In 1840 certain mechanics of the Faubourg St. Antoine, weary, as they put it, of being hoodwinked by journalists and of serving as tools for the ambition of ready speech-makers, resolved to found and to edit a journal of pure radicalism and of logic apart from evasion or circumlocution. They combined therefore and deliberated for the firm establishment of their doctrines; they took as their basis the republican device of liberty, equality and the rest. But liberty seemed to them incompatible with the duty of labour, equality with the law of property, and they therefore decided on communism. One of them, however, pointed out that in communism the sharpest would preside over the division and would get the lion’s share; it was decreed thereupon that no one should have the right to intellectual superiority. But it was further remarked that even physical beauty might constitute an aristocracy, so they decreed that there should be an equality in ugliness. Finally, as those who till the ground are yoked to the ground, it was settled that true communists could not follow agriculture, must have only the world for their fatherland and humanity itself for their family, whence it became them to have recourse to caravans and go round the world eternally. We are not relating a parable, we have known those who were present at the convention in question and we have read the first number of their journal, which was entitled _The Humanitarian_ and was suppressed in 1841. As to this, the press reports of the period may be consulted. Had the journal continued and had the incipient sect recruited proselytes for the Icarian emigration, as the old attorney Cabet was doing at the same period, a new race of Bohemians would have been organised, and vagabondage would have counted one race the more. CHAPTER III LEGEND AND HISTORY OF RAYMUND LULLY We have explained that the Church proscribed initiation because it was indignant at the profanations of the Gnosis. When Mohammed armed eastern fanaticism against faith he opposed savage and warlike credulity to the piety which is ignorant but which prays. His successors set foot in Europe and threatened to overrun it speedily. The Christians said: Providence is chastising us; and the Moslems answered: Fatality is on our side.