The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Introduction.
• Biographical and Critical.
• Author’s Preface to the First French Edition.
• Author’s Preface to the English Edition.
• Book I.: Evolution and Retrogression.
• Chapter I.: Social Retrogression.
• Chapter II.: Socialist Programmes.
• Chapter III.: Character of Political and Intellectual Progress.
• Chapter IV.: Character of Social Progress.
• Chapter V.: The Evolution of Property.
• Chapter VI.: Doctrinal Contradictions of the Socialists.
• Chapter VII.: Practical Self-contradiction of the Socialists.
• Book II.: Socialistic Sophisms.
• Chapter I.: Labour and Wealth.
• Chapter II.: On the Limits of Collectivist Society.
• Chapter III.: The Law of Supply and Demand.
• Chapter IV.: The %u201ciron Law%u201d of Wages.
• Chapter V.: Integral Wages.
• Chapter VI.: To Each According to His Needs.
• Chapter VII.: The Abolition of Wages.
• Chapter VIII.: Machinery.
• Chapter IX.: Excessive Production.
• Chapter X.: Economic Crises.
• Chapter XI.: Cheapness.
• Chapter XII.: The Game of the Gullible.
• Chapter XIII.: Socialistic Methods.
• Chapter XIV.: Facts Compared With Socialist Statements.
• Chapter XV.: Redistribution of Wealth.
• Book III.: Socialistic Legislation.
• Chapter I.: Putting Socialistic Sophisms In Force.
• Chapter II.: The Regulation of Child Labour.
• Chapter III.: Female Labour and the Law.
• Chapter IV.: Compulsory Idleness of Lying-in Women.
• Chapter V.: National Labour and Foreign Workmen.
• Chapter VI.: Trade Syndicates.
• Chapter VII.: Registry Offices.
• Chapter VIII.: Nature of %u201clabour Laws.%u201d
• Book IV.: Socialistic Morality and Respect For the Law.
• Chapter I.: Contempt For the Law.
• Chapter II.: Servile Labour and Free Labour.
• Book V.: Strikes and Social War.
• Chapter I.: Cost and Consequences of Strikes.
• Chapter II.: The Causes of Strikes.
• Chapter III.: During the Strike.
• Chapter IV.: Social War.
• Book VI.: Responsibilities.
• Chapter I.: Parliament and Strikes.
• Chapter II.: Subsidies to Strikers.
• Chapter III.: The Executive, the Judicature, and Strikes.
• Chapter IV.: Liberty and Anarchy.
• Chapter V.: The Socialism of Employers.
• Chapter VI.: Militarism, Protection, and Socialism.
• Conclusion.

BOOK V.

STRIKES AND SOCIAL WAR.

CHAPTER I.

COST AND CONSEQUENCES OF STRIKES.

Strikes in France in 1890 and 1891—Cost of Strikes—Strikes in England in 1892—Statistics relating to Arbitration—Losses resulting from Strikes—Displacement of Trade—Trades Unions and Strikes—Mistrust.

According to the information given by the Labour Department, 313 strikes, involving 118,000 workmen, took place in France in 1890; and 267 strikes, involving 108,000 strikers, in 1891. The Departments which have had the most strikes are the Nord, with 61 in 1890, and 68 in 1891; the Loire, with 29 in 1890; the Ardennes, with 28 in 1890; and the Rhone, with 28 in 1890, and 20 in 1891. Only 52 Departments were affected by strikes in 1890, and 54 in 1891.

The results of these strikes were as follows:—

The 91 successful strikes affected 22,400 workmen; the 67 that were partially successful affected 54,200 workmen; those which miscarried affected 32,200 workmen.

The principal causes of these strikes were demands for increased wages, the shortening of the hours of work, and reduction of salaries effected by employers.

One third of the successful strikes lasted for less than one week. When a strike lasted more than a fortnight it seemed to be doomed to failure.

These figures give a very poor idea as to the importance of strikes. The sacrifices which they have cost, both to employers and to men, the value of the advantages gained, and also the pecuniary and mercantile consequences which may have resulted from them, are unknown.

