y the sharpest of my agonies--I am afraid that
the multitude may rest content with the partial gratifications to be
granted them everywhere by those who will use all their clinging,
cunning power to prevent the people from understanding, and then from
wishing. On the day of victory, they will pour intoxication and
dazzling deceptions into you, and put almost superhuman cries into your
mouths, "We have delivered humanity; we are the soldiers of the Right!"
without telling you all that such a statement includes of gravity, of
immense pledges and constructive genius, what it involves in respect
for great peoples, whoever they are, and of gratitude to those who are
trying to deliver themselves. They will again take up their eternal
mission of stupefying the great conscious forces, and turning them
aside from their ends. They will appeal for union and peace and
patience, to the opportunism of changes, to the danger of going too
quickly, or of meddling in your neighbor's affairs, and all the other
fallacies of the sort. They will try again to ridicule and strike down
those whom the newspapers (the ones in their pay) call dreamers,
sectarians, and traitors; once again they will flourish all their old
talismans. Doubtless they will propose, in the fashionable words of
the moment, some official parodies of international justice, which they
will break up one day like theatrical scenery; they will enunciate some
popular right, curtailed by childish restrictions and monstrous
definitions, resembling a brigand's code of honor. The wrong torn from
confessed autocracies will hatch out elsewhere--in the sham republics,
and the self-styled liberal countries who have played a hidden game.
The concessions they will make will clothe the old rotten autocracy
again, and perpetuate it. One imperialism will replace the other, and
the generations to come will be marked for the sword. Soldier,
wherever you are, they will try to efface your memory, or to exploit
it, by leading it astray, and forgetfulness of the truth is the first
form of your adversity! May neither defeat nor victory be against you.
You are above both of them, for you are all the people.

The skies are peopled with stars, a harmony which clasps reason close,
and applies the mind to the adorable idea of universal unity. Must
that harmony give us hope or misgiving?

We are in a great night of the world. The thing is to know if we shall
wake up to-morrow. We have only