VI
The economists, whose science the war has so often tested, are laboring to define what will be the conditions of life in the period that will follow the world war; their estimates leave little room for the hope of an agreeable and easy material existence; they hold over the mass of men, conquered and conquerors alike, the menace of desperate labor and slight and wretched returns.
These learned researches, added to the similar conclusions of common sense, do not seem to discourage the laborious race of men. They have been told they must work, and even now, while they are struggling against a hundred fearful perils, they are mentally preparing to earn their difficult living, if only the war does not take away their lives.
The modern industrial monster sets these conditions in advance. We already know that competition will be pitiless, we know too that enjoyment will only be for the highest bidder. Individuals, at the sight of this future, mutually urge one another to be stubborn. The world is preparing to take up again, obstinately, the old order that has cost it so many trials. As yet no one speaks of a new life.
There will be so many voices to praise these desperate resolutions, so many books will be written to persuade men to persevere in their old hatreds that a timid voice may well raise itself to protest against the consummation of the error.
A man whom I love and esteem above all others once said to me:
“When peace is signed and I return home, I shall have to give up all the distractions I used to have if I wish to work as much as will be necessary to recover a situation as good as the one I had before.”
Believe me, O my friend who said these words to me, I love work too well to blame your decision; but I was thinking only of your happiness, and it was of your situation that you spoke to me. Are you sure that they are rightly related, those two words, those two ideas? What do you hope from the future if you are not going to allow a large place in it to the soul?
What compensation will be left for our passion of today if we take up all our prejudices again, if we return to our own vomit?
The old civilization seems condemned. To break with it, we must first of all seek our individual satisfaction outside money, our happiness outside the whirlpool of pleasure. We must flee deliberately from the tyranny of luxury. In this way even the events of the present oblige us to seek our true path. Must we keep blindly and obstinately to the ways of slavery? We have slighted the best sources of interest, joy and wealth; shall we misprize them now that they remain the only fresh and faithful things in the aridity of our time? Shall we neglect our souls again to seek a false fortune that can only betray us? Shall we contend with exasperated brutes over possessions we know to be unstable and deceptive?
No! No! Here should lie the lesson and the one benefit of this war: that we should undeceive ourselves about ourselves and about our ends! Let us not devote our courage to choosing a ferocious discipline devoid of the ideal. Let us once for all reject our calculating and demoralizing intelligence. Let us organize, in the peace that returns, the reign of the heart.