Chapter XIII: The Struggle

"Emile," rejoined the manufacturer with well-feigned calmness, "I see that we have been talking for some moments without understanding each other, and that if we continue on this tack you will pick a quarrel with me and treat me as if you were a young saint and I an old heathen. With whom are you in such a passion? I was quite right, at the outset, to try to put you on your guard against enthusiasm. All this warmth of brain is simply youthful effervescence, and when you are as old as I am and have had a little experience and are accustomed to doing your duty, you won't think it necessary to flap your wings in order to be honest, or to shout your convictions so loud. Beware of emphasis, which is nothing more than the language of self-satisfied vanity. Tell me, boy, do you happen to believe that honor, morality, good faith in keeping engagements, humane sentiments, pity for the unfortunate, devotion to country, respect for the rights of others, domestic virtues and the love of one's neighbor are very rare and substantially impossible virtues in these days and in the world we live in?"

"Yes, father, I do firmly believe it."

"Well, I believe nothing of the kind. I am less misanthropic at fifty than you are at one-and-twenty; I have a better opinion of my fellow-men, apparently because I don't possess your lights and your infallible glance!"

"In heaven's name! do not make fun of me, father; you break my heart."

"Very well, let us talk seriously. I will assume with you that those virtues are the religion and the rule of life of a small number of people. Will you at least do me the honor to assume that they are not wholly foreign to your father's character?"

"Most of your acts, father, have convinced me that to do good was your sole ambition. Why then do your words seem to attempt to show me that you have a less noble aim?"

"That is precisely what I want to come at. You agree that my conduct is irreproachable, and yet you are scandalized to hear me appeal to calm common sense and to the counsel of sound logic! Tell me, what would you think of your father if, every hour in the day, you should hear him declaiming against those who do not follow his example? If, setting himself up as a model, and all puffed out with self-love and self-admiration, he should weary you at every turn with his own praises and with anathemas hurled at the rest of mankind? You would hold your peace and throw a veil over that annoying absurdity; but, do what you would, the thought would come that your worthy father had one deplorable weakness and that his vanity detracted from his merit."

"Doubtless, father, I prefer your reserve and your judicious modesty; but when we are alone together, and on the rare and solemn occasions when you deign to open your heart to me, should I not be overjoyed to hear you extol noble ideas and kindle a holy enthusiasm in my heart, instead of hearing you sneer at my aspirations and trample them contemptuously in the dirt."

"I do not despise noble ideas, nor do I laugh at your worthy aspirations. What I do spurn and what I desire to stifle in you are the declamation and braggadocio of the new humanitarian schools. I cannot endure their holding up principles as old as the world in the guise of truths unheard of until this day. I would like you to love duty with immovable tranquillity, and perform it with the stoical silence of genuine conviction. Believe me, an acquaintance with good and evil doesn't date from yesterday, and I did not wait to learn justice until you had sucked in the celestial manna while smoking your cigar on the sidewalks of Poitiers."

"All this may be true, generally speaking," said Emile, heated by Monsieur Cardonnet's persistent irony. "There are old citizens who, like you, father, practise virtue without ostentation, and there may be impertinent students who preach it without loving it and, as it were, without knowing what it is. But your last shaft of satire I can not take to my own account or that of my young friends. I do not claim to be anything more than a child and do not pride myself on any experience I may have had. On the contrary, I come with respect and confidence, actuated only by good instincts and good intentions, to ask you for the truth, for advice, example, assistance and instruction. I have on my side only my youthful ideas, and I lay them at your feet. Disgusted as I am by the shocking contradictions which the laws of society recognize and sanction, I implore you to tell me how you have been able to accept them without protest, and to remain an honest man. I confess that I am weak and ignorant, for I cannot conceive the possibility of such a thing. So tell me, I pray you, instead of heaping freezing sarcasm on me. Am I blameworthy in asking for light? am I insolent and mad because I desire to know the laws of my conscience and the aim of my life? Yes, your character is noble and your conduct judicious and wise; your heart is kind and your hand liberal; you assist the poor man and you pay him handsomely for his labor. But whither are you going by this straight, sure road? It seems to me that you sometimes lack indulgence, and your severity has often frightened me.

