I.
The crusade is being organised. The monarchy arrays itself for battle. It has returned to the dictatorial habits of Louis XIV. and is preparing coups d'état with the arms of the sixteenth century.
In the midst of the great popular excitement of 1830 the monarchy was distraught for a moment, and thought its doom had come. In truth we, and we alone, saved it from its doom. We lost a marvellous opportunity. We forgot that the morrow of victory is much more perilous than its eve. Intoxicated with triumph and pride, we pitched our tents when we ought to have hastened on, and, like thoughtless children, we betook ourselves to play with the arms of those we had vanquished. Diplomacy lay well-nigh crushed under the popular barricades, and yet we welcomed it as a friend into our ranks; we made its arts ours, and, raining notes and protocols, learned to ape our discomfited masters. Like the condottieri of old, we sent back free and armed the prisoners of battle. The monarchy was stretched low and at our mercy, and we, like medieval knights, we republicans, drew back two paces as though to give it an opportunity to remount. Coldly calculating, it took advantage of our chivalrous ardour to begin its work again, a work undertaken with a constancy and unity of conception that should make us blush at our discords and slackness.
While we were numbering our dead, they began silently to increase their ranks. While we were disputing among ourselves whether to march in the name of '91 or of '93, of Robespierre or of Daboeuf, they were marching on, slowly, silently, caressing some, threatening others, working their way underground when they thought themselves not powerful enough to venture into the light of day, avoiding obstacles they could not overcome. Instead of snatching from the grave a shred or so of the banner of the past, they clothed the whole past with a semblance of life, and re-decked it with the colours of the future. Anger, ambition, jealousy, everything yielded to the one end of gaining Power. In the North the form was given up to preserve the substance, and the habits of despotism were renounced that the monarchy of the usurper might fraternise with the monarchy of divine right. In the South they knelt in the mire, and suffered the insults of diplomacy, to obtain from it peace and help. To-day the alliance is concluded, the equilibrium re-established between the old and the new powers; and both alike weigh upon us. The enemies of progress touch the apogee of power. Corruption has conquered souls that fear could not reach; gold has finished the work of the prisons. Consciences have been bought and sold, genius prostituted, anarchy sown among thinkers, crosses and pensions showered upon some, proscriptions and terrors upon others; the bourgeoisie has been seduced by trickery, suspicion sown broadcast, espionage raised to a system. The monarchy in the pride of its strength has cast the cloak aside, and to-day impiously denies God, Progress, the People, Humanity. With the constable" on one side and the executioner on the other, it wipes out our right to free movement and to the future; it destroys our memories and hopes, puts brute force in the place of ideas, bids us to our knees as it bade our fathers when they were serfs, when thought was banned, intellect and conscience dumb, and silence the law for all. And we, what shall we do? Shall we give way to despair? Shall we renounce for a time our battle-cry, frank, loyal, strenuous as our soul? Repeat the fifteen years' comedy? Show that we are tamed? Deceive the monarchy which we could, and would not, vanquish? Copy its methods, its habits, its tactics? Lead it smilingly by tortuous ways, to the precipice's edge, then suddenly unmask ourselves, stab it in the back, and hurl it down the abyss?
Men who adopt and counsel such as the only policy left to us, who preach patience as the sole remedy for our ills, or who admit the necessity of the struggle but leave the powers that be to begin it, such men do not, I believe, understand the present state of affairs. They change a call to create into a call to oppose. They falsify the stamp of the age; they betray unconsciously the cause they seek to further; they forget that the task assigned to the nineteenth century is one whose very essence it is to create, initiate, make new, one which only free spontaneous action and a free and daring conscience can complete.
It is not enough to drag a monarchy to the abyss: we must be prepared to fill up that abyss, fill it up for ever, and on it raise a lasting edifice. Monarchies can be un-made and re-made in a day. The mighty hand of Napoleon overturned half a score; but monarchy still lives, and greeted his grave with a smile of triumph. In 1830, a throne of eight centuries vanished under three blows struck by the people; and yet we to-day are proscribed by a monarchy which has risen from its ruins. Let us never forget this.
What was called the fifteen years' comedy was played in France wondrous well. The skilful and flawless jesuitry of the actors might merit the envy of crowned heads. What were the consequences?
The fifteen years' comedy killed the monarchy of the elder branch of the Bourbons; but it killed at the same time the frank, austere, revolutionary energy which had placed France at the head of the nations of Europe. While it doomed the powers that be to sleepless dread, it doomed the advanced party in France to a long role of dishonesty. For, through it hypocrisy wormed itself into the souls of men, calculation took the place of enthusiasm, the brain superseded the heart, and theories of passive resistance succeeded to the genius that ever presses forward to things new. The masculine, vigorous national thought languished under a multitude of petty, bastard incomplete conceits, and apostasy entered the sphere of political life. That disloyal, treacherous war of subterfuges spread over French civilisation a stratum of corruption whose results last to this day: another such war would be fatal indeed. Here is matter for reflection. When the times are ripe for breaking from the present and advancing towards the future, all hesitation is fatal: it unnerves and dissolves. Rapid movement is the secret of all great victories. When the consequences of a principle are exhausted, and the edifice which has sheltered us for centuries threatens to fall, we should shake the dust from our feet and hasten elsewhere. Life is outside. Within, there is but the cold, benumbing air of the tomb, scepticism wandering among the ruins, egotism following in its track; then, isolation and death.
And to-day the times are ripe. The consequences of the principle of individualism which dominated the past are exhausted. The monarchy has reached its second restoration and finds no more creative virtue in itself; its life is but a wretched plagiarism. Show me, if you can, a single important act, a single sign of European life, that does not proceed from the social principle, which does not depend upon the people, the king of the future. The old world can only resist; its remaining strength is but the strength of passive resistance. The aristocracies of to-day are but corpses, now and again galvanised into motion. Monarchy is the reflection, the shadow of a life that has passed away. Since 1814 the future calls to us. For twenty-two years the people, eager for a step forward, strain their ears for that cry. And would you travel once more over the old ground, fall back, begin again a task that is done, copy the past, and, because the monarchy is in its dotage, return to infancy?
What do you hope for when you beg inspiration in the enemy's camp, and follow in its footsteps? Whither will you fare along the tortuous road of revolutionary diplomacy over which you would drag the younger generation? Beware! the roads of mere opposition such as yours lead only to monarchy. There exists generally an essential relation between the means and the end; and constitutional tactics can only result in constitutional changes. The fifteen years' opposition gave birth to 1830. Every analogous opposition will (unforeseen circumstances apart) give birth to similar results. In 1830 the people confined within the Charter the limits of the attack, because it had used itself to confine in the same bounds the limits of the defence. It will be ever the same. If, in the old revolution, the French people angrily answered the challenge of the allied monarchies of Europe by beheading a king and raising the republican banner, that challenge, we must never forget, was unprovoked and a war to the death. Of the members of the royal family, some were in arms against France on the frontier; others were persistent conspirators against her in Paris. Without these causes the revolution would never have reached so easily that state of things. The impulse given by the demands of the States-General would not have passed beyond the movement of '91. But monarchical Europe to-day wages no open war of arms against the revolutions of a people thirty millions strong: she offers them a traitor's hand, and the kiss of Judas. She does not challenge them to battle : she tries to dishonour them. Then she creates a solitude about them; surrounds them like scorpions with a circle of fire, and in that circle they consume their own strength, and since the life of revolutions consists in growth, they perish.
But suppose it happen otherwise; suppose the people, outstripping the first impulse, wipe out a principle instead of simply modifying it; suppose they change a monarchical revolution into a republican one, and attain the purpose you have at heart. You will then have gained the form, not the habits, customs, ideas, beliefs, of a republic. The people which moves not from faith, but by simple reaction against the abuses of monarchy, will preserve the antecedents, the traditions, the education of the monarchy: you will have the form of a republic, but the substance of a monarchy. Questions of political organisation will overlay the true, the supreme question, which is a moral and a social one.
