HX 
 266 
 L13dE 
 
 T TO BE Lazy 
 OTHER Studies 
 
 PAUL LAFARGUE l 
 
 man
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE 
 RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 AND OTHER STUDIES 
 
 BY 
 PAUL LAFARGUE 
 
 Translated by CHARLES H. KERR 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANTi
 
 Copyright, 1907 
 By Charles H. Kerr & Company
 
 PREFACE 
 
 M. Thiers, at a private session of the com- 
 Jiission on primary education of 1849, said : "I 
 wish to make the influence of the clergy all- 
 powerful because I count upon it to propagate 
 that good philosophy which teaches man that he 
 is here below to suffer, and not that other philos- 
 ophy which on the contrary bids man to enjoy." 
 M. Thiers was stating the ethics of the capital- 
 ist class, whose fierce egoism and narrow intel- 
 ligence he incarnated. 
 
 The Bourgeoisie, when it was struggling 
 against the nobility sustained by the clergy, 
 hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism ; but 
 once triumphant, it changed its tone and manner 
 and today it uses religion to support its economic 
 and political supremacy. In the fifteenth and six- 
 teenth centuries, it had joyfully taken up the 
 pagan tradition and glorified the flesh and its 
 passions, reproved by Christianity; in our days, 
 gorgeci with goods and with pleasures, it denies 
 
 -1 C^ooir^^
 
 4 PREFACE 
 
 the teachings of its thinkers like Rabelais and 
 Diderot, and preaches abstinence to the wage- 
 workers. Capitalist ethics, a pitiful parody on 
 Christian ethics, strikes with its anathema the 
 flesh of the laborer; its ideal is to reduce the 
 producer to the smallest number of needs, to 
 suppress his joys and his passions and to con- 
 demn him to play the part of a machine turning 
 out work without respite and without thanks. 
 
 The revolutionary socialists must take up 
 again the battle fought by the philosophers and 
 pamphleteers of the bourgeoisie ; they must 
 march up to the assault of the ethics and the 
 social theories of capitalism ; they must demolish 
 in the heads of the class which they call to ac- 
 tion the prejudices sown in them by the ruling 
 class; they must proclaim in the faces of the 
 hypocrites of all ethical systems that the earth 
 shall cease to be the vale of tears for the laborer ; 
 that in the communist society of the future, 
 which we shall establish "peaceably if we may, 
 forcibly if we must," the impulses of men will 
 be given a free rein, for "all these impulses are 
 by nature good, we have nothing to avoid but 
 their misuse and their excesses,*" and they will 
 not be avoided except by their mutual counter- 
 
 • Deccartae. "L«« Passions de I'ame.'
 
 PREFACE 3 
 
 balancing, by the harmonious development of 
 the human organism, for as Dr. Beddoe says, 
 "It is only when a race reaches its maximum 
 of physical development, that it arrives at its 
 highest point of energy and moral vigor." Such 
 was also the opinion of the great naturalist 
 Charles Darwin.* 
 
 This refutation of the "Right to Work" which 
 I am republishing with some additional notes ap- 
 peared in the weekly "Egalite", 1880, second 
 series. P. L. 
 
 Saint e-Pelagie Prison, 1883. 
 
 ♦ Doctor Beddoo. "Memoirs of the Anthropological So- 
 ciety." 
 
 Charles Darwin. "Descent of Man."
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY— 
 
 I. A Disastrous Dogma 9 
 
 II. Blessings of Worl? 14 
 
 III. The Conseriuences of Over-Production 30 
 
 IV. New Songs to New Music 48 
 
 Appendix 57 
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 63 
 
 THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM 105 
 
 THE WOMAN QUESTION Ill 
 
 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 139 
 
 THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS 
 
 OF MAN 157 
 
 7
 
 THE 
 RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 Let us be lazy in everything, except In lov- 
 ing and drinking, except in being lazy. 
 
 —Leasing. 
 
 A DISASTROUS DOGMA. 
 
 A Strange delusion possesses the working clas- 
 ses of the nations where capitalist civilization 
 holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train 
 the individual and social woes which for two 
 centuries have tortured sad humanity. This 
 delusion is the love of work, the furious passion 
 for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the 
 vital force of the individual and his progeny. 
 Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the 
 priests, the economists and the moralists have 
 cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite 
 men, they have wished to be wiser than their 
 God; weak and contemptible men, they have 
 fi
 
 10 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 presumed to rehabilitate what their God had 
 cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christ- 
 ian, an economist or a moraHst, I appeal from 
 their judgement to that of their God ; from the 
 preachings of their religious, economics or free- 
 thought ethics, to .the frightful consequences of 
 work in capitalist society. 
 
 In capitalist society work is the cause of 
 all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic 
 deformity. Compare the thorough-bred in 
 Rothschild's stables, served by a retinue of bi- 
 peds, with the heavy brute of the Norman farms 
 which plows the earth, carts the manure, hauls 
 the crops. Look at the noble savage whom the 
 missionaries of trade and the traders of religion 
 have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syph- 
 ilis and the dogma of work, and then look at our 
 miserable slaves of machines.* 
 
 * European explorers pause in wonder before the 
 physical beauty and the proud bearing of the men of 
 primitive races, not soiled by what Paepplg calls "the 
 poisonous breath of civilization." Speaking of the ab- 
 origines of the Oceanic Islands, Lord George Campbell 
 writes: "There is not a people in the world which 
 strikes one more favorably at first sight. Their 
 smooth skin of a light copper tint, their hair golden 
 and curly, their beautiful and happy faces, in a word, 
 their whole person formed a new and splendid speci- 
 men of the 'genus homo'; their physical appearance 
 gave the impression of a race superior to ours." The 
 civilized men of ancient Rome, witness Caesar and 
 Tacitus, regarded with the same admiration the Ger- 
 mans of the communist tribes which invaded the Ro- 
 man empire. Following Tacitus, Salvien, the priest of 
 the fifth century who received the surname of master 
 of the Bishops, held up the barbarians as an example
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 11 
 
 When, in our civilized Europe, we would find 
 a trace of the native beauty of man, we must 
 go seek it in the nations where economic prejud- 
 ices have not yet uprooted the hatred of work. 
 Spain, which, alas, is degenerating, may still 
 boast of possessing fewer factories than we have 
 of prisons and barracks ; but the artist rejoices 
 in his admiration of the hardy Andalusian, brown 
 as his native chestnuts, straight and flexible as a 
 steel rod ; and the heart leaps at hearing the beg- 
 
 to civilized Oiristians: "We are immodest before the 
 barbarians, ■who are more chaste than we. Even niore> 
 the barbarians are wounded at our lack of modesty; 
 the Goths do not permit debauchees of their own na- 
 tion to remain among them; alone in the midst of 
 them, by the sad privilege of their nationality and 
 their name, the Romans have the right to be impure. 
 (Pederasty was then the height of the fashion among 
 both pagans and Christians.) The oppressed fly to the 
 barbarians to seek for mercy and a shelter." (De 
 Gubernatione Dei.) The old civilization and the rising 
 Christianity corrupted the barbarians of the ancient 
 world, as the old Christianity and the modern capital- 
 ist civilization are corrupting the savages of the new 
 world. 
 
 M. P. LePlay, whose talent for observation must be 
 recognized, even if we reject his sociological conclu- 
 sions, tainted w^ith philanthropic and Christian Phari- 
 saism, says in his book "Les Ouvriers Europ^ens" 
 (1885): "The Propensity of the Bachkirs for laziness 
 (the Bachkirs are semi-nomadic shepherds of the Asi- 
 atic slope of the Ural mountains) ; the leisure of nom- 
 adic life, the habit of meditation which this engenders 
 In the best endowed individuals,— all this often gives 
 them a distinction of manner, a fineness of intelligence 
 and judgement which is rarely to be observed on the 
 
 same social level in a more developed civilization 
 
 The thing most repugnant to them is agricultural 
 labor: they will do anything rather than accept the 
 trade of a farmer." Agriculture is in fact the first ex- 
 ample of servile labor in the history of man. Accord- 
 ing to biblical tradition, the first criminal, Cain, Is ft 
 farmer.
 
 12 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 gar, superbly draped in his ragged capa, parleying 
 on terms of equality with the duke of Ossuna. 
 For the Spaniard, in whom the primitive animal 
 has not been atrophied, work is the worst sort 
 of slavery.* The Greeks in their era of great- 
 ness had only contempt for work: their slaves 
 alone were permitted to labor: the free man 
 knew only exercises for the body and mind.J 
 And so it was in this era that men like Aristotle, 
 Phidias, Aristophanes moved and breathed 
 among the people ; it was the time when a hand- 
 ful of heroes at Marathon crushed the hordes 
 of Asia, soon to be subdued by Alexander. The 
 philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for 
 work, that degradation of the free man, the poets 
 sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods : 
 O Melibae Deus nobis haec otia fecit, f 
 Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, preached 
 idleness: [_^Consider the lilies of the field, how 
 they grow : they toil not, neither do they 
 spin : and yet I say unto you that even Solomon 
 in all his glory was not arrayed like one of 
 these. 'M Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave 
 his worshipers the supreme example of ideal 
 
 •The Spanish proverb says: Descanzar es salud. 
 (Rest is healthful.) 
 
 + O Mellbaeus! a god has granted us this idleness. 
 Virgil's Bucolics. (See appendix.)
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 13 
 
 laziness; after six days of work, he rests for all 
 eternity. 
 
 On the other hand, what are the races for 
 which work is an organic necessity? The 
 Auvergnians; the Scotch, those Auvergnians of 
 the British Isles; the GaHcians, those Auvergn- 
 ians of Spain; the Pomeranians, those Auvergn- 
 ians of Germany ; the Chinese, those Auvergnians 
 of Asia. In our society, which are the classes 
 that love work for work's sake? The peasant 
 proprietors, the little shopkeepers; the former 
 bent double over their fields, the latter crouched 
 in their shops, burrow like the mole in his sub- 
 terranean passage and never stand up to look at 
 nature leisurely. 
 
 And meanwhile the proletariat, the great class 
 embracing all the producers of civilized nations, 
 the class which in freeing itself will free human- 
 ity from servile toil and will make of the human 
 animal a free being, — the proletariat, betraying 
 its instincts, despising its historic mission,ihas 
 let itself be perverted by the dogma of work.j 
 Rude and terrible has been its punishment. All 
 its individual and social woes are born of its 
 passion for work.
 
 14 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 II. 
 
 BLESSINGS OF WORK. 
 
 In 1770 at London, an anonymous pamphlet 
 appeared under the title, "An Essay on Trade 
 and Commerce". It made some stir in its time. 
 The author, a great philanthropist, was indignant 
 that "the factory population of England had 
 taken into its head the fixed idea that in their 
 quality of Englishmen all the individuals compos- 
 ing it have by right of birth the privilege ol 
 being freer and more independent than the labor- 
 ers of any country in Europai This idea may 
 have its usefulness for soldiers, since it stimuli 
 ates their valor, but the less the factory workers 
 are imbued with it the better for themselves and 
 the state. Laborers ought never to look on 
 themselves as independent of their superiors. 
 It is extremely dangerous to encourage such in^ 
 fatuations in a commercial state like ours, where 
 perhaps seven-eighths of the population have lit- 
 tle or no property. The cure will not be complete 
 until our industrial laborers are contented to 
 work six days for the same sum which they now 
 earn in four." Thus, nearly a century before 
 Guizot,[^work was openly preached in London as 
 a curb to the noble passions of man^ ''The more 
 my people work, the less vices they will have'V
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 15 
 
 wrote Napoleon on May 5th, 1807, from Osterod. 
 "I am the authority. . . .and I should be disposed 
 to order that on Sunday after the hour of service 
 be past, the shops be opened and the laborers 
 return to their work." To root out laziness and 
 curb the sentiments of pride and independence 
 which arise from it, the author of the ""Essay 
 on Trade" proposed to imprison the poor in 
 ideal "work-houses", which should become 
 "houses of terror, where they should work four- 
 teen hours a day in such fashion that when meal 
 time was deducted there should remain twelve 
 hours of work full and complete". 
 
 Twelve hours of work a day, that is the ideal 
 of the philanthropists and moralists of the eight- 
 eenth century. How have we outdone this nee 
 plus ultra! Modern factories have become ideal 
 houses of correction in which the toiling masses 
 are imprisoned, in which they are condemned 
 to compulsory work for twelve or fourteen hours, 
 not the men only but also women and children.* 
 And to think that the sons of the heroes of the 
 Terror have allowed themselves to be degraded 
 
 ♦ At the first Congress of Charities held at Brussels 
 in 1857 one of the richest manufacturers of Marquette, 
 near Lille, M. Scrive, to the plaudits of the membera 
 of the congress declared with the noble satisfaction 
 of a duty performed: "We have introduced certain 
 methods of diversion for the children. We teach thera 
 to sing during their work, also to count while work-
 
 16 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 by the religion of ^yoJ^k, to the point of accept- 
 ing, since 1848, as a revolutionary conquest, the 
 law limiting factory labor to twelve hours. They 
 proclaim as a revolutionary principle the Right 
 to Work. Shame to the French proletariat! 
 Only slaves would have been capable of such 
 baseness. A Greek of the heroic times would 
 have required twenty years of capitalist civiliza- 
 tion before he could have conceived such vile- 
 ness. 
 
 And if the miseries of compulsory work and 
 the tortures of hunger have descended upon 
 the proletariat more in number than the locusts 
 of the Bible, it is because the proletariat itself 
 invited them. This work, which in June 1848 
 the laborers demanded with arms in their hands, 
 this they have imposed on their families ; they 
 have delivered up to the barons of industry their 
 wives and children. With their own hands they 
 have demolished their domestic hearths. With 
 their own hands they have dried up the milk of 
 their wives. The unhappy women carrying and 
 nursing their babes have been obliged to go into 
 
 Ing. That distracts them and makes them accept 
 bravely "those twelve hours of labor which are neces- 
 sary to procure their means of existence." Twelve 
 hours of labor, and such labor, imposed on children 
 less than twelve years old! The materialists will al- 
 ways regret that there is no hell in which to confine 
 these Christian philanthropic murderers of childhood.
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 17 
 
 the mines and factories to bend their backs and 
 exhaust their nerves. With their own hands 
 they have broken the Hfe and the vigor of their 
 children. Shame on the proletarians! Where 
 are those neighborly housewives told of in our 
 fables and in our old tales, bold and frank of 
 speech, lovers of Bacchus? Where are those 
 buxom girls, always on the move, always cook- 
 ing, always singing, always spreading life, en- 
 gendering life's joy, giving painless birth to 
 healthy and vigorous children ? . . . . (Today we 
 have factory girls and women, pale drooping 
 flowers, with impoverished blood, with disord- 
 ered stomachs, with languid limbs .... They 
 have never known the pleasure of a healthful 
 passion, nor would they be capable of telling 
 of it merrily !J And the children ? Twelve hours 
 of work for children! O, misery. But not all 
 the Jules Simon of the Academy of Moral and 
 Political Science, not all the Germinys of Jesuit- 
 ism, could have invented a vice more degrading 
 to the intelligence of the children, more cor- 
 rupting of their instincts, more destructive of 
 their organism than work in the vitiated atmos- 
 phere of the capitalist factory. 
 (jOur epoch has been called the century of 
 work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery 
 and corruption7\
 
 |9 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 And all the while the philosophers, the bourge* 
 ois economists — from the painfully confused 
 August Comte to the ludicrously clear Leroy- 
 Beaulieu; the people of bourgeois literature — 
 from the quackishly romantic Victor Hugo to 
 the artlessly grotesque Paul de Kock, — all have 
 intoned ; nauseating songs in honor of the god 
 Progress, the eldest son of Work^ Listen to 
 them and you would think that happiness was 
 soon to reign over the earth, that its coming 
 was already perceived. They rummaged in the 
 dust of past centuries to bring back feudal miser- 
 ies to serve as a sombre contrast to the delights 
 of the present times. Have they wearied us, 
 these satisfied people, yesterday pensioners at the 
 table of the nobility, today pen-valets of the 
 capitalist class and fatly paid? Have they reck- 
 oned us weary of the peasant, such as La Bruyere 
 described him? Well, here is the brilliant pict- 
 ure of proletarian delights in the year of capital- 
 ist progress 1840, penned by one of their own 
 men, Dr. Villerme, member of the Institute, the 
 same who in 1848 was a member of that scient- 
 ific society (Thiers, Cousin, Passy, Blanqui, the 
 academician, were in it), which disseminated 
 among the masses the nonsense of bourgeois 
 economics and ethics. 
 
 It is of manufacturing Alsace that Dr. Vil-
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 19 
 
 lerme speaks, — the Alsace of Kestner and Doll- 
 fus, those flowers of industrial philanthropy and 
 republicanism. But before the doctor raises up 
 before us his picture of proletarian miseries, let 
 us listen to an Alsatian manufacturer, Mr. Th. 
 Mieg, of the house of Dollfus, Mieg & Co., 
 depicting the condition of the old-time artisan: 
 "At Mulhouse fifty years ago (in 1813, when 
 modern mechanical industry was just arising) 
 the laborers were all children of the soil, in- 
 habiting the town and the surrounding villages, 
 and almost all owning a house and often a little 
 field."* It was the golden age of the laborer. 
 But at that time Alsatian industry did not deluge 
 the world with its cottons, nor make millionaires 
 out of its Dollfus and Koechlin. But twenty-five 
 years after, when Villerme visited Alsace, the 
 modern Minotaur, the capitalist workshop, had 
 conquered the country /in its insatiable appetite 
 for human labor it had dragged the workmen 
 from their hearths, the better to wring them and 
 press out the labor which they contained.) It 
 was by thousands that the workers flocked to- 
 gether at the signal of the steam whistle. "A 
 great number"^ says Villerme, "five thousand 
 
 • Speech delivered before the International Society 
 of Practical Studies in Social Economics, at Paris In 
 May 1863. and published in the French "Economist" 
 of the same epoc^v
 
 90 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 out of seventeen thousand, were obliged by his:^ 
 rents to lodge in neighboring villages. Some 
 of them lived three or four miles from the fac- 
 tory where they worked.* 
 
 "At Mulhouse in Dornach, work began at five 
 o'clock in the morning and ended at eight o'clock 
 in the evening, summer and winter. It was a 
 sight to watch them arrive each morning into 
 the city and depart each evening. 'Among them 
 were a multitude of women, pale, often walk- 
 ing bare-footed through the mud, and who for 
 lack of umbrellas when the rain or snow fell, 
 wore their aprons or skirts turned up over their 
 heads. There was a still larger number of 
 young children, equally dirty, equally pale, 
 covered with rags, greasy from the machine oil 
 which drops on them while they work. They 
 were better protected from the rain because 
 their clothes shed water; but unlike the women 
 just mentioned, they did not carry their day's 
 provisions in a basket, but they carryed in their 
 hands or hid under their clothing as best they 
 might, the morsel of bread which must serve 
 them as food until time for them to return 
 home. 
 
 Thus to the strain of an insufferably long 
 
 ♦ Note that this was before the era of railroads and 
 street cars. (Translator.)
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 31 
 
 day —at least fifteen hours — is added for these 
 wretches the fatigue of the painful daily jour- 
 neys. (Consequently they reach home over- 
 whelmed by the need of sleep, and next day they 
 rise before they are completely rested in ordei 
 to reach the factory by the opening time.". 
 
 Now, look at the holes in which were packed 
 those who lodge in the town : "I saw at Mul- 
 house in Dornach, and the neighboring houses, 
 some of those miserable lodgings where two 
 families slept each in its corner on straw thrown 
 on the floor and kept in its place by two planks. 
 ....This wretchedness among the laborers of 
 the cotton industry in the department of the up- 
 per Rhine is so extreme that it produces this 
 sad result, that while in the families of the 
 manufacturers, merchants, shop-keepers or 
 factory superintendents, half of the children 
 reach their twenty-first year, this same half 
 ceases to exist before the lapse of two years in 
 the families of weavers and cotton spinners." 
 
 Speaking of the labor of the workshop, Vil- 
 lerme adds : "It is not a work, a task, it is 
 a torture and it is inflicted on children of six 
 to eight years. It is this long torture day after 
 day which wastes away the laborers in the cot- 
 ton spinning factories". And as to the dura- 
 tion of the work Villerme observes, that the
 
 23 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 /convicts in prisons work but ten hours, the 
 slaves in the west Indies work but nine hours, 
 while there existed in France after its Revolu- 
 tion of 1789, which had proclaimed the pompous 
 Rights of Man "factories where the day was 
 sixteen hours, out of which the laborers were 
 allowed only an hour and a half for meals. "*j 
 
 What a miserable abortion of the revolution- 
 ary principles of the bourgeoisie ! i^Vhat woeful 
 gifts from its god Progress ! The philanthrop- 
 ists hail as benefactors of humanity those who 
 having done nothing to become rich, give work 
 to the poor. Far better were it to scatter pesti- 
 lence and to poisen the springs than to erect a 
 capitalist factory in the midst of a rural popula- 
 tion. Introduce factory work, and farewell joy, 
 health and liberty; farewell to all that makes 
 life beautiful and worth living. f 
 
 And the economists go on repeating to the 
 
 * L. R. Villermfi. "Tableau de I'gtat physique et 
 moral des ouvriers dans les fabriques de coton, de 
 laine et de soie (1840). It is not because Dollfup, 
 Koechlin and other Alsacian manufacturers were re- 
 publicans, patriots and protestant philanthropists that 
 they treated their laborers in this way, for Blanqui, 
 the academician, Reybaud, the prototype of Jerome 
 Paturot, and Jules Simon, have observed the same 
 amenities for the working class among the very 
 catholic and monarchical manufacturers of Lille and 
 Lyons. These are capitalist virtues ■which harmonize 
 delightfuly with all political and religious convictions. 
 
 tThe Indians of the warlike tribes of Brazil kill 
 their invalids and old people; they show their affec- 
 tion for them by putting an end to a life which is no 
 longer enlivened by combats, feasts and dances. All
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 23 
 
 laborers, "Work, to increase social wealth", and 
 nevertheless an economist, Destutt de Tracy, 
 answers : fit is in poor nations that people are 
 comfortable, in rich nations they are ordinarily 
 poor^; and his disciple Cherbuliez continues: 
 "The laborers themselves in co-operating toward 
 the accumulation of productive capital contri- 
 bute to the event which sooner or later must 
 deprive them of a part of their wages". But 
 deafened and stupified by their own bowlings, 
 the economists answer: ''Wbrk, always work, to 
 create your prosperity", and in the name of 
 Christian meekness a priest of the Anglican 
 Church, the Rev. Mr. Townshend, intones : 
 Work, work, night and day. By working you 
 make your poverty increase and your poverty 
 releases us from imposing work upon you by 
 force of law. The legal imposition of work 
 "gives too much trouble, requires too much 
 violence and makes too much noise. Hunger, 
 on the contrary, is not only a pressure which is 
 peaceful, silent and incessant, but as it is the 
 most natural motive for work and industry, it 
 
 primitive peoples have given these proofs of affectior? 
 to their relatives: the Massagetae of the Caspian Sea 
 (Herodotus), as well as the Wens of Germany and the 
 Celts of Gaul. In the churches of Sweden even lately 
 they preserved clubs called family clubs which served 
 to deliver parents from the sorrows of old age. How 
 degenerate are the modern proletarians to accept with 
 patience the terrible miseries of factory labor!
 
