Fear stamps the faces of the young men of the new generation, who appear to be anxious only about their health, and who, unable to digest except by the help of mineral waters and camomile, open their mouths only to criticise and to disparage; who praise nothing, like nothing, want nothing, as if they had fishes’ blood in their veins. Why all this trouble to preserve and keep themselves, for all the good that they get out of or contribute to life? Could youth set less value than it does upon life? The recent suicide of a schoolboy at Lyons added a fresh paragraph--the most terrible of all--to the indictment of the _Déracinés_, the Uprooted ones, against an education which ignores the facts of family, race, locality, and country. Before going to his death the poor lad wrote on the blackboard, “I am young, I am pure, and I am going to die.” The teaching of his professor of philosophy had disgusted him with life. What had they taught him? The beauty of pure reason, of science, of humanitarianism. Instead of being told to take his proper place in the order of things, he was called upon to destroy all in order to rebuild all again, to make a clean slate of the past, of tradition, of the destiny which had caused him to be born in a particular country at a particular date, in order to create a new personality for himself, a new universe, a new God. Besides preparing for his material future they expected of him, as of all Frenchmen, that he should create for himself a metaphysics, a politics, and a morality. He succumbed to all these burdens. Life did not appear to him in a shape with exact outlines, with beautiful lights and dark shadows, with the concomitants of effort, joy, and sorrow, with a splendour of created things, with privileges of working, of feeling behind one a past that one may carry forward, and of being able to count even on the future. It was for him a dense fog, which his reason vainly tried to pierce, in which he heard the call neither of God, of race, nor of country. He did not see his own importance, which was not merely individual but collective, he did not understand that everyone’s duty is to recognise one’s own place, that everyone’s strength and profit are to be sought in the realities of existence on which he depends and which in their turn depend on him. And so he learned a new fear of living. These modern young men have sisters. I will not venture to describe them. A Persian proverb warns us “not to strike a woman, even with a flower.” But the poets, who have every license, even against love, have taken on themselves the task of painting the portrait. Who does not recall the “Lines to a Dead Woman”? “Yes, good she was--if ’twere enough That as she passed her hand would give, Without God seeing, saying aught, If gold without kind words be alms. “She thought--if a melodious voice, A soft and sweet, but empty sound, Like to the murmur of a stream, Be token of the thought behind.