Each country will be a moral force, and no longer a brutal force; while all brutal forces clash with themselves, all moral forces make mighty harmony together.

The universal republic is the inevitable consequence of equal rights in life for all.  Start from the principle of equality, and you arrive at the people’s international.  If you do not arrive there it is because you have not reasoned aright.  They who start from the opposite point of view—­God, and the divine rights of popes and Kings and nobles, and authority and tradition—­will come, by fabulous paths but quite logically, to opposite conclusions.  You must not cease to hold that there are only two teachings face to face.  All things are amenable to reason, the supreme Reason which mutilated humanity, wounded in the eyes, has deified among the clouds.

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You will do away with the rights of the dead, and with heredity of power, whatever it may be, that inheritance which is unjust in all its gradations, for tradition takes root there, and it is an outrage on equality, against the order of labor.  Labor is a great civic deed which all men and all women without exception must share or go down.  Such divisions will reduce it for each one to dignified proportions and prevent it from devouring human lives.

You will not permit colonial ownership by States, which makes stains on the map of the world and is not justified by confessable reasons; and you will organize the abolition of that collective slavery.  You will allow the individual property of the living to stand.  It is equitable because its necessity is inherent in the circumstances of the living, and because there are cases where you cannot tear away the right of ownership without tearing right itself.  Besides, the love of things is a passion, like the love of beings.  The object of social organization is not to destroy sentiment and pleasure, but on the contrary to allow them to flourish, within the limit of not wronging others.  It is right to enjoy what you have clearly earned by your work.  That focused wisdom alone bursts among the old order of things like a curse.

Chase away forever, everywhere, everywhere, the bad masters of the sacred school.  Knowledge incessantly remakes the whole of civilization.  The child’s intelligence is too precious not to be under the protection of all.  The heads of families are not free to deal according to their caprices with the ignorance which each child brings into the daylight; they have not that liberty contrary to liberty.  A child does not belong body and soul to its parents; it is a person, and our ears are wounded by the blasphemy—­a residue of despotic Roman tradition—­of those who speak of their sons killed in the war and say, “I have given my son.”  You do not give living beings—­and all intelligence belongs primarily to reason.