 ;84 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 also provokes to the most powerful efforts." 
 (Work, work, proletarians, to increase social 
 wealth and your in'"vidual poverty; work, work, 
 in order that becoming poorer, you may have 
 more reason to work and become miserable. 
 Such is the inexorable law of capitalist produc- 
 tion^ 
 
 Because, lending ear to the fallacious words 
 of the economists, the proletarians have given 
 themselves up body and soul to the vice of work, 
 they precipitate the whole of society into these 
 industrial crises of over-production which con- 
 vulse the social organism. Then because there 
 is a plethora of merchandise and a dearth of pur- 
 chasers, the shops are closed and hunger scour- 
 ges the working people with its whip of a 
 thousand lashes. The proletarians, brutalized by 
 the dogma of work, not understanding that the 
 over-work which they have inflicted upon them- 
 selves during the time of pretended prosperity 
 is the cause of their present misery, do not run 
 to the granaries of wheat and cry : "We are 
 hungry, we wish to eat. True we have not a red 
 cent, but beggars as we are, it is we. neverthe- 
 less, who harvested the wheat and gathered the 
 grapes." They do not besiege the warehouse 
 of Bonnet, or Jujurieux, the inventor of in- 
 dustrial convents, and cry out: "M. Bonnet,
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 35 
 
 here are your working women, silk workers, 
 spinners, weavers; they are shivering pitifully 
 under their patched cotton dresses, yet it is 
 they who have spun and woven the silk robes of 
 the fashionable women of all Christendom. The 
 poor creatures working thirteen hours a day, 
 had no time to think of their toilet. Now, they 
 are out of work and have J:ime to rustle in the 
 silks they have made. (Ever since they lost 
 their milk teeth they have devoted themselves 
 to your fortune and have lived in abstinence?) 
 Now they are at leisure and wish to enjoy a 
 little of the fruits of their labor. Come, M. 
 Bonnet, give them your silks, M. Harmel shall 
 furnish his muslins, M. Pouyer-Quertier his 
 calicos, M. Pinet his boots for their dear little 
 feet, cold and damp. Clad from top to toe and 
 gleeful, they will be delightful to look at. Come, 
 no evasions, you are a friend of humanity, are 
 you not, and a Christian into the bargain? Put 
 at the disposal of your working girls the fortune 
 they have built up for you out of their flesh ; you 
 want to help business, get your goods into circu- 
 lation, — here are consumers ready at hand. Give 
 them unlimited credit. You are simply compel- 
 led to give credit to merchants whom you do 
 not know from Adam or Eve, who have given 
 you nothing, not even a glass of water. Your
 
 26 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 working women will pay the debt the best they 
 can. If at maturity they let their notes go to 
 protest, and if they have nothing to attach, you 
 can demand that they pay you in prayers. They 
 will send you to paradise better than your black- 
 gowned priests steeped in tobacco." 
 
 Instead of taking advantage of periods of 
 crisis, for a general distribution of their products 
 and a universal holiday, the laborers, perishing 
 with hunger, go and beat their heads against 
 the doors of the workshops. W^th pale faces, 
 emaciated bodies, pitiful speeches they assail the 
 manufacturers : "Good M, Chagot, sweet M. 
 Schneider, give us work, it is not hunger, but 
 the passion for work which torments us". And 
 these wretches, who have scarcely the strength 
 to stand upright, sell twelve and fourteen hours 
 of work twice as cheap as when they had bread 
 on the table. And the philanthropists of indus- 
 try profit by their lockouts to manufacture at 
 lower cost. 
 
 If industrial crises follow periods of over- 
 work as inevitably as night follows day, bring- 
 ing after them lockouts and poverty without end, 
 they also lead to inevitable bankruptcy. So 
 long as the manufacturer has credit he gives 
 free rein to the rage for work. He borrows, 
 and borrows again, to furnish raw material to
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 27 
 
 his laborers, and goes on producing without 
 considering that the market is becoming satiated 
 and that if his goods don't happen to be sold, 
 his notes will still come due. At his wits' end, 
 he implores the banker, he throws himself at 
 his feet, offering his blood, his honor. "A little 
 gold will do my business better", answers the 
 Rothschild. "You have 20,000 pairs of hose 
 in your warehouse ; they are worth 20c. I will 
 take them at 4c." The banker gets possession 
 of the goods and sells them at 6c or 8c, and 
 pockets certain frisky dollars which owe nothing 
 to anybody : but the manufacturer has stepped 
 back for a better leap. At last the crash comes 
 and the warehouses disgorge. Then so much 
 merchandise is thrown out of the window that 
 you cannot imagine how it came in by the door. 
 Hundreds of millions are required to figure the 
 value of the goods that are destroyed. In the 
 last century they were burned or thrown into 
 the water.* 
 
 But before reaching this decision, the manu- 
 facturers travel the world over in search of 
 markets for the goods which are heaping up. 
 They force their government to annex Congo, 
 
 • At the Industrial Congress held in Berlin in Jan. 
 21, ■'S79, the losses in the iron industry of Germany 
 durini^ the last crisis were estimated at $109,056,000^
 
 28 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 to seize on Tonquin, to batter down the Chinese 
 Wall with cannon shots to make an outlet for 
 their cotton goods. In previous centuries it was 
 a duel to the death between France and Eng- 
 land as to which should have the exclusive pri- 
 vilege of selling to America and the Indies. 
 Thousands of young and vigorous men reddened 
 the seas with their blood during the colonial 
 wars of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eight- 
 eenth centuries. 
 
 (There is a surplus of capital as well as of 
 g^oods. The financiers no longer know where 
 to place it. Then they go among the happy 
 nations who are loafing in the sun smoking 
 cigarettes and they lay down railroads, erect 
 factories and import the curse of work. And 
 this exportation of French capital ends one fine 
 morning in diplomatic complications. In Egypt, 
 for example, France, England and Germany 
 were on the point of hairpulling to decide which 
 usurers shall be paid first. Or it ends with wars 
 'ike that in Mexico where French soldiers are 
 sent to play the part of constables to collect bad 
 debts.* 
 
 * M. Clemenceau's "Justice" sa!d on April 6, 1880, 
 In Its financial department: "We have heard this opin- 
 ion maintained, that even without pressure the bil- 
 lions of the war jf 1870 would have been equally lost 
 for France, that is under the form of loans periodic* 
 ally put out to balance the budgets of foreign coun«
 
 c 
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 39 
 
 These individual and social miseries, however 
 great and innumerable they may be, however 
 eternal they appear, will vanish like hyenas and 
 jackals at the approach of the lion, when the 
 proletariat shall say "I will". ('But to arrive at 
 the realization of its strength the proletariat must 
 trample under foot the prejudices of Christian 
 ethics, economic ethics and free-thought ethics'j 
 It must return to its natural instincts, it must 
 
 proclaim the Rights of Laziness, a thousand 
 times more noble and more sacred than the 
 anaemic Rights of Man concocted by the meta- 
 physical lawyers of the bourgeois revolutions 
 It must accustom itself to working but three 
 hours a day, reserving the rest of the day and 
 night for leisure and feasting. 
 
 Thus far my task has been easy; I have had 
 but to describe real evils well known, alas, by 
 all of us; but to convince the proletariat that 
 the ethics innoculated into it is wicked, that the 
 unbridled work to which it has given itself up 
 for the last hundred years is the most terrible 
 
 tries; this is also our opinion." The loss of English 
 capital on loans of South American Republics is esti- 
 mated at a billion dollars. The French laborers not 
 only produced the billion dollars paid Bismarck, but 
 they continued to pay interest on the war indemnity 
 to Ollivier, Girardin, Bazaine and other income draw- 
 ers, who brought on the war and the rout. Neverthe- 
 less they still have one shred of consolation; theso 
 billions will not bring on a war of renrisaL
 
 80 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 scourge that has ever struck humanity, that work 
 will become a mere condiment to the pleasures 
 of idleness, a beneficial exercise to the human 
 organism, a passion useful to the social organ- 
 ism only when wisely regulated and limited to 
 a maximum of three hours a day ; this is an 
 arduous task beyond my strength. Only com- 
 munist physiologists, hygienists and economists 
 could undertake it. In the following pages I 
 shall merely try to show that (given the modern 
 means of production and their unlimited repro- 
 djic^tive power it is necessary to curb the^x- 
 travagant passion of the laborers for work and 
 to oblige them to consume the goods which they 
 produce.; 
 
 III. 
 
 THE CONSEQUENCES OF OVER-PRODUCTION. 
 
 A Greek poet of Cicero's time, Antiparos, thus 
 sang of the invention of the water-mill (for 
 grinding grain), which was to free the slave 
 women and bring back the Golden Age : "Spare 
 the arm which turns the mill, O, millers, and 
 sleep peacefully. Let the cock warn you in vain 
 that day is breaking. Demeter has imposed up- 
 on the nymphs the labor of the slaves, and be- 
 hold them leaping merrily over the wheel, and
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 81 
 
 behold the axle tree, shaken, turning with its 
 spokes and making the heavy rolling stone rev- 
 olve. Let us live the life of our fathers, and 
 let us rejoice in idleness over the gifts that the 
 goddess grants us." Alas !, the leisure which the 
 pagan poet announced has not come, rihe blind, 
 perverse and murderous passion for work trans- 
 forms the liberating machine into an instrument 
 for the enslavement of free men. Its product- 
 iveness impoverishes' them. ^ 
 
 A good workingwoman makes with her need- 
 les only five meshes a minute, while certain 
 circular knitting machines make 30,000 in the 
 same time. Every minute of the machine is 
 thus equivalent to a hundred hours of the work- 
 ingwomen's labor, or again, every minute of the 
 machine's labor, gives the workingwomen ten 
 days of rest. What is true for the knitting in- 
 dustry is more or less true for all industries 
 reconstructed by modern machinery. But what 
 do we see? fin proportion as the machine is 
 improved and performs man's work with an ever 
 increasing rapidity and exactness, the laborer, 
 instead of prolonging his former rest (times, 
 redoubje s his ard or, as if he wished to rival the 
 machine. O, absurd and murderous competi- 
 tion! . 
 
 That the competition of man and the machine
 
 32 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 might have free course, the proletarians have 
 aboHshed wise laws which limited the labor of 
 the artisans of the ancient guilds; they have 
 suppressed the holidays.* Because the ^oduc- 
 ers of that time worked but five days out of 
 seven, are we to believe the stories told by lying 
 economists, that they lived on nothing but air 
 and fresh water? Not so,/they had leisure to 
 taste the joys of earth, to make love and to 
 frolic, to banquet joyously in honor of the jovial 
 god of idleness!. Gloomy England, immersed 
 in protestantisrri; was then called "Merrie Eng- 
 
 • Under the old regime, the laws of the church guar- 
 anteed the laborer ninety rest days, fifty-two Sundays 
 and thirty-eight holidays, during which he was strict- 
 ly forbidden to work. This was the great crime of 
 catliolicism, the principal cause of the irreligion of 
 the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie: under the 
 revolution, when once it w^as in the saddle, it abo- 
 lished the holidays and replaced the week of seven 
 days by that of ten, in order that the people might 
 no longer have more than one rest day out of the 
 ten. It emancipated the laborers from the yoke of 
 the church in order the better to subjugate them un- 
 der the yoke of work. 
 
 The hatred against the holidays does not appear 
 until the modern industrial and commercial bour- 
 geoisie takes definite form, between the fifteenth and 
 sixteenth centuries. Henry IV asked of the pope that 
 they be reduced. He refused because "one of the cur- 
 rent heresies of the day is regarding feasts" (Letters 
 of Cardinal d'Ossat). But in 1666 Pereflxus, archbishop 
 of Paris, suppressed seventeen of them in his diocese. 
 Protestantism, which was the Christian religion adapt- 
 ed to the new industrial and commercial needs of the 
 bourgeoisie, was less solicitous for the people's rest. 
 It dethroned the saints in heaven in order to abolish 
 their feast days on earth. 
 
 Religious reform and philosophical free thought 
 were but pretexts which permitted the Jesuitical and 
 rapacious bourgeoisie to pilfer the feast days of the 
 people. ,
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 33 
 
 'and." Rabelais, Quevedo, Cervantes, and the 
 unknown authors of the romances make 
 our mouths water with their pictures of those 
 monumental feasts* with which the men of that 
 time regaled themselves between two battles and 
 two devastations, in which everything "went by 
 the barrel". Jordaens and the Flemish School 
 have told the story of these feasts in their de- 
 lightful pictures. Where, O, where, are the 
 sublime gargantuan stomachs of those days ; 
 where are the sublime brains encircling all human 
 thought? We have indeed grown puny and de- 
 generate. Embalmed beef, potatoes, doctored 
 wine and Prussian schnaps, judiciously com- 
 bined with compulsory labor have weakened our 
 bodies and narrowed our minds. And the times 
 when man cramps his stomach and the machine 
 enlarges its out-put are the very times when the 
 economists preach to us the Malthusian theory, 
 
 ♦ These g-igantic feasts lasted for weeks. Don Ro- 
 drigo de Lara wins his bride by expeUing the Moors 
 from old Calatrava, and the Romancero relates the 
 story: 
 
 Les bodas fueron en Burgos 
 Las tornabodas en Salas: 
 En bodas y tornabodas 
 Pasaron slete semanas 
 Tantas vienen de las g-entes 
 Que no caben pnr las plazas 
 (The wedding was at Bourges. the infaring at Salas. 
 In tlie wedding and the infaring seven weeks were 
 spent. So many people came that the town could not 
 
 hold them ). 
 
 The men of these seven-weeks weddings were the 
 heroic soldiers of the wars of independence.
 
 84 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 the religion of abstinence and the dogma of 
 work. Really it would be better to pluck out 
 such tongues and throw them to the dogs. 
 
 Because the working class, with its simple 
 good faith, has allowed itself to be thus indoc- 
 trinated, because with its native impetuosity it 
 has blindly hurled itself into work and abstin- 
 ence, (the capitalist class has found itself con- 
 demned to laziness and forced enjoyment, to 
 unproductiveness and overconsumption^ But if 
 the over-work of the laborer bruises his flesh 
 and tortures his nerves, it is also fertile in griefs 
 for the capitalist. 
 
 [The abstinence to which the productive class 
 condemns itself obliges the capitalists to devote 
 themselves to the over-consumption of the pro- 
 ducts turned out so riotously by the laborers^ 
 At the beginning of capitalist production a cent- 
 ury or two ago, the capitalist was a steady man 
 of reasonable and peaceable habits. He con- 
 tented himself with one wife or thereabouts. He 
 drank only when he was thirsty and ate only 
 when he was hungry. He left to the lords and 
 ladies of the court the noble virtues of debauch- 
 ery. Today every son of the newly rich makes 
 it incumbent upon himself to cultivate the dise- 
 ase for which quicksilver is a specific in order 
 to justify the labors imposed upon the workmen
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 35 
 
 in quicksilver mines ; every capitalist crams him- 
 self with capons stuffed vi^ith truffles and with 
 the choicest brands of "^ne in order to encour- 
 age the breeders of blooded poultry and the 
 growers of Bordelais. In this occupation the 
 o^rganism rapidly becomes shattered, the hair 
 falls out, the gums shrink away from the teeth, 
 the body becomes deformed, the stomach ob- 
 trudes abnormally, respiration becomes difficult, 
 the motions become labored, the joints become 
 stiff, the fingers knotted. Others, too feeble in 
 body to endure the fatigues of debauchery, but 
 endowed with the bump of philanthropic dis- 
 crimination, dry up their brains over political 
 economy, or juridical philosophy in elaborating 
 thick soporific books to employ the leisure hours 
 of compositors and pressmen. The women of 
 fashion live a life of martyrdom, in trying on 
 and showing off the fairy-like toilets which the 
 seamstresses die in making. They shift like shut- 
 tles from morning until night from one gown into 
 another. For hours together they give up their 
 hollow heads to the a/tists in hair, who at any 
 cost insist on assuaging their passion for the 
 construction of false chignons. Bound in their 
 corsets, pinched in their boots, decollette to 
 make a coal-miner blush, they whirl around the 
 whole night through at their charity balls in
 
 36 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 order to pick up a few cents for poor people,— 
 sanctified souls! 
 
 To fulfill his double social function of non- 
 producer and over-consumer, the capitalist was 
 not only obliged to violate his modest taste, to 
 lose his laborious habits of two centuries ago and 
 to give himself up to unbounded luxury, spicy 
 indigestibles and syphilitic debauches, but also to 
 withdraw from productive labor an enormous 
 mass of men in order to enlist them as his as- 
 sistantSo 
 
 Here are a few figures to prove how colossal 
 is this waste of productive forces. According 
 to the census of 1861, the population of Eng- 
 land and Wales comprised 20,066,244 persons, 
 9,776,259 male and 10,289,965 female. If we 
 deduct those too old or too young to work, the 
 unproductive women, boys and girls, then the 
 "ideological professions", such as governors, 
 policemen, clergy, magistrates, soldiers, prosti- 
 tutes, artists, scientists, etc.» next the people 
 exclusively occupied with eating the labor of 
 others under the form of land-rent, interest, 
 dividends, etc.... there remains a total of eight 
 million individuals of both sexes and of every 
 age, including the capitalists who function in 
 production, commerce, finance, etc. Out of 
 these eight millions the figures run:
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 37 
 
 Agricultural laborers, including herdsmen, serv- 
 ants and farmers' daughters living at 
 
 home 1,098,261 
 
 Factory Workers in cotton, wool, hemp, 
 
 linen silk, knitting 642,607 
 
 Mine Workers 565,835 
 
 Metal Workers (blast furnaces, rolling 
 
 mills, etc.) 396,998 
 
 Domestics 1,208,648 
 
 ''If we add together the textile workers and 
 the miners, we obtain the figures of 1,208,442; 
 if to the former we add the metal workers, we 
 have a total of 1,039,605 persons; that is to 
 say, in each case a number below that of the 
 modern domestic slaves. Behold the magnificent 
 result of the capitalist exploitation of machines."* 
 (To this class of domestics, the size of which 
 indicates the stage attained by capitalist civiliza- 
 tion, must still be added the enormous class of 
 unfortunates devoted exclusively to satisfying 
 the vain and expensive tastes of the rich clas- 
 ses : diamond cutters, lace-makers, embroider- 
 ers, binders of luxurious books, seamstresses em- 
 ployed on expensive gowns decorators of villas, 
 etc.Q 
 
 • Karl Marx's ♦•Capital". 
 
 t "The proportion In which the population of th« 
 country is employed as domestics in the service of the 
 wealthy class indicates Its progress in national wealth
 
 38 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 Once settled down into absolute laziness and 
 demoralized by enforced enjoyment, the capital- 
 ist class in spite of the injury involved in its new 
 kind of life, adapted itself to it. Soon it began 
 to look upon any change with horror. The 
 sight of the miserable conditions of life resign- 
 edly accepted by the working class and the sight 
 of the organic degradation engendered by the 
 depraved passion for work increased its aversion 
 for all compulsory labor and all restrictions of 
 its pleasures. It is precisely at that time that, 
 without taking into account the demoralization 
 which the capitalist class had imposed upon it- 
 self as a social duty, the proletarians took it 
 into their heads to inflict work on the capital- 
 ists Artless as they were, they took seriously 
 the theories of work proclaimed by the econom- 
 ists and moralists, and girded up their loins to 
 inflict the practice of these theories upon the 
 capitalists. The proletariat hoisted the banner, 
 "He who will not work Neither shall he Eat". 
 Lyons in 1831 rose up for bullets or work. The 
 federated laborers of March 1871 called their 
 
 and civilization." (R. M. Martin, "Ireland Before and 
 After the Union," 1818). Gambetta, who has denied 
 that there was a social question ever since he ceased 
 to be the poverty stricken lawyer of the Caf6 Procope. 
 undoubtedly alluded to this ever-increasing domestic 
 class when he announced the advent of new social 
 Strata.
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 39 
 
 uprising 'The Revolution of Work". To these 
 outbreaks of barbarous fury destructive of all 
 capitalist joy and laziness, the capitalists had no 
 other answer than ferocious repression, but they 
 know that if they have been able to repress these 
 revolutionary explosions, they have not drowned 
 in the blood of these gigantic massacres the ab- 
 surd idea of the proletariat wishing to inflict 
 work upon the idle and reputable classes, and 
 it is to avert this misfortune that they surround 
 themselves with guards, policemen, magistrates 
 and jailors, supported in laborious unprodutive- 
 ness. There is no more room for illusion as to 
 the function of modern armies. They are perm- 
 anently maintained only to suppress the "enemy 
 within". Thus the forts of Paris and Lyons 
 have not been built to defend the city against 
 the foreigner, but to crush it in case of revolt. 
 And if an unanswerable example be called for, 
 we mention the army of Belgium, that paradise 
 of capitalism. Its neutrality is guaranteed by 
 the European powers, and nevertheless its army 
 is one of the strongest in proportion to its popula- 
 tion. The glorious battlefields of the brave Belg- 
 ian army are the plains of the Borinage and of 
 Charleroi. It is in the blood of the unarmed 
 miners and laborers that the Belgian officers 
 temper their swords and win their epaulets. The
 
 40 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 nations of Europe have not national armies but 
 mercenary armies. They protect the capitalists 
 against the popular fury which would condemn 
 them to ten hours of mining or spinning. Again, 
 I while compressing its own stomach the working 
 class has developed abnormally the stomach of 
 the capitalist class, condemned to over-consump- 
 tion.; 
 
 For alleviation of its painful labor the capi- 
 talist class has withdrawn from the working class 
 a mass of men far superior to those still devoted 
 to useful production and has condemned them in 
 their turn to unproductiveness and over-con- 
 sumption. But this troop of useless mouths in 
 spite of its insatiable voracity, does not suffice 
 to consume all the goods which the laborers, 
 brutalized by the dogma of work, produce like 
 madmen, without wishing to consume them and 
 without even thinking whether people will be 
 found to consume them. 
 
 (Confronted with this double madness of the 
 jaborers killing themselves with over-produc- 
 tion and vegetating in abstinence, the great 
 problem of capitalist production is no longer to 
 find producers and to multiply their powers but 
 to discover consumers, to excite their appetites 
 and create in them fictitious needs) Since the 
 European laBorers, sTiive'ring with cold and
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 41 
 
 hunger, refuse to wear the stuffs they weave, to 
 drink the wines from the vineyards they tend, 
 the poor manufacturers in their goodness of 
 heart must run to the ends of the earth to find 
 people to wear the clothes and drink the wines : 
 Europe exports every year goods amounting to 
 billions of dollars to the four corners of the 
 earth, to nations that have no need of them.* 
 But the explored continents are no longer vast 
 enough. Virgin countries are needed. European 
 manufacturers dream night and day of Africa, 
 of a lake in the Saharan desert, of a railroad to 
 the Soudan. They anxiously follow the prog- 
 ress of Livingston, Stanley, Du Chaillu ; they 
 listen open-mouthed to the marvelous tales of 
 these brave travelers. What unknown wonders 
 are contained in the "dark continent"! Fields 
 are sown with elephants' teeth, rivers of cocoa- 
 nut oil are dotted with gold, millions of backsides, 
 as bare as the faces of Dufaure and Girardin, 
 are awaiting cotton goods to teach them dec- 
 
 ♦ Two examples: The English government to satisfy 
 the peasants of India, who in spite of the periodical 
 famines desolating their country insist on cultivating 
 poppies instead of rice or wheat, has been obliged 
 to undertake bloody wars in order to impose upon the 
 Chinese Government tlie free entry of Indian opium. 
 The savages of Polj^nesia, in spite of the mortality 
 resulting from it are obliged to clothe themselves 
 In the English fashion in order to consume the prod- 
 ucts of the Scotch distilleries and the Manchester cot- 
 ton mills.
 
 4!4 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 ency, and bottles of schnaps and bibles from 
 which they may learn the virtues of civilization. 
 
 But all to no purpose : the over-fed capitalist, 
 the servant class greater in numbers than the 
 productive class, the foreign and barbarous na- 
 tions, gorged with European goods ; nothing, 
 nothing can melt away the mountains of products 
 heaped up higher and more enormous than the 
 pyramids of Egypt. The productiveness of 
 European laborers defies all consumption, all 
 waste. 
 
 The manufacturers have lost their bearings 
 and know not which way to turn. They can no 
 longer find the raw material to satisfy the law- 
 less depraved passion of their laborers for work. 
 In our woolen districts dirty and half rotten 
 rags are raveled out to use in making certain 
 cloths sold under the name of renaissance, which 
 have about the same durability as the promises 
 made to voters. At Lyons, instead of leaving 
 the silk fiber in its natural simplicity and supp- 
 leness, it is loaded down with mineral salts, which 
 while increasing its weight, make it friable and 
 far from durable. (All our products are adulter- 
 ated to aid in their sale and shorten their life. 
 Our epoch will be called the "Age of adultera- 
 tion" just as the first epochs of humanity re- 
 ceived the names of "The Age of Stone "A "The
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 43 
 
 Age of Bronze", from the character of their 
 production. Certain ignorant people accuse our 
 pious manufacturers of fraud, while in reality 
 the thought which animates them is to furnish 
 work to their laborers, who cannot resign them- 
 selves to living with their arms folded. These 
 adulterations, whose sole motive is a humanitar- 
 ian sentiment, but which bring splendid profits 
 to the manufacturers who practice them, if they 
 are disastrous for the quality of the goods, if 
 they are an inexhaustible source of waste in 
 human labor, nevertheless prove the ingenuous 
 philanthropy of the capitalists, and the horrible 
 perversion of the laborers, who to gratify their 
 vice for work oblige the manufacturers to stifle 
 the cries of their conscience and to violate even 
 the laws of commercial honesty. 
 
