While I was arguing thus, M. de Lamennais[435], behind the bolts of his gaol, was attacking the same systems with his logical power, which is enlightened by the brilliancy of the poet. A passage borrowed from his pamphlet entitled, _Du Passé et de l'avenir du peuple_[436] will complete my arguments; listen to him, it is he now who speaks: "Of those who put before them this object of strict, absolute equality, the most consistent, in order to establish it and maintain it, agree upon the use of force, despotism, dictatorship, under one form or another. "The partisans of absolute equality are, at the out-set, compelled to attack the natural inequalities, in order to extenuate and, if possible, destroy them. Unable to affect the primary conditions of organization and development, their work begins at the moment when man is born or when the child leaves its mother's womb. The State then seizes upon it: behold it the absolute master of the spiritual as of the organic being. Mind and conscience, all depends upon the State, all is subject to the State. No more family, no more paternity, no more marriage henceforth; a male, a female, children whom the State handles, with which it does as it pleases, morally, physically: an universal servitude and so profound that nothing escapes it, that it penetrates to the very soul. "Where material things are concerned, equality can never be established in ever so little a lasting manner by a simple partition. If it be a question of land only, one can understand that it can be divided into as many portions as there are individuals; but, as the number of individuals varies perpetually, it would also be necessary perpetually to vary that primitive division. All individual property being abolished, there is no lawful owner except the State. This mode of ownership, if it be voluntary, is that of the monk bound down by his vows to poverty as to obedience; if it be not voluntary, it is that of the slave, where nothing modifies the harshness of his condition. All human ties, sympathetic relations, mutual devotion, exchange of services, free gift of self, all that constitutes the charm of life and its greatness, all, all has disappeared, disappeared for ever. "The methods hitherto proposed to solve the problem of the future of the people end in the negation of all the indispensable conditions of existence, destroy, either directly or by implication, duty, right, the family and would produce, if they could be applied to society, instead of the liberty in which all real progress is summarized, only a servitude with which history, however far we go back into the past, can offer nothing to compare." There is nothing to be added to this logic. [Sidenote: The Abbé de Lamennais.]