Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK SEVENTH SLANG CHAPTER IV THE TWO DUTIES TO WATCH AND TO HOPE

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This being the case, is all social danger dispelled? Certainly not. There is no
Jacquerie; society may rest assured on that point; blood will no longer rush to its head.
But let society take heed to the manner in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be
feared, but phthisis is there. Social phthisis is called misery.
One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck by lightning.
Let us not weary of repeating, and sympathetic souls must not forget that this is the
first of fraternal obligations, and selfish hearts must understand that the first of
political necessities consists in thinking first of all of the disinherited and sorrowing
throngs, in solacing, airing, enlightening, loving them, in enlarging their horizon to a
magnificent extent, in lavishing upon them education in every form, in offering them the
example of labor, never the example of idleness, in diminishing the individual burden by
enlarging the notion of the universal aim, in setting a limit to poverty without setting a
limit to wealth, in creating vast fields of public and popular activity, in having, like
Briareus, a hundred hands to extend in all directions to the oppressed and the feeble, in
employing the collective power for that grand duty of opening workshops for all arms,
schools for all aptitudes, and laboratories for all degrees of intelligence, in augmenting
salaries, diminishing trouble, balancing what should be and what is, that is to say, in
proportioning enjoyment to effort and a glut to need; in a word, in evolving from the
social apparatus more light and more comfort for the benefit of those who suffer and those
who are ignorant.
And, let us say it, all this is but the beginning. The true question is this: labor
cannot be a law without being a right.
We will not insist upon this point; this is not the proper place for that.
If nature calls itself Providence, society should call itself foresight.
Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material improvement. To
know is a sacrament, to think is the prime necessity, truth is nourishment as well as
grain. A reason which fasts from science and wisdom grows thin. Let us enter equal
complaint against stomachs and minds which do not eat. If there is anything more
heart-breaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from
hunger for the light.
The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution. Some day we shall be amazed.
As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers emerge naturally from the zone of
distress. The obliteration of misery will be accomplished by a simple elevation of level.
We should do wrong were we to doubt this blessed consummation.
The past is very strong, it is true, at the present moment. It censures. This
rejuvenation of a corpse is surprising. Behold, it is walking and advancing. It seems a
victor; this dead body is a conqueror. He arrives with his legions, superstitions, with
his sword, despotism, with his banner, ignorance; a while ago, he won ten battles. He
advances, he threatens, he laughs, he is at our doors. Let us not despair, on our side.
Let us sell the field on which Hannibal is encamped.
What have we to fear, we who believe?
No such thing as a back-flow of ideas exists any more than there exists a return of a
river on its course.
But let those who do not desire a future reflect on this matter. When they say
"no" to progress, it is not the future but themselves that they are condemning.
They are giving themselves a sad malady; they are inoculating themselves with the past.
There is but one way of rejecting To-morrow, and that is to die.
Now, no death, that of the body as late as possible, that of the soul never,--this is
what we desire.
Yes, the enigma will utter its word, the sphinx will speak, the problem will be solved.
Yes, the people, sketched out by the eighteenth century, will be finished by the
nineteenth. He who doubts this is an idiot! The future blossoming, the near blossoming
forth of universal well-being, is a divinely fatal phenomenon.
Immense combined propulsions direct human affairs and conduct them within a given time
to a logical state, that is to say, to a state of equilibrium; that is to say, to equity.
A force composed of earth and heaven results from humanity and governs it; this force is a
worker of miracles; marvellous issues are no more difficult to it than extraordinary
vicissitudes. Aided by science, which comes from one man, and by the event, which comes
from another, it is not greatly alarmed by these contradictions in the attitude of
problems, which seem impossibilities to the vulgar herd. It is no less skilful at causing
a solution to spring forth from the reconciliation of ideas, than a lesson from the
reconciliation of facts, and we may expect anything from that mysterious power of
progress, which brought the Orient and the Occident face to face one fine day, in the
depths of a sepulchre, and made the imaums converse with Bonaparte in the interior of the
Great Pyramid.
In the meantime, let there be no halt, no hesitation, no pause in the grandiose onward
march of minds. Social philosophy consists essentially in science and peace. Its object
is, and its result must be, to dissolve wrath by the study of antagonisms. It examines, it
scrutinizes, it analyzes; then it puts together once more, it proceeds by means of
reduction, discarding all hatred.
More than once, a society has been seen to give way before the wind which is let loose
upon mankind; history is full of the shipwrecks of nations and empires; manners, customs,
laws, religions,--and some fine day that unknown force, the hurricane, passes by and bears
them all away. The civilizations of India, of Chaldea, of Persia, of Syria, of Egypt, have
disappeared one after the other. Why? We know not. What are the causes of these disasters?
