CHAPTER IV.
TWO DUTIES: TO WATCH AND TO HOPE.
This being the case, is every social danger dissipated? Certainly not.There is no Jacquerie, and society may be reassured on that side; theblood will not again rush to its head, but it must pay attention to theway in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be apprehended, butthere is consumption, and social consumption is called wretchedness.People die as well when undermined as when struck by lightning. Weshall never grow weary of repeating, that to think first of all of thedisinherited and sorrowful classes, to relieve, ventilate, enlighten,and love them, to magnificently enlarge their horizon, to lavish uponthem education in every shape, to offer them the example of labor,and never that of indolence, to lessen the weight of the individualburden by increasing the notion of the universal object, to limitpoverty without limiting wealth, to create vast fields of public andpopular activity, to have, like Briareus, a hundred hands to stretchout on all sides to the crushed and the weak, to employ the collectivepower in opening workshops for every arm, schools for every aptitude,and laboratories for every intellect, to increase wages, diminish thetoil, and balance the debit and credit, that is to say, proportionthe enjoyment to the effort, and the satisfaction to the wants,--ina word, to evolve from the social machine, on behalf of those whosuffer and those who are ignorant, more light and more comfort,--is,and sympathetic souls must not forget it, the first of brotherlyobligations, and, let egotistic hearts learn the fact, the first ofpolitical necessities; And all this, we are bound to add, is only abeginning, and the true question is this, labor cannot be law, withoutbeing a right. But this is not the place to dwell on such a subject.
If nature is called Providence, society ought to call itself foresight.Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than naturalamelioration; knowledge is a viaticum; thinking is a primary necessity,and truth is nourishment, like wheat. A reason fasting for knowledgeand wisdom grows thin, and we must pity minds that do not eat quiteas much as stomachs. If there be anything more poignant than a bodypining away for want of bread, it is a mind that dies of hunger forenlightenment. The whole of our progress tends toward the solution,and some day people will be stupefied As the human race ascends, thedeepest strata will naturally emerge from the zone of distress, and theeffacement of wretchedness will be effected by a simple elevation ofthe level. We would do wrong to doubt this blessed solution. The past,we grant, is very powerful at the present hour, and is beginning again.This rejuvenescence of a corpse is surprising. It seems victorious;this dead man is a conqueror. Behold him advancing and arriving! hearrives with his legion, superstitions; with his sword, despotism; withhis barrier, ignorance; and during some time past he has gained tenbattles. He advances, he threatens, he laughs, he is at our gates. Butwe have no reason to despair; let us sell the field on which Hannibalis encamped. What can we, who believe, fear? A recoil of ideas is nomore possible than it is for a river to flow up a hill. But thosewho desire no future ought to reflect; by saying no to progress theydo not condemn the future, but themselves; and they give themselvesa deadly disease by inoculating themselves with the past. There isonly one way of refusing to-morrow, and that is, by dying. We wishfor no death,--that of the body as late as possible, and that ofthe soul never. Yes, the sphinx will speak, and the problem will besolved; the people sketched by the eighteenth century will be finishedby the nineteenth. He is an idiot who doubts it. The future, thespeedy bursting into flower of universal welfare, is a divinely fatalphenomenon. Immense and combined impulsions pushing together governhuman facts, and lead them all within a given time to the logicalstate, that is to say, to equilibrium, or in other words, to equity. Aforce composed of earth and heaven results from humanity and governsit; this force is a performer of miracles, and marvellous denouementsare as easy to it as extraordinary incidents. Aided by science, whichcomes from man, and the event, which comes from another source, itis but little frightened by those contradictions in the posture ofproblems which seem to the vulgar herd impossibilities. It is no lessskilful in producing a solution from the approximation of ideas thanin producing instruction from the approximation of facts, and we mayexpect anything and everything from the mysterious power of progress,which, on fine days, confronts the East and the West in a sepulchre,and makes the Imams hold conference with Bonaparte in the interior ofthe Great Pyramid. In the meanwhile, there is no halt, no hesitation,no check, in the grand forward march of minds. Social philosophy isessentially the source of peace; it has for its object, and must haveas result, the dissolution of passions by the study of antagonisms. Itexamines, scrutinizes, and analyzes, and then it recomposes; and itproceeds by the reducing process, by removing hatred from everything.
It has more than once occurred, that a society has been sunk by thewind which is let loose on men. History is full of the shipwrecks ofpeoples and empires; one day, that stranger, the hurricane, passes, andcarries away manners, laws, and religions. The civilizations of India,Chaldæa, Persia, Assyria, and Egypt have disappeared in turn; why? Weare ignorant. What are the causes of these disasters? We do not know.Could those societies have been saved? Was it any fault of their own?Did they obstinately adhere to some fatal vice which destroyed them?What amount of suicide is there in these terrible deaths of a nationand a race? These are unanswerable questions, for darkness covers thecondemned civilizations. They have been under water since they sank,and we have no more to say; and it is with a species of terror thatwe see in the background of that sea which is called the past, andbehind those gloomy waves, centuries, those immense vessels,--Babylon,Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, and Rome,--sunk by the terrific blast whichblows from all the mouths of the darkness. But there was darkness then,and we have light; and if we are ignorant of the diseases of ancientcivilizations, we know the infirmities of our own, and we contemplateits beauties and lay bare its deformities. Wherever it is wounded weprobe it; and at once the suffering is decided, and the study of thecause leads to the discovery of the remedy. Our civilization, the workof twenty centuries, is at once the monster and the prodigy, and isworth saving; it will be saved. To aid it is much, and to enlighten itis also something. All the labors of modern social philosophy oughtto converge to this object; and the thinker of the present day has agrand duty to apply the stethoscope to civilization. We repeat it,this auscultation is encouraging; and we intend to finish these fewpages, which are an austere interlude in a mournful drama, by laying astress on this encouragement. Beneath the social mortality the humanimperishableness is felt, and the globe does not die because here andthere are wounds in the shape of craters and ringworms in the shape ofsolfatari and a volcano which breaks out and scatters its fires around.The diseases of the people do not kill the man.
And yet some of those who follow the social clinics shake their headsat times, and the strongest, the most tender, and the most logical,have their hours of dependency. Will the future arrive? It seems asif we may almost ask this question on seeing so much terrible shadow.There is a sombre, face-to-face meeting of the egotists and thewretched. In the egotist we trace prejudices, the cloudiness of a casteeducation, appetite growing with intoxication, and prosperity thatstuns, a fear of suffering which in some goes so far as an aversionfrom the sufferers, an implacable satisfaction, and the feeling ofself so swollen that it closes the soul. In the wretched we findcovetousness, envy, the hatred of seeing others successful, the greatbounds of the human beast toward gorging, hearts full of mist, sorrow,want, fatality, and foul and common ignorance. Must we still raise oureyes to heaven? Is the luminous point which we notice there one ofthose which die out? The ideal is frightful to look on thus lost in thedepths, small, isolated, imperceptible, and brilliant, but surroundedby all those great black menaces monstrously collected around it; forall that, though, it is in no more danger than a star in the yawningthroat of the clouds.
BOOK VIII.
ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS.