Do you understand, workingmen, you who are free? You now know what the whole situation is and what the men are. Remember the vanquished not for a day, but at all hours. Women, you whose devotion sustains and elevates their courage, let the agony of the prisoners haunt you like an everlasting nightmare. Let all workshops every week put something aside from their wages. Let the subscriptions no longer be sent to the Versaillese committee, but made over to loyal hands. Let the Socialist party attest its principles of international solidarity and its power by saving those who have fallen for it.
FOOTNOTES:
[256] "We all recollect one of our comrades, Corcelles, who had contracted pulmonary phthisis of the gravest form. He could scarcely keep himself on his legs when crawling before the Commission. To the President's usual question he answered by a pitiful smile only, and while one of the younger members of the Commission, moved probably to pity at the sight of the walking corpse, bent himself towards the ear of the old surgeon, doubtless with the view of begging a respite, the latter retorted, loud enough to be heard by the patient and several other prisoners, 'Bah! the sharks will want something to eat.' And the sharks did have something to eat; less than three weeks after we were out at sea our friend Corcelles was dead, and we committed his remains to the last common reservoir." We must give the name of this friend of sharks; his name is Dr. Chanal. "Out of the four thousand condemned who passed in file before him, ten cases of exemption are not known. And perhaps the motives which dictated this may be better judged when the following facts are known. M. Edmond Adam, deputy of the Seine, having come to the Ile de Ré in order to visit M. H. Rochefort, who was shut up there, had a young woman present herself at his hotel, who proposed to him, for the modest sum of 1000 francs, to procure from the chief-surgeon a respite for his friend on his departure. She had but one word to say, remarked she, and the old man was under her orders."—Account by two escaped prisoners from New Caledonia, Paschal Grousset and Jourde, published by the Times, 27th June 1874.
[257] The Australian and English journals having revealed these sufferings, the Versaillese Government answered in its journal: "The news of the convict ship the Orne, transmitted through the English press, is inexact in all points. Far from counting 420 cases of scurvy, this vessel had hardly 360 cases."
[258] Report of the Commission of Pardons, presented in January 1876, by MM. Martel and F. Voisin.
[259] In the Ile des Pins, 900 condemned received between them all 500 hectares (about 100 acres). "We have been mistaken as to the resources offered by the Ile des Pins," philosophically remarked the Minister of Marine in 1876. "I said so three years ago," answered M. Georges Périn.
[260] "Admiral Ribourt, in his Inquiry, declares that during the year 1873 the engineering department had paid the condemned in the peninsula 110,525 francs. We must then leave off saying that the convicts won't work."—Speech of M. Georges Périn in favour of an amnesty, Sitting of the 17th May 1876.
[261] An overlooker of the first class had been condemned for an attempt to murder; another, decorated with the cross of the Légion d'Honneur, sentenced to seven years' hard labour for attempting to murder his wife. Many of them were every day condemned for drunkenness.
[262] Details taken from the very correct and by no means exaggerated relation which Paschal Grousset and Jourde published in the Times after their escape. It has since been republished as a pamphlet.
[263] Two notorious murderers.