When the oppressor said: "This world for me!" the
oppressed replied: "Heaven for me!" Now what can he say?
All the evils of the present come from two causes: the people who have
passed through 1793 and 1814, nurse wounds in their hearts. That which
was is no more; what will be, is not yet. Do not seek elsewhere the cause
of our malady.
Here is a man whose house falls in ruins; he has torn it down in order to
build another. The rubbish encumbers the spot, and he waits for fresh
materials for his new home. At the moment he has prepared to cut the
stone and mix the cement, while standing, pick in hand, with sleeves
rolled up, he is informed that there is no more stone, and is advised to
whiten the old material and make the best possible use of that. What can
you expect this man to do who is unwilling to build his nest out of
ruins? The quarry is deep, the tools too weak to hew out the stones.
"Wait!" they say to him, "we will draw out the stones one by one; hope,
work, advance, withdraw." What do they not tell him? And in the meantime
he has lost his old house, and has not yet built the new; he does not
know where to protect himself from the rain, or how to prepare his
evening meal, nor where to work, nor where to sleep, nor where to die;
and his children are newly born.
I am much deceived if we do not resemble that man. O, people of the
future! when on a warm summer day you bend over your plows in the green
fields of your native land; when you see, in the pure sunlight under a
spotless sky, the earth, your fruitful mother, smiling in her matutinal
robe on the workman, her well-beloved child; when drying on your brow the
holy baptism of sweat, you cast your eye over the vast horizon, when
there will not be one blade higher than another in the human harvest, but
only violets and marguerites in the midst of ripening sheafs.
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