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; bloodwill no longer rush to its head. But let society take heed to the mannerin which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be feared, but phthisisis there. Social phthisis is called misery.

  One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck bylightning.

  Let us not weary of repeating, and sympathetic souls must not forgetthat this is the first of fraternal obligations, and selfish hearts mustunderstand that the first of political necessities consists in thinkingfirst of all of the disinherited and sorrowing throngs, in solacing,airing, enlightening, loving them, in enlarging their horizon to amagnificent extent, in lavishing upon them education in every form, inoffering them the example of labor, never the example of idleness,in diminishing the individual burden by enlarging the notion of theuniversal aim, in setting a limit to poverty without setting a limitto wealth, in creating vast fields of public and popular activity, inhaving, like Briareus, a hundred hands to extend in all directions tothe oppressed and the feeble, in employing the collective power for thatgrand duty of opening workshops for all arms, schools for all aptitudes,and laboratories for all degrees of intelligence, in augmentingsalaries, 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 morecomfort 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 isthis: labor cannot be a law without being a right.

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

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

  Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than materialimprovement. To know is a sacrament, to think is the prime necessity,truth is nourishment as well as grain. A reason which fasts from scienceand wisdom grows thin. Let us enter equal complaint against stomachs andminds which do not eat. If there is anything more heart-breaking thana body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying fromhunger for the light.

  The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution. Some day weshall be amazed. As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers emergenaturally from the zone of distress. The obliteration of misery will beaccomplished 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 andadvancing. It seems a victor; this dead body is a conqueror. He arriveswith his legions, superstitions, with his sword, despotism, with hisbanner, ignorance; a while ago, he won ten battles. He advances, hethreatens, he laughs, he is at our doors. Let us not despair, on ourside. 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 existsa return of a river on its course.

  But let those who do not desire a future reflect on this matter. Whenthey say "no" to progress, it is not the future but themselves thatthey are condemning. They are giving themselves a sad malady; they areinoculating themselves with the past. There is but one way of rejectingTo-morrow, and that is to die.

  Now, no death, that of the body as late as possible, that of the soulnever,--this is what we desire.

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

  Yes, the people, sketched out by the eighteenth century, will befinished by the nineteenth. He who doubts this is an idiot! The futureblossoming, the near blossoming forth of universal well-being, is adivinely fatal phenomenon.

  Immense combined propulsions direct human affairs and conduct themwithin a given time to a logical state, that is to say, to a state ofequilibrium; that is to say, to equity. A force composed of earth andheaven results from humanity and governs it; this force is a workerof miracles; marvellous issues are no more difficult to it thanextraordinary vicissitudes. Aided by science, which comes from one man,and by the event, which comes from another, it is not greatly alarmedby these contradictions in the attitude of problems, which seemimpossibilities to the vulgar herd. It is no less skilful at causing asolution to spring forth from the reconciliation of ideas, than a lessonfrom the reconciliation of facts, and we may expect anything from thatmysterious power of progress, which brought the Orient and the Occidentface to face one fine day, in the depths of a sepulchre, and made theimaums converse with Bonaparte in the interior of the Great Pyramid.

  In the meantime, let there be no halt, no hesitation, no pause in thegrandiose onward march of minds. Social philosophy consists essentiallyin science and peace. Its object is, and its result must be, to dissolvewrath by the study of antagonisms. It examines, it scrutinizes, itanalyzes; then it puts together once more, it proceeds by means ofreduction, discarding all hatred.

  More than once, a society has been seen to give way before the windwhich is let loose upon mankind; history is full of the shipwrecks ofnations and empires; manners, customs, laws, religions,--and some fineday that unknown force, the hurricane, passes by and bears them allaway. The civilizations of India, of Chaldea, of Persia, of Syria, ofEgypt, have disappeared one after the other. Why? We know not. What arethe causes of these disasters? We do not know. Could these societieshave been saved? Was it their fault? Did they persist in the fatal vicewhich destroyed them? What is the amount of suicide in these terribledeaths of a nation and a race? Questions to which there exists no reply.Darkness enwraps condemned civilizations. They sprung a leak, then theysank. We have nothing more to say; and it is with a sort of terror thatwe look on, at the bottom of that sea which is called the past, behindthose colossal waves, at the shipwreck of those immense vessels,Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, Rome, beneath the fearful gusts whichemerge from all the mouths of the shadows. But shadows are there, andlight is here. We are not acquainted with the maladies of these ancientcivilizations, we do not know the infirmities of our own. Everywhereupon it we have the right of light, we contemplate its beauties, welay bare its defects. Where it is ill, we probe; and the sickness oncediagnosed, the study of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy.Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is its law and itsprodigy; it is worth the trouble of saving. It will be saved. It isalready much to have solaced it; its enlightenment is yet another point.All the labors of modern social philosophies must converge towardsthis point. The thinker of to-day has a great duty--to auscultatecivilization.

  We repeat, that this auscultation brings encouragement; it is by thispersistence in encouragement that we wish to conclude these pages, anaustere interlude in a mournful drama. Beneath the social mortality, wefeel human imperishableness. The globe does not perish, because it hasthese wounds, craters, eruptions, sulphur pits, here and there, norbecause of a volcano which ejects its pus. The maladies of the people donot kill man.

  And yet, any one who follows the course of social clinics shakes hishead at times. The strongest, the tenderest, the most logical have theirhours of weakness.

  Will the future arrive? It seems as though we might almost putthis question, when we behold so much terrible darkness. Melancholyface-to-face encounter of selfish and wretched. On the part ofthe selfish, the prejudices, shadows of costly education, appetiteincreasing through intoxication, a giddiness of prosperity which dulls,a fear of suffering which, in some, goes as far as an aversion for thesuffering, an implacable satisfaction, the _I_ so swollen that it barsthe soul; on the side of the wretched covetousness, envy, hatred ofseeing others enjoy, the profound impulses of the human beast towardsassuaging 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 pointwhich we distinguish there one of those which vanish? The idealis 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 themaw of the clouds.

  BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS