mastery. Neither God nor man should supervise, order, or interfere. This is the fight also against those who claim more enlightenment than their fellows.
Sorel's dudgeon against the "intellectual" is that (as intellectual) he is always on the hunt for power over men. This leads the superior person to the political field where, among the suavities of parliamentary etiquette, his slow but certain corruption begins. In order to climb higher still he sells out to the next higher stratum of respectability. The politician, as Sorel portrays him, is the exact counterpart of the prostitute:—a creature for sale. He is forever trying to persuade labor that its real interests are the same as his own, or of the party to which he adds luster. The whole mercenary pack is "avide de posseder les profits des emplois public."[1]
The reply to this smart persiflage, is that it skips all the facts. In every advanced nation labor has made its own solid and incontestable gains in alliance with political intellectuals who have given every proof of sincerity that disinterested life-long service carries.
It must be conceded that the most sacred struggle in the world is that in which labor may be said to lead;—the struggle toward a regenerated and reorganized society in which at last every rotten shred of unfair privilege shall be cut out. But this highest and hardest task is not to be performed by one class alone. Not one in the great total of us all who has good will shall be shut out of it. All who can and will, must play their part. Yes, even the defamed possessor of over-weighted millions, if he is led to look
- ↑ See La Decomposition du Marxism.