Criticism will not regenerate the peoples. Criticism is powerful to dissolve, not to create. Criticism is incapable of passing beyond the theory of the individual; and the triumph of individualism can only engender a revolution for Protestantism and liberty. Far otherwise is the republic. The republic, as I at least understand it, means association, of which liberty is only an element, a necessary antecedent. It means association, a new philosophy of life, a divine Ideal that shall move the world, the only means of regeneration vouchsafed to the human race. Opposition is an instrument of mere criticism. It kills; it does not give life. And when it declares a principle to be dead, it takes its seat upon the dead body and stirs no further. Only a new Ideal can thrust the corpse aside, and move forward in search of a new life. For this reason the revolution of 1789, a revolution essentially Protestant in its character, ended by enthroning criticism, by affirming the brotherhood of individuals, by organising liberty. And by reason of this the revolution of 1830—a revolution purely of opposition—proved itself from the first incapable of translating into action that social conception of which it had distant glimpses. Opposition can only demonstrate the barrenness, the decadence, the exhaustion of a principle. Beyond, for it, there is the void, whereon men build not. A republic is not planted upon a demonstration ad absurdum. Direct proof is indispensable. Authoritative Truth alone can give us salvation.
II.
Two things are essential to future progress: the manifestation of a principle, and its incarnation in deeds. Apostles of a faith which aims at construction, we cannot advance save with banners unfurled, confronting the hostile faith in deadly battle. Wait, they say. But for what? For opportunities? But what are opportunities save a special arrangement of the circumstances whose office it is to give birth to deeds? And whence can opportunities arise except from our own efforts? Do you want war P Whom will the combatants be drawn from ? From those who are marching in full accord, peoples who have even now renewed a covenant of brotherhood, who have one end in view, one enemy, one fear? Will it be against peoples prostrate in the mire? War will never arise in Europe except by insurrection. Do you want coups d'état? Only a strenuous, obstinate struggle can make them inevitable. But how maintain the struggle P By conspiracy? The preachers of patience object, even as they object to insurrection. By the printing press? The governments kill it: you have everywhere laws which fetter it, censors who vex the writer, judges who condemn thought and shut it within prison walls. Can you surmount these obstacles? In France, perhaps. But take the case of a country absolutely without a Press; without a Parliament or a Council where politics may be discussed; without literary journals; without a national theatre; without popular education; without foreign books. Suppose that country to suffer, suffer terribly, the upper and middle classes as well as the mass of its people, from poverty, from domestic and foreign oppression, from constant violation of the national principle, and the absence of all intellectual and industrial development. What is that country to do? Whence can arise that slow and gradual progress which you admire ?
And yet that country does exist. Its name is Italy, Poland, and for some time, Germany. It embraces nearly two-thirds of Europe.
Look at Italy!
In her there is neither progress, nor any chance of progress, save by revolution. Tyranny has raised an impenetrable wall along her frontier. A triple army of spies, of customs officers, and of constabulary holds nightly and daily vigil to prevent the circulation of thought. Mutual instruction is prescribed. The universities are closed or enslaved. The penalty of death hangs not only over those who print clandestinely, but over those who possess or read the forbidden book.
The introduction of independent foreign newspapers is forbidden. Intelligence perishes in infancy for lack of nourishment. Young men sell their faith for selfindulgence, or waste their strength in fits of barren cynicism. They oscillate between Don Juan and Timon. And privileged souls, souls afire for Right, who for an instant caught glimpses of the Future, when environment weighs heavy upon them, let their light go out, and perish, without an object, without a mission, like flowers unwatered or the Peri shorn of her wings. Who, I ask again, shall give progress to this people? Who shall give it to Poland, who lies in equal case? Who shall give it to Germany, whose lot will soon be the same, when, in obedience to your counsels, her patriots have stayed the struggle which peoples indeed the prisons, but awakens, little by little, the masses? How may we introduce into those countries the undefined but sacred thought invoked by all, if we are influenced by personal calculations, and draw back in face of the danger, if we dare not with arms in our hands, like the smugglers of the Pyrenees, defend the contraband of the intellect?
Insurrection: I see for those peoples no other possible counsel; insurrection as soon as circumstances allow : insurrection, strenuous, ubiquitous: the insurrection of the masses: the holy war of the oppressed: the republic to make republicans: the people in action to initiate progress. Let the insurrection announce with its awful voice the decrees of God: let it clear and level the ground on which its own immortal structure shall be raised. Let it, like the Nile, flood all the country that it is destined to make fertile. We speak here especially for those who lie at the base of the European social system—for those who wander in darkness condemned to silence by a double tyranny, while others more privileged can walk illumined by the sun, and discern clearly the end of the common labour—for enslaved races who for long centuries have sought in vain the mission assigned to them by God—for Poland, for Hungary, for Italy, for Spain, a country of great destinies, to-day wasting its strength between two systems, each one the translation of a false principle—for Germany also...for whom to-day we can only show a sympathy so lukewarm as to show like indifference. We speak for all, because all are indispensable elements of the European commonweal that is to be—because above and beyond the special mission which each of us is called to fulfil on earth, there is a common mission which embraces all Humanity—because we fail to see that men have as yet duly realised how essential it is that the republican Party should be morally united by the apostolic power of the written word, and that it is the written word which determines the choice of the system round which all the forces of the progressive press of Europe must rally. We have men to-day, republican writers of merit, who maintain that there is no light to guide the people to a better land except it come from the hands of those who hold watch and guard to keep them in the slough in which they lie—others who are content to implore, almost as an alms, some fraction of liberty for the people—others who desire that European association should ripen under the sun of constitutional monarchy, who reject as dangerous any attempt at regeneration by means of a great religious principle, who protest against every bold movement of the people as inopportune and ineffectual, against every really creative belief displayed by the defenders of the people. And I protest against the false theory, which confounds the material expression of progress with progress itself, and redoubles, as it were, the burdens of the peoples, by condemning them to an initiation by degrees, parallel to the stages of suffering they have passed through.
No: those peoples will sink to the depths of hell in their fall; but if they rise, they will attain to heaven.
Nations are initiated into the worship of liberty by the sufferings of servitude. They have endured beyond words; when they rise, they will grow, beyond all imagination, to a giant's stature. Their grief was blessed. Every tear taught them a truth. Every year of martyrdom prepared them for an absolute redemption. They have drained the cup to the dregs. Nothing is left to them but to dash it to pieces.
What, then, is to be done?
Preach I fight! act!
The republican Party must change neither attitude nor language. Every modification introduced, for dubious tactical reasons, into its conditions of life, would bring it from its high estate to a mere political party. Now, the republican Party is not a political party: it is an essentially religious party. It has its faith, its doctrine, its martyrs from Spartacus onwards; and it must have doctrine inviolable, authority infallible, the martyr's spirit and call to self-sacrifice. Forgetfulness of this duty, imitation of the monarchy or aristocracy, the substitution of negations for positive beliefs, have often wrecked it. The Idea, the religious thought, of which it is, even unconsciously, a manifestation on earth, has raised it to giant stature when all men said that it had gone for ever. We must not forget that political parties fall and die: religious parties never die, except when the victory is won, when their vital principle has attained its full development, and become identified with the progress of civilisation and of morals. Then, but not till then, in the heart of the people, or in the brain of some individual, powerful by virtue of genius and love, God plants a new thought, vaster and more fruitful than that which is passing away; the centre of faith advances a step, and only those who gather around it constitute the party of the future.
The republican Party need not fear for the final issue of its mission, or be discouraged for temporary defeats that do not affect the main body, and only concentrate around it the combatants who, in the heat of battle, have strayed too far away; or fear because at every turn men try to set up might for right, matter for spirit. The danger is elsewhere.
Having regard to the essence of things, and without reference to the passing hour or the men of our day, the position of the republican Party is, by reason of the recent persecutions, better than before. The law of 9th of September, which was to prove fatal to us, has given representative monarchy its death-blow. It has settled the eternal question between the citizen monarchy and the dynastic opposition. It has discredited systems which professed to reconcile the sovereignty of the people and the irresponsibility of its deputies, continued progress and the immobility of an hereditary power. It has demonstrated the impotence of the doctrinaire and destroyed political eclecticism. The period of transition, which unnerved the combatants by deceptive hopes and foolish terrors, is at an end. Slaves or victors: “To be or not to be": the question is now clearly stated in these terms: we must choose between debasing our nature and intelligence and become renegades to every sacred idea, every powerful conception, or rising in open war and appealing from the justice of kings to the justice of peoples, to the judgment of God. The truce is broken for ever. People and monarchy are to-day enemies, enemies confessed and beyond recall. On one side monarchy, its centuries of life in the past, its traditional authority, its sicarii, its tax-gatherers, its constabulary: on the other, the people, its centuries in the future, its instinct of new things, its immortal youth, its countless hosts. The jousts are cleared for the two combatants. The battle may begin at any moment.
