“9. Responsibility of employers for accidents to their employees.
“10. Participation of laborers in the establishment of rules and laws for different shops; suppression of the right of employers to impose fines and penalties upon laborers.
“11. Annulment of all contracts which have alienated public property (banks, railroads, mines, etc.), and the management of all state-workshops by laborers employed therein.
“12. Abolition of all indirect taxes, and the transformation of all direct taxes into a progressive tax on incomes exceeding 3000 francs; suppression of all collateral inheritances, and of inheritances in direct line exceeding 20,000 francs.”[153]
Clovis Hugues, mentioned as “unclassed,” is a collectivist deputy. It is stated, however, that he has announced his intention of leaving the party, on account of the tyranny with which they have attempted to control him in every step. Joffrin refused to attend Louis Blanc’s funeral, as he held that he had proved false to the laborers in 1871. Hugues, an old friend of Blanc’s, attended, and was reproved for this, whereupon he indignantly declared the above-mentioned intention, maintaining that Louis Blanc was an honorable, high-minded man, and a true friend of the laborer.
De Laveleye believes that a majority of French workmen are socialists, while Malon confidently speaks of the socialists as forming the élite of the proletariat. The latter states their views and tendencies at the present time in the following language: “We have rejected all religious regenerations, whether they are called New Catholic, New Christian, pantheistic, or theo-humanitarian; and we have accepted every scientific demonstration, however much opposed it might be to the previous order of our conceptions.
“We have recognized that the social and intellectual world, like the physical world, are governed by natural laws, and are subject to relations of succession and similitude independent of our personal intervention. We have admitted that our will itself is determined by natural laws which, it may not break.
“This has given us larger views, and especially has taught us to seek in a terrestrial future the ideal which is at the basis of every human nature.
“We have acquired a more profound knowledge of the laws which govern social phenomena. We know that as our human nature is essentially capable of modification and perfection, so social phenomena and industrial phenomena, being based thereon, are modifiable in large degree, and we labor to modify them as much as possible.”[154]