men today are sending the young ones to death;
it does not make them younger, and they are killing the future_.

_Instead of raging against the laws of life, a wholesome people will
try to understand them and see its real progress, not in a stupid
obstinacy which refuses to grow old, but in a constant effort to
advance with the age, changing and becoming greater. To each epoch its
own task. It is merely sloth and weakness if we cling all our lives
to the same one. Learn to change, for in that is life. The factory of
humanity has work for all of us. Labour for all, peoples of the world,
each man taking pride in the work of all the rest, for the travail,
the genius of the whole earth is ours also!_

These articles appeared here and there, whenever possible, in some
little sheet of advanced literary and anarchistic views, in which
violent attacks on persons took the place of a reasoned-out campaign
against the order of things. They were nearly illegible, defaced as
they were by the censor. Besides, when an article was reprinted in
another paper, he would let pass with a capricious forgetfulness what
he had cut out the day before, and cut what he had passed then. It
took close study to make out the sense of the article after this
treatment, but the remarkable thing was that the adversaries of
Clerambault, not his friends, went to this trouble. Ordinarily, at
Paris, these squalls do not last long. The most vindictive enemies,
trained to wars of the pen, know that silence is a sharper weapon than
insult, and get more out of their animosity by keeping it quiet; but
in the hysterical crisis in which Europe was struggling, there was no
guide, even for hatred. Clerambault was continually being recalled
to the public mind by the violent attacks of Bertin, though he never
failed to conclude each one in which he had discharged his venom, with
a disdainful: "He is not worth speaking of."

Bertin was only too familiar with the weaknesses, defects of mind,
and small absurdities of his former friend; he could not resist the
temptation to touch them with a sure hand, and Clerambault, stung
and not wise enough to hide it, let himself be drawn into the fight,
retaliated, and proved that he too could draw blood from the other.
Thus a fierce enmity arose between the two.

The result might have been foreseen. Up to this time Clerambault
had been inoffensive, confining himself on the whole to moral
dissertations. His polemic did not step o