“Glance at those men to whom our words are addressed. You know that they are crushed with fatigue and privation. They have experienced every danger and every sort of weariness. By what right will you hinder them from taking refuge in a world which is henceforth the least contestable of their domains? Do not, on their account, be afraid of reverie; it could never fill them with as much bitterness as does this modern reality of which you are the unpunished builders. “If you are not weary of glimpsing your future through the specifications, the account-books, the cage-bars, and the unbreathable fumes of industrialism, at least allow these to cherish a marvelous and, in spite of all its disappointments, an efficacious future. It is not a question of forgetting life,--that is too beautiful and too desirable, but rather of amplifying and fertilizing it. Whatever may be the outcome of a generous dream, it always ennobles the man who has entertained it. Allow the unhappy to be rich in a possession that costs them only love and simple faith. Do not let your reason dispossess them of the only treasure that your greed has not been able to snatch from them. It is the cult of the future and of memory that sustains man in the uncertainty of the present hour. If he walks by instinct towards these refuges, do not turn him aside, and think, O priests of reason, of the warning of Pascal: ‘It is on the knowledge of the heart and of the instincts that Reason has to lean, and establish there the whole of her discourse’.” X I have seen thousands of men suffer and die. Every day I see new ones enter the somber arena and struggle. My part is to help them in this torment, to assure them aid and hope. I have a wide experience of these things now and I know that men are never denied a future, even when life is on the point of betraying them. Philosophers and poets, led astray by religion or by a mystical passion for death, have given the severe counsel that we should never conceal from the dying the approach of their annihilation. It is a theoretical view of charity, an artificial, mischievous doctrine that does not stand the test, that should not be put to the test. Its partisans suspect falsehood where there is only pity and modesty, for it is not the part of man to be so proud of his own judgment as to take away from someone with the certitude of life that fabulous future which is more precious than life itself.