The New Age, Latest Thoughts, Memories of Caledonia
The New Age
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 1
Like the sap of April, blood rises for the age-old renewal in the old human tree (the old tree of misery).
Beneath the humus of falling errors that pile up like dead leaves, here are the snowdrops and golden daffodils, and the old tree shudders in the spring breezes.
The red flowers of the mezereon bleed vividly from the branches; the swollen buds burst open: here are the new leaves and flowers.
It is a stage of nature.
It will become deep thickets where nests will call to one another, where fruit will ripen; and everything will return to the crucible of universal life.
Thus blows the morning breeze at the rosy dawn of the New World.
Religions and States are still here before our eyes, but do not corpses retain their human appearance when buried to be entrusted to the earth?
Do not the paleness, the rigidity of the dead, the stench of decay, indicate that all is over for the being that has ceased to live?
This paleness, this decay—old society already has them in the throes of its agony.
Rest assured, it is coming to an end.
She is dying, the old ogre who has drunk human blood since the beginning of time to prolong her cursed existence.
Her provocations, her relentless cruelties, her worn-out plots—none of it will help; it is the age-old winter, this cursed world must depart: here is the spring in which the human race will prepare the nest for its young, who until now have been more miserable than those of the beasts.
This old world must surely die, since no one is safe in it any longer, since the race’s instinct for self-preservation is awakening, and everyone, seized with anxiety and unable to breathe in the pestilential ruins, casts a desperate glance toward the horizon.
Stages have been skipped; only yesterday, many believed all this to be solid; today, no one other than dupes or rogues denies the evidence of the facts. — Revolution is imperative. The interest of all demands an end to parasitism.
When a swarm of bees, plundered by hornets, has no more honey in its hive, it wages a war to the death against the bandits before resuming its work.
We, on the other hand, parley with the human hornets, humbly asking them to leave a little honey at the bottom of the cell so that the hive can begin filling itself again for them.
Animals unite against common danger; wild oxen go off in herds to seek more fertile pastures: together, they face the wolves.
Would humans alone fail to unite to traverse the terrible era in which we find ourselves? Are we less intelligent than the beast?
What will be done with the thousands upon thousands of workers wandering hungry through the dark lands from which they have already extracted so much wealth for their exploiters?
Are they going to let themselves be slaughtered like packs of wolves?
The Romans, when they were not rich enough to send their surplus slaves to Carthage, buried them alive; a hecatomb would have made too much noise; the shroud of sand is silent. Is this how the capitalist clique will proceed?
Will they fill the prisons with all the starving people? They would soon be overflowing to the brim.
Will they build new ones? There is no longer enough money even for evil: the Tonkin follies and others have absorbed millions, and the secret funds are exhausted from setting traps for revolutionaries.
Will they try to soothe, to lull the people back to sleep with promises?
That has become difficult. The revanchist Don Quixotic figures blowing their bugles at the slightest sign from Bismarck (to protect them while giving the illusion of threatening them) fortunately do not fool the entire youth: the spirit of the International has survived the Versaillais firing squads.
Louder and more powerful than brass, the calls of Liberty and Equality thunder from peak to peak, their legend awakening new senses.
Now we must have the reality of these words inscribed everywhere, which are nowhere put into practice.
The human chrysalis is evolving: its wings will no longer be forced back into the burst shell.
Everything must go to the common Ocean, summoned by needs for renewal, by senses hitherto unknown, whose inevitable development nothing can stop.
Just as a drop of water belongs to another drop in the same wave and the same ocean, all humanity rolls in the same storm toward the great goal.
The human beast which, from the depths of time, had risen from the family to the tribe, to the horde, to the nation, rises, rises further, rises always; and the family becomes the entire race.
Languages, which have evolved alongside human vicissitudes, are adopting similar words for their new needs, because all peoples experience this same need: Revolution.
And revolution in science, in the arts, as in industry, makes increasingly necessary this universal language that is already forming on its own and which will be the corollary of the great awakening.
