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THE TWO DUTIES:
TO WATCH AND TO HOPE
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 right.
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 right 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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