XIX. If you wish that this revolution should not have the same end

If you wish that this revolution should not have the same end, beware of abject Materialism, degrading Sensualism, gross Socialism, of besotted Communism; of all these doctrines of flesh and blood, of meat and drink, of hunger and thirst, of wages and traffic, which these corruptors of the soul of the People preach to you, exclusively, as the sole thought, the sole hope, as the only duty, and only end of man! They will soon make you slaves of ease, serfs of your desires.

Are you willing to have inscribed on the tomb of our French race, as on that of the Sybarites, this epitaph: "This People ate and drank well, while they browsed upon the earth?" No! You desire that History should write thus: "This People worshipped well, served God and humanity well, -- in thought, in philosophy, in religion, in literature, in arts, in arms, in labor, in liberty, in their Aristocracies, in their Democracies, in their Monarchies, and their Republics! This nation was the spiritual laborer, the conqueror of truth; the disciple of the highest God, in all the ways of civilization, -- and, to approach nearer to him, it invented the Republic, that government of duties and of rights, that rule of spiritualism, which finds in ideas its only sovereignty."

Seek God, then. This is your nature and your grandeur. And do not seek Him in these Materialisms! For God is not below, -- he is on high!

LAMARTINE,

Representative of the People.

THE END.