At Anzin, in 1884, it is calculated that the strike cost the workmen 1,135,000 francs (£45,000), and the company 600,000 francs (£24,000), that is, 1,735,000 francs, without counting the damage caused by the stopping of the works.

In England, the total number of strikes and lockouts for the year 1891, was 893, affecting 295,000 persons, either voluntarily or otherwise; for the striking of certain workmen caused a stoppage of work to others. These strikes had an average duration of twenty-four days.

Most of them were caused by questions of wages. In 1890, there were 59 caused by the question of employment of non-unionists, and in 1891, 47. Fifty-one per cent. were checked; 36 per cent. proved successful; the result of the others is unknown. Four hundred and sixty-eight strikes out of 824, in which 120,579 people were implicated out of 263,507, were terminated by compromise, and only 12, affecting 12,100 workmen were settled by arbitration. It is useful to quote these figures in order to destroy the illusion so wide-spread in France, that it is enough to pronounce the word “arbitration” and to pass a law concerning arbitration, to put an end to all these disputes.

The losses to the workmen who were forced by the strikes to abstain from labour for four weeks, are calculated at £1,500,000.

The cost of the Hull strike in 1892, which lasted for eight weeks, is calculated at £9,000 for the town, and £60,004 in loss of wages.

Mr. Bevan, calculating the loss of wages as at 4s. 2d. per day, for five days a week, for 110 strikes in England, from 1870 to 1879, arrives at a figure of £4,468,000. The strike of the Clyde ship-builders cost 7,500,000 francs (£300,000) in 1877; that of the Durham miners in 1879, 6 millions of francs (£240,000).

The Labour Bureau, in the United States, reckoned that the strikes of 1881 to 1887 cost the workmen 260 millions of francs or 50 million dollars. These are only figures to some people; but the consequences to women, to children, and to the health of the workmen themselves, are terrible. Moreover, the position of the employers has been attacked and weakened; funds destined for improvements have disappeared, and the powers of production in an industry that has undergone a strike are restricted. Sometimes a strike suffices even to ruin a trade.

These examples have made Trades Unions prudent as to striking. In 1888, out of 104 Unions, only 39 subsidised strikes; and a certain number of Trades Unions have specified in their statutes, that the vote on this subject shall not be taken according to the majority, but according to a certain quorum. At the Brussels Congress of 1892, an English Delegate was indignant that the Engineers’ Union (the strongest and wealthiest of all), had, in 1889, spent over £100,000 on sickness, funerals, retiring pensions, accidents, etc., as against about £1,800 on strikes and the costs of the struggles.

This powerful and wealthy association seems to mistrust the results of strikes.

CHAPTER II.

THE CAUSES OF STRIKES.

The Miner by Birth and the Miner by Adoption—Navvies and the Scale of Prices—The Anzin Strike of 1884—M. Basly’s Confession—The Hatters—Pretensions of the Syndicates—Strikes Caused by Minorities.

In a dry enumeration one cannot take into account the true causes of strikes, their justification, or the proportion between the risk to be run and the result to be obtained. We can only state certain facts, upon which we can base a rough estimate as to the psychology of strikes.

At Anzin, in 1878, the workmen had no grievance to make known, and formulated no definite claims. In my conversations with a large number of the men, I could only get hold of one clear idea: the miners by birth complained of the competition caused by the miners by adoption, “who came and undersold the trade.”

When, in May, 1880, a strike broke out at Roubaix, the difficulty was to find out what the strikers wanted.

In the month of August, 1882, the Paris carpenters struck, not on the question of wages, for here is the progress which they had made—1877, 60; 1879, 70; 1882, 80 centimes per hour; but they demanded a reduction of the hours of labour and the abolition of sub contracting.

We have mentioned the schedules of charges which the Municipal Council claimed to impose upon the contractors for the public works in the city of Paris, establishing a maximum number of hours of work and a minimum wage. One fine morning in 1888, in two neighbouring streets, some navvies found themselves working under different conditions; one gang was working under the regulations of the old schedule of charges, and the other under the new. The former did not understand this difference; neither did they understand why they should earn less than their companions. When some municipal councillors tried to explain it to them, they struck.