III.
"You are deceived", they tell us. "The peoples lack faith. The masses lie torpid. So used are they to wear have to do with helots, not with men. How will you drag them to battle, and keep them in the field? Many a time have we called them to arms; we have raised the cry of 'people, liberty, vengeance!' and they lifted for a moment their drowsy heads, and then fell back into their old torpor. They saw the funeral procession of our martyrs pass by, knew not that their rights, their life, their salvation, were being buried with them. They follow riches, and fear condemns them to stand still. Enthusiasm is spent and cannot easily be rekindled. Yet, without the masses you are powerless to act; you can face martyrdom, not gain the victory. Die if you think that one day a generation of avengers will spring from your blood, but do not involve in your fate those who lack alike your strength and hope. Martyrdom cannot be made the baptism of a whole Party. It is useless to waste in abortive attempts forces which one day may be effectively employed. Do not delude yourselves about the times. Be resigned and wait patiently."
The problem is a serious one. It involves the future of the Party.
The peoples lack faith. But what effects should we argue from this fact, and what are its causes? Shall we affirm a false identity between faith and power? shall we say that where faith is wanting the power to achieve does not exist; that to-day the people are impotent from the very nature of things, that they have not suffered enough, that the times are not ripe, that the atonement— if indeed the peoples have aught to atone—is yet unaccomplished?
To accept such opinions would be to accept a system of historical fatalism which the intelligence of the age has rejected. We should make cowardly obeisance to a fact, without any effort to explain it, and deny the innate potentialities of humanity. The existence of a fact does not prove its necessity: it can only govern the actions of those who press materialism to its extremes and renounce the study of causes to lie passive under their influence. Will you deny to a man power to walk because he stands motionless before you? The actual condition of things is no measure of the forces which are latent in the peoples. Are the peoples essentially weak, or do they simply lack faith, that faith which reveals itself in deeds and sets. forces in motion? These are the true terms of the problem. Yes; the peoples lack faith; not the individual faith, which makes martyrs, but the common, social faith, which gains victories; the faith which awakens the multitudes; that faith in their destiny, in their mission, in the mission of the Age, which illumines and rouses, prays and fights; which fearlessly advances along the paths of God and Humanity, bearing in its right hand the people's sword, in its heart the people's religion, in its soul the people's future. But this faith which was preached by Lamennais, the high priest of the age, and which should be translated by others in the terms of their own national life, will it come to us from our sense of strength or from our conscience? Is it an instinct of our real impotence that has banished it from our lives, or is it opinions falsely conceived, and prejudices that we can fight? Would not one act of strenuous will suffice to restore the balance between oppressor and oppressed? And if this be so, are we working to evoke it? Are our tendencies, our manifestations of the thought we would promote, sufficient to achieve our purpose ? Are we impelled by fate to lead the movement, or are the masses who follow us responsible for the present sleep of death?
Consider Italy. Misfortune, suffering, protests, individual sacrifice, have reached their extreme limit in that land. The cup is full. Oppression, like the air, is all-pervading: rebellion also. Three separate States, twenty cities, two millions of men revolt in a week, overthrow their governments and declare themselves emancipated, and not a single protest was made, not a single drop of blood was shed. Insurrections follow in quick succession. Is force wanting to those twenty-five millions? Italy in revolution has strength enough to fight three Austrias. Do they lack the inspiration of traditions, the religion of memories, a storied past? Nay, the people still bow before the holy relics of a greatness that was once. Do they lack a mission? Nay, Italy alone among the nations has twice given the gospel of Unity to Europe. Is courage wanting ? Ask of the days of 1746, of 1799; of the memories of the Grande Armée; of the martyrs, thrice holy, who for fourteen years have died for an idea, silent and inglorious.
Consider Switzerland. Can any one deny true valour, the deep sense of independence, of those sons of the Alps? Five centuries of struggle, of intrigues, of civil and religious strife, have failed to soil their flag of 1308 with foreign oppression. And yet Switzerland—that Switzerland who defeated Austria in twenty battles, whose war-cry would suffice to raise Germany and Italy in insurrection, and who knows well how kings would pause ere they embarked on a European war that the peoples clamoured for, because they know that its last battle would be the Waterloo of Monarchy—yet Switzerland today, as the months come round, accepts dishonour and bows her head before each petty dispatch of an Austrian agent.
Remember 1813 and the German youth who deserted the lecture-rooms of the Universities to hasten to the battles of Independence; remember the thrill of excitement at the cry of Nationality, Liberty, a common Fatherland, which ran through Germany from one end to the other, and then tell me if the Deputies, Electors, public writers, and all the men of position who were content to lose themselves in the maze of constitutional opposition, if all these had rallied around the banner of Hambach, whether that would not have sufficed to rouse the whole people.
Remember Grochow, Waver, Ostrolenska, and then tell me to what straits Russia would have been driven, if Poland had wasted no precious time, begging help of the diplomacy who had stabbed her for a hundred years; if her armies had at once shifted the active revolutionary movement to its natural centre beyond the Boug; if some great conception of a people's freedom had called to insurrection the races, whose true heart Bogdan Chmielnicki revealed in 1648; if, while enthusiasm was dictator, and terror paralysed the enemy, while the masses of Lithuania, of Galicia, of Ucrania, were quivering with hopes of liberty, the insurrection had flown from the Belvedere to Lithuania.
I state with profound conviction, that there probably does not exist a single people in Europe which is not able by faith, by self-sacrifice, and by the logic of revolution to break its chains in the face of monarchical Europe conspiring to work its doom—not a people that is not able through the holy creed of the Future and of Love, through the mighty watchward inscribed on its banner of insurrection, to start a crusade in Europe—no, not a people which has not had its chance since 1830.
But in Italy, in Germany, in Poland, in Switzerland, in France, everywhere, men, unfortunately influential, have perverted the orginal character of the revolution— ambitious and covetous men have seen in the uprising of a people only a chance to slake their own thirst of pelf or power—weak men who trembled at the difficulties of the undertaking, have, at the very onset, sacrificed the logical development of insurrection to their own fears. Everywhere false and deadly doctrines have turned revolutions from their goal. The theory of class rule has supplanted the people's theory of the emancipation of all by efforts of all. The national idea has been weakened or destroyed by the idea of foreign assistance. Nowhere did the promoters and directors of the insurrection cast into the scale of their country's destiny the sum-total of the forces that a strenuous and inspired will would have brought into play: nowhere have consciousness of a high mission, faith in its fulfilment, and a knowledge of the age and its dominant idea, guided the men who assumed the control of events, and made themselves responsible to humanity for their success.
They had before them a task for giants, and they grovelled on their bellies. They saw darkly the secret of the generations; they heard the cry of tribes of men eager to shake off the dust of their sepulchres, and, youthful or regenerate, confront a new life. It was their task to publish, without fear, on the housetops the gospel of the People and the Nations; and instead, they stammered halting words of royal concessions, of a charter, of compacts between right and might, justice and injustice. They tried, like old men whose natural force is spent, to prolong an artificial existence, and sought in the policy of the old régime the secret of its imperfect and fleeting life. They mingled life and death, liberty and servitude, privilege and equality, past and future. We were bound —though even on their dead bodies—to raise the flag of revolt so high that all nations might read on it a promise of victory. And they dragged it through the mire of royalty, overlaid it with protocols and nailed its motionless folds, like the sign of a bawdy house, on the doors of all the Foreign Legations: they believed in the promises of every minister, in the hopes held out by every Ambassador; in everything, except in the people and its omnipotence. We saw revolutionary leaders immersed in the study of the treaties of 1815, seeking therein, forsooth, the charter of Polish or Italian liberty; others more guilty, denied Humanity, and made selfishness their God, when they wrote on their banner a principle of non-intervention worthy of the Middle Ages; others, more guilty still, denied their brothers and their Fatherland, broke up national unity at the moment that they should have introduced its triumph; they uttered the impious words, “Men of Bologna, the cause of the Modenese is not our cause,” even while the foreigner was advancing to their gates. They all forgot—in their zeal to give, as they said, a legal character to revolution—that every insurrection acquires legality from its aim, legitimacy from victory, means of defence from offence, pledges of success from expansion: they forgot that the charter of each nation's liberty is a clause in the Charter of Humanity, that they alone deserve to conquer who are prepared to conquer or to die for all.
