We must strive to make our stunned humanity realize that happiness does not consist in travelling at the rate of sixty miles an hour, rising up into the air on a machine or talking under the ocean, but above all else in being rich in beautiful thoughts, contented with its work, honored with warm affections.
We must restore the cult of the arts which contribute to the purification of the soul, which are consoling in times of affliction and remain, by their nature, incapable of serving ignoble ends.
We must employ our strength to altering the meaning of the words “riches,” “possessions,” “authority,” to showing that they are things of the soul and that the material acceptance of these terms corresponds to realities that are perfidious and ironical. We must at the same time transform the ideas of benevolence and ambition, open a new career to these virtues, create for them new ends and new satisfactions. Those who consider such a program with irony or scepticism make a great mistake. Its realization may seem illusory, but it will undoubtedly become a necessity. The material goods at the disposal of humanity will find themselves considerably reduced both by the destruction of which they have been the object and by the long arrest of the production of them.
Their rarity and their growing expensiveness will be the source of grave and almost insoluble conflicts, which new effusions of blood will only make more venomous.
Humanity can hurl against this terrible future a defiance full of grandeur. It can, under the influence of its spiritual masters, seek its happiness in a wise and passionate transformation of its desires.
Let us not urge it toward resignation but toward the conquest of the true riches, those that assure it the moral possession of the world.
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.