The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-11-21
"A NAME THAT
 SHEDS LIGHT"

France celebrates to-day the 222nd of the birth of her great est man of latters, her prince of phil- osophers, her supreme prophet of lbi- erty, Voltaire. It is, as Victor Hugo said, "a name that sheds light" To the Freachman of to-day, this war is -as Anatole France has expressed it Ia conflict between culture of Vol taire and the "kuItur" of Voltaire's royal admirer, Frederick the Great.
 Born Nov. 21, 1694-"ug1y as Pope. and sickly as Pascal" Voltaire began life under the name of Francois Ma rie Arouet. Early in life he assum- ed the name of voltaire, and began that warfare which Victor Hugo has so eloquently described:
 "In the presence of a society friv- olous and dismal .Vo1taire alone, hav- ing before his eyes those. united forces the court, nobility, capital; that un- conscious power, the blind multitude; that terrible magistracy, so severe to subjects, so docile to the master, crushing and flattering, kneeIng on the people before the king; Voltaire alone, repeat it, declared war against that coalition of all the social iniouities, against that enormous and terrible world, and he accepted bat tie with it. And what was his wea- pen? That which has the Hghtness of the wind and the power of the thun- derbolt A pen. Voltaire conquered; Voltaire waged the splendid warfare, war of thought against matter, the
 oH 1v1ai hn war of the just against the unjust, the war for the oppressed against the oppressor; the war of goodness, the war of kindness. He had the tender ness of a woman and the wrath of hero. He conquered the old code and the old dogma. He conquered the feudal lord. and the Gothic judge. /He raised the populace to the dignity of people. He taught, pacificated, civi- lized. He accepted all the menaces, all the outrages, all the prosecutions. calumny, and exile. He conquered violence by a smile, despotism by sar- casm, infallibility bykirony. obstinacy by perseverance, ignorance by truth.
 The immortal smile of Voltaire- that smile, says Hugo, "is Voltaire. That smile, sometimes becomes laugh ter, but the philosophic sadness tenn. pers it. Toward the strong it is mock cry; toward the weak it is a caress. It disquiets the oppressor, and reassures the oppressed. Against the great, 1t is raillery; for the little 1t is pity. An, let us be moved by that smile! It had in it the rays of the dawn.'
 It has been said that no Ang1o-Sax- on ever understood Voltaire, but Jas. Parton, an American, and Lord Nor ley, the great English man of let. ters, have written biographies scarce ly surpassed by the, best of the mill titudinous French lives of Voltaire. Lord Morley declared:
 "Te Veltaire reason and human ity were but a single word, and love of truth and passion fer justice but one emotion. None of the famous men who have fought that they them selves might think freely and speak truly, have ever seen more clearly, that the fundamental aim of the con- test was that others might live hap oily. Who has not been touched by that immortal word of his, of the three years in which he iabered with out remission for justice to the widow ana OeSCeiiudiits >oA Cdido NuhJoS1iy o1A ecuted): During that time not smile escaped me without nay representing myself for it, as for a crime.'"
 Voltaire's reward came when, an old man of eighty-feur, he returned to Paris to receive the alteration of the multitude-such adoration as few other men have ever known. And then he died. with the smile still upon his thin lips.