GERMINAL
not be accepted; it was only a disguised effort to economise on the Company's part; they wanted to rob every man of an hour's work a day. It was too much this time; the day was coming when the miserable, pushed to extremity, would wreak justice.
He stood with his arms in the air. At the word "justice" the crowd, shaken by a long shudder, broke out into applause which rolled along with the sound of dry leaves. Some voices cried:
"Justice! it is time! Justice."
Gradually Étienne grew heated. He had not Rasseneur's easy flowing abundance. Words often failed him, he had to force his phrases, bringing them out with an effort which he emphasised by a movement of his shoulders. Only in these continual shocks he came upon familiar images which seized on his audience by their energy; while his workman's gestures, his elbows in and then extended, with his fists thrust out, his jaw suddenly advanced as if to bite, had also an extraordinary effect on his mates. They all said that if he was not big he made himself heard.
"The wage system is a new form of slavery," he began again, in a more sonorous voice. "The mine ought to belong to the miner, as the sea belongs to the fisherman, and the earth to the peasant. Do you see? The mine belongs to you, to all of you who, for a century, have paid for it with so much blood and misery!"
He boldly entered on the obscure questions of law, and lost himself in the difficulties of the special regulations concerning mines. The sub-soil, like the soil, belonged to the nation: only an odious privilege gave the monopoly of it to the Companies; all the more since, at Montsou, the pretended legality of the concession was complicated by treaties formally made with the owners of the old fiefs, according to the ancient custom of Hainault. The miners, then, had only to re-conquer their property; and with extended hands he indicated the whole country beyond the forest. At this moment the moon, which had risen above the horizon, lit him up as it glided from behind the high branches. When the crowd, which was still in shadow, thus saw him, white with light, distributing fortune with his open hands, they applauded anew by prolonged clapping.
[254]
