aged, who already had ceased to exist before leaving the
earth. We must tell ourselves that now, in each of our homes, both in
our cities and in the country-side, both in the palace and in the
meanest hovel, there lives and reigns a young dead man in the glory of
his strength. He fills the poorest, darkest dwelling with a splendour
of which it had never ventured to dream. His constant presence,
imperious and inevitable, diffuses through it and maintains a religion
and ideas which it had never known there before, hallows everything
around it, forces the eyes to look higher and the spirit to refrain
from descending, purifies the air that is breathed and the speech that
is held and the thoughts that are mustered there and, little by
little, ennobles and uplifts a whole people on a scale of unexampled
vastness.

4

Such dead as these have a power as profound, as fruitful as life and
less precarious. It is terrible that this experience should have been
made, for it is the most pitiless and the first in such enormous
masses that mankind has ever undergone; but, now that the ordeal is
almost over, we shall soon derive from it the most unexpected fruits.
It will not be long before we see the differences increase and the
destinies diverge between the nations which have acquired all these
dead and all this glory and those which were deprived of them; and we
shall perceive with amazement that those nations which have lost the
most are those which have kept their riches and their men. There are
losses which are inestimable gains; and there are gains whereby the
future is lost. There are dead whom the living cannot replace and the
mere thought of whom accomplishes things which their bodies could not
perform. There are dead whose energy surpasses death and recovers
life; and we are almost every one of us at this moment the mandataries
of a being greater, nobler, graver, wiser and more truly living than
ourselves. With all those who accompany him, he will be our judge, if
it is the fact that the dead weigh the soul of the living and that on
their verdict our happiness depends. He will be our guide and our
protector, for it is the first time, since history has revealed its
misfortunes to us, that man has felt so great a host of such mighty
dead soaring above his head and speaking within his heart.

5

We shall live henceforward under their laws, which will be more just
but not more severe nor more cheerless than ours; for it i