"I have always said to myself that your sight was clearer and your mind more provident than those of tender, timid natures, that the momentary suffering you inflict was with a view to doing lasting good and to strengthening the foundations of talent; and so, notwithstanding my distaste for the studies you imposed upon me, notwithstanding the sacrifice of my tastes to your hidden purposes, and the constant denial and stifling of my desires at their birth, I made it the law of my life to follow you and obey you in everything. But the time has come when you must open my eyes if you wish me to succeed in this superhuman effort; for the study of the law doesn't satisfy my conscience; I cannot imagine myself ever engaging in legal contests, still less compelling myself, like you, to urge men on to toil for my benefit, unless I see clearly whither I am going and what sacrifice beneficial to mankind I shall have consummated at the cost of my happiness."

"Your happiness then would consist in doing nothing and living with your arms folded, staring at the stars? It seems that work of any sort vexes and tires you, even the study of the law, which all young men learn in sport?"

"You are well aware that the contrary is true, father; you saw me become passionately interested in the most abstract studies, and you stopped me as if I were rushing to my destruction. You know well, however, what my wishes were, when you urged me to seek some material application of the sciences I preferred. You were not willing that I should be an artist or a poet; perhaps you were right; but I might have been a naturalist, or at least an agriculturist, and you forbade that. And yet that was a real, practical application.

"Love of nature impelled me toward life in the country. The infinite pleasure that I took in investigating nature's laws and mysteries led me naturally to the discovery of its concealed forces and to the attempt to guide them and make them more fruitful by intelligent toil. Yes, that was my vocation, you may be sure. Agriculture is in its infancy; the peasant wears himself out in monotonous routine tasks; vast tracts of land are untilled. Science would increase tenfold the richness of the soil and lighten the labor of man.

"My ideas concerning society were in accord with my dreams of such a future. I asked you to send me to some model farm to study. I should have been happy to become a peasant, to work with mind and body, to be constantly in contact with men and things as nature knows them. I would have applied myself with zeal, I would have ploughed farther than some others perhaps in the field of discoveries! And some day I would have founded, upon some desert, naked tract of land transformed by my labors, a colony of free men living together like brothers and loving me as a brother. That was my only ambition, in that direction alone was I thirsty for fortune and glory. Was it an insane freak? and why did you require me to go and work like a slave to learn a code of laws that will never be mine?"

"There you are! there you are!" said Monsieur Cardonnet shrugging his shoulders; "there we have the Utopia of Brother Emile, Moravian brother, Quaker, Neo-Christian, Neo-Platonist and God knows what. It is magnificent, but it is absurd."

"Pray tell me why, father? for again you pronounce sentence without giving any reasons."

"Because, mingling your socialistic Utopias with your vain speculations as a scientist, you would have poured treasures upon the barren rock, you would not have raised wheat from the sterile soil nor would you have raised men capable of living as brothers from the communistic idea. You would have spent foolishly with one hand what I had saved with the other; and, at forty years of age, with your imagination run dry, at the end of your genius and your confidence, disgusted with the imbecility or the perversity of your disciples, mad perhaps--for that is what excitable and romantic minds come to when they seek to put their dreams in practice, you would have come back to me, crushed by your helplessness, angry with mankind, and too old to return to the right road. Whereas, if you listen to me and follow me, we will travel together over a straight, sure road, and within ten years we shall have made a fortune of which I don't dare name the amount, for you would not believe me."

"Let us admit that this is not a dream also, father, for it makes little difference for my present purpose; what shall we do with this fortune?"

"Whatever you choose, all the good that you may then dream of doing; for I am not at all disturbed about your common sense and prudence, if you will wait for experience of life and allow your brain to mature in peace."

"What do you say? we will do good! you must tell me about that, father, and I will be all ears! What is the blessing with which we will endow mankind?"

