the first lessons taught to a
people emerging from a long past of error and corruption, and hesitating
as to the choice of its future, may be of serious import. The doctrines
of federalism, which, if preached in France at the present day, would be
but an innocent Utopia, threatened the dissolution of the country during
the first years of the Revolution. They laid bare the path for foreign
conquest, and roused the _Mountain_ to bloody and terrible means of
repression.

Such for us are the wretched doctrines of which I speak. Fate has set
before us a great and holy mission, which, if we fail to accomplish it
now, may be postponed for half a century. Every delay, every error, may
be fatal. And the people through whom we have to work are uneducated,
liable to accept any error which wears a semblance of war against the
past, and in danger, from their long habit of slavery, of relapsing
into egotism.

Now the tendency of the doctrines of materialism is to lead the mass to
egotism through the path of interest. Therefore it grieves me to hear
them preached by many worthy but inconsiderate young men amongst us; and
I conjure them, by all they hold most sacred, to meditate deeply the
moral consequences of the doctrines they preach, and especially to study
their effect in the case of a neighboring nation, which carried negation
to the extreme during the past century, and which we behold at the
present day utterly corrupted by the worship of temporary and material
interest, disinherited of all noble activity, and sunk in the
degradation and infamy of slavery.

Every error is a crime in those whose duty it is to watch over the
cradle of a nation.

Either we must admit the idea of a God,--of the moral law, which is an
emanation from him,--and the idea of human duty, freely accepted by
mankind, as the practical consequence of that law,--or we must admit the
idea of a ruling force of things, and its practical consequence, the
worship of individual force or success, the omnipotence of _fact_. From
this dilemma there is no escape.

Either we must accept the sovereignty of an _aim_ prescribed by
conscience, in which all the individuals composing a nation are bound to
unite, and the pursuit of which constitutes the _nationality_ of a given
people among the many of which humanity is composed,--an aim recognized
by them all, and superior to them all, and therefore _religious_; or we
must accept the sovereignty of the _right_, arbitrar