Chapter 2
Human society does not have much longer for these wars that serve only its enemies, its masters: no one can prevent tomorrow’s sun from succeeding our night.
Today, no man can live otherwise than as a bird on a branch—that is to say, watched by the cat or the hunter.
States themselves have the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads: debt gnaws at them, and the loans that keep them alive wear out like everything else.
The starving, the desperate with sharp teeth, emerge from the woods; they run across the plains, they enter the cities: the hive, weary of being plundered, hums and reveals its stinger. They who created everything are in want of everything.
At the street corners, they have long been dying as vagrants before the palaces they built: the grass of the fields can no longer feed them—it is reserved for the herds of the rich.
There is work only for those who accept a pittance or who stupefy themselves in an eight-to-ten-hour daily grind.
Then anger rises: the exploited feel that they, too, have a heart, a stomach, a brain.
All of this is hungry, all of this refuses to die; and they are rising! The Jacques ignite their torches from the miners’ lamps: no proletarian will crawl back into his hole—better to die in revolt.
Revolt! It is the awakening of consciences, it is indignation, it is the reclamation of violated rights… Who, after all, revolts without having been wronged?
The more heavily the wretched are oppressed, the more terrible the revolt will be; the more crimes those in power commit, the more clearly people will finally see, and the more relentlessly justice will be served…
Chapter 3
“— Capital!” they say with fearful awe, “0nly think of destroying capital! What?”
Ah! Reason and logic did justice to Capital long ago: is it of a higher nature than labor and science?
Imagine a handful of Rothschilds owning all the gold and diamond mines on earth—what would they do with them without the miners? Who then would extract the gold from the sand, or the diamond from the rough stone?
Give the exploiters marble quarries with no one to carve or haul the blocks…
Let those people realize that they are incapable of turning anything to account without the workers: will they eat the soil if no one makes it yield?
Come now! The capitalist Bastille has long ceased to count for the future.
And besides, that fraction of goods they hold to the detriment of the mass of the disenfranchised is minute compared to the prodigious wealth science will grant us!
The hell of the afterlife was not destroyed on earth only to be reconstituted here; it was destroyed the moment people realized how monstrous he would be—this eternally tormenting God who, capable of bestowing justice everywhere, would leave the world to struggle forever in every despair, in every horror. And along with the hell of religions collapse earthly hells, with their lures of selfish rewards that spawn nothing but corruption.
It is through these corrupting rewards that some have been made to wait so long that their patience is worn out, while others have been so thoroughly convinced that everything must be this way through age-old injustice that their consciences have grown paralyzed, committing or enduring the crime.
That is over: the veils of all the tabernacles are tearing apart.
An end to thrones, an end to the trappings of illusory dignities, an end to human trinkets.
Everything in which people no longer believe is dead.
We are beginning to notice that birds, ants, and bees group together freely to do their work together and resist any danger that might arise—and that animals set an example of sociability for human beings.
How will the prison of the past fall, struck on all sides by popular storms?
No one knows.
Will it collapse in disaster?
Will the privileged, driven into a corner by common misfortune, make a great Night of August 4th?
Will the popular tide submerge the world?…
What is certain is that the century will not set without the star of the Revolution finally rising: human beings, like all living creatures, want to live, and soon no one—not even the exploiter—will be able to live unless right replaces might.
Proletarians, office workers, small shopkeepers, small landowners—all feel that from one end of society to the other, everyone, in their bitter struggle for existence, is simultaneously devouring and devoured.
The great landlord, the great capitalist, presses down on the small owner in the same way the small shopkeepers press down on the workers—who themselves inflict upon one another the same fatal laws of competition, while also bearing the entire weight of exploiters large and small. Thus, like grain beneath the millstone, they are ultimately crushed.
On the other hand, we see that the sun and the air, belonging to everyone (because they could not be leased out for the profit of a few), continue to invigorate nature for the benefit of all; that in taking the train, no traveler prevents others from reaching their destination; that letters or telegrams received by some in no way hinder the arrival of letters or telegrams for others.
