To dissolve such fatal chains, a miraculous concurrence of happy events would be necessary.  A whole nation, cured of the delirium of superstition, must be inaccessible to the impulse of fanaticism.  Freed from the yoke of false doctrine, a whole people must impose upon itself that of true morality and reason.  This people should be courageous and prudent, wise and docile.  Each individual, knowing his rights, should not transgress them.  The poor should know how to resist seduction, and the rich the allurements of avarice.  There should be found leaders disinterested and just, and their tyrants should be seized with a spirit of madness and folly.  This people, recovering its rights, should feel its inability to exercise them in person, and should name its representatives.  Creator of its magistrates, it should know at once to respect them and to judge them.  In the sudden reform of a whole nation, accustomed to live by abuses, each individual displaced should bear with patience his privations, and submit to a change of habits.  This nation should have the courage to conquer its liberty; the power to defend it, the wisdom to establish it, and the generosity to extend it to others.  And can we ever expect the union of so many circumstances?  But suppose that chance in its infinite combinations should produce them, shall I see those fortunate days.  Will not my ashes long ere then be mouldering in the tomb?

Here, sunk in sorrow, my oppressed heart no longer found utterance.  The Genius answered not, but I heard him whisper to himself: 

Let us revive the hope of this man; for if he who loves his fellow creatures be suffered to despair, what will become of nations?  The past is perhaps too discouraging; I must anticipate futurity, and disclose to the eye of virtue the astonishing age that is ready to begin; that, on viewing the object she desires, she may be animated with new ardor, and redouble her efforts to attain it.

CHAPTER XV.

The new age.

Scarcely had he finished these words, when a great tumult arose in the west; and turning to that quarter, I perceived, at the extremity of the Mediterranean, in one of the nations of Europe, a prodigious movement—­such as when a violent sedition arises in a vast city—­a numberless people, rushing in all directions, pour through the streets and fluctuate like waves in the public places.  My ear, struck with the cries which resounded to the heavens, distinguished these words: 

What is this new prodigy?  What cruel and mysterious scourge is this?  We are a numerous people and we want hands!  We have an excellent soil, and we are in want of subsistence?  We are active and laborious, and we live in indigence!  We pay enormous tributes, and we are told they are not sufficient!  We are at peace without, and our persons and property are not safe within.  Who, then, is the secret enemy that devours us?