When the Anzin strike broke out in 1884, abolition of sub-contracting was demanded, and, above all, a new method of working was protested against. M. Basly declared,1 in his deposition made before the delegation of the Commission, that “if the Anzin workmen had known the actual methods of working, the strike would not have broken out.”

When miners are out on strike they raise the question of the administration of pension funds and relief funds. This permanent demand rarely suffices to cause a strike; but it always appears as one of the chief of the alleged grievances. Often, when a company has believed itself to be moved by the best intentions, its intentions have been distorted or taken in bad part.

Strikers have again and again called for the founding of co-operative societies of consumers. This was the case, in 1882, at Bessèges, at Anzin in 1884, and at Decazeville in 1886.

In 1881, the Hatters’ Mutual Aid Society, which, as it itself recognised, was a syndicate of resistance, insisted upon a strike under conditions which show how far the idea of the power of syndicates and the contempt for the freedom of labour can go, in the opinion of some of their members.

The firm of Crespin, Laville & Co. had two places of business, one in the Rue Vitruve, the other in the Rue Simon-le-Franc. It paid the workmen at the latter house according to the society scale, and the former at a lower rate. The society ordered the latter to go out on strike. They obeyed. It then ordered the workmen in the Rue Simon-le-Franc to go out on strike in their turn. Some submitted; others protested, saying:—We are working according to the society scale. We are in order. We have no reason for striking. You cannot demand it of us.—We shall expel you,” was the reply.—And our subscriptions to the pension fund, etc.?—They will be lost.”

A general meeting was convened, and under menaces, the workmen in Rue Simon-le-Franc were forced to go out on strike!

Many of the more recent strikes have been caused by the claims of the syndicates to impose their authority in workshops and factories, so as to prevent the employment of men not belonging to a syndicate. In the month of January, 1893, this claim not only caused a strike in the Marrel Works, but, on the plea of solidarity, the workmen in other factories, those of Brunon, Arbel, Deflassieux, Lacombe, the Marine Steel Works, etc., deserted their work without either proclaiming any grievance, or formulating any demands. A strike is declared; but by whom? Is it unanimous? Not at all. It is more often a minority which determines it. If it meets with opposition, its leaders have recourse to intimidation, insults, threats, and even blows. At Bessèges, in March, 1882, two or three hundred people struck. 5500 workmen wanted to work, but ended by giving in.

On November 25th, 1889, in the Chamber of Deputies, I pointed out that, on November 7th, at l’Escarpelle, a spontaneous gathering of workmen had opposed the strike. Unhappily, this was an isolated case of courage in the history of strikes.

On November 19th, 1891, I told the Chamber of Deputies, without the possibility of having my statements disputed, that the miners’ strike in the Pas-de-Calais was declared after a vote, in which the voters were divided as follows:—13,000 for, 7,000 against, 10,000 abstentions. And a general strike was proclaimed.

Delegates were forthwith nominated to draw up claims that night, ex post facto, justifying it.

CHAPTER III.

DURING THE STRIKE.

Prohibition to Work—Strikes an Episode in the Social War—Threats—Confectioners—Navvies—In Amiens—Coachmen—Strike of Belgian Glass-Blowers—The Homestead Strike—Other Strikes in the United States—The Decazeville Strike—Assassination of M. Watrin—Carmaux—M. Humblot—Explosion in the Rue des Bons-Enfants.

Strikes are declared for the substantial motives enumerated above. From the moment that the striker has left his yard, his shop, his factory, or his mine, he does not permit one of his mates to go there either.

It is vain to try and prove to him that the very principle of human liberty is to do, or not to do, as one chooses; and that he is guilty of an outrageous tyranny when he demands that a workman shall give up living upon his labour.

The great majority of strikers, if not all, answer:—From the moment that I decline to work, I forbid all others to work. If they resist, so much the worse for them. We shall strike them.

Under these circumstances, a strike does not represent to the striker an economic means of acting upon the Law of Supply and Demand. It is an instrument of oppression and an episode in social war.

He resorts to violence. All over the place may be seen men forming themselves into groups, and heaping insults and injuries on those of their fellow-workmen who decline to take part in the strike. In 1884, at Anzin, they were not content with threats; they laid waste the gardens of the non-strikers. Two thousand strikers went to the Renard pit to prevent those who had been at work from coming to the surface.

