If he has too much, it means that others have too little. How often have
we smiled sadly to hear tell of the inexhaustible wealth of France, and
the number of great fortunes, we workers, and toilers, and
intellectuals, and men and women who from our very birth have been given
up to the wearying task of keeping ourselves from dying of hunger, often
struggling in vain, often seeing the very best of us succumbing to the
pain of it all,--we who are the moral and intellectual treasure of the
nation! You who have more than your share of the wealth of the world are
rich at the cost of our suffering and our poverty. That troubles you not
at all: you have sophistries and to spare to reassure you: the sacred
rights of property, the fair struggle for life, the supreme interests of
that Moloch, the State and Progress, that fabulous monster, that
problematical Better to which men sacrifice the Good,--the Good of other
men.--But for all that, the fact remains, and all your sophistries will
never manage to deny it: "You have too much to live on. We have not
enough. And we are as good as you. And some of us are better than the
whole lot of you put together."

* * * * *

So Christophe was affected by the intoxication of the passions with
which he was surrounded. Then he was astonished at his own bursts of
eloquence. But he did not attach any importance to them. He was amused
by such easily roused excitement, which he attributed to the bottle. His
only regret was that the wine was not better, and he would belaud the
wines of the Rhine. He still thought that he was detached from
revolutionary ideas. But there arose the singular phenomenon that
Christophe brought into the discussion, if not the upholding of them, a
steadily increasing passion, while that of his companions seemed in
comparison to diminish.