The right to strike? The witnesses whom you have heard, witnesses from your own class in many cases, come to tell you how strikers, even inoffensive strikers, are sabred and horsewhipped, and how, after strikes, even victorious ones, the powerful employers thin out the ringleaders in order to terrify the rest.
The right of meeting? Ask Bousquet and Garney what they.think about it, they who have been lying in prison for two months without trial for remarks made at a public meeting, and who would be free, like M. Jaluzot, if they had been able to find the 2,000 francs bail which, by a cruel irony, they were asked to furnish.
The liberty of the press? Look at us, at us on these benches! We are all old offenders; there is not one of us who has not been prosecuted for press offences. We are known at all the district courts in France. The Advocate-General has boasted to us of the liberalism of the press laws which enable us to be tried before a jury of our peers, according to his expression. Our peers! Our equals! You, gentlemen! Really! Among you I see house owners, merchants, an engineer, an inspector, a bailiff; show me, Mr. Advocate-General, the manual and intellectual proletarians, who are seated on those benches opposite us, among the jury?
No! No! It is in vain that you deny the existence of classes, Mr. Advocate-General; they are there all the same, they stare you in the face. Just look at them. Here is one class, here on the benches of the accused. It is the proletariat; and there is another class, there opposite us—the bourgeoisie, which is there to try us.
You deny the existence of classes, Mr. Advocate-General, but I am sure that even among the municipal guards who are in this hall there was not a single one who, when.our comrade Bousquet, with that grand popular eloquence which makes the crowd vibrate like the violin under the bow, voiced yesterday the aspirations of the universal proletariat—there was not a single one who did not vibrate in unison; and at the present moment