On the contrary, the more universal communications become, the better it is for everyone.
For all these things, there is no need for a government that hinders, taxes, and levies in wholesale and retail, or even wastes; what is needed is work, intelligence, and free expression, which give life.
In short, the principle of all for all is becoming simplified, taking clear shape in minds.
It could be said, however, that the sun and air do not belong equally to everyone, since some have a thousand times more space and light than they need, while others have a thousand times less; but this being the fault of social inequalities, it must disappear along with them.
What a calamity is the ignorance that breeds them!
Ignorance of the first principles of hygiene causes so many city dwellers—who are dying for lack of air—to diminish that supply of air even further.
As if health—the first of all blessings—did not require us to sweep away, through ventilation, the miasmas of the hovel where we are crammed, and of the factory where we are stripped bare!
As if, to purify, fresh air were not the complement of fire!
“Drafts! Drafts!” What a tiresome refrain grates on the ears of those whose childhood blossomed in the sweet scents of the fields, whose lungs were tempered in the rustic atmosphere of beautiful Nature!
Lucky rich man!
It is a fact that birth and death, those great equalizers, do not present themselves in the same way for the rich as for the poor. Given our iniquitous laws, it cannot be otherwise.
But these iniquitous laws will disappear with the rest: the stubble must be uprooted and the earth turned over to sow the new wheat.
Chapter 4
Let us suppose the thing is done—that in the revolutionary storm, the wreckage on which we float has finally reached the shore, despite those who, stupidly, prefer to go down with present society.
Let us suppose the working hive spreads freely out into space; here is what it would say:
“— We can no longer live like our ancestors of the Stone Age, nor as in the past century, since successive inventions and scientific discoveries have brought the certainty that everything will yield a hundredfold when these discoveries are used for the general well-being, instead of leaving them to a handful of predators to use to starve the rest.
Machines, each of which kills hundreds of workers because they have only ever been used for the exploitation of man by man, would—belonging to all—be a source of infinite wealth for all.
Until now, the people have been victims of the machine; only the gears that multiply labor have been perfected: no one has touched the economic gear that tears the worker apart in its teeth.
Well! Since slaughterhouses cannot be established to get rid of proletarians worn out before their time, the machine takes care of it, and what a pity it would be to hamper such noble works!
Well, on the contrary: the machine, having become the servant of the worker, would make each person produce, for the general benefit, what is currently produced by such a vast number of exploited people for the benefit of a few, or even a single exploiting individual; and even then, everyone would have more time every day, more leisure for rest or study, than they can currently have in an entire week.
Rest after work! Study! How good it is! And how rare, except for the rich who have too much of it.
Just as he who never works knows nothing of the comfort of a little rest, so too does the overworked being yearn for it.
He whose brain has shrunk, walled in by selfishness, has no more ideas: they no longer spark, they are dead.
On the contrary, the worker’s brain, like his stomach, becomes ravenous through the devouring activity of an entire race left without nourishment for centuries—an activity further whetted by the virile era of humanity: in uncultivated brains, strong and proud ideas germinate like the surges of primeval forests.
It is truly a time of renewal.
In the meantime, you know these lines from good old La Fontaine:
For a stolen donkey, two thieves were fighting:
Along came a third thief
Who seized Master Aliboron…
Such is the story of governments that legislate and greedy financial companies that starve the striker and feed on the debris of old societies: governments and companies harass him, always holding the rifles of order to his throat, arguing over whether it will be the Company or the State that resumes the exploitation (as at Decazeville).
Along comes the third thief of the fable in the form of ruin, destroying the mine without miners—the mine where the dust of abandoned coal catches fire, the mine flooded by water that rushes in the moment people stop fighting it.
