Here three questions: To construct what? To construct where? To construct how? We reply: To construct the people. To construct the people according to the laws of progress. To construct the people according to the laws of light. CHAPTER II. To work for the people,--that is the great and urgent necessity. The human mind--an important thing to say at this minute--has a greater need of the ideal even than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live. Now, do you wish to realize the difference? Animals exist, man lives. To live, is to understand. To live, is to smile at the present, to look toward posterity over the wall. To live, is to have in one's self a balance, and to weigh in it the good and the evil. To live, is to have justice, truth, reason, devotion, probity, sincerity, common-sense, right, and duty nailed to the heart. To live, is to know what one is worth, what one can do and should do. Life is conscience. Cato would not rise before Ptolemy. Cato lived. Literature is the secretion of civilization, poetry of the ideal. That is why literature is one of the wants of societies. That is why poetry is a hunger of the soul. That is why poets are the first instructors of the people. That is why Shakespeare must be translated in France. That is why Molière must be translated in England. That is why comments must be made on them. That is why there must be a vast public literary domain. That is why all poets, all philosophers, all thinkers, all the producers of the greatness of the mind must be translated, commented on, published, printed, reprinted, stereotyped, distributed, explained, recited, spread abroad, given to all, given cheaply, given at cost price, given for nothing. Poetry evolves heroism. M. Royer-Collard, that original and ironical friend of routine, was, taken all in all, a wise and noble spirit Some one we know heard him say one day, "Spartacus is a poet." That wonderful and consoling Ezekiel--the tragic revealer of progress--has all kinds of singular passages full of a profound meaning: "The voice said to me: Fill the palm of thy hand with red-hot coals, and spread them on the city." And elsewhere: "The spirit having gone into them, everywhere where the spirit went, they went" And again: "A hand was stretched towards me. It held a roll which was a book. The voice said to me: Eat this roll. I opened the lips and I ate the book. And it was sweet in my mouth as honey." To eat the book is a strange and striking image,--the whole formula of perfectibility, which above is knowledge, and below, teaching. We have just said, "Literature is the secretion of civilization." Do you doubt it? Open the first statistics you come across.