In the month of August, 1882, at Montceau-les-Mines, the revolutionary Collectivists wrote some letters in red ink, on white paper, drawn up as follows:—

“SocialRevolution.”

“—Section.”

“The Committee has, in the name of justice, condemned the aforesaid X . . . . to death.”

“The Delegate of . . . . ”

Bands of men paraded the streets shouting a song of which we give the first couplet:—

• “En avant, prolétaires,
• Combattons pour la Révolution,
• Chagot, Jeannin, Henri Schneider,
• A la bouche de nos canons.
• En avant, prolétaires!”
• “Forward, Proletarians,
• Fight for the Revolution,
• Chagot, Jeannin, Henri Schneider
• At the mouth of our cannons.
• Forward, Proletarians!”

They did not confine themselves to singing. They threatened and they pillaged.

In Paris, in August, 1888, the strikes of the confectioners and navvies were full of episodes of intimidation. A band of waiters went, at 7.30 a.m., and plundered the Café Vachette and the Brasserie du Bas-Rhin. For several days they attempted to invade several cafés on the Boulevards.

Not only did the navvies go to sweep away the sheds, but they took their fellow-workmen, who were at work, prisoners, and carried them off. Citizen Goullé called out at the Bourse du Travail:—At the Dieudonnet sheds there are sixty navvies at work; there are more than ten thousand of you. Go and turn them out!”

Then they came back and boasted of their exploits:

“You ought to be pleased with us, citizens, we have kicked the bottom out of the dung-carts! And we carried about a citoyenne of the Rue-Moulin-des-Pres in triumph, because she upset one of them by herself. Naturally, if the carters resist, we strike them. If the guardians of the peace timidly intervene, M. Vaillant will call them ‘Capitalist convictkeepers!’”

The carpenters, who were out on strike at the same time, applauded an orator who cried out: “We must set fire to all the employers’ cribs.” And citizen Tortelier cried out: “We will terrorise them!”

At Amiens, in 1888, the strikers destroyed the offices of the firm of Cocquel, throwing the velvets out of window and setting fire to the premises. Dis turbances recommenced in Amiens in the month of January, 1893, in connection with putting the law relating to female labour in force. The employers were threatened, the manufactories invaded—some of them laid waste. At Rive de Giers, violence was used chiefly against the non-strikers.

The same methods were resorted to at the time of the omnibus and coachmen’s strikes. In the month of June, 1893, the strikers commenced by exacting a tax from the coachmen who continued at work, and who, as a check, had to stick a card in their hats, which had to be renewed each morning. The Prefect of Police having put an end to this abuse, the coachmen smashed and set fire to some carriages, with petroleum, and overpowered and stabbed some of the coachmen with knives.

For having asserted on various occasions, that such proceedings as these were amenable to the Penal Code, I was spat upon. According to the Manual of the Perfect Striker, the rights of man partly consist in the right to invade workshops, to destroy machinery, and to attack non-strikers.

But the things done in our French strikes are as nothing by the side of those of the glassblowers’ strike in Belgium. This strike was not caused by poverty. It was carried out by workmen who, earning £400 to £960 a year, exemplified the “Iron Law of Wages” by whims, such as taking foot baths in half a dozen bottles of champagne, according to a fashion set by the glassblower Rofler. The strike was not caused by over-work: the men worked on twenty-four days per month for nine and a half hours. It was not brought about by the reactionary views of their employer; because M. Baudoux, against whom they struck, was the leader of the Radical party. But he had introduced the Siemens furnace, which, however, did not supplant labour. But that did not make any difference. This novelty did not please the glassblowers, who were stirred up by a gust of savage frenzy. The strike broke out. They sang:

• “A Baudoux,
• A Baudoux!
• On va lui mettre la corde au cou!”
• “To Baudoux,
• To Baudoux!
• We will put a rope round his neck!”