Wherever the pioneer’s creative hand is no longer present, industry dies; and that creative hand—the pioneer’s hand alone—will resurrect it as soon as he can do so without betrayal. And he will be able to, once the mine belongs to those who dig it, the land to those who cultivate it, the machine to those who make it grind—that is to say, to each and to all, all the means of production and all the products.
The Revolution, violent Revolution, is hastened, fanned, rendered inevitable by the panic of those in power.
Property is no more if proletarians prefer to starve rather than fatten their masters, their leeches; and Capital will have had its day, like all other errors, whenever we wish.
If it pleases the worker to go on strike, if it pleases him to revolt, the earth is black with human ants. They are the numbers—the immense majority that has never known its own strength: despair will teach it to them.
Lashings from a whip teach it to the caged lion, just as the blow of a sledgehammer teaches it to the bull at the slaughterhouse: then the lion catches beneath his claws the showman who whipped him; the bull snaps the rope that bowed his head to the ring of torment, breaks free, and spreads terror in his wake.
It was seen in 1793 and on March 18th; it was seen at Decazeville when the measure was full: it will be seen elsewhere, perhaps one day at Vierzon.
Chapter 5
Nothing in nature is useless: no more than the spring buds that cover the trees in April will the new senses swelling the minds of the crowds remain without seed, or germinate in vain.
Notice this: most of the strikers, whether from Decazeville or the Borinage, knew not a word of socialism; the words Liberty or Equality, which they spell out on the pediments of public buildings, meant nothing to them.
Yet those words have radiated such warm currents that everywhere they are becoming rudimentary senses, ensuring that everywhere the human race must replace the human cattle we still are.
The last of the great solitary bards is dead. Here comes the chorus of bards, and the bards are the crowds: just as everyone speaks, just as everyone walks, everyone will use their ear, their voice, their eyes.
The ear develops through musical education; the eyes grow true in painters; the hands, which in the sculptor know how to carve wood, marble, and stone, will through practice become expert in all; for no one has eyes, ears, or hands except to use them, so that the races will reach a degree of mastery difficult to fathom.
It will be magnificent, the new legend sung by those who come after us.
All being poets, all being scholars, all knowing how to use faculties hitherto rudimentary, nothing of our present savagery will remain.
Humanity evolving at last in the full light of freedom, objections based on today’s customs would be even less valid.
“How would the idle live? How would envy and jealousy accommodate themselves to equality?”
Do not these arguments fall away of their own accord in the general well-being?
Why, good heavens! How will the sluggards live?
Will there not still be, for a long time to come, those crippled in body or mind, sluggards, people who through atavism inherit present infirmities?
The lazy, like the blind or the deaf, are infirm individuals who have a right to life, and they will live, or rather vegetate, without harming anyone.
As for jealousy, envy, and the like—would such states even be possible? Since the machine will be at the service of man and for the benefit of all, what would be the point of envying what one would always be sure to enjoy in full abundance?
Will not universalized science prevent the follies of pride?
Will workers then remain chained to a trade they could not perform for lack of aptitude, or simply because they do not care to practice it? In changing groups, would they not always find new resources?
Instead of inheritances that breed parricides, each will have the inheritance of humanity—an immense heritage, of which we have barely a notion, in the form of riches of every kind, or rather of all kinds of labor, in their immeasurable varieties.
Free groupings of free individuals, work done for the well-being of each and all: we must inevitably arrive there out of necessity, since a few idlers, a few monstrous parasites, cannot do away with the countless, rumbling legions of those who labor at their whim.
Must those whose deaths would not hinder anything from moving forward bring about the loss of the entire species?
Things, moreover, will be greatly simplified: Europe, the universe, are experiencing the same anxieties that herald the birth of the New World, for which the innermost heart of every thinker already feels a thrill.
The Stone and Bronze Ages have passed; our age will pass: we feel the spasmodic shocks of its agony, and it is in its death that we see the history of all vanished epochs.
Each of them carries off cold the things that impassioned it; they are finished: then, in the renewal, grow the things regarded as utopias at the previous stage.
