Francisco Ferrer; his life, work and martyrdom, with message written ...

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38 Francisco Fkrrer,
habitants if accord instead of competition presided over
their distribution.
It is another of the primal duties of modern society,
he holds, to endeavor to restore the sane ethical code
which dominated the best of these same primitive communities.
For this task Christianity has proved to be
totally unfit. The pagan philosophers are helpful, but
they are not sufificient. "The writers of antiquity," remarks
Rcclus in this connection, "have bequeathed us
admirable treatises of ethics and of philosophy for the
education of the man who knows how to seek wisdom
and at the same time happiness in governing his passions,
in steadying his character, in elevating his ideas,
in restricting his needs. The words of Lucretius, of Zeno,
of Epictetus, of Seneca, of Horace even, are immortal
words which will be repeated from age to age and which
will help to exalt the human ideal and the value of individuals.
But the task of to-day is no longer this purely
personal acquisition of stoical heroism ; the task of to-day
is to conquer for society as a whole, by education and
by solidarity, that which the ancestors sought for the
individual alone."
Again, if it be true (as seems to be established) that
the average man of the primitive or ancient peoples surpassed
the average man of our day in force, in agility,
in bodily health, in beauty of visage, modern society
must look to it that we equal these peoples in this respect.
All these things, Reclus claims, are possible. This
ideal of reacquiring the qualities of the ancestors, without
losing the modern qualities, is perfectly realizable.
It is not a chimera. The force of comprehension, the
increased capacity of the modern man, which permits
him to reconquer the past of the savage and to fuse it
with his most refined ideas, will eventuate in a definitive
and normal reconquest on condition that the new man
embraces all other men, all the men of all countries and
of all times in one and the same ensemble ; on condition,
in other words, that he substitute accord for existence
in place of struggle for existence. To quote again
"Humanity has already made much real progress in this direction.
It would be absurd to deny it. What is called the incoming
tide of democracy' is nothing more nor less than the increasing
sentiment of equality between the members of the different castes,
erstwhile adversaries. Beneath the thousand shifting appearances