Though it is sad to leave the fatherland, to return to it is sometimes sadder still; and there is no Frenchman who would not have preferred a life-long banishment, to seeing France ground beneath the Prussian heel, and the loss of Metz and Strasburg.  This was an invasion of barbarians; but there is another menace that is not less formidable.  I mean the invasion of our land by darkness, an invasion of the nineteenth century by the middle ages.  After the emperor, the pope; after Berlin, Rome; after the triumph of the sword, the triumph of night.  For the light of civilisation may be extinguished in either of two ways, by a military or by a clerical invasion.  The former threatens our mother, France; the latter our child, the future.

A double inviolability is the most precious possession of a civilised people—­the inviolability of territory and the inviolability of conscience; and as the soldier violates the first, so does the priest violate the other.  Yet the soldier does but obey his orders and the priest his dogmas, so that there are only two who are ultimately culpable—­Caesar, who slays, and Peter, who lies.  There is no religion which has not as its aim to seize forcibly the human soul, and it is to attempts of this kind that France is given up to-day.

One may say, indeed, that in our age there are two schools, and that these two schools sum up in themselves the two opposed currents which draw civilisation, the one towards the future and the other towards the past.  One of these schools is called Paris and the other Rome.  Each of them has its book; the one has the “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” the other has the “Syllabus”; and the first of these books says “Yes” to progress, but the second of them says “No.”  Yet progress is the footstep of God.

Paris means Montaigne, Rabelais, Pascal, Corneille, Moliere, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, Mirabeau, Danton.  Rome, on the other hand, means Innocent III., Pius V., Alexander VI., Urban VIII., Arbuez, Cisneros, Lainez, Guillandus, Ignatius.

To educate is nothing less than to govern; and clerical education means a clerical government, with a despotism as its summit and ignorance as its foundation.

Rome already holds Belgium, and would now seize Paris.  We are witnesses of a struggle to the death.  Against us is all that manifold power which emerges from the past, the spirit of monarchy, of superstition, of the barrack and of the convent; we have against us temerity, effrontery, audacity, and fear.  On our side there is nothing but the light.  That is why the victory will be with us.  For to enlighten is to deliver.  Every increase in liberty involves increased responsibility.  Nothing is graver than freedom; liberty has burdens of her own, and lays on the conscience all the chains which she unshackles from the limbs.  We find rights transforming themselves into duties.  Let us therefore take heed to what we are doing; we live in a difficult time and are answerable at once to the past and to the future.  The time has come, in this year 1876, to replace commotions by concessions.  That is how civilisation advances.  For progress is nothing other than revolution effected amicably.