bylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, Rome, beneath the fearful gusts which
emerge from all the mouths of the shadows. But shadows are there, and
light is here. We are not acquainted with the maladies of these ancient
civilizations, we do not know the infirmities of our own. Everywhere
upon it we have the right of light, we contemplate its beauties, we
lay bare its defects. Where it is ill, we probe; and the sickness once
diagnosed, the study of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy.
Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is its law and its
prodigy; it is worth the trouble of saving. It will be saved. It is
already much to have solaced it; its enlightenment is yet another point.
All the labors of modern social philosophies must converge towards
this point. The thinker of to-day has a great duty--to auscultate
civilization.

We repeat, that this auscultation brings encouragement; it is by this
persistence in encouragement that we wish to conclude these pages, an
austere interlude in a mournful drama. Beneath the social mortality, we
feel human imperishableness. The globe does not perish, because it has
these wounds, craters, eruptions, sulphur pits, here and there, nor
because of a volcano which ejects its pus. The maladies of the people do
not kill man.

And yet, any one who follows the course of social clinics shakes his
head at times. The strongest, the tenderest, the most logical have their
hours of weakness.

Will the future arrive? It seems as though we might almost put
this question, when we behold so much terrible darkness. Melancholy
face-to-face encounter of selfish and wretched. On the part of
the selfish, the prejudices, shadows of costly education, appetite
increasing through intoxication, a giddiness of prosperity which dulls,
a fear of suffering which, in some, goes as far as an aversion for the
suffering, an implacable satisfaction, the I so swollen that it bars the
soul; on the side of the wretched covetousness, envy, hatred of seeing
others enjoy, the profound impulses of the human beast towards assuaging
its desires, hearts full of mist, sadness, need, fatality, impure and
simple ignorance.

Shall we continue to raise our eyes to heaven? is the luminous point
which we distinguish there one of those which vanish? The ideal
is frightful to behold, thus lost in the depths, small, isolated,
imperceptible, brilliant, but surrounded by those great, black menaces,
monstrously heaped around it