2450 Les Miserables
shadows, which are Protestant in England, are Catholic in
Italy; but, under different names, the vescovo is identical
with the bishop, and it always means night, and of pretty
nearly the same quality. To explain the Bible badly amounts
to the same thing as to understand the Gospel badly.
Is it necessary to emphasize this? Must this melancholy
parallelism be yet more completely verified? Have you not
indigent persons? Glance below. Have you not parasites?
Glance up. Does not that hideous balance, whose two scales,
pauperism and parasitism, so mournfully preserve their
mutual equilibrium, oscillate before you as it does before
us? Where is your army of schoolmasters, the only army
which civilization acknowledges?
Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does
every one know how to read in the land of Dante and of
Michael Angelo? Have you made public schools of your bar-
racks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent war-budget
and a paltry budget of education? Have not you also that
passive obedience which is so easily converted into soldierly
obedience? military establishment which pushes the regu-
lations to the extreme of firing upon Garibaldi; that is to
say, upon the living honor of Italy? Let us subject your so-
cial order to examination, let us take it where it stands and
as it stands, let us view its flagrant offences, show me the
woman and the child. It is by the amount of protection with
which these two feeble creatures are surrounded that the
degree of civilization is to be measured. Is prostitution less
heartrending in Naples than in Paris? What is the amount
of truth that springs from your laws, and what amount of