And then—seeing the men who started the revolutions pale in front of their undertaking, retreat when action became imperative, or take a devious and timid path, without a goal, without a programme, without hope except in foreign help, the people also were afraid and paused, or rather perceived that the hour had not yet come, and stopped short. With revolutions before them betrayed in their inception, the masses abstained, nascent enthusiasm was stifled, faith disappeared.
IV.
Faith disappeared; but what have we done, what are we doing, to raise it up again? Oh shame and woe to us! Since that holy light of the nations vanished, we have been wandering in the darkness, without a bond, without a purpose, without unity of direction; or have folded our arms upon our breasts like men without hope. Some few lifted a long cry of anguish, renounced all earthly progress, to croon a chant of resignation, a death-bed prayer; or they made themselves rebels against hope, and with a bitter smile proclaimed the advent of the powers of darkness : they accepted scepticism, cynicism, faithlessness, as inevitable, irrevocable facts of human nature; and the echo of their blasphemies translated itself in degraded natures into corruption, and in untainted natures into the suicide of despair. Our literature of to-day oscillates between these extremes. Others, suddenly remembering the light which illumined their infancy, dragged themselves back to the sanctuary whence it issued, and laboured to rekindle it; or were absorbed in contemplation of self, and began to live in the ego, and there forgetting or denying the world of phenomena, never advanced beyond the study of the individual. And this is our philosophy. Others, finally, born for battle, spurred by a passion of self-sacrifice, which, under wise guidance, would have worked miracles, dominated by sublime but imperfect and ill-defined instincts, snatched a banner from their fathers' tombs, and rushed forward; but in the first few steps they parted. Each of them tore a shred from the flag and vaunted it as the flag of all the host. This is the history of our political life.
We ask pardon of the reader for our insistence on these complaints. They are our delenda Carthago. Mine is not the work of a writer: it is the stern and fearless mission of an apostle. This mission permits of no diplomacy. I am investigating the causes of a delay which seems to me to have its source outside the hostile forces. I seek a way of stating the problem in such terms as may permit us quickly to win back the power of making a new departure. Therefore I must be silent or speak the whole truth.
Now, it seems to me that the delay has two chief causes, both due to the Party wandering from its goal, both tending to substitute the worship of the past for the worship of the future.
The first of these causes has led us to mistake for a programme what was nothing more than a concluding chapter, a powerful summary, a formula which gave expression to the work of a whole age and its conquests. It has made us confound two distinct philosophies of life and two distinct ages, and reduce a mission of social regeneration to the narrow proportions of a work of development and deduction from old premisses. It has caused us to abandon the principle for its symbol, God for an idol; to stay the soul's flight towards a New Ideal, that fiery cross that is transmitted by the hand of God from one people to another; to degrade and smother the national spirit of the peoples, which is their life, their mission and the strength given for its achievement, the part assigned to them by God in the common task, in the development of thought one and manifold, which is the soul of our life on earth.
The second cause has led us to confound the principle with one of its manifestations, the eternal element of every social organisation with one of its successive developments, and to consider a mission as completed which was only expanding and, in consequence, changing its character. Because of that error we broke up the unity of the conception precisely when it required a wider development; we travestied the function of the eighteenth century; we made a negation the starting-point of the nineteenth, and abandoned religious thought when it was more than ever necessary to revive and to extend it till it embraced every element that is destined to be transformed, and to gather together in one great social conception all the truths that to-day lie unrelated and apart.
V.
The eighteenth century, which is too generally regarded as a century of scepticism and negations, devoted entirely to a task of criticism, had its faith, its mission, and practical schemes to fulfil it. It was a titanic, boundless faith in human liberty and power. Its mission was to tabulate—if the expression be permissible—the assets of the first Epoch of the European world: to epitomise and reduce to a concrete formula that which eighteen centuries of Christianity had examined, developed, made a fact: to constitute the individual as he was called to be, free, active, sacred, inviolable: that was its mission.
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Between the century and that aim stood a multitude of obstacles; fetters of all kinds on free spontaneity, on the free development of individual faculties; warnings, rules, and orders, that limited human action; the traditions of a force that was spent; aristocracies which seemed capable and strong; religious forms that forbade progress. It was necessary to overthrow them all, and the century overthrew them. It fought a long and terrible but victorious battle against every influence that frittered human power into disconnected fragments, that denied progress or stayed the flight of intellect. Every great revolutionary thought needs an ideal for its centre of action, its fulcrum. This ideal the century found by subjectively centring itself in the individual; and it was the ego, the human conscience, the "I am" of Christ to the Powers of His day. Centred in that conception, the Revolution, conscious of its own strength and sovereignty by right of conquest, disdained to prove to the world its origin, its roots in the past. First it professed its faith. It cried like Fichte: "Liberty without Equality there is no Liberty; all men are equal." Then it proceeded to deny. It denied the dead past: it denied feudalism, aristocracy, monarchy. It denied the Catholic dogma, a dogma of absolute resignation, that poisoned the springs of liberty and planted despotism at the summit of its structure. Unnumbered wrecks strewed the ground. But in the midst of them, amid all those negations, a mighty Yea arose—the creature of God ready to act, radiant with power and will—the ecce homo, repeated after eighteen centuries of suffering and strife, not by the voice of the martyr, but on the altar raised by the revolution to victory—Right, individual faith, rooted in the world for ever.
Is this all we seek? Should man, endowed with power to progress, idly repose like an emancipated slave content with his own solitary liberty ? Does nothing remain, to fulfil his mission on the earth, but to carry the principle to its logical conclusions, to translate them into facts, and to defend the ground we have won, but advance no further?
Is the series of terms which make the great equation closed because the human unknown quantity is known, because one of the terms of progress, that which constitutes the individual, can be placed among quantities that are known and defined? Is the faculty of progress exhausted ? Is no movement possible but in a circle?
Because man, consecrated by thought to the kingdom of the world, has broken through an outworn form of religion that imprisoned his activity and denied him independence, shall we never more possess a bond of common brotherhood, or religion, or conception of universal Providential law that all may take and believe?
No, eternal God! Thy word is not finished; Thy thought, the thought of the world, is not yet all revealed. It still creates, and will continue to create, for long ages beyond all human calculation. The ages that have run their course have only revealed to us a few fragments. Our mission is not ended. We scarcely know its origin; we know nothing of its final end: time and our discoveries do but extend its confines. It ascends from century to century, towards destinies unknown to us: it seeks its own law, of which we possess but the first few lines. From initiative to initiative through the series of Thy successive incarnations it purifies and extends the formula of self-sacrifice: pursues its own path: learns thy ever-widening law. Forms are altered and dissolved. Religions die. The human spirit leaves them behind, as the wayfarer leaves the fires that warmed him in the night, and goes in search of other Suns, but Religion remains. Thought is immortal; it survives all forms, and is born again from its own ashes. The idea frees itself from the shrunken symbol, escapes from the chrysalis which prisoned it, which criticism had eaten through. It shines forth pure and bright, a new star in the firmament of Humanity. How many has faith yet to add that the whole way of the future may be illumined ? Who can say how many stars, thoughts of the ages, have yet to rise in cloudless splendour and shine in the firmament of mind, that man may become a living epitome of the Word on the earth, and may say to himself, “I have faith in myself; my destiny is accomplished?
This is the Law. One task succeeds to another; one ideal of life to another. And for us the one that precedes us directs our task and declares its method and order. It includes all the terms that the earlier systems have won, and adds the new one which becomes the end and aim of all our efforts, the unknown quantity that we have to solve. Criticism, too, has its work, but finds its performance in the positive belief of the age. Criticism, in fact, lives only a borrowed life; it exists only in phenomena; it draws from other sources its purpose, mission, standard. A part of every age, it is the banner of none. The thinker who divides Epochs into organic and critical falsifies History. Every Epoch is essentially synthetic and organic. The progressive evolution of thought, of which our world is the visible manifestation, takes place by continual expansion. The chain cannot be broken. The diverse aims are bound together. The cradle is linked to the tomb.
VI.
