But Kings are not exclusively the uniformed ones among the trumpery wares of the courts.  Assuredly, the nations who have a King have more tradition and subjection than the others.  But there are countries where no man can get up and say, “My people, my army,” nations which only experience the continuation of the kingly tradition in more peaceful intensity.  There are others with the great figures of democratic leaders; but as long as the entirety of things is not overthrown—­always the entirety, the sacred entirety—­these men cannot achieve the impossible, and sooner or later their too-beautiful inclinations will be isolated and misunderstood.  In the formidable urgency of progress, what do the proportions matter to you of the elements which make up the old order of things in the world?  All the governors cling fatally together among themselves, and more solidly than you think, through the old machine of chancelleries, ministries, diplomacy, and the ceremonials with gilded swords; and when they are bent on making war for themselves there is an unquenchable likeness between them all, of which you want no more.  Break the chain; suppress all privileges, and say at last, “Let, there be equality.”

One man is as good as another.  That means that no man carries within himself any privilege which puts him above the universal law.  It means an equality in principle, and that does not invalidate the legitimacy of the differences due to work, to talent, and to moral sense.  The leveling only affects the rights of the citizen; and not the man as a whole.  You do not create the living being; you do not fashion the living clay, as God did in the Bible; you make regulations.  Individual worth, on which some pretend to rely, is relative and unstable, and no one is a judge of it.  In a well-organized entirety, it cultivates and improves itself automatically.  But that magnificent anarchy cannot, at the inception of the human Charter, take the place of the obviousness of equality.

The poor man, the proletarian, is nobler than another, but not more sacred.  In truth, all workers and all honest men are as good as each other.  But the poor, the exploited, are fifteen hundred millions here on earth.  They are the Law because they are the Number.  The moral law is only the imperative preparation of the common good.  It always involves, in different forms, the necessary limitations of some individual interests by the rest; that is to say, the sacrifice of one to the many, of the many to the whole.  The republican conception is the civic translation of the moral law; what is anti-republican is immoral.