ASSOCIATION, one of the greatest social forces, and that which made the Europe of the middle-ages, rests on principles which, since 1792, no longer exist in France, where the Individual has now triumphed over the State.  Association requires, in the first place, a self-devotion that is not understood in our day; also a guileless faith which is contrary to the spirit of the nation, and lastly, a discipline against which men in these days revolt and which the Catholic religion alone can enforce.  The moment an association is formed among us, each member, returning to his own home from an assembly where noble sentiments have been proclaimed, thinks of making his own bed out of that collective devotion, that union of forces, and of milking to his own profit the common cow, which, not being able to supply so many individual demands, dies exhausted.

Who knows how many generous sentiments were blasted, how many fruitful germs may have perished, lost to the nation through the infamous deceptions of the French Carbonari, the patriotic subscriptions to the Champ d’Asile, and other political deceptions which ought to have been grand and noble dramas, and proved to be the farces and the melodramas of police courts.  It is the same with industrial association as it is with political association.  Love of self is substituted for the love of collective bodies.  The corporations and the Hanse leagues of the middle-ages, to which we shall some day return, are still impossible.  Consequently, the only societies which actually exist are those of religious bodies, against whom a heavy war is being made at this moment; for the natural tendency of sick persons is to quarrel with remedies and often with physicians.  France ignores self-abnegation.  Therefore, no association can live except through religious sentiment; the only sentiment that quells the rebellions of mind, the calculations of ambition, and greeds of all kinds.  The seekers of better worlds ignore the fact that ASSOCIATION has such worlds to offer.

As he walked through the streets Godefroid felt himself another man.  Whoever could have looked into his being would have admired the curious phenomenon of the communication of collective power.  He was no longer a mere man, he was a tenfold force, knowing himself the representative of persons whose united forces upheld his actions and walked beside him.  Bearing that power in his heart, he felt within him a plenitude of life, a noble might, which uplifted him.  It was, as he afterwards said, one of the finest moments of his whole existence; he was conscious of a new sense, an omnipotence more sure than that of despots.  Moral power is, like thought, limitless.

“To live for others,” he thought, “to act with others, all as one, and act alone as all together, to have for leader Charity, the noblest, the most living of those ideal figures Christianity has made for us, this is indeed to live!—­Come, come, repress that petty joy, which father Alain laughed at.  And yet, how singular it is that in seeking to set myself aside from life I have found the power I have sought so long!  Yes, the world of misery will belong to me!”