and terror leading the
voter to the ballot-box as a malefactor to the prison; I put these
aside; I assume (I repeat) genuine universal suffrage, free, pure,
real; universal suffrage controlling itself, as it ought to do;
newspapers in everybody's hands, men and facts questioned and sifted,
placards covering the walls, speech everywhere, enlightenment
everywhere! Very good! to universal suffrage of this sort submit peace
and war, the strength of the army, the public credit, the budget, the
public aid, the penalty of death, the irremovability of judges, the
indissolubility of marriages, divorce, the civil and political status
of women, free education, the constitution of the commune, the rights
of labour, the payment of the clergy, free trade, railways, the
currency, colonisation, the fiscal code,--all the problems, the
solution of which does not involve its own abdication--for universal
suffrage may do everything except abdicate; submit these things to it
and it will solve them, not without error, perhaps, but with the grand
total of certitude that appertains to human sovereignty; it will solve
them masterfully. Now, put to it the question whether John or Peter did
well or ill in stealing an apple from an orchard. At that, it halts; it
is at fault. Why? Is it because this question is on a lower plane? No:
it is because it is on a higher plane. All that constitutes the proper
organization of societies, whether you consider them as territory,
commune, state, as country, every political, financial, social matter,
depends on universal suffrage and obeys it; the smallest atom of the
smallest moral question defies it.

The ship is at the mercy of the ocean, the star is not.

It has been said of M. Leverrier and of yourself, Monsieur Bonaparte,
that you were the only two men who believed in your star. You do, in
fact, believe in your star; you look for it above your head. Well, that
star which you seek outside of yourself, other men have within
themselves. It shines beneath the vaulted roof of their brain, it
enlightens and guides them, it shows them the true outlines of life; it
exhibits to them, in the obscurity of human destiny, good and evil, the
just and the unjust, the real and the false, ignominy and honour,
honesty and knavery, virtue and crime. This star, without which the
human soul is but darkness, is moral truth.

Wanting this light, you have deceived yourself. Your ballot of the 20th
of December is, in the eyes