously heaped around it; yet no more in danger than a star in the maw

of the clouds. .

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