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 that the first of fraternal obligations, and the first of political necessities, consists in thinking first of all of the disinherited and sorrowing throngs, in solacing, airing, enlightening, loving them, 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 opening workshops for all arms, schools for all aptitudes, and laboratories for all degrees of intelligence, in proportioning enjoyment to effort and a glut to need. 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. 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. The future blossoming of universal well-being is a divinely fatal phenomenon.
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 to dissolve wrath by the study of antagonisms. 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. The civilizations of India, of Chaldea, of Persia, of Syria, of Egypt, have disappeared one after the other. Why? We know not. Darkness enwraps condemned civilizations. They sprung a leak, then they sank. It is with a sort of terror that we look on, at the bottom of that sea which is called the past, at the shipwreck of those immense vessels, Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, Rome. 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; 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 worth the trouble of saving. It will be saved. The thinker of to-day has a great duty: to auscultate civilization. This auscultation brings encouragement. Beneath the social mortality, we feel human imperishableness. The globe does not perish because it has craters here and there. 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. 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. 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.
