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; the blood will not again rush to its head, but it must pay attention to the way in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be apprehended, but there is consumption, and social consumption is called wretchedness. People die as well when undermined as when struck by lightning. We shall never grow weary of repeating, that to think first of all of the disinherited and sorrowful classes, to relieve, ventilate, enlighten, and love them, to magnificently enlarge their horizon, to lavish upon them education in every shape, to offer them the example of labor, and never that of indolence, to lessen the weight of the individual burden by increasing the notion of the universal object, to limit poverty without limiting wealth, to create vast fields of public and popular activity, to have, like Briareus, a hundred hands to stretch out on all sides to the crushed and the weak, to employ the collective power in opening workshops for every arm, schools for every aptitude, and laboratories for every intellect, to increase wages, diminish the toil, and balance the debit and credit, that is to say, proportion the enjoyment to the effort, and the satisfaction to the wants,—in a word, to evolve from the social machine, on behalf of those who suffer and those who are ignorant, more light and more comfort,—is, and sympathetic souls must not forget it, the first of brotherly obligations, and, let egotistic hearts learn the fact, the first of political necessities; And all this, we are bound to add, is only a beginning, and the true question is this, labor cannot be law, without being 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 natural amelioration; knowledge is a viaticum; thinking is a primary necessity, and truth is nourishment, like wheat. A reason fasting for knowledge and wisdom grows thin, and we must pity minds that do not eat quite as much as stomachs. If there be anything more poignant than a body pining away for want of bread, it is a mind that dies of hunger for enlightenment. The whole of our progress tends toward the solution, and some day people will be stupefied As the human race ascends, the deepest strata will naturally emerge from the zone of distress, and the effacement of wretchedness will be effected by a simple elevation of the 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! he arrives with his legion, superstitions; with his sword, despotism; with his barrier, ignorance; and during some time past he has gained ten battles. He advances, he threatens, he laughs, he is at our gates. But we have no reason to despair; let us sell the field on which Hannibal is encamped. What can we, who believe, fear? A recoil of ideas is no more possible than it is for a river to flow up a hill. But those who desire no future ought to reflect; by saying no to progress they do not condemn the future, but themselves; and they give themselves a deadly disease by inoculating themselves with the past. There is only one way of refusing to-morrow, and that is, by dying. We wish for no death,—that of the body as late as possible, and that of the soul never. Yes, the sphinx will speak, and the problem will be solved; the people sketched by the eighteenth century will be finished by the nineteenth. He is an idiot who doubts it. The future, the speedy bursting into flower of universal welfare, is a divinely fatal phenomenon. Immense and combined impulsions pushing together govern human facts, and lead them all within a given time to the logical state, that is to say, to equilibrium, or in other words, to equity. A force composed of earth and heaven results from humanity and governs it; this force is a performer of miracles, and marvellous denouements are as easy to it as extraordinary incidents. Aided by science, which comes from man, and the event, which comes from another source, it is but little frightened by those contradictions in the posture of problems which seem to the vulgar herd impossibilities. It is no less skilful in producing a solution from the approximation of ideas than in producing instruction from the approximation of facts, and we may expect 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 of the Great Pyramid. In the meanwhile, there is no halt, no hesitation, no check, in the grand forward march of minds. Social philosophy is essentially the source of peace; it has for its object, and must have as result, the dissolution of passions by the study of antagonisms. It examines, scrutinizes, and analyzes, and then it recomposes; and it proceeds by the reducing process, by removing hatred from everything.
It has more than once occurred, that a society has been sunk by the wind which is let loose on men. History is full of the shipwrecks of peoples and empires; one day, that stranger, the hurricane, passes, and carries away manners, laws, and religions. The civilizations of India, Chaldæa, Persia, Assyria, and Egypt have disappeared in turn; why? We are 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 nation and a race? These are unanswerable questions, for darkness covers the condemned civilizations. They have been under water since they sank, and we have no more to say; and it is with a species of terror that we see in the background of that sea which is called the past, and behind those gloomy waves, centuries, those immense vessels,—Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, and Rome,—sunk by the terrific blast which blows 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 ancient civilizations, we know the infirmities of our own, and we contemplate its beauties and lay bare its deformities. Wherever it is wounded we probe it; and at once the suffering is decided, and the study of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy. Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is at once the monster and the prodigy, and is worth saving; it will be saved. To aid it is much, and to enlighten it is also something. All the labors of modern social philosophy ought to converge to this object; and the thinker of the present day has a grand duty to apply the stethoscope to civilization. We repeat it, this auscultation is encouraging; and we intend to finish these few pages, which are an austere interlude in a mournful drama, by laying a stress on this encouragement. Beneath the social mortality the human imperishableness is felt, and the globe does not die because here and there are wounds in the shape of craters and ringworms in the shape of solfatari 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 heads at times, and the strongest, the most tender, and the most logical, have their hours of dependency. Will the future arrive? It seems as if we may almost ask this question on seeing so much terrible shadow. There is a sombre, face-to-face meeting of the egotists and the wretched. In the egotist we trace prejudices, the cloudiness of a caste education, appetite growing with intoxication, and prosperity that stuns, a fear of suffering which in some goes so far as an aversion from the sufferers, an implacable satisfaction, and the feeling of self so swollen that it closes the soul. In the wretched we find covetousness, envy, the hatred of seeing others successful, the great bounds of the human beast toward gorging, hearts full of mist, sorrow, want, fatality, and foul and common ignorance. Must we still raise our eyes to heaven? Is the luminous point which we notice there one of those which die out? The ideal is frightful to look on thus lost in the depths, small, isolated, imperceptible, and brilliant, but surrounded by all those great black menaces monstrously collected around it; for all that, though, it is in no more danger than a star in the yawning throat of the clouds.