Thus, scarcely had the French Revolution concluded one Epoch, when the first rays of another appeared on the horizon; scarcely had the human individual, with the charter of rights in his hand, proclaimed his triumph, when human thought presented another charter, that of Principles. Scarcely was the unknown quantity of the so-called Middle Ages solved, and the great purpose of the Christian system attained, when another unknown quantity asked solution of the present generation, another aim called for its efforts. On every side men were asking: What is the end of liberty, or of equality, which in its ultimate analysis is only the liberty of all? The free man is only an active force ready to work. In what manner shall it work? Capriciously? In every direction that presents itself? That is not life, rather a simple sequence of acts, of phenomena, of symptoms of vitality, without connection or relation, or continuity: its name is anarchy. The liberty of one will inevitably clash with the liberty of another; we shall have continually shock and counter-shock among individuals, waste of force and useless dissipation of that productive faculty within which should be held sacred. The liberty of all, without a common law to direct it, leads to a war of all, the more inexorably cruel, the more the individual combatants are equally matched. And men imagined they had found the remedy when they had disinterred from the foot of the cross of Christ-that cross which dominates a whole age in the history of the world—the phrase of brotherhood which the Man-God when dying had left to the human race: a sublime word unknown to the pagan world, through which the Christian world had, often unconsciously, fought many a holy battle from the Crusades to Lepanto. They wrote it on all their banners, and with its sister watch-words, liberty and equality, it formed the programme of the future. Then they tried to restrain progress within the circle marked out by those three points. But progress burst through the ring. Once again the eternal "cui bono" appeared. We all in fact demand an aim, a human aim : what else is existence but an end with means calculated to attain it? And Brotherhood does not include a common social ideal for men on earth: it does not include even its necessity: it has no essential necessary relation to the development of a purpose, that shall bind together in harmony all our faculties and powers. Brotherhood is certainly the base of every society, the first condition of social progress, but it is not progress itself. It makes progress possible, it supplies it with a necessary constituent, but it does not define it. The principle of brotherhood is compatible with movement in a circle. And the human mind began to understand that brotherhood—the necessary link between two principles of liberty and equality, that epitomise the individualistic philosophy—never passes beyond their limits, that its activity can only operate between individuals, that it easily assumes the name of charity, that though it can fix the starting-point whence Humanity shall reach the social Ideal, it can never be substituted for it.
The quest was pursued further. We saw darkly that the end, the function of existence, must also be the final goal of that progressive development which constitutes existence itself; that hence in order to make straight and swift for this end, it was necessary to know exactly the nature of such progression and bring our actions into harmony with it. To understand the Law and to regulate our work in accordance with it, is the true way to state the problem. Now the law of the individual can only be discovered in the species. The mission of the individual can only be learnt and defined from an elevation which commands the whole field. Hence to know even the law of the individual it is necessary to ascend. Only from a conception of Humanity can we deduce the secret, the standard, the law of life for man. Hence the necessity for the co-operation of all, for harmony in our labours, in a word, for association, in order that the work of all may be accomplished; hence also the need for a thorough change in the organisation of the revolutionary Party, in theories of government, in the study of philosophy, politics, and economics, all of which have been till now inspired by the sole principle of liberty. The horizon has changed. The sacred word Humanity, uttered with new significance, has discovered to the eye of Genius a new world, which hitherto had been no more than a presentiment; a new Age has begun.
Do we need a book to prove it? Do we need time for the principle to develop in order to demonstrate that such is really the present intellectual movement, that the century is labouring in search of its own philosophy of life? Have we not seen, for a period of nearly twenty years, all the schools of philosophy occupying themselves, even when they stray back to the past, in the search after a great unknown?
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And daily we hear the word Humanity on the lips of materialists, who cannot understand its worth, and who betray every moment their natural affinities to the individualism of the Empire. Whether as a heartfelt belief, or homage given perforce, the new Age has won its rights over nearly all intellects. Some of the perfervid apostles of progress were not long since complaining that the hostile camp had pirated our words without even understanding their significance; it was a puerile complaint. It is just in this very accord, instinctive and unwilling as it is, that we find a potent mark of the Word of our Age, Humanity.
Now, every Age has its own peculiar faith. Every system includes the conception of an ideal and a mission. And every mission has its own instrument, its own forces, its own lever. Any attempt to translate into facts the mission of one Age with the machinery of another, can only end in an indefinite series of abortive efforts. Defeated by the utter want of proportion between the means and the end, such attempts might produce martyrs, but never lead to victory.
And this is the point we have reached. All our hearts and intellects have the presentiment of a great Age; and yet we would give it, for the ensign of its faith, mere criticism and the negations with which the eighteenth century was forced to surround its new conquest of liberty. We mutter by God's inspiration the sublime words, regeneration, progress, a new mission, the future; and yet, when we try to realise the programme they contain, we obstinately use the weapons of a mission that is dead. We invoke a social world, a vast harmonious organisation of the forces which are seething confusedly in this vast workshop we call earth; and to call that new world into life, to lay the foundations of a peaceful organisation, we hark back to old habits of rebellion, that waste our strength within the circle of individualism. We raise the cry of "the future!" with the wrecks of old systems all about us. Though our chains are lengthened, we are prisoners still, and we brag of our liberty because we are free to move round the post to which our chains are fastened.
And because of this, faith slumbers in the hearts of the peoples: because of this not even the blood of a whole nation can revive it.
VII.
Faith requires a purpose that shall embrace the whole of life, that shall concentrate all its manifestations and direct its diverse modes, or subordinate them to the controlling activity of a single one: it requires a fervid, unshaken belief that that purpose shall be attained; the profound conviction of a mission and the obligation to fulfil it; finally, the consciousness of a supreme power that guards the believer's progress to his goal. These are the indispensable elements: and where any one is wanting, we may have a sect, a school, a political party; not a faith, nor an hourly self-sacrifice for the sake of a high religious ideal.
But we have no definite religious ideal, or deep conviction of the duty implied in a mission, or the consciousness of a supreme and protecting authority. Our apostolate to-day is an opposition of criticism. We fight by appealing to selfish interests, and our weapon is a theory of rights. We are all, sublime presentiments notwithstanding, children of rebellion. We move, like renegades, without God, without Law, without a banner which shall beckon to the future. The old aim has disappeared: the new one, which, for an instant we dimly saw, is annulled by the doctrine of rights, that alone directs our labours. For us the individual is at once end and means. We use the essentially religious phrase, Humanity, and banish religion from all our works. We look only at the political side of things. We talk of harmonising human faculties, and neglect the most obvious and active element of human nature. We are bold enough not to shrink from the dream of a material European unity, and yet we thoughtlessly break up its moral unity by ignoring the fundamental conditions of all association —uniformity of belief and of religious sanction. In the midst of such contradictions we attempt, forsooth, to make a new world.
Nor do I exaggerate. I know the exceptions and admire them. But the Party, speaking generally, is such as I describe it. Its presentiments, its aspirations, belong to the new Age: the characteristics of its organisation and the means it proposes to adopt, belong to the old. The Party has long divined the mission entrusted to it, but without understanding its character or the machinery adapted to its fulfilment. Hence it is powerless to succeed, and will be, until the day come, when it shall understand that the cry "God wills it" is the eternal cry of every movement which has, like ours, self-sacrifice for its foundation, the peoples for its instrument, Humanity for its end.
What! You complain that faith is dead or dying! you lament that souls are scorched with the breath of egotism—and yet you mock at belief, and proclaim in your pages that religion no longer exists; that its day is past, and the religious future of the peoples for ever closed! You marvel that the masses advance but slowly along the path of self-sacrifice and association, and in the meantime you lay down as your principle a theory of individualism that has only a negative value; a theory that results not in association, but in loose concourses of human atoms, and which in ultimate analysis is only egotism draped in the mantle of philosophical formulas. Your purpose should be a work of regeneration, of moral reform—for without this any political organisation is barren—and you delude yourselves with expectations of success while you banish from your work the religious idea.
Politics deal with men where and as they are: they define their tendencies and regulate their actions in accordance with them. It is only religious thought that can transfigure both.
