the big middlemen, flour merchants, wine agencies and sugar refiners. Still farther off from the table of the prosperous I see the great mass of the proletarians, those who for their whole fortune have only their arms and their brains; working men and women of the factory, exposed to long periods of unemployment; petty officials, clerks, and other employes, obliged to bow their heads and hide their opinions; domestic servants of both sexes, flesh for toil, flesh for cannon, flesh for lust.
Behold your countries!
Monstrous social inequality, monstrous exploitation of man by man, that is what a country is nowadays, and that is what the workers take off their hats to when the flag is carried by. They seem to say: "Oh, how beautiful is our country! Oh, how free, sweet and just she is!" How you must laugh, Mr. Advocate-General, when you hear them sing:
"To die for one's country
Is of all the fates the most beauteous,
The most worthy of envy."
You believe, perhaps, gentlemen of the jury—a natural illusion among the privileged classes—that it is by labor and thrift that one arrives at the table of the happy ones of this world. We know that one does arrive there sometimes by labor and by the spirit of organization and economy; and we are quite willing to believe that it is thus that you, gentlemen, have managed to find your way there. But we others, who are all manual or brain workers, we know very well that if occasionally a man gains fortune and ease by his own labor and privations, it is ever so much more often by the work and the privations of others.
THE ROBBER CLASS!
And if you, gentlemen, are ignorant of the history of your class, we, here, are not. We know that in the Revolutionary Assemblies of 1789 and 1793 there was not a single workman, not a single peasant, but only members
