To Right belong the inviolability of human life, liberty, peace; and nothing that is indissoluble, irrevocable, or irreparable.  To Law belong the scaffold, sword, and sceptre; war itself; and every kind of yoke, from divorceless marriage in the family to the state of siege in the city.  Right is to come and go, buy, sell, exchange; Law has its frontiers and its custom-houses.  Right would have free and compulsory education, without encroaching on young consciences; that is to say, lay instruction; Law would have the teaching of ignorant friars.  Right demands liberty of belief, but Law establishes the state religions.  Universal suffrage and universal jury belong to Right, but restricted franchise and packed juries are creatures of the Law.

What a difference there is!  And let it be understood that all social agitation arises from the persistence of Right against the obstinacy of Law.  The keynote of the present writer’s public life has been “Pro jure contra legem"—­for the Right which makes men, against the Law which men have made.  He believes that liberty is the highest expression of Right, and that the republican formula, “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” leaves nothing to be added or to be taken away.  For Liberty is Right, Equality is Fact, and Fraternity is Duty.  The whole of man is there.  We are brothers in our life, equal in birth and death, free in soul.

II.—­Days of Childhood

At the beginning of this nineteenth century there was a child who lived in a great house, surrounded by a large garden, in the most deserted part of Paris.  He lived with his mother, two brothers, and a venerable and worthy priest, who was his only tutor, and taught him much Latin, a little Greek, and no history at all.  Here, at the time of the First Empire, the three boys played and worked, watched the clouds and trees and listened to the birds, under the sweet influence of their mother’s smile.

It was the child’s misfortune, though no one’s fault, that he was taught by a priest.  What can be more terrible than a system of untruth, sincerely believed?  For a priest teaches falsehoods, ignorant of the truth, and thinks he does well; everything he does for the child is done against the child, making crooked that which nature has made straight; his teaching poisons the young mind with aged prejudices, drawing evening twilight, like a curtain, over the dawn.

That ancient, solitary house and garden, formerly a convent and then the home of his childhood, is still in his old age a dear and religious memory, though its site is now profaned by a modern street He sees it in a romantic atmosphere, in which, amid sunbeams and roses, his spirit opened into flower.  What a stillness was in its vast rooms and cloisters.  Only at long intervals was the silence broken by the return of a plumed and sabred general, his father, from the wars.  That child, already thoughtful, was myself.