Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/699

 Behold the Future

(From "The Red Wave")

(A glimpse of the home-life of a Syndicalist leader, an interesting contrast with the passage from the English book preceding)

François raised the little chap in his arms. "Well, my young rebel, are you happy to be alive? Tomorrow I will teach you a new game: the dance of the bourgeois."

He seated himself in an arm-chair and gazed at the child with the grave and persuasive eyes of a leader of men. "You will be a good Socialist, eh, little Antoine? You will love men; you will not separate your life from that of others, like a Robinson Crusoe of egoism. Vive la revolution!"

"Vive la revolution!" cried the child.

"Behold the future!" said François Rougemont, rocking the little one upon his knees. "It will see the shining of the great dawn, the dawn of a humanity as different from our own as ours is different from the humanity of the pyramids. Ah, my little man, you will know things beside which steam, electricity, and radium are as nothing. You will see man in his beauty, because he will no longer be hungry—and for a hundred thousand years he has been hungry. He will no longer be hungry, he will have all his force! He will no longer be hungry, he will be able to unfold all his genius! He will no longer be hungry, he will construct beneath the sea tunnels that will go from one continent to another, and his aeroplanes will fill the firmament; he will no longer be hungry, and he will build cities out of fairy tales, with fields and forests upon