incontestable that in striving against the feverish will to shine, in
ceasing to make the satisfaction of our desires the end of our activity,
in returning to modest tastes, to the true life, we shall labor for the
unity of the family. Another spirit will breath in our homes, creating
new customs and an atmosphere more favorable to the education of
children. Little by little our boys and girls will feel the enticement
of ideals at once higher and more realizable. And transformation of the
home will in time exercise its influence on public spirit. As the
solidity of a wall depends upon the grain of the stones and the
consistence of the cement which binds them together, so also the energy
of public life depends upon the individual value of men and their power
of cohesion. The great desideratum of our time is the culture of the
component parts of society, of the individual man. Everything in the
present social organism leads us back to this element. In neglecting it
we expose ourselves to the loss of the benefits of progress, even to
making our most persistent efforts turn to our own hurt. If in the midst
of means continually more and more perfected, the workman diminishes in
value, of what use are these fine tools at his disposal? By their very
excellence to make more evident the faults of him who uses them without
discernment or without conscience. The wheelwork of the great modern
machine is infinitely delicate. Carelessness, incompetence or corruption
may produce here disturbances of far greater gravity than would have
threatened the more or less rudimentary organism of the society of the
past. There is need then of looking to the quality of the individual
called upon to contribute in any measure to the workings of this
mechanism. This individual should be at once solid and pliable, inspired
with the central law of life--to be one's self and fraternal. Everything
within us and without us becomes simplified and unified under the
influence of this law, which is the same for everybody and by which each
one should guide his actions; for our essential interests are not
opposing, they are identical. In cultivating the spirit of simplicity,
we should arrive, then, at giving to public life a stronger cohesion.
The phenomena of decomposition and destruction that we see there may all
be attributed to the same cause,--lack of solidity and cohesion. It will
never be possible to say how contrary to social good are the trifling
interests of caste, of coterie, of church, the bitter strife for
personal welfare, and, by a fatal consequence, how destructive these
things are of individual happiness. A society in which each member is
preoccupied with his own well-being, is organized disorder. This is all
that we learn from the irreconcilable conflicts of our uncompromising
egoism.
We too much resemble those people who claim the rights of family only to
gain advantage from them, not to do honor to the connection. On all
rounds of the social ladder we are forever putting forth claims. We all
take the ground that we are creditors: no one recognizes the fact that
he is a debtor, and our dealings with our fellows consist in inviting
them, in tones sometimes amiable, sometimes arrogant, to discharge their
indebtedness to us. No good thing is attained in this spirit. For in
fact it is the spirit of privilege, that eternal enemy of universal law,
that obstacle to brotherly understanding which is ever presenting itself
anew.
* * * * *
In a lecture delivered in 1882, M. Renan said that a nation is "a
spiritual family," and he added: "The essential of a nation is that all
the individuals should have many things in common, and also that all
should have forgotten much." It is important to know what to forget and
what to remember, not only in the past, but also in our daily life. Our
memories are lumbered with the things that divide us; the things which
unite us slip away. Each of us keeps at the most luminous point of his
souvenirs, a lively sense of his secondary quality, his part of
agriculturist, day laborer, man of letters, public officer, proletary,
bourgeois, or political or religious sectarian; but his essential
quality, which is to be a son of his country and a man, is relegated to
the shade. Scarcely does he keep even a theoretic notion of it. So that
what occupies us and determines our actions, is precisely the thing that
separates us from others, and there is hardly place for that spirit of
unity which is as the soul of a people.
So too do we foster bad feeling in our brothers. Men animated by a
spirit of particularism, exclusiveness, and pride, are continually
clashing. They cannot meet without rousing afresh the sentiment of
division and rivalry. And so there slowly heaps up in their remembrance
a stock of reciprocal ill-will, of mistrust, of rancor. All this is bad
feeling with its consequences.
It must be rooted out of our midst. Remember, forget! This we should say
to ourselves every morning, in all our relations and affairs. Remember
the essential, forget the accessory! How much better should we discharge
our duties as citizens, if high and low were nourished from this spirit!
How easy to cultivate pleasant remembrances in the mind of one's
neighbor, by sowing it with kind deeds and refraining from procedures of
which in spite of himself he is forced to say, with hatred in his heart:
"Never in the world will I forget!"
The spirit of simplicity is a great magician. It softens asperities,
bridges chasms, draws together hands and hearts. The forms which it
takes in the world are infinite in number; but never does it seem to us
more admirable than when it shows itself across the fatal barriers of
position, interest, or prejudice, overcoming the greatest obstacles,
permitting those whom everything seems to separate to understand one
another, esteem one another, love one another. This is the true social
cement, that goes into the building of a people.
THE END.