The Exposition.

The superficial observer who at this moment cast his eyes over your world, without troubling himself much about a few small blemishes scattered upon its surface, which seem destined to set off the splendors of the whole, would say without the slightest doubt that Humanity has never presented a more cheerful countenance. Everywhere, vying with one another, the wedding feasts of Gamache are celebrated. There is nothing but festivities, pleasure trains, beflagged cities, and merry faces. All the great arteries of the globe bring to your overcrowded capital the colorful multitude, come from every clime. On your boulevards the Chinese and the Persian greet the Russian and the German; Asia in cashmere gives its hand to Africa in turban; the new world and the old, young America and the citizens of the European world jostle, elbow, and converse with one another in a tone of unalterable friendship. Is the world really invited to the feast of peace? Would the French Exposition of 1867 be the so longed-for sign of universal solidarity? – We would be tempted to believe it if all animosities were extinguished; if each one, thinking of industrial prosperity and of the triumph of intelligence over matter, calmly left the engines of death, the instruments of violence and of force, to sleep in the depths of their arsenals in the state of relics fit to satisfy the curiosity of visitors.

But are you there? Oh! no; the face grimaces beneath the smile, the gaze threatens while the mouth pays compliments, and hands are cordially clasped at the very moment when each one is meditating the ruin of his neighbor. They laugh, they sing, they dance; but listen closely, and you will hear the echo repeat those laughs and those songs like sobs and cries of agony!

Joy is on the faces, but disquiet is in the hearts. They make merry in order to stun themselves and, if they think of the morrow, they close their eyes so as not to see.

The world is in crisis, and commerce asks what it will do when the great buzz of the Exposition has passed. Each one meditates upon the future, and one feels that at this moment one lives only by mortgaging the time to come.

What, then, do all these fortunate ones lack? Are they not today what they were yesterday? will they not be tomorrow what they are today? No, the commercial, intellectual, and moral bow is bent more and more, the string is drawn taut, the arrow is about to fly! – Where will it carry them? – Such is the secret of the instinctive fear that is reflected on so many brows! They do not see, they do not know, they have a presentiment of an indefinable something; a danger is in the air, and each one trembles, each one feels himself morally oppressed, as when a storm, about to break, acts upon nervous temperaments. Each one is waiting; what will happen? a catastrophe or a happy solution? Neither one nor the other; or rather, the two results will coincide. What the disquieted populations, the intelligences in distress, lack is the moral sense, attacked, mortified, half-destroyed by incredulity, by positivism, by materialism. They believe in nothingness, but they fear it; they feel themselves on the threshold of that nothingness and they tremble!… The demolishers have done their work, the ground is cleared. – Build, then, with speed, so that the present generation may remain no longer without shelter! Until now the sky has remained starry, but a cloud appears on the horizon. Cover quickly your hospitable roofs; invite all the guests of the plain and of the mountain. Soon the hurricane will destroy with vigor, and then, woe to the imprudent, trusting in the certainty of fair weather. They will have the solution of their vague apprehensions and, if they leave the lists mortified, torn, vanquished, they must blame none but themselves, their refusal to accept the hospitality so generously offered. To work, then. Build ever more quickly; welcome the traveler who comes to you, but go also to seek and try to bring to yourselves the one who turns away without knocking at your door, for God alone knows to how many sufferings he would be exposed, before finding the least refuge capable of preserving him from the claws of the scourge.

Mokí.

Allan Kardec.

Paris. – Typ. de Rouge frères, Dunon et Fresné, rue du Four-Saint-Germain, 43.