e clouds.

* * * * * *

You will do away with the rights of the dead, and with heredity of
power, whatever it may be, that inheritance which is unjust in all its
gradations, for tradition takes root there, and it is an outrage on
equality, against the order of labor. Labor is a great civic deed
which all men and all women without exception must share or go down.
Such divisions will reduce it for each one to dignified proportions and
prevent it from devouring human lives.

You will not permit colonial ownership by States, which makes stains on
the map of the world and is not justified by confessable reasons; and
you will organize the abolition of that collective slavery. You will
allow the individual property of the living to stand. It is equitable
because its necessity is inherent in the circumstances of the living,
and because there are cases where you cannot tear away the right of
ownership without tearing right itself. Besides, the love of things is
a passion, like the love of beings. The object of social organization
is not to destroy sentiment and pleasure, but on the contrary to allow
them to flourish, within the limit of not wronging others. It is right
to enjoy what you have clearly earned by your work. That focused
wisdom alone bursts among the old order of things like a curse.

Chase away forever, everywhere, everywhere, the bad masters of the
sacred school. Knowledge incessantly remakes the whole of
civilization. The child's intelligence is too precious not to be under
the protection of all. The heads of families are not free to deal
according to their caprices with the ignorance which each child brings
into the daylight; they have not that liberty contrary to liberty. A
child does not belong body and soul to its parents; it is a person, and
our ears are wounded by the blasphemy--a residue of despotic Roman
tradition--of those who speak of their sons killed in the war and say,
"I have given my son." You do not give living beings--and all
intelligence belongs primarily to reason.

There must no longer be a single school where they teach idolatry,
where the wills of to-morrow grow bigger under the terror of a God who
does not exist, and on whom so many bad arguments are thrown away or
justified. Nowhere must there be any more school-books where they
dress up in some finery of prestige what is most contemptible and
debasing in the past of the nations. Let the