Page 1683 - les-miserables

without setting a limit to wealth, in creating vast fields of
public and popular activity, in having, like Briareus, a hun-
dred hands to extend in all directions to the oppressed and
the feeble, in employing the collective power for that grand
duty of opening workshops for all arms, schools for all ap-
titudes, and laboratories for all degrees of intelligence, in
augmenting salaries, diminishing trouble, balancing what
should be and what is, that is to say, in proportioning enjoy-
ment to effort and a glut to need; in a word, in evolving from
the social apparatus more light and more comfort for the
benefit of those who suffer and those who are ignorant.
And, let us say it, all this is but the beginning. The true
question is this: labor cannot be a law without being a
right.
We will not insist upon this point; this is not the proper
place for that.
If nature calls itself Providence, society should call itself
foresight.
Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable
than material improvement. To know is a sacrament, to
think is the prime necessity, truth is nourishment as well as
grain. A reason which fasts from science and wisdom grows
thin. Let us enter equal complaint against stomachs and
minds which do not eat. If there is anything more heart-
breaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul
which is dying from hunger for the light.
The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution.
Some day we shall be amazed. As the human race mounts
upward, the deep layers emerge naturally from the zone of

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