The son of peasants, who has emerged from the people yet has always remained a peasant, has too keen a sense of injustice not to be a democrat; and how many young men has he not taught to emancipate themselves by knowledge? But above all he is proud of being a Frenchman; his mind, so lucid, so logical, which has never gone abroad in search of its own inspirations, and has never been influenced by any but those old French masters, François Dufour and Réaumur, and the old French classics, has always felt an instinctive repugnance, which it has never been able to overcome, for all those ideas which some are surreptitiously seeking to put forward in our midst in favour of some foreign trade-mark. Although his visit to the court of Napoleon III left him with a rather sympathetic idea of the Emperor, whose gentle, dreamy appearance he still likes to recall, he detested the Empire and the "brigand's trick" which established it. On the day of the proclamation of the Republic he was seen in the streets of Avignon in company with some of his pupils. He was agreeably surprised at the turn events had taken, and delighted by the unforeseen result of the war. A spirit as proud and independent as his was naturally the enemy of any species of servitude. State socialism of the equalitarian and communistic kind was to him no less horrifying. Was not Nature at hand, always to remind him of her eternal lessons? "Equality, a magnificent political label, but scarcely more! Where is it, this equality? In our societies shall we find even two persons exactly equal in vigour, health, intelligence, capacity for work, foresight, and so many other gifts which are the great factors of prosperity?...A single note does not make a harmony: we must have dissimilar notes; discords even, which, by their harshness, give value to the concords; human societies are harmonious only thus, by the concourse of dissimilarities." (15/14.) And what a puerile Utopia, what a disappointing illusion is that of communism! Let us see under what conditions, at the price of what sacrifices, nature here and there realizes it. Among the bees "twenty thousand renounce maternity and devote themselves to celibacy to raise the prodigious family of a single mother." Among the ants, the wasps, the termites "thousands and thousands remain incomplete and become humble auxiliaries of a few who are sexually gifted."