discreetness.
Nevertheless, after breakfast, he did take Madame de la Chanterie apart
and told her that he should be absent for some days.

"That is good, my child," replied Madame de la Chanterie; "try to do
honor to your godfather, who has answered for you to his brothers."

Godefroid bade adieu to the three remaining brethren, who made him an
affectionate bow, by which they seemed to bless his entrance upon a
painful career.

ASSOCIATION, one of the greatest social forces, and that which made the
Europe of the middle-ages, rests on principles which, since 1792, no
longer exist in France, where the Individual has now triumphed over the
State. Association requires, in the first place, a self-devotion that is
not understood in our day; also a guileless faith which is contrary to
the spirit of the nation, and lastly, a discipline against which men in
these days revolt and which the Catholic religion alone can enforce. The
moment an association is formed among us, each member, returning to his
own home from an assembly where noble sentiments have been proclaimed,
thinks of making his own bed out of that collective devotion, that union
of forces, and of milking to his own profit the common cow, which, not
being able to supply so many individual demands, dies exhausted.

Who knows how many generous sentiments were blasted, how many fruitful
germs may have perished, lost to the nation through the infamous
deceptions of the French Carbonari, the patriotic subscriptions to the
Champ d'Asile, and other political deceptions which ought to have been
grand and noble dramas, and proved to be the farces and the melodramas
of police courts. It is the same with industrial association as it is
with political association. Love of self is substituted for the love
of collective bodies. The corporations and the Hanse leagues of the
middle-ages, _to which we shall some day return_, are still impossible.
Consequently, the only societies which actually exist are those of
religious bodies, against whom a heavy war is being made at this moment;
for the natural tendency of sick persons is to quarrel with remedies
and often with physicians. France ignores self-abnegation. Therefore,
no association can live except through religious sentiment; the only
sentiment that quells the rebellions of mind, the calculations of
ambition, and greeds of all kinds. The seekers of better worlds ignore
the fact that ASSOCIATION has such worlds to offer.

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