It was the first day of the New Year. Between two showers Monsieur Bergeret and his daughter Pauline wended their way along the streets still covered with fresh golden mud, to wish the compliments of the season to a maternal aunt of Monsieur Bergeret’s who still survived, but lived alone, if living it could be called, in a little Beguine’s cell which stood in a kitchen garden, amid the sound of convent bells. Pauline was happy without a reason simply because holidays such as these, which marked the flight of time, made her the more conscious of the delightful progress of her young life.

On this solemn day Monsieur Bergeret still observed his customary indulgence, no longer expecting much good from his fellow-creatures or from life itself, but knowing, like Monsieur Fagon, that one must forgive nature a great deal. All along the road beggars of every description, standing upright like candlesticks, or spread out like temporary altars, formed the decorations of this social fÊte. They had all come to help to adorn the bourgeois quarters, all our poor unfortunates, lame, halt and blind; crooks, tramps, pickpockets, malingerers, rogues, and hardened ruffians. Yielding, however, to the general tendency to obliterate individual character, and to conform with the universal mediocrity of manners, they did not expose to view horrible malformations and ghastly sores as in the days of the great CoËsre. They did not bind their mutilated limbs with blood-stained rags; they were modest and affected only endurable infirmities. One of them hobbled nimbly after Monsieur Bergeret for some considerable distance. Then he stopped and took up his position once more like a lamp-post on the edge of the pavement. After which Monsieur Bergeret remarked to his daughter:

“I have just committed a wicked action; I have given alms. In giving a couple of sous to Monsieur Hobbler I tasted the shameful joy of humiliating my fellow-man. I was a partner to the odious pact that gives power to the strong and leaves the weak in their weakness. I have sealed with my own seal the injustice of ages and contributed my share to depriving this man of one half of his soul.”

“You’ve done all that, papa?” asked Pauline incredulously.

“Almost all that,” replied Monsieur Bergeret. “I have sold fraternity to my brother Hobbler, using false weights, and in humiliating him I have brought humiliation on myself, for almsgiving degrades both him who gives and him who takes. I have done wrong.”

“I don’t think so,” said Pauline.

“You don’t think so,” replied Monsieur Bergeret, “because you have no philosophy and are incapable of tracing from an apparently innocent action the stupendous consequences which it bears within itself. This fellow induced me to offer him alms. I could not resist the importunity of his whining appeal. I pitied his bare thin neck, the knees of his trousers, which, baggy from too long wear, bear such a depressing resemblance to the knees of a camel, and his feet, on which his shoes were gaping at the toes like a couple of ducks. Seducer! Dangerous Hobbler! Through you my sous have produced their little share of baseness and shame. Through you I have created with ten centimes a little ugliness and evil. In handing you that tiny token of wealth and power, I have ironically made you a capitalist, and invited you, an unhonoured guest, to the banquet of society, the feast of civilization. And as I did it I felt that I was one of the mighty of this world as compared with you, a rich man compared with you, my gentle Hobbler, exquisite mendicant and flatterer. I rejoiced and was proud, exulting in my opulence and my greatness. O Hobbler, live for ever! Pulcher hymnus divitiarum pauper immortalis.

“An abominable practice, that of almsgiving! A barbarous pity, that of charity! An ancient error, that of the well-to-do who give a penny and think they are performing a good deed, who believe they have fulfilled their whole duty to their fellow-man by means of the most miserable, awkward, ridiculous, senseless and mean action which could possibly be committed with a view to a better distribution of wealth. This habit of almsgiving is contrary to beneficence and abhorrent to charity.”

“Really?” said Pauline good-humouredly.

“Almsgiving,” went on Monsieur Bergeret, “is no more to be compared to beneficence than a monkey’s grimace to the smile of the Joconda. Beneficence is as ingenious as almsgiving is inept. It is vigilant, and proportions its efforts to the need. That is precisely what I did not do with regard to brother Hobbler. The very name of beneficence evoked the most beautiful ideas in the sensitive minds of the century of the philosophers. It used to be believed that the name was first created by the good AbbÉ de Saint-Pierre, but it is older still, and can be found in the old Balzac. In the sixteenth century men said bÉnÉficence, not bienfaisance, but it is the same word. I must admit that I do not find its pristine beauty in the word bienfaisance; for me it has been spoiled by the Pharisees who have made too free a use of it. We have many charitable institutions in our country, pawn-shops, provident societies, mutual aid and insurance societies. Some of these are useful and do good service. But their common defect is that they proceed to aggravate the very social iniquity which they are intended to correct; they are poisonous remedies. Universal beneficence would have every one living by his own labours and not on the labours of others. Everything but fair exchange and solidarity is vile and shameful and unfruitful. Human charity is the co-operation of all in the production and division of the fruits of labour.

