"The common people also believed it, and every employer could bring his employés to the feet of the new masters, the poor creatures imagining that their arms were about to bring them in millions. It was a sort of fever, a universal mania. I sought men, I found only machines. I talked of the fatherland and honor, they replied by discussing sulphur and silk weaving. I went away disheartened, but uncertain, not daring to censure too severely what I had seen, and saying to myself that it was not for me, ignorant and uncivilized as I was, to pass judgment upon the new resources which these mysterious discoveries were going to create for my country. "But since then, great heaven! I have seen the result of these fine promises so far as the common people are concerned! I have seen some shrewd fellows restore their own fortunes by ruining their friends and paying court to the ruling powers. I have seen many families of petty tradespeople attain great wealth; but I have seen honorable men persecuted more and more; I have seen, especially, and I see now every day, more beggars and more poor wretches without bread, without homes, without education, without a future. And I ask myself what good you have done with your new ideas, your progress, your theories of equality! You despise the past, you spit upon the old abuses, and you have killed the future by creating new abuses more monstrous than the old. The best among you, the young men, are on the alert for the revolutionary doctrines of nations more advanced than ours. You consider yourselves highly enlightened, very strong, when you can say: 'No more nobles, no more priests, no more convents, no more of anything connected with the past!' And you do not see that you no longer have the poesy, the faith and the pride which gave life to the past. "Let us see!" added the Capuchin, folding his arms over his heaving breast, and eyeing Michel with a half fatherly, half bullying, air: "you are a very young man, a child! You consider yourself very clever, because you know what people say and think in society at this moment. You look at this stupid monk, who passes the day breaking rock in order to set out an extra row of peppers or tomatoes on the lava next year, and you say: "'That's a strange way for a man to pass his life! And yet this man was neither lazy nor dull. He might have been a lawyer or a tradesman, and have earned money like other men. He might have married, had children, and taught them to hold their own in society. He preferred to bury himself alive in a convent and beg! It is because he is under the influence of the past, and has always been the dupe of the old chimeras and old superstitions of his country!'