 And nevertheless, in spite of the overproduc- 
 tion of goods, in spite of the adulterations in 
 manufacturing, the laborers encumber the market 
 in countless numbers imploring : Work ! Work ! 
 Their superabundance ought to compel them to 
 bridle their passion ; on the contrary it carries 
 it to the point of paroxysm. Let a chance for 
 work present itself, thither they rush; then they 
 demand twelve, fourteen hours to glut their 
 appetite for work, and the next day they are 
 again thrown out on the pavement with no more
 
 44 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 food for '"heii vice. Every year in all industries 
 lockoiHs occur with the regularity of the sea- 
 sons. Over-work, destructive of the organism, 
 is succeeded by absolute rest during two or four 
 months, and when work ceases the pittance cea- 
 ses. {Since the vice of work is diabolically at- 
 tached to the heart of the laborers, since its 
 requirements stifle all the other instincts of na- 
 ture, since the quantity of work required by 
 society is necessarily limited by consumption and 
 by the supply of raw materials, why devour in 
 six months the work of a whole year; why not 
 distribute it uniformly over the twelve months 
 and force every workingman to content himself 
 with six or five hours a day throughout the year 
 instead of getting indigestion from twelve hours 
 during six months ? Y Once assured of their daily 
 portion of work, the laborers will no longer be 
 jealous of each other, no longer fight to snatch 
 away work from each other's hands and bread 
 from each other's mouths, and then, not ex- 
 hausted in body and mind, they will begin to 
 practice the virtues of laziness. 
 
 Brutalized by their vice, the laborers have 
 been unable to rise to the conception of this fact, 
 that to have work for all it is necessary to appor- 
 tion it like water on a ship in distress. Mean- 
 while certain manufacturers in the name of cap-
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 45 
 
 italist exploitation have for a long time de- 
 manded a legal limitation of the work day. Be- 
 fore the commission of i860 on professional edu- 
 cation, one of the greatest manufacturers of 
 Alsace, M. Bourcart of Guebwiller, declared : 
 "The day of twelve hours is excessive and ought 
 to be reduced to eleven, while work ought to be 
 stopped at two o'clock on Saturday. I advise 
 the adoption of this measure, although it may 
 appear onerous at first sight. We have tried it 
 in our industrial establishments for four years 
 and find ourselves the better for it, while the 
 average production, far from having diminished, 
 has increased." In his study of machines M. F. 
 Passy quotes the following letter from a great 
 Belgian manufacturer M. Ottevaere : "Our ma- 
 chines, although the same as those of the English 
 spinning mills, do not produce what they ought 
 to produce or what those same machines would 
 produce in England, although the spinners there 
 work two hours a day less. We all work two 
 good hours too much. I am convinced that if 
 we worked only eleven hours instead of thirteen 
 we should have the same product and we should 
 consequently produce more ecconomically.' 
 Again, M. Leroy Beaulieu affirms that it is a 
 remark of a great Belgian manufacturer that the
 
 46 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 weeks in which a holiday falls result in a prod- 
 uct not less than ordinary weeks.* 
 
 An aristocratic government has dared to do 
 what a people, duped in their simplicity by the 
 moralists, never dared. Despising the lofty and 
 moral industrial considerations of the economists, 
 who like the birds of ill omen, croaked that to 
 reduce by one hour the work in factories was to 
 decree the ruin of English industry, the govern- 
 ment of England has forbidden by a law strictly 
 enforced to work more than ten hours a day, 
 and as before England remains the first industrial 
 nation of the world, f 
 
 The experiment tried on so great a scale is on 
 record ; the experience of certain intelligent cap- 
 italists is on record. They prove beyond a doubt 
 that to strengthen human production it is neces- 
 sary to reduce the hours of labor and multiply 
 the pay days and feast days, yet the French na- 
 tion is not convinced. But if the miserable re- 
 duction of two hours has increased English pro- 
 duction by almost one-third in ten years, what 
 breathless speed would be given to French pro- 
 
 * Paul Leroy-Beaulieu. La Question GuvriSre au 
 XIX si&cle, 1872. 
 
 t It should be observed that this was written in 
 1883, since which time the United States has taken the 
 first rank. The soundness of Lafargue's reasoning is 
 confirmed by the fact that in this country the iioura 
 of labor in the most important industries are even 
 less than in England. (Translator.)
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 47 
 
 duction by a legal limitation of the working day 
 to three hours. Cannot the laborers understand 
 that by over-working themselves they exhaust 
 their own strength and that of their progeny, 
 that they are used up and long before their time 
 come to be incapable of any work at all, that ab- 
 sorbed and brutalized by this single vice they are 
 no longer men but pieces of men, that they kill 
 within themselves all beautiful faculties, to leave 
 nothing alive and flourishing except the furious 
 madness for workJ Like Arcadian parrots, they 
 repeat the lesson of the economist : "Let us work, 
 let us work to increase the national wealth.' O, 
 idiots, it is because you work too much that the 
 industrial equipment develops slowly. Stop bray- 
 ing and listen to an economist, no other than M. 
 L. Reybaud, whom we were fortunate enough to 
 lose a few months ago. "It is in general bv the 
 conditions of hand-work that the revolution in 
 methods of labor is regulated. As long as hand- 
 work furnishes its services at a low price, it is 
 lavished, while efforts are made to economize it 
 when its services become more costly." * 
 
 (To force the capitalists to improve their ma- 
 chines of wood and iron it is necessary to raise 
 wages and diminish the working hours of the 
 
 • Louis Reybaud. Le coton, son regime, ses oro- 
 biemes (1863).
 
 48 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 machines of flesh and blood J Do you ask for 
 proofs? They can be furnished by the hundreds. 
 In spinning, the self-acting mule was invented 
 and applied at Manchester because the spinners 
 refused to work such long hours as before. In 
 America the machine is invading all branches of 
 farm production, from the making of butter to 
 the weeding of wheat. Why, because the Ame- 
 rican, free and lazy, would prefer a thousand 
 deaths to the bovine life of the French peasant. 
 Plowing, so painful and and so crippling to the 
 laborer in our glorious France, is in the Ameri- 
 can West an agreeable open-air pastime, which 
 he practices in a sitting posture, smoking his 
 pipe nonchalantly. 
 
 IV. 
 
 NEW SONGS TO NEW MUSIC. 
 
 We have seen that by diminishing the hours 
 of labor new mechanical forces will be conquered 
 for social production. Furthermore, by obliging 
 the laborers to consume their products the army 
 of workers will be immensely increased. The cap- 
 italist class once relieved from its function of uni- 
 versal consumer will hasten to dismiss its train 
 of soldiers, magistrates, journalists, procurers, 
 which it has withdrawn trom. useful labor to help
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 49 
 
 it in consuming and wasting. Then the labor 
 market will overflow. Then will be required an 
 iron law to put a limit on work. It will be im- 
 possible to find employment for that swarm of 
 former unproductives, more numerous than in- 
 sect parasites, and after them must be considered 
 all those who provide for their needs and their 
 vain and expensive tastes. When there are no 
 more lackeys and generals to decorate, no more 
 free and married prostitutes to be covered with 
 laces, no more cannons to bore, no more palaces 
 to build, there will be need of severe laws to com- 
 pel the working women and workingmen who 
 have been employed on embroidered laces, iron 
 workings, buildings, to take the hygienic and 
 calisthenic exercises requisite to re-establish their 
 health and improve their race. When once we 
 begin to consume European products at home 
 instead of sending them to the devil, it will be 
 necessary that the sailors, dock handlers and the 
 draymen sit down and learn to twirl their thumbs. 
 The happy Polynesians may then love as they 
 like without fearing the civilized Venus and the 
 sermons of European moralists. 
 
 And that is not all : In order to find work for 
 all the non-producers of our present society, in 
 order to leave room for the industrial equipment 
 to go on developing indefinitely, the working
 
 60 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 class will be compelled, like the capitalist class, 
 to ^o violence to its taste for abstinence and to 
 develop indefinitely its consuming capacities; 
 Instead of eating an ounce or two of gristly meat 
 once a day, when it eats any, it will eat juicy 
 beefsteaks of a pound or two ; instead of drinking 
 moderately of bad wine, it will become more 
 orthodox than the pope and will drink broad and 
 deep bumpers of Bordeaux and Burgundy with- 
 out commercial baptism and will leave water to 
 the beasts. 
 
 The proletarians have taken into their heads 
 to inflict upon the capitalists ten hours of forge 
 and factory ; that is their great mistake, because 
 of social antagonisms and civil wars. Work 
 ought to be forbidden and not imposed. The 
 Rothschilds and other capitalists should be al- 
 lowed to bring testimony to the fact that through- 
 out their whole lives they have been perfect vag- 
 abonds, and if they swear they wish to continue 
 to live as perfect vagabonds in spite of the gen- 
 eral mania for work, they should be pensioned 
 and should receive every morning at the city hall 
 a five-dollar gold piece for their pocket money. 
 Social discords will vanish. Bond holders and 
 capitalists will be first to rally to the popular 
 party, once convinced that far from wishing them 
 harm, its purpose is rather to relieve them of
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 51 
 
 the labor of over-consumption and waste, with 
 which they have been overwhelmed since their 
 birth. As for the capitalists who are incapable 
 of proving their title to the name of vagabond, 
 they will be allowed to follow their instincts. 
 There are plenty of disgusting occupations in 
 which to place them, Dufaure might be set at 
 cleaning public closets, Gallifet* might perform 
 surgical operations on diseased horses and hogs. 
 The members of the amnesty commission might 
 be sent to the stock yards to pick out the oxen 
 and the sheep to be slaughtered. The senators 
 might play the part of undertakers and lackeys 
 in funeral processions. As for the others, occu- 
 pations could be found for them on a level with 
 their intelligence. Lorgeril and Broglie could 
 cork champagne bottles, only they would have 
 to be muzzled as a precaution against intoxica- 
 tion. Ferry, Freycinet and Tirard might destroy 
 the bugs and vermin in the departments of state 
 and other public houses. It would, however, be 
 necessary to put the public funds out of the reach 
 of the capitalists out of due regard for their ac- 
 quired habits. 
 
 But vengeance, harsh and prolonged, will be 
 
 • Gallifet was the general who was directly respon- 
 sible for the massacre of thousande of French work- 
 Inemen at the closing days of the Paris Commune.
 
 6S THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 heaped upon the moralists who have perverted 
 nature, the bigots, the canters, the hypocrites, 
 "and other such sects of men who disguise them- 
 selves like maskers to deceive the world. For 
 whilst they give the common people to under- 
 stand that they are busied about nothing but con- 
 templation and devotion in fastings and macera- 
 tion of their sensuality, — and that only to sus- 
 tain and aliment the small fraility of their hu- 
 manity, — it is so far otherwise that on the con- 
 trary, God knows, what cheer they make ; et 
 Curios simulant, sed Bacchanalia vivunt* You 
 may read it in gjeat letters, in the coloring of 
 their red snouts, and gulching bellies as big as a 
 tun, unless it be when they perfume themselves 
 with sulphur."t On the days of great popular 
 rejoicing, when instead of swallowing dust as on 
 the 15th of August and 14th of July under cap- 
 italism, the communists and coUectivists will eat, 
 drink and dance to their hearts' content, the 
 members of the Academy, of moral and political 
 sciences, the priests with long robes and short, 
 of the economic, catholic, protestant, Jewish, posi- 
 tivist and free-thought church ; the propagandists 
 of Malthusianism, and of Christian, altruistic, 
 independent or dependent ethics, clothed in yel- 
 
 * They simulate Curius but live like Bacchanals. 
 (Juvenal.) 
 
 t Rabelais "Pantagruel." Book II. Chapter XXXIY, 
 Translation of Urquhart and Motteux.
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 53 
 
 k)w, shall be compelled to hold a candle until it 
 bums their fingers, shall starve in sight of tables 
 loaded with meats, fruits and flowers and shall 
 agonize with thirst in sight of flowing hogsheads. 
 Four times a year with the changing seasons 
 they shall be shut up like the knife grinders' dogs 
 in great wheels and condemned to grind wind 
 for ten hours. 
 
 The lawyers and legislators shall suffer the 
 same punishment. Under the regime of idleness, 
 to kill the time, which kills us second by second, 
 there will be shows and theatrical performances 
 always and always. And here we have the very 
 work for our bourgeois legislators. We shall or- 
 ganize them into traveling companies to go to 
 the fairs and villages, giving legislative exhibi- 
 tions. The generals in riding boots, their breasts 
 brilliantly decorated with medals and crosses, 
 shall go through the streets and courts levying 
 recruits among the good people. Gambetta and 
 his comrade Cassagnac shall tend door. Cas- 
 sagnac, in full duelist costume, rolling his eyes 
 and twisting his mustache, spitting out burning 
 tow, shall threaten every one with his father's 
 pistol* and sink into a hole as soon as they show 
 
 * Paul de Cassagnac, like his father, Granier, was 
 rominent as a conservative politician, journalist and 
 
 prom 
 duelist.
 
 54 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 him LulHer's portrait. Gambetta will discourse 
 on foreign politics and on little Greece, who 
 makes a doctor of him and would set Europe on 
 fire to pilfer Turkey ; on great Russia that stulti- 
 fies him with the mincemeat she promises to make 
 of Prussia and who would fain see mischief brew- 
 ing in the west of Europe so as to feather her 
 nest in the east and to strangle nihilism at home ; 
 on Mr. Bismark who was good enough to allow 
 
 him to pronounce himself on the amnesty 
 
 then uncovering his mountainous belly smeared 
 over with red and white and blue, the three na- 
 tional colors, he will beat the tattoo on it, and 
 enumerate the delicate little ortolans, the truffles 
 and the glasses of Margaux and Y'quem that it 
 has gulped down to encourage agriculture, and 
 to keep his electors of Belleville in good spirits. 
 
 In the barracks the entertainment will open 
 with the "Electoral Farce." 
 
 In the presence of the voters with wooden 
 heads and asses' ears, the bourgeois candidates, 
 dressed as clowns, will dance the dance of poli- 
 tical liberties, wiping themselves fore and aft 
 with their freely promising electoral programs, 
 and talking with tears in their eyes of the mis- 
 eries of the people and with copper in their voices 
 of the glories of France. Then the heads of the 
 voters will bray solidly in chorus, hi han ! hi han!
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 55 
 
 Then will start the great play, "The Theft of 
 the Nation's Goods." 
 
 Capitalist France, an enormous female, hairy- 
 faced and bald-headed, fat, flabby, puffy and pale, 
 with sunken eyes, sleepy and yawning, is stretch- 
 ing herself out on a velvet couch. At her feet 
 Industrial Capitalism, a gigantic organism of 
 iron, with an ape-like mask, is mechanically de- 
 vouring men, women and children, whose thrill- 
 ing and heart-rending cries fill the air ; the bank 
 with a marten's muzzle, a hyena's body and harpy 
 — hands, is nimbly flipping coins out of his 
 pocket. Hordes of miserable, emaciated prole- 
 tarians in rags, escorted by gendarmes with 
 drawn sabers, pursued by furies lashing them 
 with whips of hunger, are bringing to the feet 
 of capitalist France heaps of merchandise, casks 
 of wine, sacks of gold and wheat. Langlois, his 
 nether garment in one hand, the testament of 
 Proudhon in the other and the book of the na- 
 tional budget between his teeth, is encamped at 
 the head of the defenders of national property 
 and is mounting guard. When the laborers, 
 beaten with gun stocks and pricked with bayo- 
 nets, have laid down their burdens, they are 
 driven away and the door is opened to the man- 
 ufacturers, merchants and bankers. They hurl 
 themselves pell mell upon the heap, devouring
 
 56 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 cotton goods, sacks of wheat, ingots of gold, 
 emptying casks of wine. When they have de- 
 voured all they can, they sink down, filthy and 
 disgusting objects in their ordure and vomitings. 
 Then the thunder bursts forth, the earth shakes 
 and opens, Historic Destiny arises, with her iron 
 foot she crushes the heads of the capitalists, hic- 
 coughing, staggering, falling, unable to flee. 
 With her broad hand she overthrows capitalist 
 France, astounded and sweating with fear. 
 
 * * * 
 
 (if, uprooting from its heart the vice which 
 dominates it and degrades its nature, the work- 
 ing class were to arise in its terrible strength, 
 not to demand the Rights of Man, which are but 
 the rights of capitalist exploitation, not to de- 
 mand the Right to Work which is but the right 
 to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding 
 any man to work more than three hours a day, 
 the earth, the old earth, trembling with joy would 
 feel a new universe leaping within her J But how 
 should we ask a proletariat corrupted by capital- 
 ist ethics, to take a manly resolution.... 
 
 Like Christ, the doleful personification of an- 
 cient slavery, the men, the women and the chil- 
 dren of the proletariat have been climbing pain- 
 fully for a century up the hard Calvary of pain;
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 57 
 
 for a century compulsory toil has broken their 
 bones, bruised their flesh, tortured their nerves; 
 for a century hunger has torn their entrails and 
 their brains. O Laziness, have pity on our long 
 misery ! O Laziness, mother of the arts and no- 
 ble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish I 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 Our moralists are very modest people. If they 
 invented the dogma of work, they still have 
 doubts of its efficacy in tranquilizing the soul, 
 rejoicing the spirit, and maintaining the proper 
 functioning of the entrails and other organs. 
 They wish to try its workings on the populace, 
 in anima vili, before turning it against the cap- 
 italists, to excuse and authorize whose vices is 
 their peculiar mission. 
 
 But, you, three-for-a-cent philosophers, why 
 thus cudgel your brains to work out an ethics 
 the practice of which you dare not counsel to 
 your masters? Your dogma of work, of which 
 you are so proud, do you wish to see it scoffed 
 at, dishonored? Let us open the history of an- 
 cient peoples and the writings of their philoso- 
 phers and law givers. "I could not affirm," says 
 the father of history, Herodotus, "whether the 
 Greeks derived from the Egyptians the contempt
 
 58 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 which they have for work, because I find the 
 same contempt established among the Thracians, 
 the Cythians, the Persians, the Lydians ; in a 
 word, because among most barbarians, those who 
 learn mechanical arts and even their children are 
 regarded as the meanest of their citizens. All 
 the Greeks have been nurtured in this principle, 
 particularly the Lacedaemonians." * 
 
 "At Athens the citizens were veritable nobles 
 who had to concern themselves but with the de- 
 fense and the administration of the community, 
 like the savage warriors from whom they de- 
 scended. Since they must thus have all their time 
 free to watch over the interests of the republic, 
 with their mental and bodily strength, they laid 
 all labor upon the slaves. Likewise at Lacedae- 
 mon, even the women were not allowed to spin 
 or weave that they might not detract from their 
 nobility." f 
 
 The Romans recognized but two noble and 
 free professions, agriculture and arms. All the 
 citizens by right lived at the expense of the treaS' 
 ury without being constrained to provide for theii 
 living by any of the sordid arts (thus, they de- 
 signated the trades), which rightfully belonged 
 
 • Herodotus, Book II. 
 
 t Biot. De L'abolition de L'esclavaee ancien en O* 
 ddent, 1840.
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 59 
 
 to slaves. The elder Brutus to arouse the peo- 
 ple, accused Tarquin, the tyrant, of the special 
 outrage of having converted free citizens into 
 artisans and masons.* 
 
 The ancient philosophers had their disputes 
 upon the origin of ideas but they agreed when 
 it came to the abhorrence of work. "Nature," 
 said Plato in his social Utopia, his model republic, 
 "Nature has made no shoemaker nor smith. Such 
 occupations degrade the people who exercise 
 them. Vile mercenaries, nameless wretches, who 
 are by their very condition excluded from poli- 
 tical rights. As for the merchants accustomed 
 to lying and deceiving, they will be allowed in 
 the city only as a necessary evil. The citizen 
 who shall have degraded himself by the com- 
 merce of the shop shall be prosecuted for this 
 offense. If he is convicted, he shall be con- 
 demned to a year in prison ; the punishment shall 
 be doubled for each repeated offense." f 
 (Tn his "Economics," Xenophon writes, "The 
 people who give themselves up to manual labor 
 are never promoted to public offices, and with 
 good reason. The greater part of them, con- 
 demned to be seated the whole day long, some 
 even to endure the heat of the fire continually, 
 
 * Livy, Book I. 
 
 t Piato's "Republic," Book V.
 
 60 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 cannot fail to be changed in body, and it is al- 
 most inevitable that the mind be affected." "What 
 honorable thing can come out of a shop?" asks 
 Cicero. "What can commerce produce in the 
 way of honor? Everything called shop is un- 
 worthy an honorable man. Merchants can gain 
 no profit without lying, and what is more shame- 
 ful than falsehood? Again, we must regard as 
 something base and vile the trade of those who 
 sell their toil and industry, for whoever gives his 
 labor for money sells himself and puts himself 
 in the rank of slaves."*J 
 
 Proletarians, brutalized by the dogma of work, 
 listen to the voice of these philosophers, which 
 has been concealed from you with jealous care: 
 A citizen who gives his labor for money degrades 
 himself to the rank of slaves, he commits a crime 
 which deserves years of imprisonment?) 
 
 Christian hypocrisy and capitalist utilitarian- 
 ism had not perverted these philosophers of the 
 ancient republics. Speaking for free men, they 
 expressed their thought naively. Plato, Aristo- 
 tle, those intellectual giants, beside whom ouf 
 latter day philosophers are but pygmies,/wish the 
 citizens of their ideal republics to live in the most 
 complete^ leisure, for as Xenophon observed, 
 
 • Cicero s "De Officils," I, 42. 
 
 Ci
 
 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 6J 
 
 "Work takes all the time and with it one has 
 no leisure for the republic and his friends."^ Ac- 
 cording to Plutarch, the great claim of Lycurgus, 
 wisest of men, to the admiration of posterity, was 
 that he had granted leisure to the citizens of 
 Sparta by forbidding to them any trade whatever. 
 But our moralists of Christianity and capitalism 
 will answer, "These thinkers and philosophers 
 praised the institution of slavery." Perfectly 
 true, but could it have been otherwise, granted 
 the economic and political conditions of their 
 epoch ? War was the normal state of ancient so- 
 cieties. The free man was obliged to devote his 
 time to discussing the affairs of state and watch- 
 ing over its defense. The trades were then too 
 primitive and clumsy for those practicing them 
 to exercise their birth-right of soldier and citi- 
 zen; thus the philosophers and law-givers, if 
 they wished to have warriors and citizens in their 
 heroic republics, were obliged to tolerate slaves. 
 (But do not the moralists and economists of cap- 
 italism praise wage labor, the mjxiern skveryf) 
 and to what men does the capitalist slavery give 
 leisure? To people like Rothschild, Schneider, 
 and Madame Boucicaut, useless and harmful 
 slaves of their vices and of their domestic serv- 
 ants. "The prejudice of slavery dominated the 
 minds of Pythagoras and Aristotle," — this has
 
 62 THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY 
 
 been written disdainfully ; and yet Aristotle fore= 
 saw : that if every tool could by itself execute its 
 proper function, as the masterpieces of Daedalus 
 moved themselves or as the tripods of Vulcan set 
 themselves spontaneously at their sacred work ; if 
 for exaniple the shuttles of the weavers did their 
 own weaving, the foreman of the workshop 
 would have no more need of helpers, nor the 
 master of slaves." 
 
