What have these shadows of the past to do with us today?  Bayard, Joan of Arc, we have no further need of heroism like theirs, knights and martyrs of a dead cause.  We want apostles of the future, great hearts that will give themselves for a larger country, a higher ideal.  Forward then; cross the old frontiers, and if you must still use these crutches, to help your lameness, thrust the barriers back to the doors of the East, the confines of Europe, until at last step by step you reach the end, and men encircle the globe, each holding by the other’s hand.  Before you insult me, poor little author, descend into your own heart, examine yourself.  The gift of speech was given you to guide your people, and you have used it to deceive yourself and lead them astray.  You have added to their error instead of saving them, even to the point that you have laid your own son whom you loved on the altar of your untruth.

Now at least dare to show to others the ruin that you are, and say:  “See what I am, and take warning!” ...Go!  And may your misfortunes save those that come after from the same fate!  Dare to speak, and cry out to them:  “You are mad, peoples of the earth; instead of defending your Country, you are killing her.  You are your Country and the enemies are your brothers.  Millions of God’s creatures” love one another.

The same silence as before seemed to swallow up this last cry.  Clerambault lived outside of popular circles where he would have found the warm sympathy of simple, healthy minds.  Not the slightest echo of his thought came to him.

He knew that he was not really alone, though he seemed so.  Two apparently contradictory sentiments—­his modesty and his faith—­united to say to him:  “What you thought, others have thought also; you are too small, this truth is too great, to exist only in you.  The light that your weak eyes have seen has shone also for others.  See where now the Great Bear inclines to the horizon,—­millions of eyes are looking at it, perhaps; but you cannot see them, only the far-off light makes a bond between their sight and yours.”

The solitude of the mind is only a painful delusion; it has no real existence, for even the most independent of us are members of a spiritual family.  This community of spirit has no relation to time or space; its elements are dispersed among all peoples and all ages.  Conservatives see them in the past, but the revolutionists and the persecuted look to the future for them.  Past and future are not less real than the immediate present, which is a wall beyond which the calm eyes of the flock can see nothing.  The present itself is not what the arbitrary divisions of states, nations, and religions would have us believe.  In our time humanity is a bazaar of ideas, unsorted and thrown together in a heap, with hastily constructed partitions between them, so that brothers are separated from brothers, and thrown in with strangers.