"You ask the question! In heaven's name, what divine mystery do you expect to find in human affairs? We shall have bestowed upon a whole province the benefits of industrial activity! Are we not already on the way? Is not work the source and sustenance of work? do we not employ more men here in a day than agriculture and the petty uncivilized trades that I propose to put down used to employ in a month? Do they not receive higher wages? Are they not in a fair way to acquire the spirit of order, prudence, sobriety, all the virtues that they lack? Where are these virtues, the poor man's only blessing, concealed? In absorbing work, in salutary fatigue and in proportionate wages. The good mechanic has the family spirit, respect for property, submission to the laws, economy, and the habit and the advantages of saving. Idleness, with all the wretched arguments it engenders, is what ruins him. Keep him busy, overwhelm him with work; he is strong, and will become stronger; he will cease to dream of overturning society. He will become orderly in his conduct, his house will be well kept, he will introduce comfort and tranquillity there. And if he lives to be old and infirm, however willing you may be to assist him, it will not be necessary. He will have thought of the future himself; he will no longer need alms and a protector like your friend Jappeloup the vagabond; he will be really a free man. There is no other way to save the people, Emile. I am sorry to tell you that it will take longer to carry out this plan than to conceive a fine Utopian scheme; but if it be a long and hard undertaking, it is worthy of a philosopher like you, and I do not consider it beyond the strength of a hard worker of my sort."

"What! is that the whole ideal of industry?" said Emile, crushed by this conclusion. "Have the people no other future than incessant toil, for the benefit of a class that is never to work at all?"

"That is not my idea," Monsieur Cardonnet replied; "I hate and despise idlers; that is why I don't like poets and metaphysicians. I think that everybody should work according to his powers, and my _ideal_, as that word seems to please you, is not far removed from that of the Saint-Simonians: 'To every one according to his capacity,' recompense proportioned to desert. But in these days the manufacturing industry has not yet become so firmly established that we can think about a moral system of subdivision. We must look at what is and not speculate as to what is possible. The whole movement of the age tends toward manufacturing. Let it reign and triumph then; let all men work, some with the arm, some with the brain; it is for him who has more brain than arm to direct the others: it is his right and his duty to make a fortune. His wealth becomes sacred, since it is destined to increase in order that there may be more work and higher wages. Society should lend a hand therefore in every way to establish the power of the sagacious man; his sagacity is a public blessing; and he himself should struggle constantly to increase his activity; it is his duty, his religion, his philosophy. In short he must be rich in order to keep growing richer, as you said, Emile, not realizing that you were uttering the most valuable of axioms."

"So, father, you would give to a man only as long as he works? Pray, do you make no account of the man who cannot work?"

"I find in wealth the means of assisting the infirm and the insane."

"But the sluggard?"

"I try to correct him, and if I fail, I turn him over to the law, since he is certain before long to become a nuisance and to incur its penalties."

"In a perfectly constituted society that might be just, because the sluggard would be a monstrous exception; but in exercising authority according to such strict rules as yours, when you demand from the workingman all his strength, all his time, all his thoughts, all his life, ah! how many would be dismissed as sluggards and abandoned to their fate!"

"With the advantages accruing from the increase of manufacturing, we should very soon succeed in increasing the well-being of the poorer classes to such an extent that we could easily found schools where their children would be taught the love of work at almost no expense."

"I think that you are mistaken, father; but even if it were true that the rich would give their attention to the education of the poor, the love of incessant work, without other compensation than the certainty of a pittance for one's old age, is so contrary to nature that you can never kindle it in children. A few exceptional natures, consumed by energy or ambition, will sacrifice their youth; but whoever is simple-hearted, loving, inclined to reverie, to innocent and legitimate pleasures, and under the influence of that craving for affection and tranquillity which is the lawful privilege of the human race, will fly from this jail of incessant toil in which you seek to confine him, and will prefer the chances of poverty to the security of slavery. Ah! father, your rugged constitution, your untiring energy, your stoical sobriety and your inveterate habit of working make you an exceptional man, and you imagine a society formed after your image, you do not see that there is no suitable place there for any but exceptional men. Permit me to tell you that that is a Utopian conception far more appalling than mine."

