“La folie d’hier est la sagesse de demain” has been said so long, and accepted so long, that there is no tracing it to its origin; and yet we go on diligently disregarding it, seizing every fresh occasion to “kick against the pricks,” quite as if the stupidity of the practice had not been demonstrated a thousand times over, quite as if the stones rejected by the builders had never become the heads of the corners, and the first had never been last, and the last first.
“Vieux soldats de plomb que nous sommes, Au cordeau nous alignant tous, Si de nos rangs sortent des hommes, Tous nous crions: A bas les fous! On les persécute, on les tue, Sauf, après un long examen, A leur dresser une statue Pour la gloire du genre humain.”[143]
“If we came from a globe where there was some semblance of rule and order,” says Georges Clemenceau, “the spectacle of our planet would appear to us a pure abomination.” In the interests of clearness, M. Clemenceau has exaggerated, perhaps. Nevertheless, there is an element of truth in what he says. Our society is abundantly open to criticism; and that we chance to be inimical to panaceas and suspicious of Utopias is no valid reason for calling the black of our society white, and blandly treating its absurdities, illogicalities, injustices, and cruelties as infallibilities and amenities. Because the reformer commits the folly of dogmatising in one direction does not excuse us for committing the counter-folly of dogmatising in another. Suppose we hold with Omar that
“the first Morning of Creation wrote What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read,”
and suppose we are prone to take at the letter these lines of Walt Whitman,—
“There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now,”—
is it, therefore, necessary for us to shut our eyes to the most obvious facts of the present and to all possibilities for the future?
When Victor Barrucand, a few years ago, put forward his scheme for free bread (“le pain gratuit”), he was not treated as a visionary in any important quarter. The semi-bourgeois journals showed themselves, in several instances, rather friendly; and the opposition he encountered from the straight bourgeois press was of quite a different sort from that which is evoked by a preposterous proposition. M. Clemenceau, one of the few radicals who has never for a moment lost his balance, supported him warmly.