one succor--_we_ know of what the
night is made. But shall we be able to impart our lucid faith, seeing
that the heralds of warning are everywhere few, and that the greatest
victims hate the only ideal which is not one, and call it utopian?
Public opinion floats over the surface of the peoples, wavering and
submissive to the wind; it lends but fleeting conscience and conviction
to the majority; it cries "Down with the reformers!" It cries
"Sacrilege!" because it is made to see in its vague thoughts what it
could not itself see there. It cries that they are distorting it,
whereas they are enlarging it.

I am not afraid, as many are, and as I once was myself, of being
reviled and slandered. I do not cling to respect and gratitude for
myself. But if I succeed in reaching men, I should like them not to
curse me. Why should they, since it is not for myself? It is only
because I am sure I am right. I am sure of the principles I see at the
source of all--justice, logic, equality; all those divinely human
truths whose contrast with the realized truth of to-day is so
heart-breaking. And I want to appeal to you all; and that confidence
which fills me with a tragic joy, I want to give it to you, at once as
a command and as a prayer. There are not several ways of attaining it
athwart everything, and of fastening life and the truth together again;
there is only one--right-doing. Let rule begin again with the sublime
control of the intellect. I am a man like the rest, a man like you.
You who shake your head or shrug your shoulders as you listen to
me--why are we, we two, we all, so foreign to each other, when we are
not foreign?

I believe, in spite of all, in truth's victory. I believe in the
momentous value, hereafter inviolable, of those few truly fraternal men
in all the countries of the world, who, in the oscillation of national
egoisms let loose, stand up and stand out, steadfast as the glorious
statues of Right and Duty. To-night I believe--nay, I am certain--that
the new order will be built upon that archipelago of men. Even if we
have still to suffer as far as we can see ahead, the idea can no more
cease to throb and grow stronger than the human heart can; and the will
which is already rising here and there they can no longer destroy.

I proclaim the inevitable advent of the universal republic. Not the
transient backslidings, nor the darkness and the dread, nor the tragic
difficulty of uplifting the world