Religious thought is the breath of life of Humanity: at once its life and soul, its spirit and its outward sign. Humanity exists only in the consciousness of its own origin, and the presentiment of its own destinies. It reveals itself only when it concentrates its forces on some point between the two. Now this is precisely the function of the religious idea. That idea establishes a belief in the common origin of all; it places before us, as an article of belief, a common future; it concentrates all the active faculties round a central point, from which they move on unceasingly in the direction of that future; it directs all the forces latent in the human soul to its attainment. It comprehends life in all its aspects; in its every manifestation, however minute; it breathes good wishes over the cradle and the tomb; supplies, in philosophic language, the higher and most general formula of a given Epoch of civilisation, the simplest and most comprehensive expression of its knowledge, the common principle which governs the whole, and controls all its successive evolutions. That idea is, for the individual, the symbol of the relation that exists between him and the Age to which he belongs, the revelation of his function, and standard of conduct; the flag that makes him able to fulfil his mission. That idea elevates and purifies the individual; dries up the springs of egotism, by changing and removing outside himself the centre of activity. It creates for man that theory of duty which is the mother of self-sacrifice, which ever was, and ever will be, the inspirer of great and noble things; a sublime theory, that draws man near to God, borrows from the divine nature a spark of omnipotence, crosses at one leap all obstacles, makes the martyr's scaffold a ladder to victory, and is as superior to the narrow, imperfect theory of rights as the law is superior to one of its corollaries.
Right is the faith of the individual: Duty is the common, collective faith. Right can only organise resistance; destroy, not found. Duty builds up and associates; it springs from a general law, whereas Right has its origin only in individual will. Hence nothing prevents attacks on rights: every injured individual may rebel against them; and force alone is the supreme arbiter between the antagonists. This, in fact, was the reply that societies founded upon rights often made to their enemies. Now societies that make duty their basis would not be driven to use force; once admit the principle of duty, and the possibility of strife has gone, the individual is made subordinate to the common aim, and thus duty cuts at the very root of the evil for which right has only palliatives. Moreover, the doctrine of rights does not include progress as a necessary element: it admits it merely as a simple fact. The exercise of rights being necessarily optional, progress is abandoned to the caprice of a liberty without rule or purpose. And Right kills self-sacrifice, and banishes martyrdom from the world. In every theory of individual rights, material interests alone dominate and martyrdom becomes absurd: what interests can exist beyond the tomb? But for all that, martyrdom is often the baptism of a world, the solemn initiation of progress. Every doctrine that does not rest on progress as an essential law of its being is inferior to the ideal and to the needs of the Age. And yet, the doctrine of rights even to-day reigns sovereign among us; it rules that republican party which announces itself as the advanced party in Europe: and yet—for it matters little if our lips instinctively utter the words, duty, self-sacrifice, mission—the liberty of the republicans is merely a theory of resistance: their religion, if indeed they mention it, only expresses the relation between God and the individual: the political order they invoke and honour by the name of social is only a series of prohibitions promoted into laws, which ensure to each the power of pursuing his own aim, his own interests, his own tendencies: their definition of Law does not go beyond the expression of the general will: their formula of association is the Society of Rights: their creed does not pass beyond the limits laid down nearly half a century ago in a Declaration of Rights, by a man who was himself the incarnation of the struggle: their theories of Authority are theories of mistrust: their organic problem—an old remnant of a patched-up constitutionalism—is reduced to finding a point around which individualism and association, liberty and general law, may oscillate for ever in barren antagonism: their people is often a caste—the most numerous, it is true, and the most useful—in open rebellion against other castes in order to enjoy in its turn the rights that God intends for all: their republic is the turbulent, intolerant democracy of Athens: their war-cry is a cry of vengeance: their symbol, Spartacus.
Now, this is the eighteenth century once more, its philosophy, its theory of mankind, its materialistic polity, its analysis, its Protestant criticism, its sovereignty of the individual, its rejection of an old religious formula, its mistrust of all authority, its spirit of strife and emancipation. It is the French Revolution over again; the past with some new glimpses of the future; servitude to old things surrounded by the prestige of youth.
VIII.
The past is fatal to us. The French Revolution, I state with conviction, is crushing us. It weighs almost like an incubus upon our heart and impedes its action. We are dazzled by the splendour of its gigantic struggles, fascinated by its victorious glance, and so remain to-day still prostrate before it. We expect everything, both in men and things, from its programme; we attempt to copy Robespierre and St. Just, and search in the records of the Clubs of 1792 or 1793 names for the sections of 1833 or 1834. Now, while we are aping our fathers we forget that our fathers aped no one, and were great because of this. Their inspirations flowed from contemporary sources, from the needs of the masses, from the nature of their environment. And precisely because the instrument they employed was adapted to the purpose they had in view, they worked miracles. Why do we not act as they did? Why, while studying and respecting tradition, should we not move onward? We ought to worship the greatness of our fathers, and seek in their tombs a pledge of the future, not the future itself. The future is before us, and God, the father of all revelations and all ages, alone can point out the infinite way.
Up, then and let us be great in our turn. For this, it is necessary to understand our mission in its fulness. We stand to-day between two ages, between the grave of one world and the cradle of another, between the last boundary of the individualistic philosophy and the threshold of Humanity. With eyes fixed on the future, we must break the last links of the chain which holds us in bondage to the past, and with deliberate stages move on. We have freed ourselves from the abuses of the old world: we must now free ourselves from its glories. The task of the eighteenth century is accomplished. Our fathers repose tranquil and proud in their tombs. They sleep, like warriors after battle, wrapped in their flag. Fear not that you will grieve them.
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But let us advance in the name of God. We will return hereafter to lay at its foot, there where our fathers lie, some of the laurels that our own hands have won. To-day we have to found the polity of the nineteenth century, to climb through philosophy to faith; to define and organise association, proclaim Humanity, initiate the new Age. The old Age can attain its actual fulfilment only in the baptism of the new. These things are perhaps not new. I know this and confess it gladly. My voice is but one among many that preach nearly the same ideas, and proclaim association as the fundamental principle that must henceforth direct our political work. Many powerful intellects have condemned the cold doctrine of rights wherever they have found it alone and disconnected, condemned it as the last formula of individualism, to-day degenerating into sheer materialism: many schools, some extinct, some still active, invoke duty as an anchor of salvation for a society tormented by fruitless desires. Why, then, do I insist on protesting against their want of foresight? What does it matter if the end preached be the centre of a new programme, or only the development of the old; if men whose cry, like ours, is forward! persist in confounding association with fraternity, or Humanity—the compendium of all human faculties organised to one end—with more liberty and equality for all? Why proclaim a new Age, and so involve ourselves in all the difficulties of a fresh task?
Is, then, our contest one of names alone?
I think not.
It is important to proclaim a new Age: to affirm that all we preach to-day on earth is verily a new programme; and, for this reason, that it is bound to be henceforth universally recognised.
We desire not only to think, but to act. We desire not only the freeing of one people, and of others through it, but the freeing of all the peoples through their own efforts. Now, conscience alone frees the peoples. They will act only when they recognise a new ideal whose attainment demands the exertions of all, the equality of all, and a new departure. Without such recognition, there is no hope of faith, of self-sacrifice, of enthusiasm mighty to work. The peoples who lie crushed by the burden of the earlier movement will lightly surrender the accomplishment of the new one to the nation that has taken the responsibility, and therewith the glory. They will be content to follow from afar, and ask no more. And if through causes unknown to them that people shall halt on the way, they will halt with it. And then we shall have silence, inaction, suspended life. This is the spectacle that, while I write, the whole of Europe presents.
The ideal of a new Age, which includes a new end to be attained, gives the initiative to the future, and kindles the universal conscience into life. By it we learn to start afresh and not to copy; we work out our own mission, not execute another's; we put Europe in the stead of France. We furnish a potent element to feed revolutionary activity. By proclaiming a new Age we proclaim the existence of a new philosophy of life, a general conception destined to embrace all the terms of earlier philosophies with yet one more; and, working from that new term, we co-ordinate all the historical series, all the facts that are grouped around it, all the manifestations of life, all the aspects of the human problem, all the branches of human knowledge. We give a second, a new impulse to the labour of the intellect. We proclaim the need of a new encyclopedia, which shall summarise all the progress we have made, and in itself be one step forward more. We place outside controversy all the aims which formed the purpose of past revolutions, the liberty, the equality, the fraternity of men and of peoples; we put them in the list of undisputed truths. We part for ever from the exclusively individualist Age, and with greater reason, from that individualism which is the materialism of that age. We block the roads to the past.
