Work [Travail]

In this respect the book has a peculiar significance. Though the English press pays very little attention to the matter, things are moving apace in France. The quiet of that country is only surface-deep. The Socialist schools are each day making more and more progress. The very peasants are fast becoming Socialists, and, as I wrote comparatively recently in my preface to the new English version of M. Zola's 'Germinal,' the most serious troubles may almost at any moment convulse the Republic. Thus it is well that M. Zola, who has always been a fervent partisan of peace and human brotherliness, should be found at such a juncture pointing out pacific courses to those who believe that a bath of blood must necessarily precede all social regeneration.
Incidentally, in the course of his statements and arguments, M. Zola brings forward some very interesting points. I would particularly refer the reader to what he writes on the subject of education. Again, his sketch of the unhappy French peasant of nowadays may be scanned with advantage by those who foolishly believe that peasant to be one of the most contented beings in the world. The contrary is unhappily the case, the subdivision of the soil having reached such a point that the land cannot be properly or profitably cultivated. After lasting a hundred years, the order of things established in the French provinces by the Great Revolution has utterly broken down. The economic conditions of the world have changed, and the only hope for French agriculture rests in farming on a huge scale. This the peasant, amidst his hard struggle with pauperism, is now realising, and this it is which is fast making him a Socialist.
All that M. Zola writes in 'Work' on the subject of iron and steel factories, and the progressive changes in processes and so forth, will doubtless be read with interest at the present time, when so much is being said and written about a certain large American 'trust.' The reliance which he places in Science—the great pacific revolutionary—to effect the most advantageous changes in present-day conditions of labour, is assuredly justified by facts. Personally, I rely far more on science than on any innate spirit of brotherliness between men, to bring about comparative happiness for the human race.