And then, one should count.
Who, during this slow, eternal march toward execution that has been the history of humanity, who has spilled the blood — always the same blood — without pause, without a moment of pity? Governments, religions, industries — those penal colonies of labor — are drenched in it. Murder drips from their laws, their prayers, their progress. Just yesterday, there were the frenzied butcheries that, as the Commune lay dying, transformed Paris into a charnel house; there were those useless massacres where innocent women and tiny children embraced the ballistic virtuosity of the Lebel rifles at Fourmies. And every day, there are mines that explode, burying fifty, a hundred, five hundred poor devils in a single minute of horrific destruction, their charred bodies never to see the sun again. And there are those atrocious conquests in distant lands, where happy, unknown, and peaceful races writhe beneath the boot of the Western slaver, the plunderer of continents, the impure violator of virgin lands and ancestral forests.
Every step one takes in this society bristling with privileges is marked by a spot of blood; at every gear of the governmental machinery, the flesh of the poor is ground up, spinning and quivering; and tears flow everywhere, in the night of suffering where no one dares to enter. In the face of these ceaseless slaughters and ceaseless tortures, what is this cracking wall, this collapsing staircase?
