ir is that we cling
to what we had at the beginning; and when we no longer trust that, we
feel that all is lost. A great nation has never reached the object
sought; and so much the better, for almost always what is reached is
superior to what was sought, though different. It is not wise to start
out with our wisdom ready made, but to gather it sincerely as we go
along.

You are not the same men that you were in 1914. If you dare admit it,
then dare to act it also! That will be the chief gain--perhaps the
only one--of the war. But do you really care? So many things conspire
to intimidate you; the weariness of these years, old habits, dread of
the effort needed to examine yourself, to throw away what is dead, and
stand for what is living. We have, we do not know what respect for the
old, a lazy preference for what we are accustomed to, even if it is
bad, fatal. Then there is the indolent need for what is easy which
makes us take a trodden path rather than hew out a new one for
ourselves. Is it not the ideal of most Frenchmen to accept their plan
of life ready-made in childhood and never change it? If only this war,
which has destroyed so many of your hearths, could force you to come
out from your ashes, to found other healths, to seek other truths!

The wish to break with the past, and adventure themselves in unknown
regions was not lacking to these young men. They would rather have
preferred to go ahead without stopping, and they had scarcely left
the Old World when they expected to take possession of the New.--No
hesitation, no middle course; they wanted absolute solutions, either
the docile servitude of the past, or revolution.

These were Moreau's views; he looked upon Clerambault's hope of
social revolution as a certainty, and in the exhortation to win truth
patiently step by step he heard an appeal to violent action which
would conquer it at once.

He introduced Clerambault to two or three groups of young
intellectuals with revolutionary tendencies. They were not very
numerous, for here and there you would see the same faces, but they
gained an importance which they would not otherwise have had, from
the watch which was kept on them by the authorities. Silly people in
power, armed to the teeth with millions of bayonets, police and courts
of justice at their command, yet uneasy and afraid to let a dozen
freethinkers meet to discuss them!

These circles had not the air of conspiracies, and though they rath