And the
proof that they feel that it is so is found in the fact that you cannot
expatriate them with impunity, and that they love the ground watered by
the sweat of their brow, that the true peasant dies of homesickness in
the uniform of the soldier, far from the fields where he was born. But
that man lacks a part of the enjoyments I possess, immaterial enjoyments
to which he is abundantly entitled, he the workman in the vast temple
which the heavens are vast enough to embrace. He lacks knowledge of his
own sentiments. They who condemned him to servitude from his mother's
womb, being unable to take from him the power of reverie, have taken the
power of reflection.
Ah! well, such as he is, incomplete and doomed to never-ending
childhood, he is nobler even so than he in whom knowledge has stifled
sentiment. Do not place yourselves above him, you who consider
yourselves endowed with the lawful and inalienable right to command him,
for that terrible error proves that in you the mind has killed the heart
and that you are the most incomplete and the blindest of men!--I prefer
the simplicity of his mind to the false enlightenment of yours; and if I
had to tell his life, it would be more pleasant for me to bring out its
attractive and affecting aspects than it is creditable to you to depict
the abject condition to which the scornful rigor of your social precepts
may debase him.
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