“Charity is justice; it is love, and the poor are more skilled in it than the rich. What rich man has ever practised human charity as fully as Epictetus or BenoÎt Malon? True charity is the gift of each man’s work to all; it is a beautiful kindness; it is the harmonious gesture of the soul which bows itself like a vase of precious ointment, pouring forth its benefits. It is Michael Angelo painting the Sistine Chapel, or the deputies in the National Assembly on the night of the 4th of August. It is giving, in all its happy completeness; it is money poured forth together with love and thought. We have nothing that belongs to us alone but ourselves; we truly give only when we give our work, our minds, our genius. And this splendid offering of one’s whole self to all men enriches the giver as much as the community.”

“But,” objected Pauline, “you could not give love and beauty to Hobbler, so you gave him what was most convenient to him.”

“It is true that Hobbler has become a mere animal. Of all the good things that gratify man, he cares only for alcohol. I conclude as much from the fact that as he came towards me he reeked of brandy. But, such as he is, he is our work. Our pride fathered and our sin mothered him; he is the evil fruit of our vices. Every man in the world should both give and receive. He has not given enough, doubtless because he has not received enough.”

“He may be lazy,” said Pauline. “Mon Dieu, how can we do away with poverty and weakness and idleness! Don’t you believe that men are naturally good and that it is society that makes them wicked?”

“No, I don’t believe that men are naturally good,” replied Monsieur Bergeret. “What I see is that they are emerging painfully and very slowly from their primitive barbarism, and that with great effort they are organizing a justice that is uncertain and a charity that is precarious. The time is yet far distant when they will be kind and gentle to one another. The time is yet far distant when they will not war upon one another, and when pictures representing battle scenes will be hidden away as affording an immoral and shameful spectacle. I believe that the reign of violence will last a long time yet, that for many years to come the nations will rend one another asunder for trivial reasons; that for many years to come the people of the same country will desperately snatch from one another the common necessaries of life, instead of equitably dividing them. But I also believe that men are least ferocious when they are least wretched, that in the long run the progress of industry will produce a certain softening of manners. A botanist has assured me that if a hawthorn be transplanted from a stony to a fruitful soil its thorns will change into flowers.”

“There you are! You are an optimist, papa; I knew you were!” cried Pauline, stopping short for a moment in the middle of the pavement to gaze at her father with her dawn-grey eyes, full of gentle radiance and morning coolness. “You are an optimist. You are working with a cheerful heart to build the house of the future. That is good! It is a fine thing to build the New Republic with men of good will.” Monsieur Bergeret smiled at the hopeful words and youthful eyes.

“Yes,” he said, “it would be fine to lay the foundations for the new society, where each man would receive the just price of his labour.”

“It will happen, won’t it? But when?” asked Pauline innocently.

“Do not ask me to prophesy, my child,” answered Monsieur Bergeret sadly and gently. “It is not without reason that the ancients considered the power of piercing the future as the most fatal gift that could be bestowed upon man. If it were possible for us to see what is to come, there would be nothing left for us but to die; or perhaps we should fall stricken to death by grief or terror. We must work at the future like weavers who work at their tapestries without seeing what they accomplish.”

Thus conversing, the father and daughter proceeded on their way. In front of the square in the Rue de SÈvres they met a solitary beggar standing motionless on the pavement.

“I’ve no more change,” said Monsieur Bergeret. “Can you lend me a couple of sous, Pauline? That outstretched hand bars my way. If it were in the Place de la Concorde it would still bar my way. The outstretched hand of a beggar is a barrier that I cannot pass. It is a weakness that I cannot overcome. Give the man something. It’s pardonable. We must not let ourselves exaggerate the harm we do.”