 (Aristotle's dream is our reality. Our machines, 
 with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying 
 steel, with fruitfulness, wonderful inexhaustible, 
 accomplish by themselves with docility their 
 sacred labor. And nevertheless the genius of the 
 great philosophers of capitalism remains domi- 
 nated by the prejudice of the wage system, worst 
 of slaveries. ) They do not yet understand that 
 the machine is the saviour of humanitv^ the god 
 who shall reaeem man from the sordidae artes 
 and from working for hire^ the god who shall 
 give him leisure and liberty.
 
 SOCIALISM 
 AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 Address delivered at Paris March 23, 1900, 
 
 AT A MEETING CALLED BY THE GrOUP OF COL- 
 
 LECTivisT Students attached to the Parti 
 Ouvrier Fran^ais. 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen : — I am happy to deliver 
 this address under the presidency of Vaillant, 
 because it is a pledge of the close and lasting 
 union between our two organizations, and be- 
 cause Vaillant is one of the intellectuals of the 
 socialist party; he is acknowledged to be the 
 most learned of French socialists and perhaps 
 of European socialists, now that Marx, Engels 
 and Lavroff are no longer with us. 
 
 The group of collectivist students which has 
 organized this conference, has been led to choose 
 this subject, because French socialism has just 
 passed through a crisis which is not exactly one 
 of growth, though such it has been called but 
 
 63
 
 64 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTU«t-S 
 
 which has been caused by the arrival oi a certain 
 number of bourgeois intellectuals within the 
 ranks of the party. It is therefore interesting 
 to examine the situation of the intellectuals in 
 capitalist society, their historic role since the 
 revolution of 1789, and the manner in which the 
 bourgeoisie has kept the promises it made them, 
 when it was struggling against the aristocracy* 
 The eighteenth century was the century of 
 reason — everything, religion, philosophy, science, 
 politics, privileges of classes, of the state, of 
 municipalities, was submitted to its pitiless crit- 
 icism. Never in history has there been such a 
 fermentation of ideas and such a revolutionary 
 preparation of men's minds. Mirabeau, who 
 himself played a great role in the ideological 
 agitation, might well say in the national assem- 
 bly : "We have no time to think, but happily, 
 we have a supply of ideas." All that was needed 
 was to realize them. Capitalism, to reward the 
 intellectuals who had labored with so much en- 
 thusiasm for the coming of its revolution, prom- 
 ised them honors and favors ; intelligence and 
 wisdom, as well as virtue, should be the sole 
 privileges of the society it was founding upon 
 the ruins of the old order. Promises cost it 
 little; it announced to all men that it brought 
 them joy and happiness, with liberty, equality
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 65 
 
 and fraternity, which, although eternal princi- 
 ples, were now born for the first time. Its social 
 world was to be so new that even before the 
 Republic was proclaimed, Camille Desmoulins 
 demanded that they begin a new era which 
 should date from the taking of the Bastile. 
 
 I need not teach you what application capital- 
 ism has made of these eternal principles which 
 by way of cynical raillery, the Republic carves 
 on the lintels of her prisons, her penitentiaries, 
 her barracks and her halls of state.* I will 
 only remind you that savage and barbarous 
 tribes, uncorrupted by civilization, living under 
 the regime of common property, without inscrib- 
 ing anywhere these eternal principles, without 
 even formulating them, practice them in a man- 
 ner more perfect than ever was dreamed of by 
 the capitalists who discovered them in 1789. 
 
 It did not take long to determine the value of 
 the promises of capitalism ; the very day it 
 opened its political shop, it commenced proceed- 
 ings in bankruptcy. The constituent assembly, 
 which formulated the Rights of man and of the 
 citizen and proclaimed equality before the law, 
 discussed and voted, in 1790, an electoral act 
 
 * Ever since the French Revolution the law has 
 required the words "Liberty, Egalitfe Fraternity, to 
 be placed over the door of every public building in 
 France. — Translator.
 
 *>6 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 which established inequality before the law ; no 
 one was to be a voter but the "active citizen," 
 paying in money a direct tax equal to three 
 days' labor, and no one was to be eligible to 
 office but the citizen paying a direct tax of a 
 "silver mark," about 55 francs. "But under the 
 law of the silver mark," clamored Loustalot, 
 Desmoulins and the intellectualists without real 
 estate, "Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose 'Social 
 Contract is the bible of the revolution, would 
 be capable neither of voting nor of holding 
 office." The electoral law deprived so many 
 citizens of political rights, that in the municipal 
 elections of 1790, at Paris, a city which counted 
 about half a million inhabitants, there were but 
 12,000 voters, Bailly was chosen mayor by 10,- 
 000 votes. 
 
 If the eternal principles were not new, it is 
 also true that the flattering promises made by 
 the intellectuals had already begun to be real- 
 ized before the advent of capitalism to power. 
 The church, which is a theocratic democracy, 
 opens her bosom to all. . That they may enter, 
 all lay aside their titles and privileges, and all 
 can aspire to the highest positions ; popes have 
 risen from the lower ranks of society. Sixtus 
 Fifth had in his youth tended swine. The 
 chuTch of the midW'.e ages jealously attracted to
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS o7 
 
 herself the thinkers and men of learning, al- 
 though she respected the preference of those 
 who wished to remain laymen, but extended 
 over them her protection and her favors ; she 
 allowed them all boldness of thought, on the 
 single condition of keeping up the appearance 
 of faith, and never leaving her enclosure to lav- 
 ish themselves upon the vulgar. Thus Copern- 
 icus might write and dedicate to the pope his 
 "treatise on the revolutions of the celestial 
 bodies," in which, contrary to the teaching of 
 the Bible, he proves that the earth turns around 
 the sun. But Copernicus was a canon at Frann- 
 bourg and he wrote in Latin. When a century 
 later Galileo, who was not identified wath the 
 clergy and who on the contrary sought the pro- 
 tection of the secular authorities, professed 
 publicly, at Venice and Florence, the theories 
 of Copernicus, the Vatican stretched out its 
 terrible hand over him and forced the illustri- 
 ous old man to deny his scientific belief. Even 
 after the crisis of Protestantism, the church pre- 
 served its liberality toward the scientists who 
 belonged to it. Mersenne, a monk of the order 
 of the Minimes, one of the great geometers of 
 the seventeenth century, a precursor and friend 
 of Descartes, corresponded freely with Hobbes, 
 the father of modern materialism; the notes of
 
 68 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 the French edition of "De Cive" contain frag- 
 ments of this correspondence. 
 
 The church, in keeping up this Hberal conduct, 
 may have been animated by a disinterested love 
 of pure science, but what chiefly concerned her 
 was the interest of her dominancy ; she wished 
 to monopolize the intellectuals and science, just 
 as in the old theocratic Egypt the priests had 
 done to whom the Greek thinkers resorted in 
 search of the first elements of science and phil- 
 osophy. 
 
 It would be insulting capitalism to attribute 
 to it a disinterested love of science, which (from 
 its point of view has but one reason for exist- 
 ence, that of utilizing natural forces to the en- 
 hancement of its wealth, y It cares nothing for 
 pure speculation and it is by way of self-defence 
 that it allows its scientists to devote their mental 
 energy to theoretic researches instead of ex- 
 hausting it on practical applications. This con- 
 tempt for pure speculation is shown under a 
 philosophic form in the positivism of Auguste 
 Comte, who embodies so well the narrowness of 
 the groveling spirit of capitalism. 
 
 But if science apart from its industrial appli- 
 cations does not interest the bourgeoisie their 
 solicitude for the intellectuals takes on none of 
 the forms which we saw in that of the church,
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 69 
 
 and nowhere is their indifference to them better 
 shown than in the relative position of material 
 property and of intellectual property before the 
 law. 
 
 Alaterial property, whatever its origin, is by 
 capitalist law a thing eternal ; it is forever as- 
 sured to its possessor; it is handed down from 
 father to son to the end of the centuries, and no 
 civil or political power may lay upon it a sac- 
 rilegious hand., We have lately seen a charac- 
 teristic example of this inviolability of material 
 property. 
 
 The keeper of the signal station at Durban 
 transmitted to the Boers heliographic dispatches 
 informing them regarding the ships which en- 
 tered the harbor, the men, the horses and the 
 munitions of war which they transported. His 
 treason brought him 125,000 francs, which, like 
 an intelligent capitalist, he deposited in the bank. 
 The English military authorities seized the 
 traitor, condemned him and shot him, but they 
 respected his property so honorably acquired, 
 and his widow and son are now its legitimate pos- 
 sessors. The law, apart from certain variations, 
 being the same in all capitalist countries, things 
 go on in France as in England. No authority 
 could lay hand on the property of Bazaine, nor 
 make De Lesseps, Cottu and their families dis-
 
 to SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 gorge the millions artfully extracted from the 
 "lambs" on Panama canal stock. 
 
 This legal sanctity of property is a new thing, 
 in France it dates from the revolution of 1789. 
 The old regime, which had small respect for 
 this sort of property, authorized the confiscation 
 of the property of those legally condemned, and 
 the abolition of confiscation is one of the first 
 reforms demanded in the petitions of Paris and 
 several provincial cities to the states general. 
 Capitalism, by forbidding the confiscation of 
 property obtained by fraudulent and infamous 
 means, proclaims that the source of its fortune 
 is quite as fraudulent and infamous as that of 
 criminals and traitors. 
 
 Capitalist law has none of these amenities for 
 intellectual property. Literary and artistic prop- 
 erty such as the law protects at all has but a 
 precarious life, limited to the life of the author 
 and a certain time after his death — fifty years 
 according to the latest legislation ; that time 
 passed, it lapses into common property; for ex- 
 ample, beginning with March of this year, any 
 publisher has the right to bring out for his own 
 profit the works of Balzac, the genius of roman- 
 tic literature. 
 
 Literary property, though a matter of interest 
 to publishers, who are certainly few in number,
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 71 
 
 brings no benefit to the mass of the capitalist 
 class, blit not so with property in inventions, 
 which is of prime importance to all the manu- 
 facturing and mercantile capitalists. Consequent- 
 ly over it the law extends no protection. The 
 inventor, if he wishes to defend his intellectual 
 property against capitalist pirates, must begin 
 by buying that right, taking out a patent, which 
 he must renew every year ; on the day he misses 
 a payment, his intellectual property becomes the 
 lawful prey of the robbers of capitalism. Even 
 if he pays, he can secure that right only for a 
 time ; in France, fourteen years. And during 
 these few years, not long enough generally to 
 get his invention fully introduced into practical 
 industry, it is he, the inventor, who at his own 
 expense has to set in motion the machinery of 
 the law against the capitalist pirates who rob 
 him. 
 
 The trade-mark, which is a capitalistic prop- 
 erty that never required any intellectual effort, 
 is on the contrary indefinitely protected by law 
 like material property. 
 
 It is with reluctance that the capitalist class 
 has granted the inventor the right of defending 
 his intellectual property, for by virtue of its po- 
 sition as the ruling class it regards itself as en- 
 titled to the fruits of intellectual labor as well
 
 72 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 as of manual labor; just as the feudal lord as- 
 serted his right of possession over the property 
 of his serfs. The history of the inventors of our 
 century is the monstrous story of their spoliation 
 by the capitalists; it is a long and melancholy 
 roll of martyrs. The inventor, by the very fact 
 of his genius, is condemned with his family to 
 ruin and suffering. 
 
 It is not only inventions requiring long and 
 laborious study, heavy outlay for their comple- 
 tion and long time for their introduction, that 
 plunge the inventor into the inferno of poverty; 
 this is equally true of inventions that are most 
 simple, most immediately applicable and most 
 fertile in rich results. I will mentiton but one ex- 
 ample : there lately died at Paris in extreme pov- 
 erty a man whose invention saves millions of 
 francs a year to the railroads and mining com- 
 panies; he had discovered a way to utilize the 
 mountains of coal dust that encumbered the 
 neighborhood of wharfs and mines by convert- 
 ing it into "briquettes," such as are today in com- 
 mon use for fuel. 
 
 The capitalist bourgeoisie, the most revolu- 
 tionary class that ever oppressed human soci- 
 eties, cannot increase its wealth without continu- 
 ously revolutionizing the means of production, 
 continuously incorporating into its industrial
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 73 
 
 equipment new applications of mechanics, chem- 
 istry and physics. Its thirst for inventions is so 
 insatiable that it creates factories for inventions. 
 Certain American capitalists united in construct- 
 ing for Edison at Menlo Park the most wonder- 
 ful laboratory in the world, and in putting at 
 his disposal trained scientists, chosen workmen, 
 and the ordinary materials necessary to make and 
 keep on making inventions which the capitalists 
 patent, exploit or sell. Edison, who is himself 
 a shrewd business man, has taken care to secure 
 for himself a part of the benefits brought by the 
 Menlo Park inventions. 
 
 But not all inventors are able like Edison to 
 dictate terms to the capitalists who equip inven- 
 tion factories. The Thompson-Houston Com- 
 pany at Paris and Siemens at London and Ber- 
 lin,* in connection with their plants for turning 
 out electrical machinery, have laboratories where 
 ingenious men are kept busy searching out new 
 applications of electricity. At Frankfort the man^ 
 ufactory of aniline dyes, the largest in the world, 
 where anti-pyrine, that mineral quinine, was dis- 
 covered, keeps on its pay roll more than a hun- 
 dred chemists to discover new products of coal- 
 
 * It is a well-known fact that in the American 
 establishments of these and similar companies each 
 workman before receiving employment must sign pa- 
 pers transferring to the corporation the title to all 
 inventions made by him while in its service.— Translator,
 
 74 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 tar. Each discovery is at once patented by the 
 house, which, by way of encouragement, gives 
 a reward to the inventor. 
 
 We may up to a certain point regard all fac- 
 tories and workshops as laboratories for inven- 
 tions, since a considerable number of improve- 
 ments in machinery have been devised by work- 
 men in the course of their work. The inventor 
 having no money to patent and apply his discov- 
 ery, the employer takes out the patent in his own 
 name, and in accordance with the spirit of cap- 
 italist justice, it is he who reaps all the benefit. 
 When the government takes it into its head to 
 rewards talent, it is the employer who receives 
 the decoration ; the inventive workman, who is 
 not an intellectual, continues to revolve like the 
 other machines under the black and greasy num- 
 ber which distinguishes him, and as in this cap- 
 italist world he must be content with little, he 
 consoles himself for his poverty by the reflection 
 that his invention is bringing wealth and honor 
 to his employer. 
 
 The capitalist class, which to increase its 
 wealth is in pressing need of inventions, is in 
 even more imperative need of intellectuals to 
 supervise their application and to direct its in- 
 dustrial machinery. The capitalists, before they 
 equipped invention factories, had organized fac-
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 75 
 
 tories to turn out intellectuals. Dollfus, Scherer- 
 Kestner and other employes of Alsace, the most 
 intelligent, most philanthropic and consequently 
 the heaviest exploiters in France before the war, 
 had founded with their spare pennies at Mul- 
 house, schools of design, of chemistry and of 
 physics, where the brightest children of their 
 workmen were instructed gratis, in order that 
 they might always have at hand and at reason- 
 able figure the intellectual capacities required 
 for carrying on their industries. Twenty years 
 ago the directors of the Mulhouse school per- 
 suaded the municipal council of Paris to establish 
 the city school of chemistry and physics. At the 
 beginning, whether it is still the case I do not 
 know, the pupils were recruited in the common 
 schools, they received a higher education, gratis, 
 a dinner at noon at the school, and fifty francs a 
 month to indemnify the parents for the loss from 
 the fact that their sons were not in the work- 
 shop. 
 
 On the platform of the constituent assembly 
 of 1790 the Marquis of Foucault could declare 
 that to be a laborer it was not necessary to know 
 how to read and write. The necessities of in- 
 dustrial production compel the capitalist of to- 
 day to speak in language altogether different; 
 his economic interests and not his love of hu-
 
 76 SOaAUSM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 manity and of science force him to encourage 
 and to develop both elementary and higher edu- 
 cation. 
 
 But the slave merchants of ancient Rome 
 were, by the same title, patrons of education. 
 To the more intelligent of their human merchan- 
 dise they gave instruction in medicine, philos- 
 ophy, Greek literature, music, science, etc. The 
 education of the slave enhanced his market 
 value. The slave who was an expert cook 
 brought a better figure than the slave doctor, 
 philosopher or literator. In our days it is still 
 so; the big capitalists pay their chief cooks bet- 
 ter than the. state pays the professors of liberal 
 arts, even though they be members of the Insti- 
 tute. But contrary to the practice of the Roman 
 slave merchants, our capitalist class lavishes in- 
 struction only in order to depress the selling 
 price of intellectual capacity. 
 
 Greek mythology tells how Midas had the gift 
 of turning everything into gold ; the capitalist 
 class has a similar property, it transforms every- 
 thing that it touches into merchandise ; it has 
 done this for intellectual capacities ; chemists, 
 engineers and Latin scholars are bought like she- 
 asses and guano. 
 
 A voice: "And they buy deputies, too!" 
 
 People who have no tallow nor veal nor socks
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 77 
 
 to sell have their conscience and their votes; 
 when they are deputies, they are bought. 
 
 When intellectual capacities become merchan- 
 dise they have to be treated like other merchan- 
 dise, and they are. When there are many oysters 
 in the market the price of oysters goes down, 
 but when the arrivals are scarce the price goes 
 up. When chemists and engineers are plenty on 
 the labor market, the price of inventors and of 
 chemists goes down. Now that the Central 
 School and the School of Physics and Chemistry 
 turn out yearly upon the pavements of Paris 
 chemists by the dozen, their price has consider- 
 ably gone down. Twenty years ago the capital- 
 ist paid a chemist reasonably, he gave him $ioo 
 to $120 a month and engaged him by the year. 
 The employers whose regard for an employee is 
 measured by what they have to pay him, were 
 full of politeness and consideration for their 
 chemists who cost so dear. But since they have 
 been abundant, their price has fallen to $40 and 
 $30 a month ; in the north they are not engaged 
 by the year but for the sugar season, which lasts 
 three or four months, at the end of which they 
 are discharged with the workmen. Go and shift 
 for yourself, says the employer. Next fall when 
 the beets come I know I shall find chemists to 
 superintend making them into sugar.
 
 78 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 The chemists are not exceptional; you know 
 only too well that in all branches there is an 
 overproduction of intellectuals, and that when a 
 place is vacant, tens and hundreds offer them- 
 selves to fill it ; and it is this pressure which per- 
 mits the capitalists to lower the price of the in- 
 tellectuals and to put it even below the wage o*t 
 the manual laborer. 
 
 Poverty is harder for the intellectual than for 
 the workingman; it bruises him morally and 
 physically. The workingman, enduring hard- 
 ships from childhood and knocking about the 
 street and the shops, is accustomed to enduring 
 the troubles of life ; the intellectual, brought up 
 in a hot-house, has the life bleached out of him 
 by the shadow of the college walls, his nervous 
 system is over-developed and takes on an un- 
 healthy impressionability. What the working- 
 man endures thoughtlessly is to him a painful 
 shock. The intellectual is wounded to the depths 
 of his moral being by the exigencies of a wage- 
 worker's life. With the same or even a higher 
 wage the intellectual is in a worse economic con- 
 dition than the laborer, for the latter may dress 
 as cheaply as he likes, but the former, if only not 
 to offend the eye of his employer and his chiefs 
 with whom he is brought in contact is obliged to 
 dress expensively and even elegantly. He must
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 79 
 
 save on his food what he has to spend on his 
 clothing. 
 
 The capitaHsts have degraded the intellectuals 
 below the economic level of the manual laborers. 
 This is their reward for having so magnificently 
 prepared the way for the bourgeois revolution of 
 the eighteenth century. 
 
 Jaures in his preface to the Socialist History 
 of France says that "the intellectual bourgeoisie, 
 offended by a brutal and commercial society and 
 disenchanted with the bourgeois power, is rally- 
 ing to the support of socialism." Unfortunately 
 nothing could be less exact. This transforma- 
 tion of the intellectual faculties into merchan- 
 dise, which ought to have filled the intellectuals 
 with wrath and indignation, leaves them indif- 
 ferent. Never would the free citizen of the an- 
 cient republics of Athens and Rome have sub- 
 mitted to such degradation. The free man who 
 sells his work, says Cicero, lowers himself to the 
 rank of the slaves. Socrates and Plato were in- 
 dignant against the Sophists who required pay 
 for their philosophic teaching, for to Socrates 
 and Plato thought was too noble a thing to be 
 bought and sold like carrots and shoes. Even 
 the French clergy of 1789 resented as a mortal 
 insult the proposition to pay a salary for wor-
 
 80 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 ship. But our intellectuals are accustoming, 
 themselves to such degradation. 
 
 Spurred on by the mercantile passion, they are 
 never better satisfied with themselves or with so- 
 ciety than when they succeed in selling their in- 
 tellectual merchandise at a good price; they have 
 even come to the point of making its selling price 
 the measure of its value. Zola, who is one of 
 the most distinguished representatives of literary 
 intellectualism, estimates the artistic value of a 
 novel by the number of editions sold. To sell 
 their intellectual merchandise has become in 
 them such an all-absorbing principle that if one 
 speaks to them of socialism, before they inquire 
 into its theories, they ask whether in the social- 
 istic society intellectual labor will be paid for 
 and whether it will be rewarded equally with 
 manual labor. 
 
 Imbeciles ! they have eyes but they see not that 
 it is the capitalist bourgeoisie which establishes 
 that degrading- equality ; and to increase its 
 wealth degrades intellectual labor to the point of 
 paying it at a lower rate than manual labor. 
 
 We should have to put off the triumph of so- 
 cialism not to the year 2,000 but to the end of 
 the world if we had to wait upon the delicate, 
 shrinking and impressionable hesitancy of the in- 
 tellectuals. The history of the century is at hand
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 81 
 
 to teach us just how much we have a right to ex- 
 pect from these gentlemen. 
 
 Since 1789 governments of the most diverse 
 and opposed character have succeeded each other 
 in France; and always, without hesitation, the 
 intellectuals have hastened to offer their devoted 
 services. I am not merely speaking of those two- 
 for-a-cent intellectuals who litter up the news- 
 papers, the parliaments and the economic asso- 
 ciations ; but I mean the scientists, the university 
 professors, the members of the Institute ; the 
 higher they raise their heads, the lower they bow 
 the knee. 
 
 Princes of science, who ought to have con- 
 versed on equal terms with kings and emperors, 
 have marketed their glory to buy offices and 
 favors from ephemeral ministers. Cuvier, one 
 of the mightiest geniuses of the modern era, 
 whom the revolution took from the household 
 of a nobleman to make of him at twenty-five 
 years one of the Museum professors, Cuvier took 
 the oath of allegiance and served with fidelity the 
 Republic, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Charles X 
 and Louis Philippe, the last of whom created 
 him a peer of France to reward him for his 
 career of servility. 
 
 To devote one's self to all governments with- 
 out distinction is not enough. Pasteur placed
 
 82 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 his glorious name at the service of the financiers, 
 who placed him in the administrative council of 
 the Credit Foncier, side by side with Jules 
 Simon, with dukes and counts, with senators, 
 deputies and ex-ministers, in order to entrap the 
 "lambs." When De Lesseps was equipping his 
 colossal swindle of the Panama canal, he enrolled 
 the intellectuals of the Institute, of the French 
 Academy, of literature, of the clergy, of all the 
 circles of higher life. 
 
 It is not in the circle of the intellectuals, de- 
 graded by centuries of capitalist oppression, that 
 we must seek examples of civic courage and 
 moral dignity. They have not even the sense of 
 professional class-consciousness. At the time 
 of the Dreyfus affair, a certain minister dis- 
 charged, as if he had been a mere prison guard, 
 one of the professors of chemistry in the Poly- 
 technic school who had had the rare courage to 
 give public expression to his opinion. When in 
 a factory the employer dismisses a workman in 
 too arbitrary a fashion, his comrades grumble, 
 and sometimes quit work, even though misery 
 and hunger await them in the street. 
 
 All his colleagues in the Polytechnic school 
 bowed their heads in silence ; each one crouched 
 in self- regarding fear, and what is still more 
 characteristic, not a single partisan of Dreyfus
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 83 
 
 in the Society of the Rights of Man or in the 
 ranks of the press raised a voice to remind them 
 of the idea of professional solidarity. The in- 
 tellectuals, who on all occasions display their 
 transcendental ethics, have still a long road to 
 travel before they reach the moral plane of the 
 working class and of the socialist party. 
 
