[7] $2,316,000.
All at once the Bongards, the Doloirs, the Savins, the Milhommes seemed to appear before him; he could hear them stammering the paltry excuses that came from cowardly hearts and poisoned minds, seeking refuge in ignorance and fear-fraught egotism. They represented France, the scared, brutified masses, handed over to prejudice and clerical imbecility. To rot the people more quickly anti-Semitism had been invented, that revival of religious hate by which too it was hoped to win over even unbelievers who had deserted the Church. But to hurl the people against the Jews and to exploit its ancestral passions was only a beginning; at the end lay a return to slavery, a plunge into darkness and ancient bondage. And to-morrow there would be Bongards, Doloirs, Savins, and Milhommes of a still lower type, more stupefied, more steeped in darkness and falsehood than those of to-day, if the children should still be left in the hands of the Brothers and the Jesuits, on the forms of the many Congregational schools.
It would not be sufficient to close those schools; it was also necessary to purify the Communal schools, which the stealthy work of the Church had ended by affecting, paralysing secular education, and installing reactionary masters and mistresses among the teachers, who by their lessons and their examples perpetuated error. For one man like Férou, so intelligent and brave, even if maddened by misery, for one woman like Mademoiselle Mazeline, all heart and reason, how many disturbingly worthless ones there were—how many, too, who were badly disposed, who went over to the enemy and did the greatest harm! There were Mademoiselle Rouzaires, who from ambition sided with the stronger party and carried their interested clericalism to excess; there were Mignots drifting, allowing themselves to be impelled hither and thither by those around them; there were Doutrequins, honest old Republicans, who had become anti-Semites and reactionaries from an error of patriotism; and behind all these appeared the entire elementary staff of the country, disturbed, spoilt, losing its way, and liable to lead the children confided to it, the generations of which the future would be compounded, to the bottomless pit. Marc felt a chill at his heart as he thought of it. Never before had the peril threatening the nation seemed to him so imminent and so redoubtable.
It was certain that the elementary schools would prove the battle-ground of the social contest; for the one real question was to decide what education should be given to those masses which, little by little, would assuredly dispossess the middle class of its usurped power. Victorious over the expiring nobility in 1789, the bourgeoisie had replaced it, and for a whole century it had kept possession of the entire spoils, refusing to the masses their equitable share. At present the rôle of the bourgeoisie was finished; it acknowledged it, by going over to reaction, desperate as it felt at the idea of having to part with power, terrified by the rise of the democracy which was certain to dispossess it. Voltairean when it had thought itself in full and peaceful enjoyment of its conquests, clerical now that in its anxious need it found it had to summon reaction to its help, it was worn out, rotted by abuse of power, and the ever advancing social forces would eliminate it from the system. The energy of to-morrow would be found in the masses, in them slumbered humanity's huge reserve force of intelligence and will. Marc's only hope now was in those children of the people who frequented the elementary schools from one to the other end of France. They constituted the raw material out of which the future nation would be fashioned, and it was necessary to educate them in such wise that they might discharge their duty as freed citizens, possessed of knowledge and will power, released from all the absurd dogmas, errors, and superstitions which destroy human liberty and dignity.
No happiness was possible, whether moral or material, save in the possession of knowledge. The view inspired by the Gospel dictum, 'Happy the poor in spirit,'[8] had held mankind in a quagmire of wretchedness and bondage for ages. No, no! The poor in spirit are perforce mere cattle, fit flesh for slavery and for suffering. As long as there shall be a multitude of the poor in spirit, so will there be a multitude of wretched beings, mere beasts of burden, exploited, preyed upon by an infinitesimal minority of thieves and bandits. The happy people will one day be that which is possessed of knowledge and will. It is from the black pessimism based on sundry passages of the Bible that the world must be delivered—the world, terrified, crushed down for more than two thousand years, living solely for the sake of death. Nothing could be more dangerous than to take the old Semite doctrine as the only moral and social code. Happy, on the contrary, are those who know—happy the intelligent, the men of will and action, for the kingdom of the world shall belong to them! That was the cry which now arose to Marc's lips, from his whole being, in a great transport of faith and enthusiasm.
[8] This is how the French render the well-known words of the Sermon on the Mount, as given in Matthew v. 2. It will be remembered that in Luke vi. 20, only the word 'poor' is given, 'in spirit' being omitted. I must confess that I do not know what the 'higher criticism' has to say of this inconsistency, and I am not learned enough to express an opinion of any value on the Greek texts.—Trans.
And all at once he arrived at a decision: he would accept Salvan's offer, he would come to Maillebois as elementary master, and he would contend against the Church, against that contamination of the people, of which he had witnessed one of the delirious fits at the ridiculous ceremony held that afternoon. He would work for the liberation of the humble, he would strive to make them free citizens. To win back those masses whom he saw weighed down by ignorance and falsehood, incapable of justice, he would go to the children and to the children's children, instruct them, and, little by little, create a people of truth who, then alone, would become a people of justice. That was the loftiest duty, the most pressing good work, that on which depended the country's very salvation, its strength and glory in its liberating and justice-bringing mission through the ages and through the other nations. And if, after three days' hesitation and anguish at the idea of imperilling the happiness he enjoyed in Geneviève's arms, a moment had sufficed for Marc to arrive at that weighty decision, was it not that he had also found himself confronted by the serious problem of the position of woman, whom the Church had turned into a mere stupefied serf, an instrument of falsity and destruction?
What would they become as wives and mothers, those little girls whom Mademoiselle Rouzaire now led to the Capuchins? When the Church had seized them and held them by their senses, their weakness, and their sufferings, it would never release them; it would employ them as terrible engines of warfare, to demolish men and pervert children. So long as woman, in her ancient contest with man, with respect to unjust laws and iniquitous moral customs, should thus remain the property and the weapon of the Church, social happiness would remain impossible, war would be perpetuated between the disunited sexes. And woman would only at last be a free creature, a free companion for man, disposing of herself and of her happiness for the happiness of her husband and her child, on the day when she should cease to belong to the priest, her present master—he who disorganised and corrupted her.
With respect to Marc himself, was it not an unacknowledged fear, the dread of some drama, which might ravage his own household, that had made him tremble and recoil from the prospect of doing his duty? The sudden decision he had taken might mean a struggle at his own hearth, the necessity of doing his duty to those of his own home, even though his heart might bleed cruelly the while. He knew that now; thus there was some heroism in the course he chose with all simplicity, with all enthusiasm for the good, work which he hoped to prosecute. The highest rôle and the noblest in a nascent democracy is that of the poor and scorned elementary schoolmaster, appointed to teach the humble, to train them to be happy citizens, the builders of the future City of Justice and Peace. Marc felt it was so, and he suddenly realised the exact sense of his mission, his apostleship of Truth, that fervent passion to acquire Truth, certain and positive, then cry it aloud and teach it to all, which had ever possessed him.
Raising his eyes to the railway station, the young man suddenly perceived that it was past four o'clock. The train which he and his wife were to have taken had gone, and it would be necessary to wait till six, when the next one started. Almost immediately afterwards he saw Geneviève approaching, looking much distressed, and carrying little Louise in her arms in order to get over the ground more rapidly. 'Ah! my friend, you must forgive me, I quite forgot the time,' she exclaimed. 'Grandmother detained me, and seemed so annoyed by my impatience to join you that I ended by no longer noticing how time slipped by.'