And finally, by that affirmation we reject every doctrine of eclecticism and transition, every imperfect and issueless phrase that states a problem without attempting to solve it. We part from every school that tries to reconcile life and death, and to reform the world by an extinct philosophy. We bind God Himself surety for the sacred doctrine of the people, and its sovereignty. We place, in the very stamp of the age, a new title to universal suffrage. We raise politics to a philosophical conception. We establish an apostolate of Humanity, by vindicating that common right of nations which should be the symbol of our creed. We consecrate those spontaneous, sudden, collective movements of the peoples, whose work it is to proclaim the new Ideal of life, and translate it into action. We lay the cornerstone of a Humanitarian Faith, to which the republican Party must rise, if it still wish to conquer. Therefore it is that every Age has its baptism of faith; ours still lacks it, and we can, if nothing more, prepare the way, and make ourselves its heralds.
IX.
Ours is therefore no idle contest of words. The triumph or the failure of the cause we uphold depends upon the road which the Party takes.
We fell as a political party: we must rise again as a religious party.
The religious element is universal and immortal: it binds men together in a universal brotherhood. Every great revolution is marked with its imprint, and reveals it in its origin and aim. Heralds of a new world, we must found a moral unity, the Catholicism of Humanity. And we move encouraged by the holy promise of Jesus: we seek the new Gospel, of which He left us, ere He died, the immortal hope, and of which the Christian Gospel is the germ, as man is the germ of Humanity. On the soil fertilised by fifty generations of martyrs, we hail with Lessing that immensity of future which finds its fulcrum in the Fatherland, and its goal in Humanity. Then shall the peoples make a common covenant, and define in brotherly compact each one's mission in the future, the office which devolves on each in the general association, which owns one Law, one God for all. It is for us to hasten the moment when the Revolution, the tocsin of the peoples, shall call together a new Convention, that shall be a true Council of the faithful. Therefore our war must needs be a holy crusade. Let God shine on our banner, as on our destinies. Raise we on the old world's wreck an altar where the people may burn the incense of reconciliation. And know we all at least what answer to make to Him who would ask of us: Whence come ye? In whose name do ye preach?
Often have I heard such questions. Often has it been said of our little band of apostles: “The republicans have no philosophic basis, no indisputable principle, as the fountain of their creed.” The accusers, it is true, were men who think they have a philosophy because some among their followers have made a collection of philosophies, a religion because they have priests, a political doctrine because they have soldiers and grapeshot. None the less the charge was taken up by men of good faith, who could not fail to note in our ranks a visible lack of unity or of a harmonious philosophy; an absence of religious belief that could not be easily reconciled with the social and essentially religious end that republicanism now and again proclaims.
Now, we are able to reply: We come in the name of God and of Humanity.
We believe in one God, author of all that exists, the living absolute Thought, of which our world is a ray and the Universe an incarnation.
We believe in one Law, general and immutable, that constitutes our mode of existence, that embraces every series of possible phenomena, and exercises a continuous influence upon the universe, and on all it contains, both in its physical and in its moral aspect.
Since every law requires an end to be attained, we believe in the progressive development in all existing things, of faculties and forces—which are faculties in motion—towards that unknown end, without which law would be useless and existence unintelligible.
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We believe, that inasmuch as harmony between the subject and the law is the condition of all normal existence, the manifest and immediate end of all our labours is to effect the greater completion and security of that harmony, through the fuller discovery of the law and its realisation in its subject.
We believe in Association—which is but the active belief in one God, in one Law, in one End—as the only means possessed by us to realise Truth, as the method of progress, as the only existing road to perfection, so that the higher the scale of human progress the more embracing may be its corresponding formula of association won for men, and applied to their life. We believe therefore in the Holy Alliance of the Peoples as the broadest formula of association possible in our age—in the liberty and equality of the peoples, without which association has no true life—in Nationality, which is the conscience of the peoples, which assigns to them their share of work in the association, their office in Humanity, and hence constitutes their mission on earth, their individuality; for without Nationality neither liberty nor equality is possible—and we believe in the holy Fatherland, that is, the cradle of nationality, the altar and patrimony of the individuals that compose each people.
And since the Law is one, since it governs equally the two aspects, internal and external, of the life of every being, the two modes of self and relativity, of the subjective and the objective that appertain to every existence, we believe for each people and its component individuals the same that we believe for Humanity and its component peoples. As we believe in the association of peoples, so we believe in association between the individuals who compose each nation, and in it as the sole means of their progress, the principle destined to govern all their institutions, and the pledge of concord in their labours. As we believe in the liberty and equality of the peoples, so we believe in liberty and equality among the men of each Country, in the inviolability of the ego, which is the conscience of individuals, and assigns to them their share of work in the secondary association, an office in the Nation, a special mission of citizenship in the sphere of the Fatherland.
* * * * * *
...we believe for every State, in the People, the sole master, the sole sovereign, the sole interpreter of the Law of Humanity which rules the mission of each Nation: in the People one and indivisible, that knows neither caste nor privilege, save that of Genius and of Virtue, neither proletariat nor aristocracy of land or money, but only faculties and active forces consecrated, for the good of all, to the administration of the surface of the globe, our common heritage:—in the people free and independent, with an organisation that shall harmonise individual faculties and social thought; the people living by its own labour and the fruits thereof, pursuing in concord the greatest possible good of all, yet respecting the rights of the individual :—in the people made one family, with one faith, one tradition, one thought of love, and advancing to the ever fuller accomplishment of its mission:—in the people, progressive, consecrated to an apostolate of duties, never forgetful of a truth once won, never slacking its efforts because of that victory, reverent to the message of the generations, but resolved to use the present as a bridge betwixt past and future, worshipping revelation, not the revealers, able, little by little, to approach the soluton of its destiny here on earth.
God and His Law, Humanity and its work of interpretation, progress, association, liberty, equality, the doctrine of the PEOPLE, which is the vital principle of the republican Party, all meet on the common ground of our creed. We reject no conquest of the past. Before us spreads a future where meet in close embrace the two eternal principles of every organisation, the individual and Humanity, liberty and association; where one £ a genuine expression of religion, shall emrace in equal balance, every revelation of progress, every holy idea which by providential design has been successively transmitted to us.
"When before Young Europe's dawn all the altars of the old world have fallen, two altars shall be raised upon this soil that the divine Word has made fruitful: and the finger of the herald-people shall inscribe upon one, Fatherland, and upon the other, Humanity. Like sons of the same mother, like brothers who will not be parted, the people shall gather around those two altars, and offer sacrifice in peace and love. And the incense of the sacrifice shall ascend to heaven in two columns that shall draw near each other as they mount, until they are confounded in one point, which is God. And so often as they move asunder whilst they rise, fratricide shall be on earth, and mothers shall weep on earth, and angels in heaven."
Now, suppose these things repeated in Europe, not as an expression of the individual, but as the expression, the Word, the Conscience of the republican Party, of the whole party of progress—suppose the religious principle to shine again on our path and unify our labours—suppose God and Humanity conjoined in our popular symbolism, as phenomenon and idea, thought and form; think ye not that our word would not kindle the doubttossed multitudes who pray, and wait, and hope, because no crusader's cry, no religious cry, sounds in their ears? Do you believe that between our Holy Alliance and the accursed compact, between the apostles of progressive free movement, and the stagnant sophists of old Europe, they would discern on which side stands God, his Love, his Truth? And where God is there is the people also. The people's philosophy is its faith.
And when faith shows not only on your lips, but in your hearts; when your deeds answer to your words, and virtue hallows your lives as liberty hallows your minds; when as a band of brothers, believers in one flag, you appear before men as they who seek the good; when the people say of you, they are a living faith,—think ye the people will be slow to answer to your call? Think ye that the guerdon desired of all, of saving power to all, which falls to them who shall herald the way to Europe, think ye that that will not be gathered, aye and quickly?
Great thoughts make great peoples. Let your life be the epitome of one great organic thought. Widen the peoples' horizon. Free their conscience from the materialism that weighs it down. Point them to a vast mission. Baptize them once again. Anger at wrong done to material interests can only bring forth revolts; principles alone effect revolutions. Go back to first principles and the people will follow you.
The question which agitates the world is a religious question. Criticism and anarchy of belief have extinguished faith in the hearts of the peoples. A philosophy that constructs, and unity of belief, will revive it.
