brotherhood and affection, is yet so oppressive to those supremely
industrious hands, which had never known the grievous burden of alms.
Let us forget even those last of our cities to be menaced, the
fairest, the proudest, the most beloved of our cities, which
constitute the very face of our country and which only a miracle could
now save. Let us forget, in a word, the greatest calamity and the most
crying injustice of history and think to-day only of our approaching
deliverance. It is not too early to hail it. It is already in all our
thoughts, as it is in all our hearts. It is already in the air which
we breathe, in all the eyes that smile at us, in all the voices that
welcome us, in all the hands outstretched to us, waving the laurels
which they hold; for what is bringing us deliverance is the wonder,
the admiration of the whole world!


2

To-morrow we shall go back to our homes. We shall not mourn though we
find them in ruins. They will rise again more beautiful than of old
from the ashes and the shards. We shall know days of heroic poverty;
but we have learnt that poverty is powerless to sadden souls upheld by
a great love and nourished by a noble ideal. We shall return with
heads erect, regenerated in a regenerated Europe, rejuvenated by our
magnificent misfortune, purified by victory and cleansed of the
littleness that obscured the virtues which slumbered within us and of
which we are not aware. We shall have lost all the goods that perish
but as readily come to live again. And in their place we shall have
acquired those riches which shall not again perish within our hearts.
Our eyes were closed to many things; now they have opened upon wider
horizons. Of old we dared not avert our gaze from our wealth, our