espairing, in every place
where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of
the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm
him, the book of Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: "Open to
me, I come for you."

At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which
is still so sombre, the miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all
climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

Your Italy is no more exempt from the evil than is our France. Your
admirable Italy has all miseries on the face of it. Does not banditism,
that raging form of pauperism, inhabit your mountains? Few nations are
more deeply eaten by that ulcer of convents which I have endeavored to
fathom. In spite of your possessing Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Turin,
Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Venice, a
heroic history, sublime ruins, magnificent ruins, and superb cities,
you are, like ourselves, poor. You are covered with marvels and vermin.
Assuredly, the sun of Italy is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky
does not prevent rags on man.

Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies, fanaticisms,
blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs. You taste nothing of
the present nor of the future without a flavor of the past being mingled
with it. You have a barbarian, the monk, and a savage, the lazzarone.
The social question is the same for you as for us. There are a few less
deaths from hunger with you, and a few more from fever; your social
hygiene is not much better than ours; shadows, which are Protestant in
England, are Catholic in Italy; but, under different names, the vescovo
is identical with the bishop, and it always means night, and of pretty
nearly the same quality. To explain the Bible badly amounts to the same
thing as to understand the Gospel badly.

Is it necessary to emphasize this? Must this melancholy parallelism
be yet more completely verified? Have you not indigent persons? Glance
below. Have you not parasites? Glance up. Does not that hideous balance,
whose two scales, pauperism and parasitism, so mournfully preserve their
mutual equilibrium, oscillate before you as it does before us? Where
is your army of schoolmasters, the only army which civilization
acknowledges?

Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to
read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public
schools of your bar