Truth can be left to slumber among a people accustomed to servility. But
once the attention has been awakened and a choice between truth and
error has to be made, the mind turns as readily towards truth as healthy
eyes turn naturally towards the light. In matters of morality, moreover,
even a little light leads, like it or not, to equity, because truth, in matters
of morality, is connected to rights. Knowledge of rights awakens a feeling
for rights and a feeling for rights serves to revive, in the depths of the
soul, that wellspring of liberty that, among European peoples, has never
entirely run dry. One would have to be blind not to see how happily our
Nation has grasped some of those fertile principles that lead to everything
that is good, just, and useful. It is no longer possible to forget them or
contemplate them with sterile indifference. In this new state of affairs, it
is natural for the oppressed classes to have a more lively feeling for the
need to restore good order. It is they who have the most interest in
bringing men back to justice, the first of all the virtues, the virtue has
been exiled for so long from earth. This means that it is the Third Estate
that will have to make the greatest effort and almost all the initial outlay
needed for the work of national restoration. Due warning must be given,
moreover, that if things cannot be made better, there can be no question
of simply leaving them as they are. Circumstances do not allow for that
kind of cowardly calculation. The choice is either to advance or retreat. If
you are not prepared to proscribe the mass of iniquitous and antisocial
privileges, then you will have to choose to accept them and make them
legal. But the blood boils at the mere thought that at the end of the
eighteenth century it could be possible to give a legal sanction to the
abominable fruit of feudal abomination. There once was a time (and, unhappily,
it was a long time) when the impotence of the Third Estate
would quite rightly have led patriots to shed a tear or heave a sigh. But if
it were to seal its own misfortune now; if, at the very moment when it
can do something, it were to subject itself voluntarily to abjection and
opprobrium, with what sort of names and feelings would it not deserve
to be castigated? If it is right to commiserate with the weak, it is also right
to despise the coward. Better still to dismiss this image of a final misfortune
that cannot now be conceived, presupposing as it does the most vile
baseness among twenty-five million men