Never listen, either, to the fine words they offer you, the letters of which you see like dry bones on hoardings and the fronts of buildings.  There are official proclamations, full of the notion of liberty and rights, which would be beautiful if they said truly what they say.  But they who compose them do not attach their full meaning to the words.  What they recite they are not capable of wanting, nor even of understanding.  The one indisputable sign of progress in ideas to-day is that there are things which they dare no longer leave publicly unsaid, and that’s all.  There are not all the political parties that there seem to be.  They swarm, certainly, as numerous as the cases of short sight; but there are only two—­the democrats and the conservatives.  Every political deed ends fatally either in one or the other, and all their leaders have always a tendency to act in the direction of reaction.  Beware, and never forget that if certain assertions are made by certain lips, that is a sufficient reason why you should at once mistrust them.  When the bleached old republicans[1] take your cause in their hands, be quite sure that it is not yours.  Be wary as lions.

[Footnote 1:  The word is used here much in the sense of our word “Tories.”—­Tr.]

Do not let the simplicity of the new world out of your sight.  The social trust is simple.  The complications are in what is overhead—­the accumulation of delusions and prejudice heaped up by ages of tyrants, parasites, and lawyers.  That conviction sheds a real glimmer of light on your duty and points out the way to accomplish it.  He who would dig right down to the truth must simplify; his faith must be brutally simple, or he is lost.  Laugh at the subtle shades and distinctions of the rhetoricians and the specialist physicians.  Say aloud:  “This is what is,” and then, “That is what must be.”

You will never have that simplicity, you people of the world, if you do not seize it.  If you want it, do it yourself with your own hands.  And I give you now the talisman, the wonderful magic word—­you can!

That you may be a judge of existing things, go back to their origins, and get at the endings of all.  The noblest and most fruitful work of the human intelligence is to make a clean sweep of every enforced idea—­of advantages or meanings—­and to go right through appearances in search of the eternal bases.  Thus you will clearly see the moral law at the beginning of all things, and the conception of justice and equality will appear to you beautiful as daylight.

Strong in that supreme simplicity, you shall say:  I am the people of the peoples; therefore I am the King of Kings, and I will that sovereignty flows everywhere from me, since I am might and right.  I want no more despots, confessed or otherwise, great or little; I know, and I want no more.  The incomplete liberation of 1789 was attacked by the Kings.  Complete liberation will attack the Kings.