declarations which I made in the name of the Socialist Federation of the Yonne a few months ago in the meeting at the Tivoli Vaux-Hall, some comrades of my party objected, like the Advocate-General himself, that, if my ideas spread on this side of the frontier, the German Kaiser would just make a mouthful of France; he would annex it, and then there would be an end to all our liberties. Let us follow them in this fantastic hypothesis, of which I will shortly show you the impossible character.
You seem to think that if we became tomorrow the subjects of the Kaiser, all our political liberties would disappear, and with them the right to speak our native language. Come, now! Mr. Advocate-General. You are unaware perhaps that universal suffrage exists in Germany for the elections to the imperial parliament, the Reichstag; that labor organizations are twice as numerous on the other side of the Rhine as they are here; that public meetings are as numerous as they are here; and that the German socialist daily papers are "redder" than those labeled "socialist" in this country.
And you imagine that the Kaiser, who, in this German nation which you represent to us as politically backward, cannot even hinder the exercise of these political liberties, you imagine that he would be able to prevent them among us, who, on your own showing, are more unruly than the German workers. And if he tried to, do you suppose that we should not resort to secret propaganda, the most powerful and efficacious form of propaganda?
But listen to the sounds which reach us from Russia, a country still more backward, economically, intellectually and politically, than the Germany of the Kaiser. Listen, and you will hear the sounds which foretell the ignorminious downfall of the autocracy. As a consequence of the old patriarchal Russia, agricultural and Czarist, having tasted of the capitalist system, as a consequence of the investments of the French, German, and English capitalists—we are not the only internationalists!—having gone to create a Russian industrialism and to furrow the
