French fiction -- 20th century; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
But Kings are not exclusively the uniformed ones among the trumpery
wares of the courts. Assuredly, the nations who have a King have more
tradition and subjection than the others. But there are countries
where no man can get up and say, "My people, my army," nations which
only experience the continuation of the kingly tradition in more
peaceful intensity. There are others with the great figures of
democratic leaders; but as long as the entirety of things is not
overthrown--always the entirety, the sacred entirety--these men cannot
achieve the impossible, and sooner or later their too-beautiful
inclinations will be isolated and misunderstood. In the formidable
urgency of progress, what do the proportions matter to you of the
elements which make up the old order of things in the world? All the
governors cling fatally together among themselves, and more solidly
than you think, through the old machine of chancelleries, ministries,
diplomacy, and the ceremonials with gilded swords; and when they are
bent on making war for themselves there is an unquenchable likeness
between them all, of which you want no more. Break the chain; suppress
all privileges, and say at last, "Let, there be equality."
One man is as good as another. That means that no man carries within
himself any privilege which puts him above the universal law. It means
an equality in principle, and that does not invalidate the legitimacy
of the differences due to work, to talent, and to moral sense. The
leveling only affects the rights of the citizen; and not the man as a
whole. You do not create the living being; you do not fashion the
living clay, as God did in the Bible; you make regulations. Individual
worth, on which some pretend to rely, is relative and unstable, and no
one is a judge of it. In a well-organized entirety, it cultivates and
improves itself automatically. But that magnificent anarchy cannot, at
the inception of the human Charter, take the place of the obviousness
of equality.
The poor man, the proletarian, is nobler than another, but not more
sacred. In truth, all workers and all honest men are as good as each
other. But the poor, the exploited, are fifteen hundred millions here
on earth. They are the Law because they are the Number. The moral law
is only the imperative preparation of the common good. It always
involves, in different forms, the necessary limitations of some
individual interests by the rest; that is to say, the sacrifice of one
to the many, of the many to the whole. The republican conception is
the civic translation of the moral law; what is anti-republican is
immoral.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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