The ideas set down as landmarks by the lost sentinels serve new explorers, and boundlessly we advance toward times incomparably closer to the Ideal.
Precisely between those times and ours lies the period in which humanity, growing into adulthood, no longer bears except by balking the chains that freeze it in the rut.
No lulling promise will ever again soothe those who have seen the misfortunes heaped upon our species by credulity—not even the shimmer of improvement based on empty words.
Words blow away with every wind: oaths and complaints fall together in the eternal sweep.
This is what, under the name of parliamentarism, prolongs the current stage where we tread water.
A tormented stage where vertigo increasingly haunts the heights of power: powerlessness, parasitism, stupidity, and madness, leaning on one another, are still standing.
But what ruin lasts forever?
Thus there is no doubt that the most abominable of all decrepitudes—our social state—must soon disappear.
With this society turned into a cutthroat alley, there is an absolute necessity to bring it to an end.
Chapter 6
Do you know how we will realize the old world no longer exists? Only those who have returned from a dungeon to the light, to safety—only they could say.
The groupings formed by common danger, surviving alone amidst the common ruin, will naturally take back matters of general interest, of which today our mortal enemies are the sole beneficiaries:
Postal services, railways, telegraphs, mines, agriculture will be all the more active as communications among workers will possess the overflowing vitality of liberated crowds—finally breathing free.
No more wars, no more parasites to gorge: man’s power over things will be all the greater and all the more beneficial once the power of individuals over one another has been destroyed.
No more struggles for existence—struggles like those of wild beasts: all forces turned toward multiplying production so that every being swims in abundance; all new inventions—and science, finally free in its investigations—serving, for the first time, the whole of humanity: radiant, fruitful, audacious, they will strike with their brilliance everything that at this very hour is still diminished, stifled, obscured.
If, alas, so much effort is spent to hinder the irresistible march of progress, it is because, beside those who live on ignorance, error, and injustice, there are those who die of them and find it fitting; there are also the laggards clinging stubbornly to useless things because they cost them so much to acquire—it is natural—and it is not with words that people will be cured of such infatuations: catastrophes alone will suffice.
Debates will go on in our bourgeois (and even revolutionary) talking shops when the tidal wave of the starving passes over all our heads.
It is rising fast, and through the breaches made everywhere—at Decazeville, in Belgium, in England, in America—the reef protecting the worm-eaten world grows chipped day by day, and through these breaches will pass the roaring ocean of revolt. (Everything comes in its own time.)
It is into that ocean that human rivers plunge: thus go arts, literature, sciences; thus everything drowns beneath the surge of the red dawn of the twentieth century, which is already shining.
And beneath the tide of this rising dawn, like a heap of molten dust, small vanities become the immense love of human progress; and the tinkling bells of fame and honors cease to ring for ears, for hearts burning with a thirst for perfectibility.
Everything that seems indecipherable to us—electricity, magnetism—will, in twenty-five years, have produced such results that, combined with discoveries in chemistry, agriculture, and mechanics, people will wonder in astonishment how the men of our time could believe that the misery decimating the masses was an inevitable calamity, necessary for the well-being of a handful of privileged few!
Is it not high time that everyone became privileged? Has this not lasted long enough already—long enough that everyone drags their ball and chain, pulling at their shackles without managing to break them? Broken? Then they will all be broken.
“Here comes the Red Easter,” goes the song of the Jacques.
The Red Easter after which the human chrysalis will have evolved, urged on by the breezes of Germinal, only to be thrown onto the earth afterward, wings torn, perhaps. What matter! It has felt the open air: others will fly in it, and caught by the same sublime fever, all will fly in their turn.
Chapter 7
What is the use of always comparing what will happen in a healthy environment to what takes place under this foul regime?
Do not windows closed against the winter snow open wide to the warm breezes of summer?
Do the stages of life have the same needs, the same capacities?
Let us stop dwelling, then, on idle arguments.
Are not new needs and new capacities, in turn, the source of other needs that awaken further capacities?