They put iron into the furnaces, and set fire to the four corners of the factory, thus madly destroying the instruments of their labour. They burnt M. Baudoux’s mansion; and, if they did not massacre him and his, it was only because they did not fall into their hands. Fighting broke out at Jurnet. There were twenty-five killed and wounded. At Roux seventeen were killed. At Louvières they shouted: “Shoot down the bourgeois! Do not spare the children, the seeds of the bourgeois! Blow up the factories! Stave in the mine ventilators!” They tried to carry out their threats: they used dynamite at Roux, and at Marchiennes, and at Louvières a cartridge exploded under the window of a café where the officers were seated.

In the United States, strikes have come to be real wars. Those who waged the great railway strike, in 1877, intercepted trains, destroyed the lines, demolished the carriages and engines, and set fire to the warehouses. Such again was the strike, in 1892, at Homestead, Pennsylvania, the works belonging to Mr. Carnegie, who, starting as a working-man, is now master of metal manufactories which give employment to 20,000 men, and who has written a book entitled Triumphant Democracy, and a study on the art of spending a fortune. Because of the rate of wages which the Amalgamated Association wished to impose, the Company closed its works, and declared its intention of employing none but non-union men. The workmen took up arms, and made themselves masters of the town. The Company applied to Robert Pinkerton’s private police agency, which sent them three hundred men. When the strikers saw these men on the boats they fired at them: three of the police were killed; they retaliated, and some of the workmen were wounded. The steam-tug having left, the Pinkerton men remained under the strikers’ fire; the strikers brought up a cannon and directed jets of burning petroleum on the vessel. Forced to capitulate, the police were taken to prison, where they arrived overwhelmed with insults and blows, and some of them half cut to pieces. Whilst all this was going on, a man named Beckmann, forced his way into the private office of the general director, Mr. Frick, and struck him four blows with a revolver. A force of six thousand men had to be sent to Homestead before order could be re-established. Work recommenced with nonunion men—what we, in France, should call non-syndicated men.

At Cœur d’Alène, in the State of Idaho, some miners having been replaced by non-union men, massacred, pillaged, blew up the iron railway bridge, and declined to lay down their arms until after a battle in which 250 were taken prisoners.

In the State of Tennessee, the miners besieged Coal Creek, taking possession of it, and their strike, too, was only closed by a fight.

At Buffalo, on Lake Erie, on August 15th, 1892, the pointsmen, to prevent non-union pointsmen from taking their places, destroyed the points, and set fire to some hundreds of railway waggons loaded with cotton and merchandise. The State Government had to set 13,000 militia on foot to quell the outbreak.

If in France strikes have not assumed the same proportions, and have not been distinguished by the same brutality, it is not the fault of some of their leaders.

Some days before the Decazeville strike, Bedel, who had been arrested for a robbery of bicycles, said: “I shall kill some one.” He was condemned to six days’ imprisonment at the time of the strike. He kept his word.

When the strike broke out, on January 26, 1886, he, at the head of a band of strikers, forced his way into M. Watrin’s office, and summoned him to go to the Town-ball. He went, escorted by a crowd of four hundred people, who threw mud at him, and shouted: “Death to Watrin! to the pond!” After sundry parleyings, in which the miners’ delegate assured M. Watrin that he had nothing to fear, he, accompanied by the engineers of the mine and the engineer of the Departmental mines, M. Laur, started to go to the Bourran mine. There they found a crowd awaiting them, which grew more and more menacing; two of the engineers were struck by stones. M. Watrin and those accompanying him took refuge in the railed-in centre of the Plateau des bois; the barrier gave way under the pressure of the crowd. M. Watrin and the engineers reached an old building at one time forming part of the company’s offices. They ascended to the first floor. A crowd of eight hundred people besieged the house. Some men succeeded in reaching the first floor by climbing up a street lamp; others, supplied with bars and great egg-shaped pieces of oak, mounted by means of a ladder, whilst they answered by shouts of death, to the death shouts of the crowd. Caussanel shouted: “He must die!” At the same moment the street door was forced in. M. Watrin opened the door of the room wherein he had taken refuge. With one blow from a bar, a blacksmith laid open his forehead. The assailants relaxed their efforts for a moment. M. Cayrade, the Mayor, arrived, and to calm the assailants, asked M. Watrin to resign his post, and he finally, after a courageous hesitation, consented. When the Mayor announced this fact, they answered: “It is he himself whom we want. Watrin must die!” Some of the besiegers dragged him towards the door, others dragged him towards the fire-place, and they ended by throwing him from the window. Men threw themselves upon him, tore him to pieces, plucked out his beard, and stamped upon him, whilst part of the crowd fled in terror. Some brave men at last rescued him from these savages, and removed him to the hospital, where he expired at midnight, in the midst of such terror that no witnesses could be found to denounce the authors of the crime.

