I say to myself, then, "Who is this God? Is he a vain _notion_, which has no effect on the thoughts and acts of man, his creature; who inspires nothing in him; who gives him no commands; who imposes nothing upon him; who does not reward, and who does not punish?--No! God is not a mere _notion_, an idea, an evidence;--God is a _law_,--the living law, the supreme law, the universal law, the eternal law. Because God is a law on high, he is a duty on the earth; and when man says, 'I believe in God,' he says, at the same time, 'I believe in my duty towards God,--I believe in my duty towards man.' God is a government!" And what are these duties? They are of three sorts:-- _Duty towards God_,--that is to say, the duty of developing, as much as possible, my intelligence and my reason, to arrive at the purest idea and the highest worship of the Supreme Being, by whom and for whom all is, all exists:--_Religion_. _Private Duties_,--that is to say, the exact and tender discharge of all sentiments to which form has been given, either in written or unwritten laws, which bind me to those, to whom, in the order of nature, I hold most closely,--the nearest to myself in the human group--father, mother, brothers, sisters, wife, children, friends, neighbors:--_the Family_. _Collective Duties_,--that is to say, devotions, even to the sacrifice of myself, even to death, to the progress, the well-being, the preservation, the amelioration of this great human family, of which my family, and my country, are only parts; and of which I myself am only a miserable and vanishing fraction, a leaf of a summer, which vegetates and withers on a branch of the immense trunk of the human race:--_Society_. Let us speak to-day only of these last duties,--because, now we are occupied with politics alone. V. God, when one believes in Him as you and I do, imposes then on man a duty towards the society of which he makes a part. You admit it, do you not? Then follow, and analyze with me this society. Of whom, and how, is it composed? It is composed, at the same time, of strong and weak, conquerors and conquered, victors and vanquished, oppressors and oppressed, masters and slaves, nobles and serfs, of citizens and bondmen or subjects disinherited and enslaved, considered as living furniture, as tools and laughing-stocks to their fellow-men, as were the Blacks in our colonies before the Republic.