“It is high time we knew,” said Clemenceau, “whether, at the degree of civilisation to which we have attained, we can continue to tolerate that men, women, and children die of want—in a few months from the exhaustion induced by insufficiently remunerated work or in a few hours from downright hunger. Our republican and monarchical conservatives—all excellent Christians—answer, ‘No,’ but continue to act ‘Yes.’... I just remarked that M. Barrucand did not propose revolution to us. I ask myself now if I did not go a bit too fast. Yes, eighteen hundred years after the Christ, it is a revolution for Christians to prevent the death of their fellows by slow and rapid starvation. Well, then, let us inaugurate this revolution!”
“Le pain gratuit c’est le futur,” said Jules Lermina at the same moment. And, really, is it so unreasonable that every one should be given enough to eat, when slaves have been, and domestic animals are, so provided for, and when every one is given the privilege of learning to read and write? Is it not rather surprising that a person should be permitted, nay, forced, to acquire reading and writing, and should be supplied at the public expense (without apparent opposition from any source) with fresh air, lights, pure water, paved streets, and parks, and should not be provided with bread; that he is entitled to food inspection and is not entitled to food itself; that he is assured proper disposition for his waste and is not assured a sufficiency of supply; that he can count on a burial and cannot count—supreme irony!—on a living; has the right to a grave-plot and has not the right to a loaf? Is illiteracy so much more dangerous to society than destitution? Is everything as merry as it might be when death thus lords it over life; when a man asks for bread, and is given a coffin?
A CONTRAST IN FUNERALS
A republic with manhood suffrage and generally disseminated book-knowledge would probably have seemed as chimerical to the minds of our not very remote ancestors as the community of the socialist or anarchist dream seems to us. It would not be more remarkable if wage-earners should disappear than it was that serfs and slaves disappeared; if the factory system should disappear than it was that it once appeared; if alms-giving should be replaced by a recognition of the right to work than that charity from being a fine, spontaneous human impulse has become an unwieldy, soulless machine; if private property should be transformed into collective property than that private property was evolved out of the tribal possessions; if the church should cease to be an institution of the state—indeed it has already ceased to be in America—than that it ever became one; if l’union libre should supersede marriage (with the loss of the latter’s chief sanctions, private property and the already much-enfeebled authority of the church) than that monogamy has superseded polygamy; if woman should be emancipated than that man has, up to a certain point, been emancipated. Furthermore, it would be no more extraordinary if the tiers état (the present dominant bourgeoisie) should be evicted by the quatrième état (the proletariat) than it was that the tiers état evicted the nobility and clergy in 1789; if a social republic (under which without knowing or, at least, without admitting it we are already half installed) should follow close upon the heels of a simple republic than that a simple republic followed close upon the heels of a monarchy and a monarchy close upon the heels of a feudal system; if nations should pass as political entities by being merged in an Internationale than that they emerged out of the seeming chaos of the Middle Ages; if there should be one tongue over all the earth[144] than that there has come to be one tongue over any entire people; if there should be general peace than that there has been general war.
No, there is nothing inherently incredible or absurd about the ideas and ideals of the contemporary revolutionists; nothing more transcendental or more visionary than there was, for their day and their generation, in the ideas and ideals of the Encyclopedists, and of the innovators and reformers of all the past.
It may have been a mistake for the classes to impose book-learning on the masses, to compel them to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which makes men as gods; but, having given their wards to eat thereof, having deliberately stimulated them to think, the privileged must let them follow out their thinking to the logical—perhaps, also, to the bitter—end. There is no alternative. There is no such thing as staying them midway in their course, since with growing knowledge has come growing desire.
If the classes did not wish the masses to drink deep of the Pierian spring, they should have had the sense to keep them away from it altogether instead of ingenuously leading them up to sip. As it is, the people have become mentally and morally incapable of blind submission. They cannot be hoodwinked by fine phrases as of yore. Their roused and trained intelligence is rapidly penetrating the shams, puncturing the frauds, and stripping off the shows of republicanism. They will not much longer be put off with the mere forms and formulas of liberty and well-being which satisfied them at the start. They are now beginning to demand the things themselves, and they have at last the minds and the manhood necessary to enforce their demand. The illogical, hypocritical, plutocratic republic which they find themselves under disgusts and exasperates them quite as much as would a monarchy. They have resolved to have out-and-out democracy instead of the miserable makeshift for democracy that has been thrown to them as a sop; and have it they will! Gare à vous, naïve, short-sighted bourgeois, who with your reading and writing started them on their quest for the new, if you attempt to place obstructions in their path!