[Footnote 1: The word is used here much in the sense of our word "Tories."--Tr.]
Do not let the simplicity of the new world out of your sight. The social trust is simple. The complications are in what is overhead--the accumulation of delusions and prejudice heaped up by ages of tyrants, parasites, and lawyers. That conviction sheds a real glimmer of light on your duty and points out the way to accomplish it. He who would dig right down to the truth must simplify; his faith must be brutally simple, or he is lost. Laugh at the subtle shades and distinctions of the rhetoricians and the specialist physicians. Say aloud: "This is what is," and then, "That is what must be."
You will never have that simplicity, you people of the world, if you do not seize it. If you want it, do it yourself with your own hands. And I give you now the talisman, the wonderful magic word--you _can_!
That you may be a judge of existing things, go back to their origins, and get at the endings of all. The noblest and most fruitful work of the human intelligence is to make a clean sweep of every enforced idea--of advantages or meanings--and to go right through appearances in search of the eternal bases. Thus you will clearly see the moral law at the beginning of all things, and the conception of justice and equality will appear to you beautiful as daylight.
Strong in that supreme simplicity, you shall say: I am the people of the peoples; therefore I am the King of Kings, and I will that sovereignty flows everywhere from me, since I am might and right. I want no more despots, confessed or otherwise, great or little; I know, and I want no more. The incomplete liberation of 1789 was attacked by the Kings. Complete liberation will attack the Kings.
But Kings are not exclusively the uniformed ones among the trumpery wares of the courts. Assuredly, the nations who have a King have more tradition and subjection than the others. But there are countries where no man can get up and say, "My people, my army," nations which only experience the continuation of the kingly tradition in more peaceful intensity. There are others with the great figures of democratic leaders; but as long as the entirety of things is not overthrown--always the entirety, the sacred entirety--these men cannot achieve the impossible, and sooner or later their too-beautiful inclinations will be isolated and misunderstood. In the formidable urgency of progress, what do the proportions matter to you of the elements which make up the old order of things in the world? All the governors cling fatally together among themselves, and more solidly than you think, through the old machine of chancelleries, ministries, diplomacy, and the ceremonials with gilded swords; and when they are bent on making war for themselves there is an unquenchable likeness between them all, of which you want no more. Break the chain; suppress all privileges, and say at last, "Let, there be equality."