On August 15, 1892, strikers invaded the offices of the Carmaux Company, surrounding its director, M. Humblot, demanding his resignation, under threats of Watrinising him! And for three months they walked about singing,

• “Le baron au bout du canon;
• Le marquis au bout du fusil.”
• “The Baron at the mouth of a cannon;
• The Marquis at the muzzle of a gun.”

Referring thereby to Baron Reilla, President of the Board of Management, and the Marquis of Solanges, who was a member of it. They sang the Carmagnole and cried: “Long life to social revolution!” under protection of M. Deputy Baudin and the watchful eye of the authorities. And when M. Clémenceau, finding these songs and cries to be a little compromising, retorted, “Long life to the Social Republic!” the equivoque did not succeed.

The Carmaux threats ended in the pot filled with dynamite, which, being placed at the company’s offices in the Avenue de l’Opera, and taken to the police station in the Rue des Bons-Enfants, exploded, killing five people. I know that Messrs. Rochefort and Pelletan1 pretended to believe that this machine had been placed there by the Carmaux Company, but this idea was too ingenious to be generally accepted.

CHAPTER IV.

SOCIAL WAR.

“Private Explosion—Revolutionary Anarchists and Collectivists—The Vanguard System—The Dynamite Theory—The Carcassonne Resolution—The Road to the Social Paradise—Evoking “the Days of June” and of the Commune—Contempt for Native Land—War of Classes—The Bourgeois—No Danger of Social War—If there are no Accomplices.

I know that the National Council of the Collectivist Party, or, to speak more accurately, M. Jules Guesde and his friends, tried to disclaim any part in the attack in the Rue des Bons-Enfants, by saying: “For the fifth time in one year dynamite has been disgraced by a private explosion.” Would dynamite then be honoured by a public explosion? If they endeavour to equivocate, when events of the nature of the explosions in the Boulevard Saint Germain, in the Rue de Berlin, in the Véry Restaurant, and in the Rue des Bons-Enfants, excite too violent a condemnation, they forget the theories which they have instilled into those who carry them out, by, for instance, the personal threats of assassination and execution launched against certain persons mentioned by name at the meeting at the Château d’Eau on 3rd June, 1886, in celebration of the high achievements of the Decazeville strikers. If they repudiate the results of their teachings, as understood by Duval, who robbed Mme. Lemoire’s mansion; if their associate, Martinet, seemed to them to compromise them because of his nine years’ imprisonment for theft, there are nevertheless gatherings where people cry: “Long live theft! Long live assassination!” And they do not repudiate them. They have so influenced certain groups of the population of Paris, that on May 1st, 1892, three thousand people assembled together in the Salle Favie, applauded Citizen Chausse, who is now a municipal councillor, for calling dynamite a “vanguard system.”

M. Gabriel Deville, one of the theorists of Marxite Socialism, quietly published the following phrase, which he had meditated upon at leisure: “Dynamite and other similar methods of persuasion are the indispensable instruments for bringing refractory contemporary society to support the Communistic solution of the problem.”1

And some days after the explosion in the Rue des Bons-Enfants, M. Baudin said at a meeting at Carcassonne: “When necessary, we must employ science against reaction and opportunism, more skilfully than the Anarchists have done.” We are well aware that the employment of a euphemism, in the town that has the honour of having M. Ferroul for its Deputy, is of no importance. But if a man like M. Baudin makes use of them, it is because he knows how to excite enthusiasm; and, as a matter of fact, there are men who look upon Social Revolution as a kind of fairyland. Prince Kropotkine, in his Paroles d’un Revolté, writes of civil war, massacres, and the catastrophes of war, by which the proletariat will “joyously seize upon private property, for the common good,” with a zest akin to the infatuation of spiritualism. And, as is proved by the anniversaries of the 28th May, some, labouring under hallucinations, catch glimpses of a social paradise, across the memories of blood and flame of the “days of June,”1 and of the Commune; and in their dreams they follow those who promise them that these orgies of carnage and destruction shall recommence.

