Page:Further India; (IA furtherindia00clif).pdf/178

"I tell you," he writes to M. Joseph Perre, his lifelong friend, "that if there be manufacturers with enough heart and intelligence to apply themselves to the impoverish- ment of Protestant England,—men who understand suffi- ciently well the interests of civilisation and of France to desire to diminish England's commerce and influence,—there are also young men of sufficient courage, energy, and will to work for an even more difficult end. Ideal, do you call it? But not impossible for them; and this end is to overthrow her utterly and to strike her name from the ranks of the nations.

"What young and ardent soul is there that is not, dur- ing its hours of aspiration after the beautiful and the great, smitten with some noble idea, some immense and magnificent aim? What young man is there who, in the solitude of his soul, has not dreamed of the means whereby he may attain the pure and radiant crown of glory which encircles the brows of those philanthropists who have passed obscure lives in the most toilsome labours in order to ameliorate the lot of their kind? But soon the vortex of the world and the selfish interests which govern it efface the vividness of these impressions, tarnish them, cause them to be forgotten, and so, becom- ing sensible, as it is called, one loses the illusions and the dreams of youth.

"For those of whom I speak to you it has not been thus. The idea which appealed to them was that of civi- lisation in general and of the regeneration of mankind in certain countries in particular.

"Behold France, the arbiter of Europe, making use of