crease its privileges, your class took possession, on onerous terms for the taxpayers, of the railways; how, during the whole of the nineteenth century, the military laws made by them were the expression of privilege and oppression.
Since your Revolution of 1789, for a whole century your class has built up its fortune on the ruin of the weak, all in accordance with the Code; and today a few hundred thousand men, of whom many are mere drones, have monopolized all the principal means of production, mines, factories, railways and banks, levying directly or indirectly, on the toil of the great mass of the disinherited a tribute heavier than any impost of the past.
"RIGHTS" OF THE WORKERS.
But our country is much superior to all others, it appears. It is you, the Advocate-General, like so many others, who tell us that. Did you not hear him, gentlemen of the jury, complacently enumerate all the liberties which the French fatherland bestows on us? "You have universal suffrage," he said, "you have the liberty of labor combination, the right to strike, the freedom of meeting, the liberty of the press. If our country is in a bad way, it is for you to make it better!"
Universal suffrage? Just look at it! Corrupted by the intimidation of the employers in the districts dominated by the factory of the country mansion, corrupted everywhere by the ignorance of the electors, who leave school too early with only a rudimentary instruction, universal suffrage is led by the nose by your journals with big circulations, which are all in the hands of the capitalists, and which systematically falsify the facts in order to manufacture public opinion to their liking. Under the capitalist system Capital remains sovereign, even under the republican label.
The right of labor combination? It is tempered by the power of your class to subdue the workers' leaders by starvation through dismissal.