 The scientists have not only sold themselves to 
 the governments and the financiers ; they have 
 also sold science itself to the capitalist-bour- 
 geoisie. When in the eighteenth century there 
 was need to prepare the minds of men for the 
 revolution, by sapping the ideologic foundations 
 of aristocratic society, then science fulfilled its 
 sublime mission of freedom ; it was revolution- 
 ary; it furiously attacked Christianity and the 
 intuitional philosophy. But when the victorious 
 bourgeoisie decided to base its new power on re- 
 ligion, it commanded its scientists, its philoso' 
 phers and its men of letters to raise up what 
 they had overthrown ; they responded to the need 
 with enthusiasm. They reconstructed what they 
 had demolished ; they proved by scientific, senti- 
 mental and romantic argument the existence of 
 God the father, of Jesus the son and of Mary the 
 virgin mother. I do not believe history offers 
 a spectacle equal to that presented in the first 
 years of the nineteenth century by the philoso-
 
 84 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 phers, the scientists and the Hterary men, who 
 from revohitionaries and materiaUsts suddenly 
 transformed themselves into reactionaries, in- 
 tuitionalists and CathoUcs, 
 
 This backward movement still continues ; when 
 Darwin published his Origin of Species, which 
 took away from God his role of creator in the 
 organic world, as Franklin had despoiled him of 
 his thunderbolt, we saw the scientists, big and 
 little, university professors and members of the 
 Institute, enrolling themselves under the orders 
 of Flourens, who for his own part had at least 
 his eighty years for an excuse, that they might 
 demolish the Darwinian theory, which was dis- 
 pleasing to the government and hurtful to relig- 
 ious beliefs. The intellectuals exhibited that 
 painful spectacle in the fatherland of Lamark 
 and of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the creators of 
 the evolution theory, which Darwin completed 
 and made proof against criticism. 
 
 Today, now that the clerical anxiety is some- 
 what appeased, the scientists venture to profess 
 the evolution theory, which they never opposed 
 without a protest from their scientific conscience, 
 but they turn it against socialism so as to keep 
 in the good graces of the capitalists. Herbert 
 Spencer, Haeckel and the greatest men in the 
 school of Darwinism demonstrate that the classi-
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 85 
 
 fication of individuals into rich and poor, idlers 
 and laborers, capitalists and wage-earners, is the 
 necessary result of the inevitable laws of nature, 
 instead of being the fulfillment of the will and 
 the justice of God. Natural selection, they say, 
 which has differentiated the organs of the hu- 
 man body, has forever fixed the ranks and the 
 functions of the social body. They have, through 
 servility, even lost the logical spirit. They are 
 indignant against Aristotle because he, being un- 
 able to conceive of the abolition of slavery, de- 
 clared that the slave was marked off by nature; 
 but they fail to see that they are saying some- 
 thing equally monstrous when they affirm that 
 natural selection assigns to each one his place in 
 society. 
 
 Thus it is no longer God or religion which 
 condemn the workers to wretchedness — it is sci- 
 ence. Never was there an intellectual bankruptcy 
 more fraudulent. 
 
 M. Brunetieres, one of those intellectuals who 
 do not feel their degradation and who joyfully 
 fulfill their servile task, was right when he pro- 
 claimed the failure of science. He does not sus- 
 pect how colossal this bankruptcy is. 
 
 Science, the great emancipator, that has tamed 
 the powers of nature, and might in so doing have 
 freed man from toil to allow him to develop free-
 
 86 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 ly his faculties of mind and body; science, be- 
 come the slave of capital, has done nothing but 
 supply means for capitalists to increase their 
 wealth, and to intensify their exploitation of the 
 working class. Its most wonderful applications 
 to industrial technique have brought to the chil- 
 dren, the women and the men of the working 
 class nothing but overwork and misery ! 
 
 The middle-class revolutionary party of 1789 
 cried out in horror and indignation against the 
 lords, who through the long summer nights com- 
 pelled their serfs to beat the ponds near their 
 castles in order to keep the frogs from croak- 
 ing. What would they say if they saw what we 
 see? Improvements in lighting date from the 
 capitalist period. At the end of the last century 
 Argant and Carcel invented the lamp with a 
 double current of air, at the beginning of this 
 Chevreul invented the stearic candle, then gas 
 was discovered, then petroleum, then the electric 
 light, turning night into day. What benefits 
 have these scientific improvements in lighting 
 brought to the workers ? They have enabled em» 
 ployers to impose night work upon millions of 
 proletarians, not in the midsummer nights and 
 in the balmy air of the fields, but through nights 
 of summer and winter in the poisonous air of the 
 workshops and factories. The industrial appli-
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 87 
 
 cations of mechanics and chemistry have trans- 
 formed the happy and stimulating work of the 
 artisan into a torture which exhausts and kills 
 the proletarian. 
 
 When science subdued the forces of nature to 
 the service of man, ought she not to have given 
 leisure to the workers that they might develop 
 themselves physically and intellectually ; ought 
 she not to have changed the "vale of tears" into 
 a dwelling place of peace and joy? I ask you, 
 has not science failed in her mission of emanci- 
 pation ? 
 
 The obtuse capitalist himself is conscious of 
 this failure ; so he directs his economists and his 
 other intellectual domestics to prove to the work- 
 ing class that it has never been so happy and 
 that its lot goes on improving. 
 
 The economists, considering that to deserve 
 the good graces of the capitalists it was not 
 enough to falsify economic facts, are suppressing 
 economic science, which is becoming dangerous 
 for the domination of capital. Ever since Adam 
 Smith and Ricardo they go on repeating the 
 same errors regarding value, regarding the pro- 
 ductivity of the predatory and idle capitalist, 
 compiling facts and arranging statistics which 
 guide the capitalists in their speculations ; but 
 they dare not draw conclusions and build systems
 
 88 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 with the materials that they have accumulated. 
 When Ricardo wrote, the phenomena of modern 
 production were beginning their evolution, their 
 communist tendencies could not be perceived, 
 one could then study them without taking sides 
 and could build up a science without fear of 
 wounding the interests of capital. But now that 
 they have arrived at their full development and 
 show clearly their communal tendencies, the eco- 
 nomists shut their eyes that they may not see, 
 and they wage war against the principles estab- 
 lished by Ricardo, which after having served 
 as a basis for the old bourgeois economy, have 
 become the points of departure of the Marxian 
 economy. To take a whack at the socialist theo- 
 ries and put themselves at the service of the 
 financiers, like barkers and fakirs of their bogus 
 goods, are the intellectual functions of the econo- 
 mists. Latterly the owners of silver mines have 
 enlisted them to sing the praises of bimetallism, 
 while Cecil Rhodes, Barnato, Beit, Robbers & 
 Company called them in to boom the Transvaal 
 gold mines. 
 
 The intellectuals of art and literature, like the 
 jesters of the old feudal courts, are the enter- 
 tainers of the class which pays them. To satisfy 
 the tastes of the capitalists and beguile their 
 leisure — this is their sole artistic aim. The men
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 89 
 
 of letters are so well broken to this servile duty 
 that they do not understand the spirit of Moliere, 
 their great ancestor, all the while that they adore 
 the letter of his works. Moliere is the writer 
 most written about in France; learned men have 
 devoted themselves to gathering up the scattered 
 fragments of his erratic and careless youth, to 
 fixing the date and the hour of the representa- 
 tions of his comedies; if they had unearthed an 
 authentic piece of excrement from him they 
 would have set it in gold and would kiss it de- 
 votedly, but the spirit of Moliere escapes them. 
 You have read, as I have, many critical analyses 
 of his dramas. Did you ever find one of them 
 which brought out in clear light the role of this 
 militant playwright, who more than a century 
 before Beaumarchais and before revolution, at 
 Versailles, in the very court of the great mon- 
 arch, thrust at the nobility of the court and of 
 the provinces, attacked the church before which 
 Descartes and the rest trembled, hurled his jests 
 at Aristotle, the unquestioned authority of La 
 Sorbonne, that secular church ; who ridiculed 
 the Pyrrhonism which the neo-Kantians of our 
 own days oppose to the materialist philosophy of 
 Marxian socialism, but which then was the 
 weapon of the Catholics, of Pascal, of Huet, the 
 bishop of Avranches, to strike and to overthrow
 
 90 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 human reason, with its impudent desire or rea':h- 
 ing knowledge by its own strength. Pitiful, 
 wretched reason, clamored these Kantians be- 
 fore Kant, you can know nothing without the 
 aid of faith ! Moliere is unique in European lit- 
 terature, you must go back to the epoch of glori- 
 ous Athens to find his counterpart in Aristo- 
 phanes. 
 
 If the bourgeois critics timidly and unintelli- 
 gently mention this side of Moliere, there is an- 
 other of which their ignorance is complete. Mo- 
 liere was the man of his class, the champion of 
 the bourgeois class. Like the socialists who say 
 to the workers, "Break with the liberal bour- 
 geoisie, which deceives you when it does not 
 slaughter you ;" he cried to the Georges Dandins 
 and to the "bourgeois noblemen," "Avoid the 
 nobles like pests ; they deceive you, mock you 
 and rob you." 
 
 The great capitalist bourgeoisie does not 
 choose to work, either with its hands or its brain ; 
 it chooses merely to drink, to eat, to practice 
 lewdness and to look dignified in its beastly and 
 cumbersome luxury ; it does not even deign to 
 occupy itself with politics ; men like Rothschild, 
 De Lesseps, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, 
 do not run for office ; they find it more econom- 
 ical to buy the deputies than the voters, and more
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 91 
 
 convenient to put their clerks into the ministries 
 than to take part in parliamentary struggles. The 
 big capitalists interest themselves only in the 
 operations of the stock exchange, which afford 
 the delights of gambling; they dignify these by 
 the pompous name of "speculations," — a word 
 formerly reserved for the highest processes of 
 philosophical or mathematical thought. The cap- 
 italists are getting themselves replaced in the 
 supervision and management of the great indus- 
 trial and commercial enterprises by intellectuals, 
 who carry them on, and usually are well paid for 
 doing so. These intellectuals of industry and 
 politics, the privileged portion of the wage class, 
 imagine that they are an integral part of the 
 capitalist class, while they are only its servants; 
 on every occasion they take up its defense 
 against the working class, which finds in them 
 its worst enemies. 
 
 Intellectuals of this description can never be 
 led into socialism ; their interests are too closely 
 bound up with those of the capitalist class for 
 them to detach themselves and turn against it. 
 But below these favored few there is a swarm- 
 ing and famishing throng of intellectuals whose 
 lot grows worse in proportion to the increase of 
 thier numbers. These intellectuals belong to so- 
 cialism. They ought to be already in our ranks.
 
 92 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 Their education ought to have given them the 
 necessary intelligence to deal with social prob- 
 lems, but it is this very education which ob- 
 structs their hearing and keeps them away from 
 socialism. They think their education confers 
 on them a social privilege, that it will permit 
 them to get through the world by themselves, 
 each making his own way in life by crowding 
 out his neighbor or standing on the shoulders 
 of everyone else. They imagine that their pov- 
 erty is transitory and that they only need a stroke 
 of good luck to transform them into capitalists. 
 Education, they think, is the lucky number in the 
 social lottery, and it will bring them the grand 
 prize. They do not perceive that this ticket 
 given them by the capitalist class is a fraud, that 
 labor, whether manual or intellectual, has no 
 other chance than to earn its daily pittance, that 
 it has nothing to hope for but to be exploited, 
 and that the more capitalism goes on developing, 
 the more do the chances of an individual raising 
 himself out of his class go on diminishing. 
 
 And while they build castles in Spain, capital 
 crushes them, as it has crushed the small mer- 
 chants and the small manufacturers, who 
 thought they, too, with free credit and a little 
 luck, might become first-class capitalists, whose 
 names should be written in the Great Book of 
 the Public Debt.
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 93 
 
 The intellectuals, in all that has to do with 
 the understanding of the social movement, do 
 not rise above the intellectual level of those little 
 bourgeois who scoffed so fiercely at the bunglers 
 of 1830 and who, after being ruined and merged 
 in the proletariat, none the less continue to de- 
 test socialism ; to such a degree were their heads 
 perverted by the religion of property. The in- 
 tellectuals, whose brains are stuffed with all the 
 prejudices of the bourgeois class, are inferior to 
 those little bourgeois of 1830 and 1848 who at 
 least were not afraid of gunpowder; they have 
 not their spirit of combativeness, they are true 
 imbeciles, — if we restore to this word its orig- 
 inal Latin meaning of unsuited for war. With- 
 out resistance they endure rebuffs and wrongs 
 and they do not think of uniting, of organizing 
 themselves to defend their interests and give bat- 
 tle to capital on the economic field. 
 
 The intellectual proletariat as we know it is a 
 recent growth, it has especially developed in the 
 last forty years. When after the amnesty of 
 the condemned of the Commune, we began again 
 the socialist propaganda, believing that it would 
 be easy to draw the intellectuals into the move- 
 ment we took up our dwelling in their cultured 
 Latin quarter, Guesde taking up his residence in 
 the Rue de la Pitie, Vaillant in the Rue Monge
 
 94 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 and I in the Boulevard de Port Royal. We be- 
 came acquainted with hundreds of young men, 
 students of law, of medicines, of the sciences, 
 but you can count on your fingers those whom 
 we brought into the socialist camp. Our ideas at- 
 tracted them one day, but the next day the wind 
 blew from another quarter and turned their 
 heads. 
 
 An honorable merchant of Bordeaux, a promi- 
 nent member of the municipal council, said in 
 the time of the empire to my father, who was 
 disturbed over my socialism : 
 
 "Friend Lafargue, you must let youth take its 
 course ; I was a socialist when I studied at Paris, 
 I was connected with the secret societies and I 
 took part in the movement for demanding of 
 Louis Philippe the pardon of Barbes." The 
 young men of our age turn quickly, let them get 
 back to their homes and they develop prominent 
 abdomens and become reactionaries. 
 
 We welcomed joyfully the entrance of Jaures 
 into socialism ; we thought that the new form 
 which he brought to our propaganda w'ould 
 make it penetrate into circles that we had not 
 been able to touch. He has in fact made a de- 
 cided impression on the university circle, and we 
 owe it in part to him that the nurslings of the 
 Ecole Normale have ideas regarding the social
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 95 
 
 movement which are a little less absurd and 
 formless than those with which their learning 
 and intelligence have hitherto been contented. 
 Lately, joining forces with the radicai politicians 
 who had lost their working-class following, they 
 have invaded the socialist party. Their souls 
 overflow with the purest intentions; if their 
 peaceful habits prevent them from throwing 
 themselves into the conflict, and if their lofty 
 culture forbids them to take their place in the 
 ranks of the comrades, they nevertheless con- 
 descend to instruct us in ethics, to polish off our 
 ignorance, to teach us how to think, to offer us 
 such crumbs of science as we may be able to di- 
 gest, and to direct us ; they modestly offer them- 
 selves to us as leaders and schoolmasters. 
 
 These intellectuals who have spent their youth 
 in the university that they might become experts 
 on exercises, polishers of phrases, philosophers 
 or doctors, imagine one can improvise himself in- 
 to a master of the socialist theory by attending a 
 single lecture or by the careless reading of a sin- 
 gle pamphlet. Naturalists who had felt the need 
 of painful research to learn the habits of mol- 
 lusks or of the polyps who live in a community 
 on the coral banks, think that they know enough 
 to regulate human societies, and that by keep- 
 ing their stand on the first steps of the ascending
 
 96 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 ladder of animal life they can the better discern 
 the human ideal. The philosophers, the moral- 
 ists, the historians and the politicians have aims 
 equally lofty ; they bring' an abundant supply of 
 ideas and a new method of action to replace the 
 imperfect theory and tactics which in all capital- 
 ist countries have served to build up socialist 
 parties strong in numbers, unity and discipline. 
 
 The class struggle is out of fashion, declare 
 these professors of socialism. Can a line of de- 
 marcation be drawn between classes? Do not 
 the working people have savings bank accounts 
 of $20, $40 and $100, bringing them 50 cents, 
 $1.50 and $3.00 of interest yearly? Is it not true 
 that the directors and managers of mines, rail- 
 roads and financial houses are wage-workers, 
 having their functions and duties in the enter- 
 prises which they manage for the account of cap- 
 italists? The argument is unanswerable, but by 
 the same token there is no vegetable kingdom 
 nor animal kingdom because we can not sepa- 
 rate them "with an ax," as it were, for the rea- 
 son that at their points of contact, vegetables and 
 animals merge into each other. There is no 
 longer any day or any night because the sun 
 does not appear on the horizon at the same mo- 
 ment all over the earth, and because it is day at 
 the antipodes while it is night here.
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 97 
 
 The concentration of capital? A worn-out 
 tune of 1850. The corporations by their stocks 
 and bonds parcel out property and distribute it 
 among- all the citizens. How blinded we were 
 by our sectarianism when we thought that this 
 new form of property, essentially capitalistic, 
 was enabling- the financiers to plunge their thiev- 
 ing hands into the smallest purses, to extract the 
 last pieces of silver. 
 
 The poverty of the working class ! But it is 
 diminishing and soon will disappear through the 
 constant increase of wages, while interest on 
 money is constantly diminishing; some fine day 
 it will descend to zero and the bourgeois will be 
 overjoyed to offer their beloved capital on the 
 altar of socialism. That to-morrow or the day 
 after the capitalist will be forced to work, is the 
 prediction of Mr. Waldeck-Rousseau. And 
 there are intellectuals whose condition grows 
 worse in proportion as capitalism develops, who 
 are stultified by the utterances of the employers 
 to a point where they affirm that the position of 
 wage-workers is improving, and there are intel- 
 lectuals who assume to possess some knowledge 
 of political economy, who affirm that interest on 
 money is rapidly diminishing. Could these re- 
 formers of socialism perchance be ignorant that 
 Adam Smith calculated at the end of the eigh-
 
 98 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 teenth century that 3 per cent was the normal 
 interest of capital running no risk, and that the 
 financiers of our own epoch consider that it is 
 still around 3 per cent that the interest rate 
 must fluctuate. If a few years ago this rate 
 seemed to fall below 2^ per cent, it has risen to- 
 day above 3 per cent. Capital is merchandise, 
 like intellectual capacities and carrots ; as such 
 it is subject to the fluctuations of supply and de- 
 mand. It was then more offered than demanded, 
 whereas since the development of the industrial 
 plant of Russia, since the opening of China to 
 European exploitation, etc., the over-supply of 
 capital has been absorbed and its price rises with 
 its scarcity. But the intellectuals have too many 
 trifles to think of and too many harmonious 
 phrases to construct for giving any thought to 
 economic phenomena. They take for sterling 
 truths all the lies of the capitalists, and repeat 
 with pious conviction the old litanies of the orth- 
 odox economic church : "There are no classes, 
 wealth is coming to be distributed more and 
 more equitably, the workers are growing richer 
 and those living on incomes are growing poorer, 
 and the capitalist society is the best of all possi- 
 ble societies ; these truths shine forth like suns 
 and none but partisans and mystics can deny 
 them."
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 99 
 
 These intellectuals propose to modify the 
 tactics as well as the theories of the socialist 
 party ; they wish to impose upon it a new method 
 of action. It must no longer strive to conquer 
 the public powers by a great struggle, legal or 
 revolutionary as need may be, but let itself be 
 conquered by every ministry of a republican co- 
 alition ; it is no longer to oppose the socialist 
 party to all the bourgeois parties ; what is needed 
 is to put it at the service of the liberal party ; we 
 must no longer organize it for the class strug- 
 gle, but keep it ready for all the compromises of 
 politicians. And to further the triumph of the 
 new method of action, they propose to disorgan- 
 ize the socialist party, to break up its old systems 
 and to demolish the organizations which for 
 twenty years have labored to give the workers a 
 sense of their class interests and to group them 
 in a party of economic and political struggle. 
 
 But the intellectuals will lose their labors ; 
 thus far they have only succeeded in drawing 
 closer the ties uniting the socialists of the differ- 
 ent organizations, and in making themselves 
 ridiculous. 
 
 The intellectuals ought to have been the first 
 of all the various groups to revolt against cap- 
 italist society, in which they occupy a subordi- 
 nate position so little in keeping with their hopes
 
 100 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 and their talents, but they do not even under- 
 stand it; they have such a confused idea of it 
 that Auguste Comte, Renan, and others more or 
 less distinguished have cherished the dream of 
 reviving for their benefit an aristocracy copied 
 after the model of the Chinese mandarin system. 
 Such an idea is a reflection of past ages in their 
 heads, for nothing is in more absolute opposition 
 with the modern social movement than such pre- 
 tensions. The intellectuals in previous states of 
 society formed a world outside and above that of 
 production, having charge only of education, of 
 the direction of religious worship, and of the 
 political administration. 
 
 The mechanic industry of these societies com- 
 bine in the same producer, manual labor and in- 
 tellectual labor ; it was for example the same 
 cabinetmaker who designed and executed the 
 piece of furniture, who bought its first material 
 and who even undertook its sale. Capitalist pro- 
 duction has divorced two functions which once 
 were indissolubly united ; on the one side it puts 
 the manual workers, who become more and more 
 servants of the machine, and on the other the 
 intellectual workers, engineers, chemists, man- 
 agers, etc. But these two categories of workers, 
 however different and contrary they may be in 
 their education and habits, are welded together,
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS lOl 
 
 to the point that a capitaHst industry can not be 
 carried on without manual laborers any more 
 than without intellectual wage-workers. 
 
 United in production, united under the yoke of 
 capitalist exploitation, united they should be also 
 in revolt against the common enemy. The intel- 
 lectuals, if they understood their own real inter- 
 ests would come in crowds to socialism, not 
 through philanthropy, not through pity for the 
 miseries of the workers, not through affectation 
 and snobbery, but to save themselves, to assure 
 the future welfare of their wives and children, 
 to fulfill their duty to their class. They ought 
 to be ashamed of being left behind in the social 
 battle by their comrades in the manual category. 
 They have many things to teach them, but they 
 have still much to learn from them ; the work- 
 ingmen have a practical sense superior to theirs, 
 and have given proof of an instinctive intuition 
 of the communist tendencies of modern capital- 
 ism which is lacking to the intellectuals, who 
 have only been able by a conscious mental effort 
 to arrive, at this conception. If only they had 
 understood their own interests, they would long 
 since have turned against the capitalist class the 
 education which it has generously distributed in 
 order better to exploit them ; they would have 
 utilized their intellectual capacities, which are
 
 102 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 enriching their masters, as so many improved 
 weapons to fight capitaHsm and to conquer the 
 freedom of their class, the wage-working class. 
 
 Capitalist production, which has overthrown 
 the old conditions of life and of work, has elab- 
 orated new forms, which already can be dis- 
 cerned without supernatural vision, but which to 
 the intellectuals remain sealed under seven seals. 
 One of the leading lights of intellectualism, M. 
 Durkheim, in his book, "The Division of Labor," 
 which made some noise in university circles, can 
 not conceive of society except on the social pat- 
 tern of ancient Egypt, each laborer remaining, 
 his life through, penned up in one single trade. 
 However, unless one is so unfortunate as to be 
 affected by the hopeless near-sightedness of the 
 Ecole Normale, one can not help seeing that the 
 machine is suppressing trades, one after the 
 other, in a way to let only one survive, that of 
 the machinist, and that when it has finished its 
 revolutionary work which the socialists will com- 
 plete by revolutionizing capitalist society, the 
 producer of the communist society will plow and 
 sow with the machine to-day, will spin, will turn 
 wood or polish steel to-morrow, and will exercise 
 in turn all the trades to the greater profit of his 
 health and his intelligence. 
 
 The industrial applications of mechanics,
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 103 
 
 chemistry and physics, which, monopolized by 
 capital, oppress the worker, will, when they shall 
 be common property, emancipate man from toil 
 and give him leisure and liberty. 
 
 Mechanical production, which under capitalist 
 direction can only buffet the worker back and 
 forth from periods of over-work to periods of 
 enforced idleness, will when developed and reg- 
 ulated by a communist administration, require 
 from the producer, to provide for the normal 
 needs of society, only a maximum day of two or 
 three hours in the workshop, and when this time 
 of necessary social labor is fulfilled he will be 
 able to enjoy freely the physical and intellectual 
 pleasures of life. 
 