“Papa, I’d like to know what you will do with Hobbler in your Republic. You can’t imagine he will live on the fruits of his labour?”

“My daughter,” said Monsieur Bergeret, “I think he will consent to disappear. He is already greatly diminished. Idleness and a passion for rest are urging him toward final elimination. He will return to oblivion easily.”

“I believe, on the other hand, that he thoroughly enjoys being alive.”

“True, he has his joys. No doubt he delights in swallowing the vitriol of the dram-shop. He will disappear altogether with the last drinking house. There will be no publicans in my Republic, no buyers and no sellers, no rich and no poor, and each will enjoy the fruits of his labours.”

“We all shall be happy, papa.”

“No; for without suffering the sacred flame of pity which makes for the beauty of the soul would perish. But that will never be. Moral and physical evil, incessantly opposed, will share with happiness and delight the empire of the earth, as day will follow night. Evil is necessary; like good, it has its roots deep in human nature, and the one cannot perish without the other. Suffering is the twin sister of joy, and as they breathe upon the chords of our being they cause them to vibrate harmoniously. The breath of happiness alone would produce but a dull and tedious sound, like silence. But the artificial ills arising out of social conditions will no longer be added to those that are inevitable, commonplace and august, which arise out of our human state. Men will no longer be deformed by iniquitous labours by which they die rather than live. The slave will come out of his cell and the factory will no longer devour the bodies of millions.

“And I anticipate that this delivery will come from machinery itself; the engine that has mangled so many men will come gently and generously to the aid of suffering human flesh. Cruel and hard to begin with, machinery will become kind, favourable and friendly. How can it change its soul? Listen. The spark that flashed from the Leyden jar, the little subtle star that revealed itself in the last century to the wonder-stricken philosopher, will accomplish this miracle. The Unknown which has allowed itself to be conquered without revealing its nature, the mysterious captive force, the intangible, seized by human hands, the obedient lightning, bottled and distributed over the innumerable wires that cover the face of the earth with their network—electricity will yield up its energy, will give its help wherever it is needed: in the houses, the rooms, the homes where father, mother, and children will henceforth never be separated. This is no dream. The cruel machine that crushes soul and body in the factory will become domestic, intimate and familiar. But it is useless, quite useless for the pulleys, wheels, connecting-rods, cranks, bearings and flywheels to become humanized if men themselves remain iron-hearted.

“We are waiting for and appealing to a yet more wonderful change. The day will come when the employer, growing in moral beauty, will become a worker among the liberated workers; when there will be no more wages, but only an exchange in kind. The great manufacturers, like the old nobility, whose place they have taken and whom they are imitating, will go through their 4th of August. They will abandon their disputed profits and threatened privileges. They will become generous when they feel that it is time to be so.

“What says the employer of to-day? That he is the mind and the thought, and that without him his army of workers would be like a body deprived of understanding. Well, if that be true, let him content himself with so much joy and honour. Because a man is thought and soul must he therefore gorge himself with riches? When the great Donatello and his companions designed a bronze statue it was he who was the soul of the creation. He placed the price paid for the work by the prince and the citizens in a basket which hung from a pulley fixed to one of the rafters of the studio, and each of his companions untied the rope and took from the basket what he needed. Is not the joy of creative intelligence enough, and does such an advantage exempt the master worker from sharing the gain with his humble collaborators? But in my Republic there will be no gain, no wages, and all will belong to each.”

“Papa, that’s collectivism,” said Pauline quietly.

“The most precious gifts,” replied Monsieur Bergeret, “are common to all men and have always been so. Air and light are the common property of all that breathes and sees the light of day. After the secular labours of egoism and avarice, in spite of the violent efforts of individuals to seize and keep wealth, the individual possessions enjoyed by the wealthiest among us are little when compared with those that belong without distinction to mankind in general. And even in our society do you not notice that the most beautiful and splendid possessions, such as roads, rivers, forests, which were once royal, libraries and museums, belong to all? Not a single rich man has a greater claim than I to an old oak-tree at Fontainebleau or a picture in the Louvre. And they are more mine than the rich man’s if I can appreciate them better. Collective property, dreaded like some remote monster, is already among us in a thousand familiar forms. When prophesied, it alarms, in spite of the fact that we already enjoy many of the advantages which it affords.

