be undertaken by the Kings. That is
the gravest thing to be taught you. The overtures of liberality made
by the masters who have made the world what it is are only comedies.
They are only ways of blockading completely the progress to come, of
building up the past again behind new patchwork of plaster.

Never listen, either, to the fine words they offer you, the letters of
which you see like dry bones on hoardings and the fronts of buildings.
There are official proclamations, full of the notion of liberty and
rights, which would be beautiful if they said truly what they say. But
they who compose them do not attach their full meaning to the words.
What they recite they are not capable of wanting, nor even of
understanding. The one indisputable sign of progress in ideas to-day
is that there are things which they dare no longer leave publicly
unsaid, and that's all. There are not all the political parties that
there seem to be. They swarm, certainly, as numerous as the cases of
short sight; but there are only two--the democrats and the
conservatives. Every political deed ends fatally either in one or the
other, and all their leaders have always a tendency to act in the
direction of reaction. Beware, and never forget that if certain
assertions are made by certain lips, that is a sufficient reason why
you should at once mistrust them. When the bleached old republicans[1]
take your cause in their hands, be quite sure that it is not yours. Be
wary as lions.

[Footnote 1: The word is used here much in the sense of our word
"Tories."--Tr.]

Do not let the simplicity of the new world out of your sight. The
social trust is simple. The complications are in what is overhead--the
accumulation of delusions and prejudice heaped up by ages of tyrants,
parasites, and lawyers. That conviction sheds a real glimmer of light
on your duty and points out the way to accomplish it. He who would dig
right down to the truth must simplify; his faith must be brutally
simple, or he is lost. Laugh at the subtle shades and distinctions of
the rhetoricians and the specialist physicians. Say aloud: "This is
what is," and then, "That is what must be."

You will never have that simplicity, you people of the world, if you do
not seize it. If you want it, do it yourself with your own hands. And
I give you now the talisman, the wonderful magic word--you _can_!

That you may be a judge of existing things, go back to their origins,
and