to-morrow if I do not go. To wait for your death--good God! would
not that be to desire it? You must still live long years, and I wish to
live like you."

There came another pause, then Mathieu and Marianne replied together:
"Go then, my boy. You are right, one must live."

But on the day of farewell, what a wrench, what a final pang there was
when they had to tear themselves from that flesh of their flesh, all
that remained to them, in order to hand over to life the supreme gift
it demanded! The departure of Nicolas seemed to begin afresh; again
came the "never more" of the migratory child taking wing, given to the
passing wind for the sowing of unknown distant lands, far beyond the
frontiers.

"Never more!" cried Mathieu in tears.

And Marianne repeated in a great sob which rose from the very depths of
her being: "Never more! Never more!"

There was now no longer any mere question of increasing a family, of
building up the country afresh, of re-peopling France for the struggles
of the future, the question was one of the expansion of humanity, of the
reclaiming of deserts, of the peopling of the entire earth. After one's
country came the earth; after one's family, one's nation, and then
mankind. And what an invading flight, what a sudden outlook upon the
world's immensity! All the freshness of the oceans, all the perfumes
of virgin continents, blended in a mighty gust like a breeze from the
offing. Scarcely fifteen hundred million souls are to-day scattered
through the few cultivated patches of the globe, and is that not indeed
paltry, when the globe, ploughed from end to end, might nourish ten
times that number? What narrowness of mind there is in seeking to limit
mankind to its present figure, in admitting simply the continuance of
exchanges among nations, and of capitals dying where they stand--as
Babylon, Nineveh, and Memphis died--while other queens of the earth
arise, inherit, and flourish amid fresh forms of civilization, and this
without population ever more increasing! Such a theory is deadly, for
nothing remains stationary: whatever ceases to increase decreases and
disappears. Life is the rising tide whose waves daily continue the work
of creation, and perfect the work of awaited happiness, which shall come
when the times are accomplished. The flux and reflux of nations are but
periods of the forward march: the great centuries of light, which dark
ages at times replace, simply mark the phases of that mar