"Well, Emile, I wish that you believed in it," said Monsieur Cardonnet warmly; "it is a source of strength, and an invaluable stimulant in this society of dreamers, idlers and apathetic creatures in which I am devoured with impatience. Be like me, and if we should find in France, at this moment, a hundred men like us, I promise you that there would be no more exceptions a hundred years hence. Activity is contagious, magnetic, miracle-working! it was through activity that Napoléon held sway over Europe: he would have owned all Europe if he had been a manufacturer instead of a fighting man. Oh! since you are an enthusiast, be enthusiastic for my ideas! shake off your languor and share my fever! If we do not attract the whole race, we shall make great breaches through which our descendants will see it moving about in a sacred frenzy."

"No, father, never!" cried Emile, dismayed by Monsieur Cardonnet's terrible energy; "for that is not the road for mankind to follow. There is in it no trace of love or pity or gentleness. Man was not born to know naught but suffering and to extend his conquests over matter only. The conquests of the intellect in the domain of ideas, the pleasures and refinements of the heart, which, according to your plan, should be carefully regulated accessories in the workingman's life, will always be the noblest and sweetest aspiration of every normally constituted man. Do you not see that you cut off one whole side of the benevolent intentions of God? that you do not give the slave of toil time to breathe and to know himself? that education directed solely to moneymaking will make mere brutish machines and not complete men? You say that you conceive an ideal to be realized in the course of centuries, that a time may come when every one will be rewarded according to his capacity. Well, I say that your formula is false because it is incomplete, and unless we add to it: 'To everyone according to his needs,' it is unjust, it is simply asserting the right of him who is strongest in intellect or will, it is aristocracy and privilege under other forms. O father, instead of fighting with the strong against the weak, let us fight with the weak against the strong. Let us try! but in that case let us not think of making our fortunes, let us renounce the idea of hoarding for our own benefit. Give your consent, for I, for whom you are working to-day, give my consent. Let us try to identify our ideals in this way, and let us renounce personal profit while devoting ourselves to work. Since we cannot by ourselves alone create a society in which all the members have an equal interest, let us be the workmen of the future, devoted to the weak and incapable of the present."

_When he realized from the young man's bitter tone and desperate expression that it really was as serious as he had feared, he determined to go around the obstacle and to manœuvre in such a way as to recover his influence._]

"If Napoléon's genius had been trained to this doctrine, perhaps it would have converted the world; but let us find a hundred men like us, let this fever to acquire wealth become a divine zeal, let the longing to practise charity consume us, let us give all our workmen a share in all our profits, let our great fortune be not your property and my heritage, but the property of all those who have assisted us, according to their abilities and their strength, in amassing it; let the workman who brings his stone be put in a way to know as much of the material joys of life as you who bring your genius; let him too be able to live in a fine house, to breathe pure air, to eat healthy food, to rest after fatigue, and to educate his children; let us find our reward, not in the useless luxury with which you and I can surround ourselves, but in the joy of having made others happy--I can understand that ambition and be carried away by it. And then, father, dear father, your work will be blessed.

