Socially, women are the equals of men, without restrictions.  The beings who shine and who bring forth are not made solely to lend or to give the heat of their bodies.  It is right that the sum total of work should be shared, reduced and harmonized by their hands.  It is just that the fate of humanity should be grounded also in the strength of women.  Whatever the danger which their instinctive love of shining things may occasion, in spite of the facility with which they color all things with their own feelings and the totality of their slightest impulses—­the legend of their incapacity is a fog that you will dissipate with a gesture of your hands.  Their advent is in the order of things; and it is also in order to await with hopeful heart the day when the social and political chains of women will fall off, when human liberty will suddenly become twice as great.

People of the world, establish equality right up to the limits of your great life.  Lay the foundations of the republic of republics over all the area where you breathe; that is to say, the common control in broad daylight of all external affairs, of community in the laws of labor, of production and of commerce.  The subdivision of these high social and moral arrangements by nations or by limited unions of nations (enlargements which are reductions) is artificial, arbitrary, and malignant.  The so-called inseparable cohesions of national interests vanish away as soon as you draw near to examine them.  There are individual interests and a general interest, those two only.  When you say “I,” it means “I”; when you say “We,” it means Man.  So long as a single and identical Republic does not cover the world, all national liberations can only be beginnings and signals!

Thus you will disarm the “fatherlands” and “motherlands,” and you will reduce the notion of Motherland to the little bit of social importance that it must have.  You will do away with the military frontiers, and those economic and commercial barriers which are still worse.  Protection introduces violence into the expansion of labor; like militarism, it brings in a fatal absence of balance.  You will suppress that which justifies among nations the things which among individuals we call murder, robbery, and unfair competition.  You will suppress battles—­not nearly so much by the direct measure of supervision and order that you will take as because you will suppress the causes of battle.  You will suppress them chiefly because it is you who will do it, by yourself, everywhere, with your invincible strength and the lucid conscience that is free from selfish motives.  You will not make war on yourself.

You will not be afraid of magic formulas and the churches.  Your giant reason will destroy the idol which suffocates its true believers.  You will salute the flags for the last time; to that ancient enthusiasm which flattered the puerility of your ancestors, you will say a peaceful and final farewell.  In some corners of the calamities of the past, there were times of tender emotion; but truth is greater, and there are not more boundaries on the earth than on the sea!