 The artist then will paint, will sing, will dance, 
 the writer will write, the musician will compose 
 operas, the philosopher will build systems, the 
 chemist will analyze substances not to gain 
 money, to receive a salary, but to deserve ap- 
 plause, to win laurel wreaths, like the conquerors 
 at the Olympic games, but to satisfy their ar- 
 tistic and scientific passion ; for one does not 
 drink a glass of champagne or kiss the woman 
 he loves for the benefit of the gallery. The artist 
 and the scientist may then repeat the enthusiastic 
 words of Kepler, that hero of science : "The 
 elector of Saxonv with all his wealth can not
 
 104 SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 equal the pleasure I have felt in composing the 
 Mysterium Cosmographicum." 
 
 Will not the intellectuals end by hearing the 
 voice of the socialist calling them to the rescue, 
 to emancipate science and art from the capitalist 
 yoke, to liberate thought from the slavery of 
 commercialism ?
 
 THE 
 BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM 
 
 The nineteenth century was the century of 
 capitalism. Capitalism filled that century to 
 overflowing with its commerce, its industry, its 
 manners, its fashions, its literature, its art, its 
 science, its philosophy, its religion, its politics 
 and its civil code, more universal than the laws 
 imposed by Rome upon the nations of the ancient 
 world. The capitalist movement, starting from 
 England, the United States and France, has 
 shaken the foundations of Europe and of the 
 world. It has forced the old feudal monarchies 
 of Austria and Germany and the barbaric despot- 
 ism of Russia to put themselves in line ; and in 
 these last days it has gone into the extreme East, 
 into Japan, where it has overthrown the feudal 
 system and implanted the industry and the poli- 
 tics of capitalism. 
 
 Capitalism has taken possession of our planet; 
 
 105
 
 106 THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM 
 
 its fleets bring together the continents which 
 oceans had separated ; its railroads, spanning 
 mountains and deserts, furrow the earth ; the 
 electric wires, the nervous system of the globe, 
 bind all nations together, and their palpitations 
 reverberate in the great centers of population. 
 Now for the first time there is a contemporary 
 history of the world. Events in Australia, the 
 Transvaal, China, are known in London, Paris, 
 New York, at the moment they are brought 
 about, precisely as if they happened in the out- 
 skirts of the city where the news is published. 
 
 Civilized nations live off the products of the 
 whole earth. Egypt, India, Louisiana, furnish 
 the cotton, Australia the wool, Japan the silk, 
 China the tea, Brazil the coffee. New Zealand 
 and the United States the meat and grain. The 
 capitalist carries in his stomach and on his back 
 the spoils of the universe. 
 
 The study of natural phenomena has under- 
 gone an unprecedented, an unheard-of, develop- 
 ment. New sciences, geology, chemistry, physics, 
 etc., have arisen. The industrial application of 
 the forces of nature and of the discoveries of 
 science has taken on a still more startling devel- 
 opment; some of the geometrical discoveries of 
 the scientists of Alexandria, two thousand years 
 old, have for the first time been utilized.
 
 THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM 107 
 
 The production of machine industry can pro- 
 vide for all demand and more. The mechanical 
 application of the forces of nature has increased 
 man's productive forces tenfold, a hundredfold. 
 A few hours' daily labor, furnished by the able- 
 bodied members of the nation, would produce 
 enough to satisfy the material and intellectual 
 needs of all. 
 
 But what has come of the colossal and won- 
 derful development of science, industry and 
 commerce in the nineteenth century? Has it 
 made humanity stronger, healthier, haopier? Has 
 it given leisure to the producers ? Has it brought 
 comfort and contentment to the people? 
 
 Never has work been so prolonged, so ex- 
 hausting, so injurious to man's body and so fatal 
 to his intelligence. Never has the industrial la- 
 bor which undermines health, shortens life and 
 starves the intellect been so general, been im- 
 posed on such ever-growing masses of laborers. 
 The men, women and children of the proletariat 
 are bent under the iron yoke of machine indus- 
 try. Poverty is their reward when they work, 
 starvation when they lose their jobs. 
 
 In former stages of society, famine appeared 
 only when the earth refused her harvests. In 
 capitalist society, famine sits at the hearth of the 
 working class when granaries and cellars burst
 
 108 THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITAUSM 
 
 with the fruits of the earth, and when the mar- 
 ket is gorged with the products of industry. 
 
 All the toil, all the production, all the suffer- 
 ing of the working class has but served to 
 heighten its physical and mental destitution, to 
 drag it down from poverty into wretchedness. 
 
 Capitalism, controlling the means of produc- 
 tion and directing the social and political life of 
 a century of science and industry, has become 
 bankrupt. The capitalists have not even proved 
 competent, like the owners of chattel slaves, to 
 guarantee to their toilers the work to provide 
 their miserable livelihood ; capitalism massacred 
 them when they dared demand the right to work 
 — a slave's right.* 
 
 The capitalist class has also made a failure of 
 itself. It has seized upon the social wealth to 
 enjoy it, and never was the ruling class more in- 
 capable of enjoyment. The newly rich, those 
 who have built up their fortunes by accumulat- 
 ing the filchings from labor, live like strangers 
 in the midst of luxury and artistic treasures, with 
 which they surround themselves through a fool- 
 ish vanity, to pay homage to their millions. 
 
 The leading capitalists, the millionaires and 
 
 * I aUude to tho Days of June, 1848, The insurgents 
 demanded the "Right to Work."
 
 THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM 109 
 
 billionaires, are sad specimens of the human race, 
 useless and hurtful. The mark of degeneracy 
 is upon them. Their sickly offspring are old at 
 birth. Their organs are sapped with diseases. 
 Exquisite meats and wines load down their ta- 
 bles, but the stomach refuses to digest them; 
 women expert in love perfume their couches 
 with youth and beauty, but their senses are be- 
 numbed. They own palatial dwellings in en- 
 chanting sites, and they have no eyes, no feeling 
 for joyful nature, with its eternal youth and 
 change. Sated and disgusted with everything, 
 they are followed everywhere by ennui as by 
 their shadows. They yawn at rising and when 
 they go to bed ; they yawn at their fests and at 
 their orgies. They began yawning in their 
 mother's womb. 
 
 The pessimism which, in the wake of capital- 
 ist property, made its appearance in ancient 
 Greece six centuries before Jesus Christ, and 
 which has since formed the foundation of the 
 moral and religious philosophy of the capitalist 
 class, became the leading characteristic of the 
 philosophy of the second half of the nineteenth 
 century. The pessimism of Theognis sprang 
 from the uncertainties and vicissitudes of life in 
 the Greek cities, torn by the perpetual wars be- 
 tween rich and poor; the pessimism of the capit-
 
 110 THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM 
 
 alist is the bitter fruit of satiety, ennui and the 
 impoverishment of the blood. 
 
 The capitalist class is falling into its second 
 childhood; its decreptitude appears in its litera- 
 ture, now returning to its starting point. Ro- 
 mantic literature, the literary form proper to the 
 capitalist class, which started out with the ro- 
 mantic Christianity of Chateaubriand, is return- 
 ing to the same point, after passing through the 
 historical novel and the character novel. (Wit- 
 ness in this country the immense sale of "Ben 
 Hur" and its imitators. — Translator.) Capital- 
 ism, which in its virile and combative youth in 
 the eighteenth century had wished to emancipate 
 itself from Christianity, resigns itself in its old 
 age to practices of the grossest superstition. 
 
 The capitalist class, bankrupt, old, useless and 
 hurtful, has finished its historic mission ; it per- 
 sists as ruling class only through its acquired 
 momentum. The proletariat of the twentieth 
 century will execute the decree of history ; will 
 drive it from its position of social control. Then 
 the stupendous work in science and industry ac- 
 complished by civilized humanity, at the price of 
 such toil and suffering, will engender peace and 
 happiness; then will this vale of tears be trans- 
 formed into an earthly paradise.
 
 THE WOMAN QUESTION 
 
 The bourgeois has thought and still thinks that 
 woman ought to remain at home and devote her 
 activity to supervising and directing the house- 
 keeping, caring for her husband, and manufac- 
 turing and nourishing children. Even Xeno- 
 phon, at the time when the bourgeoisie was newly 
 born and was taking its shape in ancient society, 
 traced the main outlines of this ideal of woman. 
 But if through the course of centuries, this ideal 
 may have appeared reasonable, because it cor- 
 responded to economic conditions which pre- 
 vailed, it is no longer anything more than an 
 ideological survival, since these conditions have 
 ceased to exist. 
 
 The domestication of woman presupposes that 
 she fulfills in the household certain numerous 
 functions which absorb all her energy ; now, the 
 most important and the most exacting of these 
 domestic labors, — the spinning of wool and linen, 
 the cutting and making up of clothing, laundry
 
 132 THE WOMAN QUESTION 
 
 work, baking, etc., — are carried on by capitalistic 
 
 industry. It furthermore presupposes that man 
 by his contribution to the family capital and his 
 earnings provides for the material needs of the 
 family ; now, among the comfortable bourgeoisie, 
 marriage is as much an association of capitals* as 
 a union of persons and often the capital contrib- 
 uted by the wife exceeds that of the husband, and 
 in the small bourgeoisie the gains of the father 
 of the family have fallen so low that the children, 
 — ^girls as well as boys, — are compelled to earn 
 their living in business, railroad offices, banks, 
 
 * The dowry has played an important role in the 
 history of woman: at the beginning of the patriarchal 
 period the husband buys her from her father, who 
 has to refund her purchase price if for any cause 
 whatever he repudiates her and sends her back to her 
 family; later this purchase price is returned to him 
 and constitutes her dowry, which her relatives are 
 accustomed to double. From the moment when the 
 wife enters into her husband's house with a dowry, 
 she ceases to be a slave whom he may dismiss, sell 
 and kill. The dowry, which in Rome and Athens became 
 a legal charge upon the property of the husband, w^as, 
 in case of her repudiation or divorce, to be restored to 
 her in preference to any creditor. "No pleasure is 
 derived from the riches which a woman brings into the 
 household," says a fragment of Euripides, "they only 
 serve to render divorce difficult." The comic authors 
 ridiculed the husbands, who in fear of a suit over the 
 dowry, fell into dependence upon the wife. A character 
 in Plautus says to a husband who is talking against 
 his wife, "You accepted the money of her dowry, you 
 sold your authority— imperium." The wealthy Roman 
 matrons carried their insolence to such a point that 
 they did not trust the management of their dowry to 
 their husbands, they gave it over to the stewards, who 
 sometimes fulfilled with them another service, as the 
 evil-speaking Martial states. 
 
 Adultery on the part of the wife involved a legal 
 divorce and the restitution of the dowry, but rather 
 than come to this painful extremity, the husbands
 
 THE WOMAN QUESTION 113 
 
 teaching, civil service positions, etc., while it 
 often happens that the young wife continues to 
 work outside in order to help out the resources 
 of the housekeeping, when the earnings of the 
 husband do not suffice to cover the expenses. 
 
 The daughters and wives of the small bour- 
 geoisie, as well as those of the working class, 
 thus enter into competition with their father, 
 brothers and husband. This economic antagon- 
 ism, which the bourgeoisie had prevented from 
 developing by confining the wife to the family 
 dwelling, is becoming general and is intensified 
 in proportion as capitalistic production develops ; 
 it invades the fields of the liberal professions — 
 
 preferred to close their eyes to the foibles of their 
 wives; at Rome and at Athens the law had to strike 
 at them in order to recall them to their marital dig- 
 nity; in China a certain number of bamboo strokes 
 were applied to the soles of their feet. The penalties 
 not being sufficient to encourage the husbands to re- 
 pudiate their adulterous w^ives, the law, in order to prop 
 up masculine virtue, permitted those who denounced 
 the infidelity of the wife to retain a part of the dowry; 
 there were then men who married only in prospect of 
 the adultery of the wife. The Roman women evaded 
 the law by having themselves enrolled in the censor's 
 book on the list of prostitutes, to whom it did not 
 apply. The number of matrons inscribed became so 
 considerable that the Senate, under Tiberius passed a 
 decree forbidding "women who had a patrician for a 
 grandfather, husband or father to traffic in their 
 bodies." (Tacitus. Annals II., 85.) Adultery on the 
 part of the wife in the patrician society of antiquity, 
 as well as in the aristocratic society of the eighteenth 
 century, had become so general that it had so to speak 
 entered into the social customs. It was looked upon 
 lightly as a corrective and accompaniment of mar- 
 riage.
 
 114 THE WOMAN QUESTION 
 
 medicine, law, literature, journalism, the sci- 
 ences, etc., — where man had reserved for him- 
 self a monopoly, which he imagined was to be 
 eternal. The laborers, as is always the case, 
 have been the first to draw the logical conse- 
 quences of the participation of woman in social 
 production ; they have replaced the ideal of the 
 artisan, — the wife who is nothing but a house- 
 keeper, — by a new ideal, — woman as a compan- 
 ion in their economic and political struggles for 
 the raising of wages and the emancipation of 
 labor. 
 
 The bourgeois has not yet succeeded in under- 
 standing that his ideal is already long since out 
 of date and that it must be remodeled to corres- 
 pond to the new conditions of the social environ- 
 ment ; nevertheless since the first half of the nine- 
 teenth century the ladies of the bourgeoisie have 
 begun to protest against their inferior position 
 in the family, so much the more intolerable in 
 that their dowry placed them on a footing of 
 equality with the husband ; they rebelled against 
 the domestic slavery and the parsimonious life 
 to which they were condemned, as well as the dep- 
 rivation of intellectual and material enjoyments 
 which was imposed upon them ; the bolder ones 
 went so far as to demand free love and to ally 
 themselves with the Utopian sects which oreached
 
 THE WOMAN v^UESTION 115 
 
 the emancipation of woman.* The philosophers 
 and the morahsts had the simpHcity to beheve 
 that they would stop the woman movement by 
 opposing- to it the sacred interest of the family, 
 which they declared could not survive without 
 the subjection of woman to the labors of the 
 household, the sewing on of shirt buttons, the 
 mending of hose, etc., her duty was to devote 
 herself to these obscure and thankless labors, in 
 order that man might freely unfold and display 
 his brilliant and superior faculties. These same 
 philosophers, who lectured the rebellious ladies 
 on the cult of the family, sang the praises of 
 capitalist industry, which, by forcing the wife 
 away from the domestic hearth and her child's 
 cradle to condemn her to the forced labor of the 
 factory, destroys the working-class family. 
 
 The bourgeois ladies laughed at the sermons, 
 equally imbecile and ethical, of these solemn phi- 
 losophers ; they kept on their way and attained 
 the end they set for themselves ; like the patri- 
 cian lady of ancient Rome and the countess of 
 the eighteenth century, they threw off the cares 
 of housekeeping and of the nursing of the child 
 
 * The Saint Simon manifesto of 1830 announced that 
 the religion of Saint Simon had come "to put an end 
 to that shameful traffic, that legal prostitution, which 
 under the name of marriage often blesses the mon- 
 strous union of self-surrender and egoism, of light and 
 of ignorance, of youth and decrepitude."
 
 116 THE WOMAN QUESTION 
 
 upon mercenaries, that they might devote them- 
 selves wholly to the toilet, that they might be 
 the most luxuriously arrayed dolls in the capital- 
 ist world and in order to make business move. 
 The daughters and wives of American plutocracy 
 have attained the extreme limits of this sort of 
 emancipation ; they are transforming their fathers 
 and husbands into accumulators of millions, 
 which they squander madly. Since the toilet does 
 not exhaust the entire activity of the ladies of 
 capitalism, they find amusement in breaking the 
 marriage contract in order to assert their inde- 
 pendence and improve the race. The Communist 
 Manifesto remarks that the innumerable divorce 
 suits in which adultery is alleged are indisputa- 
 ble proofs of the respect inspired in the bourgeois 
 of both sexes by the sacred bonds of marriage 
 which the "licentious socialists" talk of loosen- 
 ing. 
 
 When the daughters and wives of the small 
 bourgeoisie, obliged to earn their living and to 
 increase the resources of the family, began to 
 invade the stores, the offices, the civil service and 
 the liberal professions, the bourgeois were seized 
 with anxiety for their means of existence already 
 so reduced ; feminine competition would reduce 
 them still further. The intellectuals who took 
 up the defense of the males, thought it prudent
 
 THE WOMAN QUESTION 117 
 
 not to Start afresh with the ethical sermons which 
 had miscarried so piteously in the case ot the 
 wealthy bourgeois ladies; — they appealed to sci- 
 ence ; they demonstrated by reasons which were 
 irrefutable and loftily scientific that woman can- 
 not emerge from the occupations of housekeep- 
 ing without violating the laws of nature and his- 
 tory. They proved to their complete satisfaction 
 that woman is an inferior being, incapable of re- 
 ceiving a higher intellectual education and of 
 furnishing the combination of attention, energy 
 and agility demanded by the professions in which 
 she was entering into competition with man. Her 
 brain, less voluminous, less heavy and less com- 
 plex than that of man, is a "child's brain." Her 
 less developed muscles have not the strength for 
 attack and for resistance; the bones of her fore- 
 arm, her pelvis, her femur, and in fact all her 
 osseous, muscular and nervous system do not 
 permit her to undertake more than the routine 
 of the household. Nature designed her in all 
 her organization to be the servant of man, just 
 as the odious god of the Jews and Christians 
 marked out the race of Ham for slavery. 
 
 History contributed its startling confirmation 
 of these ultra scientific truths; the philosophers 
 and the historians affirmed that always and 
 everywhere the wife, subordinate to the man, had
 
 118 THE WOMAN QUESTION 
 
 been shut up in the house, in the woman's apart- 
 ments; if such had been her lot in the past, 
 such was to be her destiny in the future, 
 was the positive declaration of Auguste 
 Comte, the profoundest of bourgeois phil- 
 osophers. Lombroso, the illustrious comedian, 
 went him one better : he seriously declared that 
 social statistics proclaimed the inferiority of 
 woman, since the number of female criminals is 
 below that of male criminals; while buried in 
 these figures, he might have added that the sta- 
 tistics of insanity demonstrate the same inferior- 
 ity. Thus we see that ethics, anatomy, physiol- 
 ogy, social statistics and history riveted forever 
 upon woman the chains of domestic servitude.. 
 
 II. 
 Bachofen, Morgan and a crowd of anthropolog- 
 ists have revised the opinion of the historians and 
 philosophers upon the role played by woman in 
 the past. They have shown that everywhere the 
 paternal family, which subordinated woman to 
 man, had been preceded by the maternal family, 
 which gave the first place to woman. The Greek 
 language contains the record of her two condi- 
 tions : while the Spartans, among whom matri- 
 archal customs persisted, still continued to call 
 her despoina, the mistress of the house, the sov-
 
 THE WOMAN QUESTION 119 
 
 ereign, the other Greeks gave to the wife the 
 name damar, the subdued, the vanquished. The 
 Odyssey, in characterizing Nausicaa, says that 
 she is parthenos admes, the girl not subdued, that 
 is to say, without a husband, without a master. 
 The modern expression "yoke of marriage" pre- 
 serves the ancient idea. 
 
 Hesiod, in opposition to Homer, who tells only 
 of patriarchal customs, preserves precious recol- 
 lections of the matriarchal family; he tells us 
 that when it existed man, even if he were a hun- 
 dred years old, lived with his prudent mother, 
 — he was fed in her house like a great child. 
 (Works and Days, V, 129-130.) It was not the 
 woman who then had the "child's brain," but the 
 man ; everything seems in fact to prove that her 
 intelligence was the first to develop. This intel- 
 lectual superiority caused her to be deified before 
 man in the primitive religions of Egypt, the In- 
 dies, Asia and Greece, and caused the first inven- 
 tions of the arts and trades, with the exception 
 of metal working, to be attributed to goddesses 
 and not to gods. The Muses, originally three in 
 number, were in Greece, even in preference to 
 Apollo, the goddesses of poetry, music and the 
 dance. Isis, "mother of corn ears and lady of 
 bread," and Demeter, lawgiver, had taught the 
 Egyptians and Greeks the tillage of barley and
 
 120 THE WOMAN QUESTION 
 
 wheat and made them renounce their anthropo- 
 phagic repasts. The woman appeared to the pre- 
 patriarchal man, like the Germans whom Taci- 
 tus knew, as having within herself something 
 holy and providential, aliqiiid sanctum et provi- 
 dum (Germania VIII). Her prudence and fore- 
 sight gave her this divine character. Must we 
 conclude that this intellectual superiority, which 
 manifested itself when the economic environment 
 is rudimentary, is a natural phenomenon ? 
 
 But, in any case, it may be asserted that the 
 vitality of woman is superior to that of man. The 
 life insurance companies of the United States, 
 England and Holland, which do not base their 
 calculation upon scientific fairy tales of the in- 
 tellectuals but upon mortality tables, pay woman 
 an annuity below that which they give man, be- 
 cause her probabilities of death are less. Here 
 for example is the annuity paid for a capital of 
 $i,ooo by American and Dutch companies:* 
 
 New York. Holland. 
 
 Age. Men. Women. Men. ' Women. 
 
 50 years $76.47 $69.57 $76.80 | 73-6o 
 
 60 years 97.24 88.03 98-50 93-50 
 
 70 years 134-31 122.48 142.00 136.70 
 
 80 years 183.95 168.00 222.70 211.70 
 
 * The French companies make no differences be- 
 tween the sexes because they pay very small annui- 
 ties. La G^nerale, the most important one in France, 
 gives for $1,000 at the age of 50 years an annuity of 
 $64.20; at 60 years $80.80; at 70 years $118.50; at 80 
 years $134.70. Thus it realizes immense profits; its 
 shares which in 1819 were worth 750 francs each were 
 quoted last January at 31,300 francs.
 
 THE WOMAN QUESTION 121 
 
 It may be objected that man, leading a more 
 active life, is more subject to accidents, diseases, 
 and other causes of death, and that consequently 
 the prolonged life of woman does not prove the 
 higher vitality of her organism, but the advant- 
 ages of a life less subject to accident. 
 
 The answer to this objection is found in the 
 statistics of the various nations. There is in no 
 country a perfect equilibrium between the num- 
 ber of women and that of men; for i,ooo men 
 there are in Belgium 1,005 women, in France 
 1,014, in England 1,062, in Scotland 1,071 and 
 in Norway 1,091. Nevertheless in these coun- 
 tries with the feminine preponderance there is 
 an excess of masculine births : of the whole of 
 Western Europe for every 1000 girls there are 
 born from 1,040 to 1,060 boys. If, in spite of this 
 excess of masculine births, more girls survive, it 
 is because the greater mortality of the boys shows 
 the balance in favor of the girls ; and this higher 
 mortality cannot be explained by the life of man 
 being more subject to accident, since it is ob- 
 served at an early age, notably during the first 
 two years. All the diseases of childhood, with 
 the exception of diphtheria and whooping cough, 
 are to a perceptible extent more fatal among boys 
 than among girls ; from zero to five years the 
 male sex is particularly frail ; at all ages, except
 
 132 THE WOMAN QUESTION 
 
 between ten and fifteen years, the male mortality 
 is in excess of the female. 
 
 The superior vitality of the female sex is also 
 noticeable in the greater ease with which it builds 
 up its organism. M. Iribe, superintendent of the 
 sanitarium of Hendaye, to which are sent Paris- 
 ian children from three to fourteen years of age, 
 who are afflicted with anaemia, incipient tuber- 
 culosis, scrofula and rickets, reports that at the 
 time of their dismissal, at the end of six months, 
 the progress in weight, girth and chest develop- 
 ment is incomparably higher in the girls than in 
 the boys, the increase in weight is double and 
 often more. 
 
 The same statement has been made by other 
 superintendents of sanitariums. (Bulletin Med- 
 ical, No. 8i, 1903.) 
 
 Woman undeniably possesses a greater vitality 
 than man. M. Gustav Loisel has made inquiry 
 "as to whether this difference existed in embry- 
 onic life, and what may be its cause?" He has 
 communicated the results of his inquiries to the 
 Biological Society of Paris, which published them 
 in its Bulletin of November 6, 1903. 
 