Man molds himself to the arts, to the sciences, to ideas of justice, just as the visual sense evolves in blind cave-salamanders when drawn out by light; and despite hostile environments, the human beast, too, finally feels called by luminous horizons.
From the fire snatched from a smoking crater, from forests set ablaze by lightning, or even from the simple friction of two pieces of wood, came so great a surge forward that after chaining the Prometheuses to the rocky peak where vultures devour them, man worshipped fire and deified it.
Nothing is more expressive than this legend.
It is always those who have the greatest stake in progress who revolt most fiercely against that progress.
They sacrificed the first who made fire; they flogged the first who, proclaiming the movement of the earth around the sun, destroyed the legend of Joshua like pulling a stone from a citadel.
Always those who attacked gods and kings were broken in the struggle; yet the gods have fallen, kings are falling, and soon Blanqui’s words will come true: “Neither God nor master!”
Though the Prometheuses be delivered to the vultures, does that prevent the tribe from gathering around the common hearth? Does that prevent steam from working wonders, or electricity from promising even greater ones?
On the contrary: the idea watered with blood germinates faster and better, taking deeper root; in minds furrowed by pain, electrified by burning and fiercely generous passions, it yields fruit; and like wild grass, it will become wheat.
The more men are broken, the more deeply—if not more rapidly—ideas spread.
One sees far through cell windows. In the great silence, one’s being expands into the whole of humanity. One lives ahead, the present vanishes: the spirit, anticipating the New Era, soars into the Future.
Now, the struggle has reached its supreme height through a convergence of events, of imperative circumstances, which at our century’s end corner the old society like a rabid beast that labor and science are replacing even before it dies.
What does it matter if the cursed beast chokes us in the spasms of its agony, since it is going to die?
Right must surely triumph, unless the workers are struck down, beaten senseless, and shot like packs of howling, hungry wolves.
And those who produce everything, yet have neither bread nor shelter, are beginning to feel that every human being ought to have a place at the banquet of abundance.
This growth of human societies can no more be stopped than an adult man can be forced back into his cradle.
The world had its early childhood lulled by legends, then its chivalrous youth, and here it is at adulthood, already preparing the nest for the races to come.
Distinct individualities are taking shape: humanity, in which all beings live and teem, is at once one and manifold.
Strange and bold figures pass by, joining the new idea with the archetypes of old.
If, alas, there are human octopuses for whom the blood of the entire world would not suffice—finance, power, asininity, cowardice, monsters crawling in our humus, requiring no less than whole crowds to crush them—we also have fakirs casting their lives away like pouring out a cup, some for the idea, others for science, but all for the great triumph.
After its struggles, the race, determined to live, will gather on the liberated soil.
The stars attract one another to orbit together in stellar space: so too will humans, freely, take their place in groups.
Free, conscious, enlightened labor will yield fertile harvests where desert fields now lie.
The force of storms and chasms, wielded like a tool, will crush rocks and carve passages through mountains to make a single human paradise out of both hemispheres.
Submarine vessels exploring the ocean floor will uncover lost continents: and Atlantis, perhaps, will appear to us dead beneath its shroud of waves, lying pale amidst cyclopean ruins festooned with gigantic corals and seaweeds.
Electricity will carry aerial ships over the polar ice to witness six-month nights under the red fringe of polar auroras.
How many things lie ahead when one looks forward—things so immense that when one considers them, it becomes impossible to care about one’s own wretched self!
When thinking of these things, personal vanities will be far behind!
Everyone will live harmless and happy within the whole of humanity, helping to multiply infinitely force, thought, and life.
Chapter 8
The ideas that germinated in our shadow are now shooting forth their flame; everywhere, under their true light, we see the things that darkness made vague and deceptive.
Here they are in real life—the ideas of Liberty, Equality, and Justice, so long posted on the walls of prisons.
We admire the works of a gathering of scholars, artists, and workers; we have admired the monuments upon which generations of human beings have labored.
