Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 7.djvu/257

 CLEMENCEAU modify the social organization without troubling to find out if man is in a state to adapt himself to it can lead only to the most pronounced disorder. Thus even for those who pretend to remake the social organization all in the first instance turns upon the primordial reform of the individual. If you reform the individual, if you apply yourself, I do not say wholly but principally, to the reform of the human personality, man will be able to find for himself the form of organization which best suits him without troubling himself with your theories, without troubling himself with the prophecies you have made and which certainly can not be realized because you can not, unless you are a divinity yourself, foresee the result of human evolution.

In any case your conceptions are fatally defective in one point, and that is that the man whom you need for the realization of your future society does not yet exist, even tho your theories might be realized; and when this man shall exist, if he ever should exist, he will employ his own intelligence in his own way without troubling himself with the path which you have taken upon yourself to trace out for him. You pretend directly to construct the future, while we construct the man who will construct the future, and in so doing we are achieving a phenomenon much greater than your own. We are not constructing a man already made for our city; we take the man such as he is, still imperfectly cleared from his primitive dens, in his cruelty, 221