old-world land of the Muscovite with railways, the Russia of the knout has begun to totter; and tomorrow, even if our revolutionary friends over there are partially vanquished, the Russian rulers will no longer be able to refuse to the people the liberty of meeting and of the press, the right to strike, and other economic and political liberties of which the capitalist system itself stands in need for its own subsistence, and which it cannot refuse anywhere to the workers of the twentieth century.
What! the hangman of all the Russias—your ally, gentlemen of the jury—can no longer refuse to the Russian moujiks the essential elements of political liberty, and yet you imagine that the German Kaiser, on becoming master of France, or the greater part of it, would be able to wrest these liberties from us!
Your ally, the butcher of all the Russias, has not succeeded after a century of occupation and attempts at Russiafication, in stopping the Poles from speaking their mother tongue, and yet you believe that the Kaiser would be able to stop us from speaking ours!
You see, then, Mr. Advocate-General, that it is quite useless to keep on trying to frighten us with this bogey of the Kaiser, for to us the question of being French or German is quite a matter of indifference. What does it matter to us whether we are labeled French or German, so long as we still have to suffer; either as industrial workers, from irregular employment and exploitation, or as peasants, from the grinding usury of the mortgage-holder and from cut-throat competition in the sale of our produce? What difference can it make to us whether it is a French or German advocate-general who prosecutes us, or whether the police who brutally ill-treat us and the soldiers who shoot us down in strikes are of one nationality or the other?
"But suppose that the Kaiser attacked us?" objected the Advocate-General. And one of the witnesses, easily nonplussed, allowed himself to be embarrassed by this
