If you wish to inspire a man of the people with good-feeling, calm, and a love of the truth, prevail on him to perform a charitable act. Get him to comfort or to relieve some one, even though you undertake to compensate him for so doing. When you meet with a hasty or passionate man, do not adopt the ill-timed and absurd method of arguing with him. Is he capable of understanding you? He is drunk with rage, and such intoxication is more terrible and brutifying than that with wine. In attempting to argue with him, you are like the woman who sermonizes her husband on his return home with his reason drowned in liquor. Rather take the man, and induce him to undertake an act of charity. Talk to him about humanity, get him to help a fellow-creature, and after that you will hardly recognize him as the same individual. That act of generosity will transform him; will raise him in his own eyes, will give him holy joys, will draw him toward God, will reconcile him to himself and to humanity. God be praised for having brought down charity to our earth! It blesses him who receives, and him who bestows it. {95} The people are specially capable of appreciating disinterestedness, the spirit of self-devotion. It is their element, and constitutes the largest share of their happiness. But latterly they have been treated harshly and cruelly. Wants, aspirations, and desires have been fostered in them which can never be gratified, and their life has been poisoned thereby. Much has been said about ameliorating their condition. So far well; but that amelioration has been made to consist, in a great measure, of material enjoyments, of more to eat and drink: in fact, of feasting. In former times they lived on rye bread and were not unhappy. Now they have wheaten bread, and meat with it, and even coffee; yet they complain and are not content. A want should not be created among the people, unless there is a certainty of its being amply and always provided for. The people, however, are not always won over through their appetites; they prefer being led by the nobler instincts of the human heart. They like what is grand, what is costly, and what is obtained by great sacrifices. They have not, in any degree, the _bourgeois_ tastes, the _bourgeois_ petty calculations, the _bourgeois_ love of little comforts. {96} They are much more disinterested than is thought. We must not attempt to gain them over by their material interests solely: that would be to ruin them and ourselves also; but, allowing them a due share of such inducements, we should rely mainly on their generosity and devotedness; for the people really admire great actions, great achievements, and the great characters who bear sway over the destinies of mankind. They entertain a species of worship for them; they refuse them no sacrifice. They attach themselves to their good or evil fortune, and with them they are always popular, always abiding.