The economists, whose science the war has so often tested, are laboring
to define what will be the conditions of life in the period that will
follow the world war; their estimates leave little room for the hope of
an agreeable and easy material existence; they hold over the mass of
men, conquered and conquerors alike, the menace of desperate labor and
slight and wretched returns.
These learned researches, added to the similar conclusions of common
sense, do not seem to discourage the laborious race of men. They have
been told they must work, and even now, while they are struggling
against a hundred fearful perils, they are mentally preparing to earn
their difficult living, if only the war does not take away their lives.
The modern industrial monster sets these conditions in advance. We
already know that competition will be pitiless, we know too that
enjoyment will only be for the highest bidder. Individuals, at the
sight of this future, mutually urge one another to be stubborn. The
world is preparing to take up again, obstinately, the old order that
has cost it so many trials. As yet no one speaks of a new life.
There will be so many voices to praise these desperate resolutions, so
many books will be written to persuade men to persevere in their old
hatreds that a timid voice may well raise itself to protest against the
consummation of the error.
A man whom I love and esteem above all others once said to me:
“When peace is signed and I return home, I shall have to give up all
the distractions I used to have if I wish to work as much as will be
necessary to recover a situation as good as the one I had before.”
Believe me, O my friend who said these words to me, I love work too
well to blame your decision; but I was thinking only of your happiness,
and it was of your situation that you spoke to me. Are you sure that
they are rightly related, those two words, those two ideas? What do you
hope from the future if you are not going to allow a large place in it
to the soul?
What compensation will be left for our passion of today if we take up
all our prejudices again, if we return to our own vomit?
The old civilization seems condemned. To break with it, we must first
of all seek our individual satisfaction outside money, our happiness
outside the whirlpool of pleasure. We must flee deliberately from the
tyranny of luxury. In this way even the events of the present oblige
us to seek our true path. Must we keep blindly and obstinately to the
ways of slavery? We have slighted the best sources of interest, joy and
wealth; shall we misprize them now that they remain the only fresh and
faithful things in the aridity of our time? Shall we neglect our souls
again to seek a false fortune that can only betray us? Shall we contend
with exasperated brutes over possessions we know to be unstable and
deceptive?
No! No! Here should lie the lesson and the one benefit of this war:
that we should undeceive ourselves about ourselves and about our ends!
Let us not devote our courage to choosing a ferocious discipline
devoid of the ideal. Let us once for all reject our calculating and
demoralizing intelligence. Let us organize, in the peace that returns,
the reign of the heart.