Ideas catch fire, blaze, stirred and fertilized by the struggle; the heart expands, life multiplies.
Burning breezes sweep over the gathered crowds; it grips you, transfigures you, throws you into the current rushing toward the revolutionary ocean, toward the crucible where even the mire radiates like the sun.
Individual men count for little in this cataclysm; progress alone survives it—just, implacable progress, which batters down the old reefs.
What parcel of land is not covered with blood? What law in the cursed net does not serve as a noose to strangle us?…
Nothing is worth keeping.
You have seen the plowman turn the furrows to sow the new wheat: so will all human strata be turned over, as if to bury within them, like old stubble, every social iniquity.
It must be done!
For whom, then, would discoveries and sciences be—for whom would machines be, if not to create happiness for all while multiplying multiplying life-giving forces?
What is the use of an appreciation for the arts if it is to be stifled among the multitudes, and cultivated only at great expense in a few vain artists?
All possess the same senses, except that the races that have overindulged have brains even more arid than those left uncultivated.
Wait until a quarter of a century has passed over the race, until it has evolved in the full light of freedom: the difference between the intellectual growth of that era and that of the present will be such as the common crowd, imbued with governing nonsense, cannot currently grasp.
Neither the States—whose last rags, soaked in the blood of the humble, we see fluttering in the storm—nor the lies of geography, race, species, or sex—none of these foolish notions will remain.
Every character, every intelligence will find its place.
The struggles for existence being over, science having regenerated the world, no one will ever again be human cattle or a proletarian.
And woman, whose life until now has been nothing but a hell?…
Let that hell depart as well, along with the hollow dreams of mystical hells!
Each individual living in all humankind; all living in each individual, and above all, living forward—always forward where the idea blazes, in that vast peace, so far, so far that the infinity of progress will appear to all in the cycle of perpetual transformations.
Thus it is that before returning to the crucible, every human being, in a few years, in a few days, will possess eternity.
Last Thoughts
Plunging into the past, one sees it join the future like two ends of a circular arc, and this circle, like sound waves, calls forth others to infinity.
Scattered across the world (from ancient India to our own time), will lost sciences germinate, or have they died in the flower?
Must we wait for new currents, for other beginnings? Will it suffice to turn over the soil to give the seeds of renewal the conditions proper to existence?
How many civilizations have foundered, how many scientific hypotheses have tumbled before other hypotheses!
Yet let us push on, on forever! Do we not have what it takes to extinguish the struggle for life? What it takes to replace the anxiety of empty stomachs and general misery with general well-being?
Besides, with minds becoming more ravenous than ever, the New Era must shine forth to satisfy them.
If the love of humanity is powerless to strike the liberating hour on the Clock of Brotherhood—that hour when crime will no longer have a place—indignation will take charge.
Hatred is pure as steel, strong as the axe; and if love is sterile, long live hatred!
Memories of New Caledonia
Here winter holds no sway,
Here the woods are ever green;
Off the Ocean, the cool breeze
Blows over the desolate hills,
And so profound is the silence
That only the swaying insect
Disturbs the stillness of the air.
At evening, on these distant shores,
A soft song sometimes swells:
’Tis poor shellfish
Murmuring as they open wide.
In the forest, the oleanders,
The flowers newly blown,
Shiver with love beneath the wind.
See, from the waves up to the stars,
Those wandering whitenesses appear!
Fleets sail under full canvas
In the immense depths.
In the night lit by worlds,
See rising from the bosom of the waves
Those phosphorescent gleams!
Come as a savior, swift-sailing ship,
To hoist the captive to your deck!
Here, in irons he expires:
The penal colony is worse than death.
In our hearts hope lives on,
And if we see France once more,
It will be to fight again!
Here comes the universal struggle:
In the air hovers Liberty!
To battle we are called
By the cry of the dispossessed!…
…The dawn has chased away the heavy shadow,
And the New World arises
On the blood-red horizon!