rings wrath like a mournful
smoke.--"What do these people want? What have they come there to do?
Let them get out of the scrape. So much the worse for them. It is their
fault. They are only getting what they deserve. It does not concern
us. Here is our poor street all riddled with balls. They are a pack of
rascals. Above all things, don't open the door."--And the house assumes
the air of a tomb. The insurgent is in the death-throes in front of
that house; he sees the grape-shot and naked swords drawing near; if
he cries, he knows that they are listening to him, and that no one will
come; there stand walls which might protect him, there are men who might
save him; and these walls have ears of flesh, and these men have bowels
of stone.

Whom shall he reproach?

No one and every one.

The incomplete times in which we live.

It is always at its own risk and peril that Utopia is converted into
revolution, and from philosophical protest becomes an armed protest, and
from Minerva turns to Pallas.

The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes revolt knows what awaits
it; it almost always comes too soon. Then it becomes resigned, and
stoically accepts catastrophe in lieu of triumph. It serves those who
deny it without complaint, even excusing them, and even disculpates
them, and its magnanimity consists in consenting to abandonment. It is
indomitable in the face of obstacles and gentle towards ingratitude.

Is this ingratitude, however?

Yes, from the point of view of the human race.

No, from the point of view of the individual.

Progress is man's mode of existence. The general life of the human race
is called Progress, the collective stride of the human race is called
Progress. Progress advances; it makes the great human and terrestrial
journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has its halting
places where it rallies the laggard troop, it has its stations where it
meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly unveiled
on its horizon, it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one of the
poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the
human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken
that slumbering Progress.

"God is dead, perhaps," said Gerard de Nerval one day to the writer of
these lines, confounding progress with God, and taking the interruption
of movement for the death of Being.

He who despairs is in the wrong. Progress infallibly awakes,