“The Positivists who meet in the house of Auguste Comte, under the leadership of the venerable Monsieur Pierre Laffitte, are in no hurry to become Socialists. But one of them made the judicious remark that all property springs from a social source. Nothing could be truer, for all property acquired by individual effort was created, and subsists, only by the co-operation of the whole community. And since private property springs from a social source we neither forget its origin nor corrupt its essence if we offer it to the community and entrust it to the State upon which it necessarily depends. And what is the State?”

Mademoiselle Bergeret hastened to answer that question:

“The State, papa, is a wretched cross-grained person sitting behind a counter-rail. You must see that no one will want to strip himself naked for such as he.”

“I understand,” said Monsieur Bergeret with a smile. “I have always tried to understand, and in so doing I have wasted much precious energy. I am discovering late in life that not to understand is a great faculty. It sometimes helps you to the conquest of the world. If Napoleon had been as intelligent as Spinoza he would have lived in a garret and written four books. I understand. But to return to this wretched cross-grained man behind the counter-rail, you trust your letters to him, Pauline, letters that you would not trust to the Tricoche Agency. He manages a portion of your property, not the least in extent or in value. He looks gloomy to you, but when he becomes everything he will cease to be anything, or rather he will only be ourselves. Annihilated by his universality, he will cease to appear tiresome. One is no longer wicked, my daughter, when one ceases to exist. What makes him unpleasant to-day is that he encroaches on individual property, that he goes along filing and scratching, taking a little bite from the fat and a big bite from the thin. That makes him unbearable. He is greedy; he is needy. In my Republic he will be without desires, like the gods. He will have all and nothing. We shall not notice him because he will be like ourselves, indistinguishable from ourselves; will be as though he didn’t exist. And when you say that I sacrifice the individual to the State, the living man to an abstraction, I am, on the contrary, subordinating the abstraction to reality, to the State which I suppress, by identifying it with the activities of the whole social organism.

“Even were my Republic never to exist I should be glad that I had played with this idea of it. It is permissible to build in Utopia. And Auguste Comte himself, who flattered himself that he built only on the data of positive science, placed Campanella in the calendar of great men.

“The dreams of philosophers have in all ages raised up men of action who have set to work to realize those dreams. Our thought creates the future. Statesmen work on the plans which we leave behind us. No, my child, I am not building in Utopia. My dream, which in no way belongs to me, but is, at this very moment, the dream of thousands upon thousands of souls, is true and prophetic. All societies whose organs no longer correspond to the functions for which they were created, and whose members are not recompensed according to the useful work which they accomplish, die. Deep-rooted disturbances and inward disorder precede and proclaim their end.

“Feudal society was strongly constituted. When the clergy ceased to represent learning, and the nobility to defend the labourer and artisan by the sword, and these two orders became merely swollen and dangerous members, the whole body perished. An unexpected and necessary revolution carried off the patriot. Who can maintain that in modern society the organs correspond with their functions and that all the members are nourished in proportion to the useful work which they perform? Who can maintain that there is a fair distribution of wealth? Who, I say, can believe in the permanence of unrighteousness?”

“And how can we put an end to it, papa? How can we change the world?”

“By the force of speech, my child. Nothing is more powerful than speech. The linking of powerful arguments and noble thoughts forms a chain that nothing can break. Speech, like the sling of David, lays low the violent and causes the mighty to fall. It is an invincible weapon, without which the world would belong to armed brutes. What keeps them in abeyance? Merely thought, naked and weaponless.

“I shall not see the new State. All changes in the social order, as in the natural order, are slow and almost imperceptible. A geologist of profound understanding, Charles Lyell by name, demonstrated that those fearful traces of the glacial period, those monstrous rocks carried into the valleys, the flora and the furry beasts of cold countries succeeding to the flora and fauna of hot countries, those apparent tokens of cataclysmic upheaval, were in reality only the effect of prolonged and multiple action, and that those great changes, produced with the merciful deliberation of natural forces, were not even suspected by the innumerable generations of living creatures that existed during their accomplishment. Social transformations operate in the same way, insensibly and incessantly. The timid man fears, as he would a future cataclysm, a change which began before he was born, which is going on before his unconscious eyes, and which will become noticeable only in a century’s time.”