sentence which condemns the guilty one in order to frighten
possible evil-doers (and never for another reason) is itself beyond
forgiveness. International dignity will close the taverns, forbid the
sale of poisons, and will reduce to impotence the vendors who want to
render abortive, in men and young people, the future's beauty and the
reign of intelligence. And here is a mandate which appears before my
eyes--the tenacious law which must pounce without respite on all public
robbers, on all those, little and big, cynics and hypocrites, who, when
their trade or their functions bring the opportunity, exploit misery
and speculate on necessity. There is a new hierarchy to make mistakes,
to commit offenses and crimes--the true one.

You can form no idea of the beauty that is possible! You cannot
imagine what all the squandered treasure can provide, what can be
brought on by the resurrection of misguided human intelligence,
successively smothered and slain hitherto by infamous slavery, by the
despicable infectious necessity of armed attack and defense, and by the
privileges which debase human worth. You can have no notion what human
intelligence may one day find of new adoration. The people's absolute
reign will give to literature and the arts--whose harmonious shape is
still but roughly sketched--a splendor boundless as the rest. National
cliques cultivate narrowness and ignorance, they cause originality to
waste away; and the national academies, to which a residue of
superstition lends respect, are only pompous ways of upholding ruins.
The domes of those Institutes which look so grand when they tower above
you are as ridiculous as extinguishers. You must widen and
internationalize, without pause or limit, all which permits of it.
With its barriers collapsed, you must fill society with broad daylight
and magnificent spaces; with patience and heroism must you clear the
ways which lead from the individual to humanity, the ways which were
stopped up with corpses of ideas and with stone images all along their
great curving horizons. Let everything be remade on simple lines.
There is only one people, there is only one people!

If you do that, you will be able to say that, at the moment when you
planned your effort and took your decision, you saved the human species
as far as it is possible on earth to do it. You will not have brought
happiness about. The fallacy-mongers do not frighten us when they
preach resignation a