 M, Loisel availed himself of 792 weights and 
 measurements made upon 72 foetuses at the
 
 THE WOMAN QUESTION 123 
 
 Maternity Hospital of Paris by C. E. Legou ;* 
 from the following weights of the foetuses at 
 three, four, five and six months he obtains the 
 following figures : 
 
 Males. Females. Differences. 
 Grammes. Grammes. 
 Total weight ...1908.18 1708.11 200.07 in favor of males 
 
 Kidneys 16.87 i7-i9 2.67 in favor of males 
 
 Superrenal glands 5.15 6.43 0.32 in favor of females 
 
 Liver 88.35 96.31 1-28 in favor of females 
 
 Spleen 2.59 2.38 7.90 in favor of females 
 
 Thymus 3.89 3.97 0.21 in favor of males 
 
 Heart 10.97 12.60 0.08 in favor of females 
 
 Lungs 47.29 44.62 1.63 in favor of females 
 
 Brain 236.94 235.17 1.17 in favor of males 
 
 "These figures thus show us," says M. Loisel, 
 "a preponderance already existing in favor of the 
 females as regards the kidneys, the superrenal 
 glands, the liver, the thvmus and the heart ; this 
 predominance is the more noticeable since the 
 total weight of the body is larger in the male than 
 in the female." 
 
 If now we take the relation between the total 
 weight and the weight of the organs which are 
 heaviest in the male, we find that the proportion 
 is still in favor of the female : 
 
 PROPORTION OF TOTAL WEIGHT. 
 
 Males. Females. 
 
 Spleen 1 to 736 1 to 718 
 
 Lungs • 1 to 40 1 to 38 
 
 Brain 1 to 8 1 to 7 
 
 * E. Legou. "Some Considerations on the Develop- 
 ment of the Foetus." Paris. 1903. The weights and 
 measurements of M. Legou were made for official use.
 
 124 THE WOMAN QUESTION 
 
 The organs here examined, brain included, are 
 thus absolutely or relatively heavier in the female 
 foetus than in the male foetus. 
 
 M, Loisel has also examined into the propor- 
 tion of the weights of the different organs to the 
 total weight according to the age of the foetus. 
 He has prepared a table, from which I take only 
 the figures concerning the brain : 
 
 Proportion of 
 AGE TOTAL WEIGHT weight of brain 
 
 to total weight. 
 Males Females Males Females 
 Grammes Grammes 
 
 I I 
 
 3 Months 58.33 65.96 — 
 
 6.5 ', 
 
 I I 
 
 4 Months 167.23 182.58 
 
 7.3 6.6 
 
 I I 
 
 5 Months 336.33 295.00 
 
 7-6 75 
 
 I r 
 
 6 Months 732.58 636.00 
 
 8:3 7-i 
 
 The weight of the male foetus, which is below 
 that of the female foetus, at three months, when 
 the sex has just been determined, grows more 
 rapidly and the proportion between the weight 
 is always to the advantage of the females from 
 the fourth month on. 
 
 "To sum up," says M. Loisel, ''all the organs 
 are heavier in the female foetus than in the male 
 foetus up to about the fourth month. The pre- 
 dominance then passes over to the male, but only
 
 THE WOMAN QUESTION 125 
 
 for the lungs and the organs for sex-union, thus 
 the cardiac muscle always remains heavier in the 
 female. The organs which are of real service to 
 the individual during the embryonic life always 
 remain more developed in the female sex. 
 
 "If now we consider that the differences in 
 favor of the females are especially in the liver, 
 the heart, the superrenal glands and the kidneys, 
 we shall come to the conclusion that the greater 
 vitality of the female organisms corresponds to 
 their being better nourished and better purified."* 
 
 IIL 
 
 The superior organization possessed by woman 
 at birth, assuring her throughout her life a much 
 greater vitality, is probably demanded by the part 
 she plays in the production of the species, a part 
 altogether more prolonged and exhausting than 
 that of the man who, when fertilization is ac- 
 complished, has no more to do, while then the 
 travail of woman begins, to continue during 
 long months, through pregnancy and after birth. 
 The women of savage tribes suckle their children 
 for two years and more. It sometimes happens 
 
 * The latest observations upon ants and bees tend 
 to prove that the fertilized eggs would give birth to 
 females and to workers; and the nonfertillzed to 
 males, which consequently would be born from eggs 
 that are less comolex.
 
 126 THE WOMAN QUESTION 
 
 that the male pays dear for his inutility ; after 
 union, the bees kill the males, and the male spider 
 must hastily take himself off that he may not be 
 devoured by the larger and stronger female. 
 Among the Sakawas, at the annual feast of My- 
 litta Anaitis, they sacrificed at Babylon the hand- 
 some slave who had just united with the priestess 
 who incarnated the Assyrian goddess. This 
 bloody religious ceremonial must have been a re- 
 production of an Amazonian custom. 
 
 The life of savagery and barbarism permits 
 woman to develop her superiority from birth ; 
 each sex there has its special function ; it is the 
 division of labor in embryo. The man, whose 
 muscular system is more developed, "fights, 
 hunts, fishes and sits down," according to the 
 Australian native, he regards all the rest as un- 
 der the jurisdiction of woman, whose function 
 puts brain activity into play at an earlier epoch. 
 She has charge of the communal house, which 
 often shelters a clan of more than one hundred 
 individuals ; she prepares clothing from skins and 
 other raw materials ; she charges herself with the 
 cultivation of the garden, the rearing of domestic 
 animals and the manufacture of household uten- 
 sils; she preserves, economizes, cooks, distributes 
 the provisions, vegetable and animal, which have 
 been gathered during the course of the year ; and
 
 THE WOMAN QUESTION 137 
 
 like the Valkyries of the Scandinavians and the 
 Keres of the pre-Homeric Greeks, she accom- 
 panies the warrior on the field battle, aids in 
 the fray, raises him up if he is wounded and 
 cares for him; her assistance is so appreciated 
 that, according to Tacitus, the barbarians who 
 under the leadership of Civilis revolted against 
 Vespasian, were seized with pity for the Roman 
 soldiers because their wives did not accompany 
 them when they marched to combat. Plato like- 
 wise who, like the chosen ones initiated in the 
 Eleusinian Mysteries, was more informed re- 
 garding ancient custjims than is supposed, makes 
 the women to be present in the battles of the 
 warriors of his Republic. 
 
 These multiple and diverse functions, which 
 obliged woman to reflect, to calculate, to think 
 of the morrow and to look ahead at long range, 
 must necessarily have developed her intellectual 
 faculties ; thus the craniologists say that only a 
 slight difference exists between the cranial capa- 
 city of the two sexes in the negroes, the Austral- 
 ians, and the red skins, while they find that it 
 goes on increasing among civilized people. Wo- 
 man is for the careless and improvident savage, 
 a providence ; she is the prudent and prescient 
 being who presides over his destinies from birth 
 to death. Man, making his religions with the
 
 128 THE WOMAN QUESTION 
 
 events and the intellectual acquisitions of his 
 daily life, was thus obliged to begin by deifying 
 woman. The pre-Homeric Greeks and Romans 
 had placed their destinies under the control of 
 goddesses, the Fates — Moirai, Parcae — whose 
 name signifies in the Latin language "sparing," 
 "economic," and in the Greek the part which 
 falls to each one in the distribution of food or 
 of booty. 
 
 If we relieve the rich and poetical Greek myth- 
 ology of the symbolical, allegorical and myst- 
 ical lucubrations with which the philosophers and 
 the poets of the classical epoch and the Alexan- 
 drine period have overloaded and complicated it, 
 and which the German mythologists, servilely 
 copied by those of France and England, have 
 carried on to their own more perfect confusion, 
 it becomes an inestimable storehouse of prehis- 
 toric customs which preserves the memory of 
 the manners which travelers and anthropologists 
 now observe living again among the savages and 
 barbarous nations of Africa and the New World. 
 The mythological legend furnishes us with in- 
 formation of the relative value of feminine and 
 masculine intelligence among the Greeks, before 
 they had entered upon the patriarchal period. 
 
 Jupiter, the "father of the gods," as Homer, 
 Hesiod and Aeschylos call him, after having
 
 THE WOMAN QUESTION 129 
 
 driven the feminine divinities from Olympus, en- 
 throned there the patriarchate, which for some 
 generations had been established upon earth; the 
 religious heaven always reflects terrestrial man- 
 ners as the moon reflects the light of the sun. 
 But Jupiter, who like every barbarian, knew 
 how to use his fists (Iliad XV. 228), who boasted 
 that he was the strongest of the gods, and who 
 to dominate the others kept next his throne two 
 servants, Force and Violence, always ready to 
 obey his orders, was inadequately prepared by 
 his intellectual qualities to replace woman in the 
 government of the Olympian family; in order 
 to supply the capacities which were lacking to 
 him, Hesiod tells us that he married Metis, "the 
 wisest among mortals and gods." The savage 
 and the barbarian, that he may take into himself 
 the courage of a fallen enemy, devours his throb- 
 bing heart ; Jupiter carried off Metis to assimilate 
 her cunning, her prudence and her wisdom, for 
 her name in the Greek language has these diverse 
 meanings ; these qualities were considered as be- 
 longing to woman. 
 
 But the process of assimilation took some time, 
 if we may judge from the rascally farce played 
 upon him by Prometheus. The latter killed and 
 butchered an enormous ox, in one pile he placed 
 the flesh which he covered with the skin upon
 
 130 THE WOMAN QUESTION 
 
 which he deposited the entrails; in another pile 
 he put the bare bones which he adroitly con- 
 cealed under heaps of fat. "You have divided 
 the parts very badly," said the father of gods 
 and men. "Most worthy Jupiter, greatest of liv- 
 ing gods, take the part that your wisdom coun- 
 sels you to choose," replied the astute Prome- 
 theus. The ruler of the heavens, listening only 
 to his gluttony, laid both hands upon the heap 
 of fat amid the laughter of the Olympians ; his 
 wrath was terrible when he saw the bare bones. 
 (Theogony 435 et seq.) Such a farce would 
 hardly have been played in the Olympian heaven 
 had it not been that on the earth similar tests 
 had been required to prove to the Father that 
 his intellectual faculties did not justify him in 
 taking the place of the Mother in the leader- 
 ship of the family and the management of its 
 property. 
 
 The higher position in the family and society, 
 which man conquered by brute force, while it 
 compelled him to a mental activity to which he 
 was little accustomed, at the same time put at 
 his disposal opportunities for reflection and de- 
 velopment which constantly increased. Woman, 
 "subdued," as the Greek expression has it, shut 
 up in the narrow circle of the family, the leader- 
 ship of which had been taken from her, and
 
 THE WOMAN QUESTION 131 
 
 having little or no contact with the outside world, 
 saw on the contrary a great reduction of the 
 means of development which she had enjoyed, 
 and to complete her subjection she was forbid- 
 den the intellectual culture which was given to 
 man. If in spite of these fetters and these dis- 
 advantages, the disastrous effects of which can- 
 not be exaggerated, the brain of woman con- 
 tinued to evolve, it was because woman's intel- 
 ligence profited through the progress realized by 
 the masculine brain; for one sex transmits to 
 the other the qualities which it has acquired; 
 thus pullets of certain varieties inherit the spurs 
 which are highly developed among the cocks, 
 while in other varieties they transmit to the males 
 their exaggerated crests. "It is fortunate," says 
 Darwin upon this point, "that the equal trans- 
 mission of the characteristics of both sexes has 
 been a general rule in the whole series of mam- 
 mals, otherwise, it is probable that man would 
 have become as superior to woman in intellectual 
 power as the peacock is to the female in orna- 
 mental plumage." (Descent of Man — Sexual 
 Selection, VIII and XIX.) 
 
 But defects as well as valuable qualities are 
 transmitted from one sex to the other : if woman 
 has profited by the brain-growth of man, he has 
 in his turn been retarded in his development by
 
 132 THE WOMAN QUESTION 
 
 the sluggishness in the development of woman's 
 brain^ produced by the reduction to the smallest 
 minimum of intellectual activity to which he 
 has condemned her. The breeders who seek the 
 choicest results are as careful to have irreproach- 
 able females as males; amateur cockfighters at- 
 tach as much importance to the selection of the 
 pullets as to the cocks, they produce only from 
 those which are armed with spurs and which 
 have the fighting spirit. It may be said that hu- 
 manity, since it emerged from communism of 
 the clan to live under the system of private prop- 
 erty, has been developed by the efforts of one 
 sex alone and that its evolution has been retarded 
 through the obstacles interposed by the other 
 sex. Man by systematically depriving woman of 
 the means of development, material and intellect- 
 ual, has made of her a force retarding human 
 progress. 
 
 In fact if we study and compare the different 
 periods of savagery and barbarism, we cannot 
 but observe the continuous and remarkable prog- 
 ress in human mind, because women and men, 
 exercising freely their physical and mental fac- 
 ulties, contribute equally to the evolution of the 
 species ; this has been retarded ever since human- 
 ity entered into the period of civilization and 
 private property, because then woman, constraiti-
 
 THE WOMAN QUESTION 133 
 
 ed and confined in her development, cannot con- 
 tribute to it in so effective a way. The senile 
 stagnation in which China has vegetated for 
 more than a thousand years can only be attrib- 
 uted to the degradation of woman, which has 
 gone to the point of the cruel mutilation of her 
 feet that she may be imprisoned the more closely 
 m the woman's quarters. Europe also suffers 
 from the degradation of woman, since in spite 
 of the extraordinary material progress of these 
 last two thousand years and the increasing and 
 no less extraordinary accumulation of human 
 knowledge, it cannot be maintained that the brain 
 of the civilized modern exceeds in power and 
 capacity that of the Greeks of the classic epoch, 
 which extends from the seventh to the fourth 
 century before the Christian era. It is certain 
 that a Victor Hugo, a Zola, or any university 
 graduate or doctor has stored in his brain an 
 abundance of positive and diversified conceptions 
 not possessed by Aeschylus, Anaxagoras, Prota- 
 goras and Aristotle, but that does not prove that 
 his imagination and his intelligence, or that of 
 his contemporaries is more rich, more varied and 
 more vast than that of the generations of Ionia 
 and Attica, who were the artificers of that incom- 
 parable budding and blossoming of science, phi- 
 losophy, literature and art at which history marv-
 
 134 THE WOMAN QUESTION 
 
 els and who reveled in that subtle and paradox- 
 ical play of sophistical philosophy, the like of 
 which has not again been seen. The sophists — 
 Photagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Plato, etc., stated, 
 discussed and solved the problems of the spir- 
 itualistic philosophy and many others besides : yet 
 the Hellenes of Asia Minor and of Greece had 
 emerged from barbarism only a few centuries 
 before. Many reasons may be cited to explain 
 this arrest in human development, but the princi- 
 pal one is the subjection of woman. 
 
 IV. 
 Capitalist production, which takes charge of 
 most of the labors to which woman devoted her- 
 self in the gentile house, has levied into its army 
 of wage-workers in factory, shop, office and 
 schoolroom, the wives and daughters of the 
 working class and of the small bourgeoisie, in 
 order to procure cheap labor. Its pressing need 
 of intellectual capacities has set aside the vener- 
 able and venerated axiom of masculine ethics : 
 ''to read, write and count ought to be all of a 
 woman's knowledge;" it has required that girls 
 like boys be instructed in the rudiments of the 
 sciences. The first step once taken, they could 
 not be forbidden to enter the universities. They 
 proved that the feminine brain, which the Intel-
 
 THE WOMAN QUESTION 136 
 
 iectuals had declared a "child's brain," was as 
 capable as the masculine brain of receiving all 
 scientific instruction. The abstract sciences 
 (mathematics, geometry, mechanics, etc.), the 
 first whose study had been accessible to woman, 
 were also the first in which they could give the 
 measure of their intellectual capacities ; they are 
 now attacking the experimental sciences (physi- 
 olog>', physics, chemistry, applied mechanics, 
 etc), in America and Europe there arises a 
 throng of women who are marching on a level 
 with men in spite of the inferiority of the con- 
 ditions of development in which they have lived 
 since their first infancy. 
 
 As Capitalism has not snatched woman from 
 the domestic hearth and launched her into so- 
 cial production to emancipate her, but to exploit 
 her more ferociously than man, so it has been 
 careful not to overthrow the economic, legal, 
 political and moral barriers which had been 
 raised to seclude her in the marital dwelling. 
 Woman, exploited by capital, endures the miser- 
 ies of the free laborer and bears in addition her 
 chains of the past. Her economic misery is ag- 
 gravated ; instead of being supported by her 
 father or husband, to whose rule she still sub- 
 mits, she is obliged to earn her living; and under 
 the pretext that she has fewer necessities than
 
 136 THE WOMAN QUESTION 
 
 man, her labor is paid less; and when her daily 
 toil in the shop, the office or school is ended, her 
 labor in the household begins. Motherhood, the 
 sacred, the highest of social functions, becomes 
 in capitalistic society a cause of horrible misery, 
 economic and physiologic. The social and eco- 
 nomic condition of woman is a danger for the 
 reproduction of the species. 
 
 But this crushing and pitiful condition an- 
 nounces the end of her servitude, which begins 
 with the establishment of private property and 
 which can end only with its abolition. Civilized 
 humanity, oppressed by the mechanical mode of 
 production, turns its face toward a society, based 
 on common property, in which woman, delivered 
 from the economic, legal and moral chains which 
 bind her, may develop freely her physical and in- 
 tellectual faculties, as in the time of the com- 
 munism of the savages. 
 
 The savages, to forbid primitive promiscuity 
 and successfully restrain the circle of sexual re- 
 lations, found no other means than to separate 
 the sexes; there are reasons for believing that 
 the women took the initiative in this separation, 
 which the specialization of their functions con- 
 solidated and emphasized. This was manifested 
 socially by religious ceremonials and secret lan- 
 guages peculiar to each set and even by strug-
 
 THE WOMAN QUESTION 137 
 
 gles;* and after having taken the character of 
 violent antagonism, it ended in the brutal subjec- 
 tion of woman, which still survives although it is 
 progressively attenuated in proportion as the 
 competition of the two sexes becomes more gen- 
 eral and intense upon the economic field. But 
 the modern antagonism will not end with the 
 victory of one sex over the other, for it is one of 
 the phenomena of the struggle of labor against 
 capital, which will find its solution in the emanci- 
 pation of the working class in which women as 
 well as men are incorporated. 
 
 The technique of production which tends to 
 suppress the specialization of trades and func- 
 tions and to replace muscular effort by attention 
 ?.nd intellectual skill and which, the more it is 
 perfected, mingles and confounds man and wo- 
 man the more in social labor, will prevent the 
 return of the conditions which in savage and 
 barbarous nations had maintained the separation 
 of the sexes. Common property will put an end 
 to the economic antagonism of specialization. 
 
 But if it is possible to catch a glimpse of the 
 end of female servitude and of the antagonism 
 
 * A. W. Howit, who observed among the Austral- 
 ians a species of sexual totemism, says that it often 
 happens that the women and men of one and the same 
 clan fight, when the animal that serves as the totem 
 for one sex is killed by the other sex.
 
 138 THE WOMAN QUESTION 
 
 of the sexes and to conceive for the human spe- 
 cies an era of incomparable bodily and mental 
 progress, brought about by women and men of 
 a high development in muscle and brain, it is im- 
 possible to foresee the sexual relations of free 
 and equal women and men who will not be united 
 nor separated by sordid material interests and by 
 the gross ethics engendered by such interests. 
 But if we may judge by the present and the past, 
 men, in whom the genetic passion is more violent 
 and more continuous than in women — the same 
 phenomenon is observed in the males and females 
 of the whole animal series — will be obliged to 
 exhibit their physical and intellectual qualities to 
 win their sweethearts. Sexual selection, which, 
 as Darwin has shown, fulfilled an important role 
 in the development of the animal species and 
 which, with rare exceptions, has ceased to play 
 this part in the Indo-European races for about 
 three thousand years, will again become one of 
 the most active factors in the perfecting of the 
 human race. 
 
 Motherhood and love will permit women to 
 regain the higher position which she occupied in 
 primitive societies, the memory of which has been 
 preserved by the legends and myths of the ancient 
 religions.
 
 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 
 
 Our comrades in Germany were discussing 
 seme time since the question whether SociaUsm 
 is a science. SociaHsm is not and cannot be a 
 science for the simple reason that it is a pohtical 
 party and must disappear when its work is ac- 
 compHshed after the abplitipn of the classes which 
 gave birth to it; but the end which it pursues is 
 scientific. 
 
 Guizot, who had a vague idea of the theory of 
 the class struggle — himself a product of the Rev- 
 olution, which was a dramatic struggle between 
 classes — said with good reason that a class can- 
 not emancipate itself until it possesses the qual- 
 ities requisite for taking the leadership of society ; 
 now one of these qualities is to have a more or 
 less definite conception of the social order which 
 it proposes to substitute for that which is op- 
 pressing it. This conception cannot but be a social 
 ideal, or, to employ a scientific word, a social 
 hypothesis; but an hypothesis, as well in the 
 
 189
 
 140 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 
 
 natural sciences as in social science, may be utop* 
 ian or scientific. 
 
 Socialism, because it is a political party of the 
 oppressed class, has therefore an ideal. . It groups 
 and organizes the efforts of the individuals who 
 wish to build on the ruins of capitalist society, 
 based upon individual property, an ideal or hypo- 
 thetical society based upon common property in 
 the means of production.) 
 
 Only through the class struggle can modern 
 socialism realize its social ideal, which possesses 
 the qualities demanded of any hypothesis that 
 claims a scientific character. The fact of choos- 
 ing a scientific goal, and of trying to reach it only 
 through the class struggle, distinguishes it from 
 the Socialism of 1848, which was pursuing 
 through the reconciliation of classes a social ideal 
 which could not but be Utopian considering the 
 historic moment in which it was conceived. 
 Socialism has thus evolved from Utopia into sci- 
 ence. Engels has traced the main lines of this 
 evolution in his memorable pamphlet, "Socialism, 
 Utopian and Scientific." It is the samewithall 
 sciences, which begin with Utopia to arrive at 
 positive knowledge ; this course is imposed by the 
 very nature of the human mind. 
 
 Man progresses in social life as in intellectual 
 life, only by starting from the known and travel-
 
 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 141 
 
 ing toward the unknown, and that unknown must 
 be represented by the imagination ; that imag- 
 inary conception of the unknown, which cannot 
 but be hypothetical, is one of the most powerful 
 incentives to action, it is the very condition of 
 every forward step. It is natural that men like 
 Bernstein in Germany and Jaures in France 
 should seek to domesticate Socialism and to put 
 it in tow of liberalism, accusing it of hypnotis- 
 ing its soldiers with an ideal of the year 3000, 
 which makes them live in the expectation of a 
 Messianic "catastrophe" and reject the imme- 
 diate advantages of an understanding and co- 
 operation with bourgeois parties, and which 
 blinds them to their shocking errors regarding the 
 concentration of wealth, the disappearance of 
 small industry and the middle class, the increase 
 of class antagonisms, the spreading and intens- 
 ification of the misery of the working class, etc. 
 These errors may have been plausible hypotheses 
 before 1848, but since then events have shown 
 their falsity. This unfortunate ideal prevents 
 them from descending from the revolutionary 
 heights to accept the responsibilities of power 
 and of setting aside the cause of labor to devote 
 themselves entirely tongue and pen, to the re- 
 habilitation of a millionaire leader; it obliges 
 them to oppose all exterior policies and acts, to
 
 143 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 
 
 vote not a cent nor a soldier for colonial expedi- 
 tions, which carry labor, Christianity, syphilis 
 and the alcoholism of civilization to the barbaric 
 tribes. The neo-methodists of the ancient and 
 outworn gospel of the brotherhood of classes 
 advise the socialists to suppress their ideal, or, 
 since it unfortunately captivates the masses of 
 the people, to speak of it without caring for it, 
 as Jaures does, that they may consecrate them- 
 selves to practical necessities, to the vast plans 
 of agricultural and industrial co-operation, to 
 popular universities, etc. 
 
 The dilettantes of politics, these practical 
 groundlings of opportunism, nevertheless hold 
 themselves up for transcendent idealists and 
 march with their eyes fixed upon the stars, be- 
 cause they substitute for ideas a brilliant or- 
 chestra of sonorous words and eternal principles. 
 
