Yet there be certain times in a young man’s life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood
When under the influence of certain (or some) reasons (or causes) (alcohol, war, etc - added Spir here) the low instincts are unbridled (or unrestrained), the brute appears (or come forward, "apparait", Fr.) and rule over (or dominate), stifling every ("toute", Fr.) noble, generous impulse; it is then the ruin (or downfall or decline) of any humanity in man.
To be under pressure is inescapable. Pressure takes place through all the world; war, siege, the worries of state. We all know men who grumble under these pressures and complain. They are cowards. They lack splendour. But there is another sort of man who is under the same pressure but does not complain, for it is the friction which polishes him. It is the pressure which refines and makes him noble
There was a young man of Quebec
Who was frozen in snow to his neck,
When asked, 'Are you Friz?'
He replied, 'Yes I is,
But we don't call this cold in Quebec.'
Every man alone is sincere.
At the entrance of a second person,
hypocrisy begins.
We parry and fend the approach
of our fellow-man by compliments,
by gossip, by amusements, by affairs.
We cover up our thought from him
under a hundred folds.