old talismans.  Doubtless they will propose, in the fashionable words of the moment, some official parodies of international justice, which they will break up one day like theatrical scenery; they will enunciate some popular right, curtailed by childish restrictions and monstrous definitions, resembling a brigand’s code of honor.  The wrong torn from confessed autocracies will hatch out elsewhere—­in the sham republics, and the self-styled liberal countries who have played a hidden game.  The concessions they will make will clothe the old rotten autocracy again, and perpetuate it.  One imperialism will replace the other, and the generations to come will be marked for the sword.  Soldier, wherever you are, they will try to efface your memory, or to exploit it, by leading it astray, and forgetfulness of the truth is the first form of your adversity!  May neither defeat nor victory be against you.  You are above both of them, for you are all the people.

The skies are peopled with stars, a harmony which clasps reason close, and applies the mind to the adorable idea of universal unity.  Must that harmony give us hope or misgiving?

We are in a great night of the world.  The thing is to know if we shall wake up to-morrow.  We have only one succor—­we know of what the night is made.  But shall we be able to impart our lucid faith, seeing that the heralds of warning are everywhere few, and that the greatest victims hate the only ideal which is not one, and call it utopian?  Public opinion floats over the surface of the peoples, wavering and submissive to the wind; it lends but fleeting conscience and conviction to the majority; it cries “Down with the reformers!” It cries “Sacrilege!” because it is made to see in its vague thoughts what it could not itself see there.  It cries that they are distorting it, whereas they are enlarging it.

I am not afraid, as many are, and as I once was myself, of being reviled and slandered.  I do not cling to respect and gratitude for myself.  But if I succeed in reaching men, I should like them not to curse me.  Why should they, since it is not for myself?  It is only because I am sure I am right.  I am sure of the principles I see at the source of all—­justice, logic, equality; all those divinely human truths whose contrast with the realized truth of to-day is so heart-breaking.  And I want to appeal to you all; and that confidence which fills me with a tragic joy, I want to give it to you, at once as a command and as a prayer.  There are not several ways of attaining it athwart everything, and of fastening life and the truth together again; there is only one—­right-doing.  Let rule begin again with the sublime control of the intellect.  I am a man like the rest, a man like you.  You who shake your head or shrug your shoulders as you listen to me—­why are we, we two, we all, so foreign to each other, when we are not foreign?