Unhappy souls! If they were not victims of one of those epidemics of folly which dazzle crowds, they would recollect that there have never been darker days for the cause which they wish to defend. Did the stones of the barricades change into four pound loaves for those who fought in “the days of June? The Commune has left a memory of a destructive frenzy, all the more odious because it set fire to Paris under the very eyes of the Prussians. And when Socialists of every shade go on pilgrimage each year to proclaim, as they unfurl the red flag, that it is by such inauspicious lights as these that they illumine the social question, all of us, in the name of labour, in the name of social peace, in the name of France, should spurn all contact with them with indignant anger—anger all the more hot because we saw these men gather eagerly round Liebknecht at the Congress of Marseilles.

It was he who, on the 28th of November, 1888, and the 18th of October, 1890, in his own name, and in those of his friends, declared that, “they had determined not to let their native land of Germany be curtailed;” and M. Bebel made it more precise by affirming that “he would never sanction the surrendering, by Germany, of Alsace and Lorraine to France! . . . ” After this M. Liebknecht presented himself at Marseilles as an apostle of peace! Provided that the French respect accomplished facts, M. Liebknecht will not attack France; and the revolutionary Socialists exclaim: What grandeur of soul!

And from their point of view they are justified; because they have already declared that they despise the idea of a fatherland. These people wish to establish their own liberty in contempt of national independence, without reflecting in their blindness, that of all despotisms, the most brutal and implacable is that of the conqueror over the conquered!1

These good apostles wish to reserve all their strength for the social war. They are quite ready to fraternise with those across the frontier; but they will never forgive the peasant of yesterday, who, through labour and economy, has been able to become a proprietor, the jobber, or the workman who has become an employer, the sons of all this proletariat, who by their intelligence and energy, with money earned by competition, have been able to become engineers, tradesmen, manufacturers, and merchants; for they are bourgeois, and, as such, criminals! It is against these that they harbour all their energy and all their rancour.

What logic, and what ethics!

These declamations, excitements, attractions may intoxicate those who traffic in them, and turn the brains of the feeble; but the contagion does not spread far. On the 28th of May, eight thousand people came together at Père-Lachaise, amongst whom there was a certain number of waverers, doubters, ne’er-do-weels, and miserable creatures, as unfit for revolutions as for work. Here, then, in greatest numbers, is assembled the revolutionary strength of Paris. The great majority of working-men know perfectly well that they must seek their maintenance in work, and that it is not riots which will provide for them. They have wives and children; they are concerned about their future. They are prudent, and only seek through the pacific means of Republican institutions to obtain the more or less real improvements which they contemplate.

Hence, all these inflammatory scenes do not represent any serious danger of a social war, except upon one condition: it is that the charlatans of Socialism find accomplices amongst Members of Parliament who, being deputed to make the laws of the country, and to superintend their enforcement, should give an example of respect for the law; amongst the officers entrusted with the maintenance of public order; amongst the magistrates entrusted with the administration of justice; amongst judges and juries entrusted with the application of the Penal Code to misdemeanours and crimes; and amongst the ministers who, being entrusted with the general interests of the country, are bound to contemplate the responsibilities which they assume, not only from the point of view of present difficulties, but above all from that of future events.

[1]M. Clémenceau’s Report, p. 50,

[1]Justice, October 9, 1892.

[1]Apercu sur le Socialisme Scientifique, 1884.

[1]The revolutionary days of 1848.—Ed.

[1]On this point I am against M. Guyot and with those whom he is criticising. In a recent article on The Jew and the Politics of the Future, I said: “Patriotism is a virtue or a vice according as it stands in opposition to narrower or wider sympathies. The patriotism which voluntarily subordinates the interests of self, of family, of class, to those of the nation, is a virtue; for the lesser good is offered up on the altar of the greater. But the patriotism which seeks advantage for our own country, at the expense of the equal rights of others, is a vice. It is a form of selfishness—an egoisme à plusieurs.—Ed.