“There’s liberty and fraternity, too.”

“But principally equality!”

I tell them that fraternity is a dream, an obscure and uncertain sentiment; that while it is unnatural for a man to hate one whom he does not know, it is equally unnatural to love him.  You can build nothing on fraternity.  Nor on liberty, either; it is too relative a thing in a society where all the elements subdivide each other by force.

But equality is always the same.  Liberty and fraternity are words while equality is a fact.  Equality should be the great human formula—­social equality, for while individuals have varying values, each must have an equal share in the social life; and that is only just, because the life of one human being is equal to the life of another.  That formula is of prodigious importance.  The principle of the equal rights of every living being and the sacred will of the majority is infallible and must be invincible; all progress will be brought about by it, all, with a force truly divine.  It will bring first the smooth bed-rock of all progress—­the settling of quarrels by that justice which is exactly the same thing as the general advantage.

And these men of the people, dimly seeing some unknown Revolution greater than the other, a revolution springing from themselves and already rising, rising in their throats, repeat “Equality!”

It seems as if they were spelling the word and then reading it distinctly on all sides—­that there is not upon the earth any privilege, prejudice or injustice that does not collapse in contact with it.  It is an answer to all, a word of sublimity.  They revolve the idea over and over, and find a kind of perfection in it.  They see errors and abuses burning in a brilliant light.

“That would be fine!” said one.

“Too fine to be true!” said another.

But the third said, “It’s because it’s true that it’s fine.  It has no other beauty, mind!  And it’s not because it’s fine that it will come.  Fineness is not in vogue, any more than love is.  It’s because it’s true that it has to be.”

“Then, since justice is wanted by the people, and the people have the power, let them do it.”

“They’re beginning already!” said some obscure lips.

“It’s the way things are running,” declared another.

“When all men have made themselves equal, we shall be forced to unite.”

“And there’ll no longer be appalling things done in the face of heaven by thirty million men who don’t wish them.”

It is true, and there is nothing to reply to it.  What pretended argument or shadow of an answer dare one oppose to it—­“There’ll no longer be the things done in the face of heaven by thirty millions of men who don’t want to do them!”

Such is the logic that I hear and follow of the words, spoken by these pitiful fellows cast upon the field of affliction, the words which spring from their bruises and pains, the words which bleed from them.