CHAPTER IV

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.