Then—but not till then—will return that active energy which grows with difficulties, but now collapses at each trifling disappointment. Then will cease that state of isolation and mistrust which wearies us, which multiplies parties, obstructs association, makes of each individual a separate rallying point, which makes us camps enough but no armies to tenant them, which parts the poets to one side, the men of prose and calculation to the other, divides yet further the men of action, and further still the high speculative intellects. Then we shall lose from our ranks those who dishonour us, the clan of unclean hearts and canting tongues, whose inconsistency of language and performance suggests doubt concerning our symbol, who prate of virtue, of self-sacrifice, of charity, while vice is in their hearts, shame on their foreheads, and selfishness in their souls; who nail their immorality on our banner, and hide themselves in the day of battle, to reappear when danger is past that they may gather the spoils of the vanquished and stain our triumph by robbing it of its fruits. Then will disappear, one by one, the prejudices and the influence of those nameless, feeble men, who blame our war-cry because themselves lack courage, who beg at an ambassador's gate a dole of hope for their country, who drag the exile's sacred name in the mire of cabinet intrigues, who dream of salvation for the nations from the chicanery of diplomatists; men who ape in their conspiracies the rusty tricks of the police, who mock at enthusiasm, deny the power of inspiration and self-sacrifice, call martyrdom quixotic, and try to regenerate the peoples by statistics. Then will vanish the thousand inconsistencies that make the party inferior to its mission; patriots' lips lisping foreigner almost as a reproach—what a blasphemy on the cross of Christ from men who call themselves Christians, republicans, and brothers—the guilty hesitation that robs so many of our friends of strength to confess their belief, that frightens them at every charge made from the enemy's camp, that makes apostles of truth appear as erring and guilty men; that fascination of old names which, by supplanting principles, has ruined so many revolutions, and sacrificed fresh ideas to the petty traditions of the past; the illogical, inconsistent spirit that denies the oneness of mankind, that demands unlimited liberty for some and absolute intolerance for others, preaches political freedom and refuses literary freedom, which shakes the social edifice to its foundations, and petrifies religion. Then we shall see no more the angry polemic that feeds on hatred, which snarls at every reminder, which neglects principles for personalities, which betrays in every sentence its jealous national exclusiveness, and wastes its strength in unimportant petty scuffles; and lastly, we shall lose the frivolity, the inconstancy of opinions, the forgetfulness of the martyrs who are our saints, of the great men who are our priests, of the great actions which are our prayer. Faith, which is intellect, will, love, will blot out all those vices, and end the discords of a society without a church, without a head, that invokes a new world, but forgets to ask its secret from God. And then, made fruitful by the breath of God and of holy beliefs, poetry, now exiled from a world that is a prey to anarchy, will blossom yet again; poetry, the flower of the angels, that martyrs' blood and mothers' tears have fed, that oft will grow amid ruins, but is ever coloured by a rising Sun. It speaks to us in prophetic tones of Humanity, European in substance, national in form. It will teach the Fatherland of the fatherlands to the nations still divided; it will translate into Art the religious, social philosophy; it will surround with its own beautiful light, woman, who though a fallen angel, is ever nearer to heaven than we. It will hasten her redemption, restoring to her the mission of inspiration, of pity, and of prayer, which Christianity divinely symbolised in Mary. It will sing the joys of martyrdom, the immortality of the vanquished, the tears that expiate, the sufferings that purify, the memories and the hopes, the traditions of one world interwoven in the cradle of another. It will murmur words of holy consolation to those children of sorrow born before their time, those fated and puissant souls who, like Byron, have no confidants on earth, and whom the world of to-day strives to rob even of God. And it will teach the young the greatness of self-sacrifice, the virtue of constancy and silence, how to be alone and yet despair not, how to endure without a cry an existence of torments half understood, unknown, long years of delusions and bitterness and wounds, all without a complaint; it will teach a belief in future things, an hourly travail to promote it, without a hope in this life of seeing its victory.
Are these illusions? Do I presume too much when I ask of faith such prodigies in a century still corrupted by scepticism, among men who are slaves of self, who love little, and quickly forget, who are troubled in soul, and heed only the calculations of egotism, and the sensations of the hour?
No; I do not presume too much. It is necessary that this come to pass, aye, and it will come. I have faith in God, in the potency of truth, and in the spirit of the age. I feel in the depths of my heart that we cannot stay as we are. The principle which was the soul of the old world is exhausted. It is for us to open the way to the new principle, and even should we perish in the attempt we will lead the way.
X.
The times were wrapped in shadow. Heaven was a void. The peoples wandered, pricked by strange fears, or paused in torpid, puzzled wonderment. Whole nations disappeared; others just raised their heads as though to see them die. A hollow sound as of dissolution was heard in the world. All creation, earth and sky, trembled. Man seemed in hideous case. Placed between two Infinites, he knew neither; he knew not past nor future. All belief was dead : dead the belief in the Gods, dead the belief in the public. Society was not; nought but a Power that drowned in blood, or ate itself away in deeds of shame and sin; a senate, poor parody of the majesty that had been, which voted gold and statutes to the tyrant; pretorians who despised the one and slew the other; informers, sophists, and a slavish and obsequious multitude. There were no principles of saving virtue: there existed but the calculation of antagonistic interests. The Fatherland was exhausted. The solemn voice of Brutus from the tomb had told the world that Virtue was but a name. And the good withdrew from that world, to keep their souls and intellects from stain. Nerva starved himself to death. Thraseas made libation of his own blood to Jove the Liberator. The soul had disappeared: the senses alone reigned. The people asked for bread and circus games. Philosophy had become scepticism, epicureanism, or mere sophistries and words. Poetry was satire. From time to time man stood appalled at his own solitude, and drew back from the wilderness. Then voices of fear were heard at night by the wayside. Then the citizens, almost frenzied with dread, clasped the bare, cold statutes of the Gods that once they worshipped, and prayed of them a spark of moral life, a ray of faith, even some illusion; but they went away unheard, with despair in their hearts and blasphemy on their lips. Such were those times, so like our own.
But yet, that was not the death-agony of the world; it was but the end of one phase of the world's evolution. A great epoch was exhausted, passing away to leave the road clear for another, whose first notes were already ringing in the north, and that awaited only its initiator to declare itself. He came. His was the soul most full of love, most virtuous and holy, most inspired by God and the future, that men have ever hailed on this earth: it was Jesus. He bent over the decaying world, and murmured in its ear a word of faith. To that obscene thing which retained nought but the aspect and notions of a man, he uttered words unknown up to that day: love, self-sacrifice, celestial origin. The dead arose; a new life thrilled through that obscene thing which philosophy had tried in vain to bring to life. From it came forth the Christian world, the world of liberty and equality. Man was made manifest, the image and foreshadowing of God. Jesus died. As Lamennais has said, he asked of men to save them only a cross to die on. But ere he died, he announced to the people the good news. To those who asked him whence he had it, he answered: From God the Father; and from the cross twice he called on Him. But from that cross his victory began, and still endures.
Have faith, then, O ye that suffer for the noble cause, apostles of a Truth that even to-day the world ignores, ye soldiers of the holy battles which the world condemns and calls rebellious. To-morrow, perhaps, that world, to-day incredulous or careless, will bow with fervour before you. To-morrow, victory will crown your crusading banner. Onward in faith, and fear not. That which Christ did Humanity can do. Believe, and you will conquer. Believe, and the peoples will end by following you. Believe, and act. Action is the Word of God: passive thought is but its shadow. Those who sunder Thought and Action dismember God, and deny the eternal Unity of things. Thrust them from your ranks; for whoso is not ready to testify to his faith with his blood is no believer.
From your cress of misfortune and persecution announce the whole faith of the Age; but few days will pass ere it receive its consecration of faith. Let your lips not utter the cry of hate, nor the conspirator's hollow phrase, but the tranquil, solemn word of the days that are to come. From our cross of poverty and proscription, we, the men of exile, who represent in our heart and faith the races of the enslaved, the millions doomed to silence, we will reply to you, and say to our brothers: the alliance is made. Hurl at your persecutors the legend God and Humanity. For yet a little time they may rebel and strive against it and stammer blasphemy. But the masses will worship it.
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Lift thy countenance to the sun of God, thou child of Humanity, and read that legend in the heavens: it moves. Faith and action. The future is ours.
