It has been said that a city whose members enjoy an equal division of goods and education will present to the gaze of the Divinity a spectacle surpassing the spectacle of the city of our fathers. The madness of the moment tends to achieve the unity of peoples and to make but one man of the whole race: well and good; but, in acquiring general faculties, will not a whole series of private sentiments perish? Good-bye to the delights of the home; good-bye to the charms of the family: among all those beings, white, yellow and black, reputed as your fellow-countrymen, you would not be able to throw yourself on a brother's neck! Was there nothing in the life of old, nothing in that limited space upon which you looked out from your ivy-framed casement? Beyond your horizon, you suspected the existence of unknown lands of which the bird of passage, the only traveller that you had seen in autumn, scarce spoke to you. It was happiness to think that the hills which surrounded you would not disappear from before your eyes; that they contained your friendships and your loves; that the moaning of the night around your dwelling would be the only sound to which you would fall asleep; that never would your soul's solitude be disturbed; that you would always meet there the thoughts that await you to resume their familiar intercourse with you. You knew where you were born, you knew where your tomb lay; as you entered the forest, you were able to say: Beaux arbres qui m'avez vu naître, Bientôt vous me verrez mourir[433]! Man does not need to travel in order to grow greater: he carries immensity with him. The accents that escape from your bosom are not measured, they find an echo in thousands of souls: he who has not that melody within himself will ask it in vain of the universe. Sit down on the trunk of the tree felled in the depths of the wood: if in your profound forgetfulness of self, in your immobility, in your silence you do not find the infinite, it is useless for you to wander on the banks of the Ganges.