Poor childish minds, hearts deficient in courage, all the suffering and humble ones, brutified by bondage and misery, become an easy prey for forgers and liars, for those who batten upon public credulity. And ever since the beginning of time every Church and Empire and Monarchy in the world has only reigned over the multitude by poisoning it, after robbing and maintaining it in the terror and slavery of false beliefs. But if the people had been poisoned so easily it must have been because it possessed no power of resistance. Poison, moral poison, acts particularly on the ignorant, on those who know nothing, those who are incapable of criticising, examining, and reasoning. Thus, beneath all the anguish, iniquity, and shame, one found ignorance--ignorance, the first and the only cause of mankind's long Calvary, its slow and laborious ascent towards the light through all the filth and the crimes of history. And assuredly, if nations were to be freed, one must go to the root of things--that root of ignorance; for once again it had been demonstrated that an ignorant people could not practise equity, that truth alone could endow it with the power of dispensing justice. At that point of his reflections Marc felt very much astonished. How came it that the mentality of the masses was no higher than that of mere savages? Had not the Republic reigned for thirty years, and had not its founders shown themselves conscious of the necessities of the times by basing the state edifice on scholastic laws, restoring the elementary schools to honour and strength, and decreeing that education thenceforth should be gratuitous, compulsory, and secular? They must have fancied at that time that the good work was virtually done, that a real democracy, delivered from old-time errors and falsehoods, would at last sprout from the soil of France. But thirty years had elapsed, and any forward step that might be achieved seemed to be cancelled by the slightest public disturbance. The people of to-day relapsed into the brutish degradation, the dementia of the people of yesterday, amidst a sudden return of ancestral darkness. What had happened then? What covert resistance, what subterranean force was it that had thus paralysed the immense efforts which had been attempted to extricate all the humble and suffering ones from their slavery and obscurity? As Marc put this question to himself he at once saw the enemy arise--the enemy, the creator of ignorance and death, the Roman Catholic Church.