We do not know. Could these societies have been saved? Was it their fault? Did they
persist in the fatal vice which destroyed them? What is the amount of suicide in these
terrible deaths of a nation and a race? Questions to which there exists no reply. Darkness
enwraps condemned civilizations. They sprung a leak, then they sank. We have nothing more
to say; and it is with a sort of terror that we look on, at the bottom of that sea which
is called the past, behind those colossal waves, at the shipwreck of those immense
vessels, Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, Rome, beneath the fearful gusts which emerge
from all the mouths of the shadows. But shadows are there, and light is here. We are not
acquainted with the maladies of these ancient civilizations, we do not know the
infirmities of our own. Everywhere upon it we have the right of light, we contemplate its
beauties, we lay bare its defects. Where it is ill, we probe; and the sickness once
diagnosed, the study of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy. Our civilization,
the work of twenty centuries, is its law and its prodigy; it is worth the trouble of
saving. It will be saved. It is already much to have solaced it; its enlightenment is yet
another point. All the labors of modern social philosophies must converge towards this
point. The thinker of to-day has a great duty-- to auscultate civilization.
We repeat, that this auscultation brings encouragement; it is by this persistence in
encouragement that we wish to conclude these pages, an austere interlude in a mournful
drama. Beneath the social mortality, we feel human imperishableness. The globe does not
perish, because it has these wounds, craters, eruptions, sulphur pits, here and there, nor
because of a volcano which ejects its pus. The maladies of the people do not kill man.
And yet, any one who follows the course of social clinics shakes his head at times. The
strongest, the tenderest, the most logical have their hours of weakness.
Will the future arrive? It seems as though we might almost put this question, when we
behold so much terrible darkness. Melancholy face-to-face encounter of selfish and
wretched. On the part of the selfish, the prejudices, shadows of costly education,
appetite increasing through intoxication, a giddiness of prosperity which dulls, a fear of
suffering which, in some, goes as far as an aversion for the suffering, an implacable
satisfaction, the I so swollen that it bars the soul; on the side of the wretched
covetousness, envy, hatred of seeing others enjoy, the profound impulses of the human
beast towards assuaging its desires, hearts full of mist, sadness, need, fatality, impure
and simple ignorance.
Shall we continue to raise our eyes to heaven? Is the luminous point which we
distinguish there one of those which vanish? The ideal is frightful to behold, thus lost
in the depths, small,isolated, imperceptible, brilliant, but surrounded by those great,
black menaces, monstrously heaped around it; yet no more in danger than a star in the maw
of the clouds.

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15. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK FIFTH THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING CHAPTER IV A HEART BENEATH A STONE
16. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK SEVENTH SLANG CHAPTER IV THE TWO DUTIES TO WATCH AND TO HOPE
17. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK SEVENTH SLANG CHAPTER III SLANG WHICH WEEPS AND SLANG WHICH LAUGHS
18. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK SEVENTH SLANG CHAPTER II ROOTS
19. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK SEVENTH SLANG CHAPTER I ORIGIN
20. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK EIGHTH ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS CHAPTER IV A CAB RUNS IN ENGLISH AND BARKS IN SLANG
21. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK TENTH THE 5TH OF JUNE 1832 CHAPTER IV THE EBULLITIONS OF FORMER DAYS
22. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK ELEVENTH THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE CHAPTER IV THE CHILD IS AMAZED AT THE OLD MAN
23. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK TWELFTH CORINTHE CHAPTER VIII MANY INTERROGATION POINTS WITH REGARD TO A CERTAIN LE CABUC WHOSE NAME MAY NOT HAVE BEEN LE CABUC
24. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK TWELFTH CORINTHE CHAPTER VII THE MAN RECRUITED IN THE RUE DES BILLETTES
25. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK TWELFTH CORINTHE CHAPTER VI WAITING
26. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK TWELFTH CORINTHE CHAPTER V PREPARATIONS
27. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK TWELFTH CORINTHE CHAPTER IV AN ATTEMPT TO CONSOLE THE WIDOW HUCHELOUP
28. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK TWELFTH CORINTHE CHAPTER III NIGHT BEGINS TO DESCEND UPON GRANTAIRE
29. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK TWELFTH CORINTHE CHAPTER II PRELIMINARY GAYETIES
30. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK TWELFTH CORINTHE CHAPTER I HISTORY OF CORINTHE FROM ITS FOUNDATION
31. Les Miserables Volume 4 Marius BOOK FOURTEENTH THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR CHAPTER IV THE BARREL OF POWDER