shall attempt to bring about the Revolution, in order to lay hold-of the social wealth usurped today by a minority. We shall transform the dwelling houses, now the property of individual landlords, into communal property.
THE NEW SOCIETY.
We shall work the factories, mines, all the great enterprises, by our unions and our engineers. Our unions of workers will administer, like great co-operative societies, the big stores of today. By a more rational and more equitable organization of production we shall create a society in which there will be well-being, knowledge, and beauty for all; a society which will be far better than that of today, even for your sons and daughters; a socialist country—a country which it will be worth our while to defend against the aggression of any bourgeoisie whatsoever.
I know very well that our collectivist or communist conception is repugnant to you; that, at the very least, it seems to you a mad Utopia. Utopia? It is thus that Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI described the pretensions of your ancestors, the bourgeois revolutionaries, who dreamed of a society in which there would be no absolute king, no privileged nobles, and no state religion.
[The President of the Court: "Mister Herve, you are delivering a regular public lecture; you are trespassing beyond the subject. The gentlemen of the jury, by this time, quite understand your point of view.]
Herve (continuing): I am used to carrying on a discussion, and I assure you, Mister President, that I am in the very heart of my subject. It is necessary that the jury should understand exactly the basis of our ideas, and for that, instead of making use of grand phrases about the revolution, phrases which too often conceal the startling originality of our doctrines, I am obliged to explain precisely, by concrete instances, the ideal for which we contend.
Gentlemen of the jury, what ought to reassure you a