"This indolence and apathy which irritate you, and which are simply the result of a struggle in which a few triumph to the detriment of the vast majority who lose their courage and succumb, will themselves disappear in the natural course of things. Then you will find so much zeal and love about you that you will no longer be obliged to wear yourself out alone in order to stimulate all the others. How could it be otherwise to-day, and of what do you complain? Under the law of selfishness each one gives of his strength and his energy in proportion to the share of the profits he receives. A marvellous result, truly, that you, who receive all the profit, should be the only zealous, assiduous worker, while the paid worker, who receives in your employ a trifle more alms than he would receive elsewhere, brings you only a little more of his zeal. You pay higher wages--that is a fine thing, certainly, and you are more to be commended than the majority of your rivals, who would prefer to lower them; but you have it in your power to increase the zeal of your employés tenfold, a hundred-fold, to kindle as by a miracle the flame of devotion, the intelligence of the heart in those benumbed and paralyzed creatures, and you do not choose to do it!--Why not, father? It is not that you care for the enjoyments of luxury; for you enjoy nothing unless it be the intoxication of your plans and your triumphs. Very well; do away with your individual profit; you have only to do it, and I will abandon my claim to it with the greatest joy! Let us be simply the trustees and managers of the common profits. This fortune that you dream of, of which you dare not tell me the amount, will so surpass your anticipations and your hopes, that you will soon have the means to give your workmen moral, intellectual and physical pleasures which will make new men of them, complete men, true men! and such men I have never seen anywhere. All equilibrium is destroyed; I see only knaves and brutes, tyrants and slaves, powerful and greedy eagles and stupid and cowardly sparrows destined to be their prey. We live according to the blind law of the savage nature; the code of savage instinct which governs the brute is still the soul of our pretended civilization; and we dare to say that the manufacturing industry will save the world without departing from that path! No, no, father, all these declamations of political economy are false and misleading! If you compel me to be rich and powerful, as you have said so many times, and if, by reason of the vulgar influence of money, the adorers of money send me to represent their interests in the counsels of the nation, I shall say what I have in my mind; I shall speak, and I suppose that I shall speak only once: for they will put me to silence or force me to leave the hall; but people will remember what I say, and they who chose me will have reason to repent their choice!"

This discussion was prolonged far into the night, and it will be readily understood that Emile did not convert his father. Monsieur Cardonnet was not evil-minded, nor impious, nor voluntarily blameworthy toward God or man. Indeed, certain practical virtues were very strongly accentuated in him, and he had great talent in one special field. But his iron will was the result of the entire absence of idealism in his character.

He loved his son but could not understand him. He was kind and attentive to his wife, but he had never failed to stifle in her any thought capable of interfering with his daily routine. He would have liked to be able to reduce Emile to subjection in the same way; but, realizing that was impossible, he was intensely annoyed and tears of vexation moistened his burning eyes more than once during that stormy interview. He sincerely believed that he was logically right; that his ideas were the only really admissible and practicable ones.

He asked himself by what fatality he happened to have a dreamer and a Utopian for a son, and more than once he raised his powerful arms to heaven, asking with indescribable pain what crime he had committed that such a calamity should be visited upon him.

Emile, worn out by fatigue and disappointment, was moved to pity at last for that wounded heart and that incurable blindness.

"Let us talk no more about these matters, father," he said, wiping away his own tears, which had their source farther down in his heart; "we cannot become identified with each other. I can only continue to show my submission and my filial love, thinking no more of myself and of a happiness which I sacrifice to you. What are your orders? Shall I return to Poitiers and go on with my studies until I pass my examinations? Shall I stay here and act as your secretary and steward? I will close my eyes and work like a machine so long as it is possible for me to do it. I will look upon myself as your employé; I will enter your service----"

"And you will cease to look upon me as your father?" said Monsieur Cardonnet. "No, Emile; stay with me, but be perfectly free. I give you three months, during which, living as you will in the bosom of your family, far from the declamations of the beardless philosophers who have ruined you, you will recover your senses unassisted. You are blessed with a robust temperament, and it may be that absorbing mental labor has overheated your brain. I look upon you as a sick child whom I have taken into the country to cure. Walk, ride, hunt; in a word, amuse yourself in order to reestablish your equilibrium, which seems to me more disturbed than that of society. I hope that you will abate your intolerance when you see that your home is not a hotbed of wickedness and corruption. Before long, perhaps, you will tell me voluntarily that profitless musing bores you, and that you feel that you must help me."

Emile bowed, without speaking, and left his father, after embracing him with a feeling of profound sorrow. Monsieur Cardonnet, having been able to do nothing better than temporize, tossed about a long while in his bed, and finally fell asleep, saying, to himself, contrary to his custom, that one must sometimes rely more upon Providence than upon oneself.