International dignity will close the taverns, forbid the sale of poisons, and will reduce to impotence the vendors who want to render abortive, in men and young people, the future’s beauty and the reign of intelligence.  And here is a mandate which appears before my eyes—­the tenacious law which must pounce without respite on all public robbers, on all those, little and big, cynics and hypocrites, who, when their trade or their functions bring the opportunity, exploit misery and speculate on necessity.  There is a new hierarchy to make mistakes, to commit offenses and crimes—­the true one.

You can form no idea of the beauty that is possible!  You cannot imagine what all the squandered treasure can provide, what can be brought on by the resurrection of misguided human intelligence, successively smothered and slain hitherto by infamous slavery, by the despicable infectious necessity of armed attack and defense, and by the privileges which debase human worth.  You can have no notion what human intelligence may one day find of new adoration.  The people’s absolute reign will give to literature and the arts—­whose harmonious shape is still but roughly sketched—­a splendor boundless as the rest.  National cliques cultivate narrowness and ignorance, they cause originality to waste away; and the national academies, to which a residue of superstition lends respect, are only pompous ways of upholding ruins.  The domes of those Institutes which look so grand when they tower above you are as ridiculous as extinguishers.  You must widen and internationalize, without pause or limit, all which permits of it.  With its barriers collapsed, you must fill society with broad daylight and magnificent spaces; with patience and heroism must you clear the ways which lead from the individual to humanity, the ways which were stopped up with corpses of ideas and with stone images all along their great curving horizons.  Let everything be remade on simple lines.  There is only one people, there is only one people!

If you do that, you will be able to say that, at the moment when you planned your effort and took your decision, you saved the human species as far as it is possible on earth to do it.  You will not have brought happiness about.  The fallacy-mongers do not frighten us when they preach resignation and paralysis on the plea that no social change can bring happiness, thus trifling with these profound things.  Happiness is part of the inner life, it is an intimate and personal paradise; it is a flash of chance or genius which comes sweetly to life among those who elbow each other, and it is also the sense of glory.  No, it is not in your hands, and so it is in nobody’s hands.  But a balanced and heedful life is necessary to man, that he may build the isolated home of happiness; and death is the fearful connection of the happenings which pass away along with our profundities.  External things and those which are hidden are essentially different, but they are held together by peace and by death.