 These bourgeois idealists edge their way in 
 everywhere; after the Revolution of 1789 they 
 rebuked the scientists for their hypotheses and 
 their theories ; according to them science should 
 have stopped with the study of facts in them- 
 selves without dreaming of uniting them into a 
 general system. "What is the use of cutting 
 stones without putting up a building," replied 
 Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, the genial disciple of 
 Lamarck, who lived to see the extinction of his
 
 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 143 
 
 theory on the continuity of species, which, only 
 thirty years after his death, was to take on a 
 new birth with Darwin. They arc. still reproach- 
 ing the physiologists for wasting their time in 
 elaborating hypotheses which ^ast on an average 
 only three years and which cannot explain 
 what takes place in a muscle which contracts 
 and in a brain which thinks. They grumble 
 against the hypotheses of the physicists, who do 
 not know the real nature of elasticity, of elec- 
 trical conductivity, or even what happens when 
 a particle of sugar is dissolved. They would like 
 to prohibit scientists from any speculation be- 
 cause it is disastrous and may lead into error. 
 But the Iattf:r protest and declare that imagina- 
 tion is one of the first and most indispensable 
 facultxp.s of the scientist, and that the hypotheses 
 to which they give birth, even though they be 
 erroneous and able to survive only three years, 
 are nevertheless the necessary condition of all 
 scientific progress. 
 
 If the communist ideal were an hypothesis 
 undemonstrable and false it would still be a pro- 
 pelling force of social progress, but such is not 
 the case. 
 
 The hypothesis in science, as in the social 
 field, is the more undemonstrable and susceptible 
 of error in proportion as the data contributing
 
 144 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 
 
 to its elaboration are less numerous and more 
 uncertain. Greek science, which had to furnish 
 a conception of the world when the data regard- 
 ing the phenomena of nature were of the most 
 rudimentary, was obliged to resort to hypotheses 
 which for boldness and intuitive accuracy are 
 marvels of history and of thought; after having 
 admitted, according to the vulgar opinion, that 
 tiie earth was flat, and that the temple of Delphi 
 was situated at its center, they put forth the 
 hypothesis of its spherical form, then undemon- 
 strable. 
 
 Socialism, which dates from the first years 
 of the nineteenth century, started, like Greek 
 science, from hypotheses the more erroneous, 
 and from ideal the more Utopian, in that the so- 
 cial world which it proposed to transform was 
 less known; and at that epoch could not be 
 known for the excellent reason that it was in 
 course of formation. 
 
 The machine operated by steam was beginning 
 to edge into industry where the tool, managed 
 by the artisan, was moved by human power, and 
 in some rare circumstances by animals, wind or 
 waterfalls. The Socialist thinkers, as Engels 
 observes, were then obliged to draw from their 
 own brain the social ideal which they could not 
 extract from the tumultuous economic environ-
 
 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 145 
 
 ment in full course of transformation. They 
 grasped again, infusing new life into it, the com- 
 munist ideal which has slumbered in the mind 
 of man since he emerged from the communism 
 of primitive society which the poetic Greek myth- 
 ology calls the golden age and which has awak- 
 ened to shine here and there with a glorious 
 splendor at great epochs of social upheaval. 
 They sought, then, to establish communism, not 
 because the economic environment was ready for 
 its introduction, but because men were miser- 
 able, because the laws of justice and equalitv 
 were violated, because the precepts of the Christ 
 could not be followed in their purity. The com- 
 munistic ideal, not springing from economic 
 reality, was then but an unconscious reminiscence 
 of a prehistoric past, and came only from ideal- 
 istic notions upon a justice, an equality and a 
 gospel law no less idealistic ; it is then idealistic 
 in the second degree, and consequently Utopian. 
 The Socialists of the first half of the nine- 
 teenth century, who rekindled the communist 
 ideal, had the rare merit of giving it a consist- 
 ency less idealistic. They spoke little of the 
 Christian religion, of justice and of equality ; 
 Robert- Owen laid the responsibilities of social 
 evils upon the family, property and religion; 
 Charles Fonrier criticises the ideas of justice and
 
 146 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 
 
 morality introduced by the bourgeois Revolution 
 of '89 with incomparable animation and irony. 
 They did not weep over the misery of the poor, 
 but left that to Victor Hugo and the charlatans 
 of romanticism. They preached the social prob- 
 lem from its realistic side, the only side from 
 which it can be solved. They used their talents 
 to prove that a social organization of production 
 would succeed in satisfying the desires of all 
 without reducing the share of any, not even that 
 of the privileged capitalist class. Meanwhile the 
 recent application of steam and machinery de- 
 manded also a new organization of labor, and 
 this was the constant concern of the industrial 
 bourgeoisie. The socialists were thus pursuing 
 the same end as the industrials ; bourgeois and 
 socialists might consequently come to an under- 
 standing. We therefore find in the socialist sects 
 of that epoch industrials, engineers and financi- 
 ers who in the second half of the century cast 
 away their sympathy for the workers and occu- 
 pied an important place in capitalist society. 
 
 The socialism of that epoch could not under 
 these conditions be anything else than pacific ; 
 instead of entering on the struggle with the 
 capitalists, the socialists thought only of con- 
 verting them to their system of social reform 
 from which they were to be the first to benefit.
 
 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 147 
 
 They proclaimed the association of capital, in- 
 telligence and labor, the interests of which, ac- 
 cording to them, were identical! they preached 
 a mutual understanding between the employer 
 and the employed, between the exploiter and the 
 exploited ; they know no class struggle ; they 
 condemned strikes and all political agitation, 
 especially if it were revolutionary ; they desired 
 order in the street and harmony in the work- 
 shop. They demanded, finally, nothing more 
 than was desired by the new industrial bour- 
 geoisie. 
 
 They foresaw that industry, strengthened by 
 the motive power of steam, machinery and the 
 concentration of the instruments of labor, would 
 have a colossal producing power, and they had 
 the simplicity to believe that the capitalists would 
 content themselves with taking only a reasonable 
 part of the wealth thus created, and would leave 
 to their co-operators, the manual and intellectual 
 laborers, a portion sufficient to enable them to 
 live in comfort. This socialism was marvellously 
 agreeable to capital, since it promised an in- 
 crease of wealth and advised an understanding 
 between the laborer and the employer. It re- 
 cruited the great majority of its adepts in the 
 educational hotbeds of the bourgeoisie. It was
 
 148 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 
 
 Utopian, therefore it was the sociaHsm of the 
 intellectuals. 
 
 But precisely because it was Utopian, the la- 
 borers, in constant antagonism with their em- 
 ployers on questions of labor and hours, looked 
 on it with suspicion. They could understand no- 
 thing of this socialism which condemned strikes 
 and political action and which assumed to har- 
 monize the interests of capital and labor, of the 
 exploiter and exploited. They kept aloof from 
 the socialists and gave all their sympathies to 
 the bourgeois republicans, because they were 
 revolutionary. They joined their secret societies 
 and climbed with them upon the barricades to 
 make riots and political revolutions. 
 
 Marx and Engels took socialism at the point 
 to which the great Utopians had brought it, but 
 mstead of torturing their brains to improvise 
 the organization of labor and of production, they 
 studied that which was already created by the 
 very necessities of the new mechanical industry 
 which had arrived at a degree of development 
 sufficient to permit its power and its tendency 
 to be apparent. Its productivity was so enorm- 
 ous, as Fourier and Saint Simon had foreseen, 
 that it was capable of providing abundantly for 
 the normal needs of all the members of society. 
 This was the first time in historv that such a
 
 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 149 
 
 productive power had been observed, and it was 
 because capitalist production could satisfy all 
 needs, and for that reason alone, that it is pos- 
 sible to reintroduce communism, that is to say 
 the equal participation of all in social wealth, 
 and the free and complete development of the 
 physical, intellectual and moral faculties. Com- 
 munism is no longer a Utopia but a possibility. 
 
 Alachinery replaces the individualistic produc- 
 tion of the small industry, by the communistic 
 production of the capitalistic factory, but prop- 
 erty in the means of labor has remained individ- 
 ual, as in the time of the small industry. There 
 is then a contradiction between the individual- 
 istic mode of possession and the communist mode 
 of production and this contradiction translates 
 itself into the antagonism between the laborer 
 and the capitalist employer. The producers, who 
 form the immense majority of the nation, no 
 longer possess the instruments of labor, the pos- 
 session of which is centralized in the idle hands 
 of a decreasing minority. The social problem 
 imposed by mechanical production will be solved, 
 as the social problems imposed by preceding 
 modes of production have been solved, by precip- 
 itating the evolution begun by economic force, 
 by finishing the expropriation of the individual 
 in the means of production, by giving to the
 
 i&. THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 
 
 communistic mode of production the commun- 
 istic mode of possession which it demands. 
 
 The communism of contemporary socialists no 
 longer proceeds, like that of former times, from 
 the cerebral lucubrations of gifted thinkers; it 
 proceeds from economic reality, it is the final 
 goal of the economic forces which, without at- 
 tracting the attention of the capitalists and their 
 intellectuals, have fashioned the communistic 
 mold of a new society, the coming of which we 
 only have to hasten. Communism, then, is no 
 longer a Utopian hypothesis; it is a scientific 
 ideal. It may be added that never has the eco- 
 nomic structure of any society been better and 
 more completely analyzed than capitalist society, 
 and that never was a social ideal conceived with 
 such numerous and positive data as the com- 
 munist idea of modern socialism. 
 
 Although it is the economic forces which fash- 
 ion men at the pleasure and spur them to ac- 
 tion, and although these constitute the myster- 
 ious force determining the great currents of his- 
 tory which the Christians attribute to God, and 
 the free-thinking bourgeois assign to Progress, 
 to Civilization, to the Immortal Principles and 
 other similar manitous, worthy of savage tribes, 
 they are nevertheless the product of human act- 
 ivity. Man, who created them and brought them
 
 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 151 
 
 into the world, has thus far let himself be guided 
 by them; yet now that he has understood their 
 nature and grasped their tendency, he can act 
 upon their evolution. The socialists who are ac- 
 cused of being stricken by Oriental fatalism and 
 of relying upon the good pleasure of economic 
 forces to bring to light the communist society 
 instead of crossing their arms like the fakirs of 
 official Economics, and of bending the knee be- 
 fore its fundamental dogma, hisses faire, laissez 
 passer, propose on the contrary to subdue them, 
 as the blind forces of nature have been subdued, 
 and force them to do good to men instead of 
 leaving them to work misery to the toilers of 
 civilization. They do not wait for their ideal 
 to fall from heaven as the Christians hope for 
 the grace of God, and the capitalists for wealth ; 
 they prepare, on the contrary, to realize it, not 
 by appealing to the intelligence of the capital- 
 ist class and to its sentiments of justice and hu- 
 manity, but by fighting it, by expropriating it 
 from its political power, which protects its eco- 
 nomic despotism. 
 
 Socialism, because it possesses a social ideal, 
 has in consequence a criticism of its own. Every 
 class which struggles for its enfranchisement 
 seeks to realize a social ideal, in complete oppO' 
 sJtion with that of the ruling class. The strug-
 
 152 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 
 
 gle is waged at first in the ideological world be- 
 fore the physical shock of the revolutionary bat- 
 tle. It thus begins the criticism of the ideas of 
 the society which must be revolted against, for 
 '^the ideas of the ruling class are the ideas of 
 society," or these ideas are the intellectual re- 
 flection of its material interests. 
 
 Thus, the wealth of the ruling class is pro- 
 duced by slave labor; religion, ethics, philosophy 
 and literature agree in authorizing slavery. The 
 ugly God of the Jews and Christianity strikes 
 with his curse the progeny of Ham, that it may 
 furnish slaves. Aristotle, the encyclopedic thinker 
 of Greek philosophy, declares that slaves are 
 predestined by nature and that no rights exist 
 for them, for there can be no rights except be- 
 tween equals. Euripides in his tragedies preaches 
 the doctrine of servile morality; St. Paul, St. 
 Augustine and the Church j:each slaves submis- 
 sion to their earthly masters that they may de- 
 serve the favor of their heavenly master; Chris- 
 tian civilization introduced slavery into America 
 and maintains it there until economic phenom- 
 ena prove that slave labor is a method of exploi- 
 tation more costly and less profitable than free 
 labor. 
 
 At the epoch when the Greco-Roman civiliza- 
 tion was dissolving, when the labor of artisans
 
 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 153 
 
 and free workers began to be substituted for 
 slave labor, pagan religion, philosophy and liter- 
 ature decided to accord them certain rights. 
 The same Euripides who advised the slave to 
 lose his personality in that of the master does 
 not wish him to be despised. "There is nothing 
 shameful in slavery but the name," says the peda- 
 gogue in Ion, "the slave, moreover, is not in- 
 ferior to the free man when he has a noble 
 heart." The mysteries of Eleusis and of Or- 
 phism, like Christianity, which continues their 
 work, admit slaves among their initiated and 
 promise them liberty, equality and happiness 
 after death. 
 
 The dominating class of the Middle Ages be- 
 ing military, the Christian religion and social 
 ethics condemned lending money at interest, and 
 covered the lender with infamy; to take interest 
 for money loaned was then something so ignom- 
 inious that the Jewish race, obliged to specialize 
 itself in the trade of money, still bears the shame 
 of it. But to-day, now that the Christians have 
 become Jews, and the ruling class lives on the 
 interest of its capital, the trade of the lender 
 at interest is the most honorable, the most de- 
 sirable, the most exclusive. 
 
 The oppressed class, although the ideology of 
 the oppressing class is imposed upon it, never-
 
 154 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 
 
 theless elaborates religious, ethical and political 
 ideas corresponding to its condition of life ; 
 vague and secret at first, they gain in precision 
 and force in proportion as the oppressed class 
 takes definite form and acquires the conscious- 
 ness of its social utility and of its strength ; and 
 the hour of its emancipation is near when its 
 conception of nature and of society opposes it- 
 self openly and boldly to that of the ruling class. 
 The economic conditions in which the bour- 
 geois moves and evolves make of it a class es- 
 sentially religious. Christianity is its work and 
 will last as long as this class shall rule society. 
 Seven or eight centuries before Christ, when 
 the bourgeoisie had its birth in the commercial 
 and industrial cities of the Mediterranean sea, 
 we may observe the elaboration of a new reli- 
 gion; the gods of paganism created by warrior 
 tribes could not be suited to a class consecrated 
 to the production and sale of merchandise. Mys- 
 terious cults (the mysteries of the Cabiri, of 
 Demeter, of Dionysus, etc.) revive the religi- 
 ous traditions of the prehistoric matriarchical 
 period ; the idea of a soul and its existence after 
 death revive; the idea of posthumous punish- 
 ments and rewards to compensate for acts of so- 
 cial injustice are introduced, etc. These religious 
 elements, combined with the intellectual data of
 
 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 155 
 
 Greek philosophy, contribute to form Christian- 
 ity, the reHgion, par excellence, of societies which 
 have for their foundation property belonging to 
 the individual and the class which enrich them- 
 selves by the exploitation of wage labor. For 
 fifteen centuries all the movements of the hour 
 geoisie, either for organization, or for selfeman- 
 cipation, or for the acquisition of power have 
 been accompanied and complicated by religious 
 crises ; but always Christianity more or less mod- 
 ified remains the religion of society. The revolu- 
 tionists of 1789, who in the ardor of the struggle 
 promised themselves to de-Christianize France, 
 were eager when the bourgeoisie were victorious 
 to raise again the altars they had overthrown and 
 to reintroduce the cult that they had proscribed. 
 The economic environment which produces 
 the proletariat relieves it on the contrary from 
 every idea of sentiment. There is not seen either 
 in Europe nor in America among the laboring 
 masses of the great industries any anxiety to 
 elaborate a religion to replace Christianity, nor 
 any desire to reform it. The economic and polit- 
 ical organizatons of the working class are com- 
 pletely uninterested as to any doctrinal discus- 
 sion of religious and spiritual dogmas, although 
 they combat the priests of all cults because they 
 are the lackeys of the capitalist class.
 
 156 THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 
 
 The victory of the proletariat will deliver hu- 
 manity from the nightmare of religion. The be- 
 lief in superior beings to explain the natural 
 world and the social inequality, and to prolong 
 the dominion of the ruling class, and the belief 
 in the posthumous existence of the soul to re- 
 compense the inequality of fate will have no 
 more justification once man, who has already 
 grasped the general causes of the phenomena of 
 nature, shall live in a communist society from 
 whence shall have disappeared the inequality and 
 the injustice of capitalistic society. 
 
 The militant socialists, following the example 
 of the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, 
 have to make a merciless criticism of the eco- 
 nomic, political, historical, philosophical, moral 
 and religious ideas of the capitalist class in order 
 to prepare in all spheres of thought the triumph 
 of the new ideology which the proletariat intro- 
 duces into the world.
 
 THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND 
 THE RIGHTS OF MAN 
 
 Capitalist Civilization has endowed the wage- 
 worker with the metaphysical Rights of Man, 
 but this is only to rivet him more closely and 
 more firmly to his economic duty. _ 
 
 "I make you free," so speak the Rights of Man 
 to the laborer, ''free to earn a wretched living 
 and turn your employer into a millionaire ; free 
 to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. 
 He will imprison you ten hours or twelve hours 
 in his workshops ; he will not let you go till you 
 are wearied to the marrow of your bones, tillj 
 you have just enough strength left to gulp down' 
 your soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You have 
 but one of your rights that you may not sell,' 
 and that is the right to pay taxes. "-t 
 
 Progress and Civilization may be hard on 
 wage-working humanity, but they have all a 
 mother's tenderness for the animals which stupid 
 bipeds call "lower."
 
 158 THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE 
 
 Civilization has especially favored the equine 
 race : it would be too great a task to go through 
 the long list of its benefactions; I will name but 
 a few, of general notoriety, that I may awaken 
 and inflame the passionate desires of the work- 
 ers, now torpid in their misery. 
 
 Horses are divided into distinct classes. The 
 equine aristocracy enjoys so many and so op- 
 pressive privileges, that if the human-faced 
 brutes which serve them as jockeys, trainers, 
 stable valets and grooms were not morally de- 
 graded to the point of not feeling their shame, 
 they would have rebelled against their lords and 
 masters, whom they rub down, groom, brush 
 and comb, also making their beds, cleaning up 
 their excrements and receiving bites and kicks 
 by way of thanks. 
 
 Aristocratic horses, like capitalists, do not 
 work; and when they exercise themselves in the 
 fields they look disdainfully, with a coupon- 
 clipper's contempt, upon the human animals 
 which plow and seed the lands, mow and rake 
 the meadows, to provide them with oats, clover, 
 timothy and other succulent plants. 
 
 These four-footed favorites of Civilization 
 command such social influence that they impose 
 their wills upon the capitalists, their brothers in 
 privilege ; they force the loftiest of them to come
 
 THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE 159 
 
 with their beautiful ladies and take tea in the 
 stables, inhaling the acrid perfumes of their 
 solid and liquid evacuations. And when these 
 lords consent to parade in public, they require 
 from ten to twenty thousand men and women to 
 stack themselves up on uncomfortable seats, un- 
 der the broiling sun, to admire their exquisitely 
 chiseled forms and their feats of running and 
 leaping. They respect none of the social dignities 
 before which the votaries of the Rights of Man 
 bow in reverence. At Chantilly not long ago one 
 of the favorites for the grand prize launched a 
 kick at the king of Belgium, because it did not 
 like the looks of his head. His royal majesty, 
 who adores horses, murmured an apology and 
 withdrew. 
 
 It is fortunate that these horses, who can count 
 more authentic ancestors than the houses of Or- 
 leans and Hohenzollern, have not been corrupted 
 by their high social station : had they taken it 
 into their heads to rival the capitalists in aesth- 
 etic pretentions, profligate luxury and depraved 
 tastes, such as wearing lace and diamonds, and 
 drinking champagne and Chateau-Margaux, a 
 blacker misery and more overwhelming drudgery 
 would be impending over the class of wage- 
 workers. 
 
 Thrice happy is it for proletarian humanity
 
 160 THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE 
 
 that these equine aristocrats have not taken the 
 fancy of feeding upon human flesh, like the old 
 Bengal tigers which rove around the villages of 
 India to carry off women and children ; if un- 
 happily the horses had been man-eaters, the capi- 
 talists, who can refuse them nothing, would have 
 built slaughter-houses for wage-workers, where 
 they could carve out and dress boy sirloins, wo- 
 man hams and girl roasts to satisfy their an- 
 thropophagic tastes. 
 
 The proletarian horses, not so well endowed, 
 have to work for their peck of oats, but the capi- 
 talist class, through deference for the aristocrats 
 of the equine race, concedes to the working 
 horses rights that are far more solid and real 
 than those inscribed in the "Rights of Man." 
 
 The first of rights, the right to existence, 
 which no civilized society will recognize for la- 
 borers, is possessed by horses. 
 
 The colt, even before his birth, while still in 
 the fetus state, begins to enjoy the right to ex- 
 istence ; his mother, when her pregnancy has 
 scarcely begun, is discharged from all work and 
 sent into the country to fashion the new being 
 in peace and comfort ; she remains near him to 
 suckle him and teach him to choose the delicious 
 grasses of the meadow, in which he gambols un- 
 til he is grown.
 
 THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE 161 
 
 The moralists and politicians of the "Rights of 
 Man" think it would be monstrous to grant 
 such rights to the laborers; I raised a tempest 
 in the Chamber of Deputies when I asked that 
 women, two months before and two months after 
 confinement, should have the right and the means 
 to absent themselves from the factory. My pro- 
 position upset the ethics of civilization and shook 
 the capitalist order. What an abominable abomi- 
 nation — to demand for babies the rights of colts. 
 
 As for the young proletarians, they can scarce- 
 ly trot on their little toes before they are con- 
 demned to hard labor in the prisons of capital- 
 ism, while the colts develop freely under kindly 
 Nature ; care is taken that they be completely 
 formed before they are set to work, and their 
 tasks are proportioned to their strength with a 
 tender care. 
 
 This care on the part of the capitalists follows 
 them all through their lives. We may still recall 
 the noble indignation of the bourgeois press 
 when it learned that the omnibus company was 
 using peat and tannery waste in its stalls as a 
 substitute for straw : to think of the unhappy 
 horses having such poor litters ! The more del- 
 icate souls of the bourgeoisie have in every capi- 
 talist country organized societies for the protec- 
 tion of animals, in order to prove that they can
 
 162 THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE 
 
 not be excited by the fate of the small victims 
 of industry, Schopenhauer, the bourgeois philo- 
 sopher, in whom was incarnated so perfectly the 
 gross egoism of the philistine, could not hear 
 the cracking of a whip without his heart being 
 torn by it. 
 
 This same omnibus company, which works its 
 laborers from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, 
 requires from its dear horses only five to seven 
 hours. It has bought green meadows in which 
 they may recuperate from fatigue or indisposi- 
 tion. Its policy is to expend more for the enter- 
 tainment of a quadruped than for paying the 
 wages of a biped. It has never occurred to any 
 legislator nor to any fanatical advocate of the 
 "Rights of Man" to reduce the horse's daily pit- 
 tance in order to assure him a retreat that would 
 be of service to him only after his death. 
 
 The Rights of Horses have not been posted 
 up; they are "unwritten rights," as Socrates 
 called the laws implanted by Nature in the con- 
 sciousness of all men. 
 
 The horse has shown his wisdom in content- 
 ing himself with these rights, with no thought 
 of demanding those of the citizen ; he has judged 
 that he would have been as stupid as man if he 
 had sacrificed his mess of lentils for the meta- 
 physical banquet of Rights to Revolt, to Equal-
 
 THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE 163 
 
 ity, to Liberty, and other trivialities which to 
 the proletariat are about as useful as a cautery 
 on a wooden leg. 
 
 Civilization, though partial to the equine race, 
 has not shown herself indifferent to the fate of 
 the other animals. Sheep, like canons, pass their 
 days in pleasant and plentiful idleness ; they are 
 fed in the stable on barley, lucerne, rutabagas 
 and other roots, raised by wage-workers ; shep- 
 herds conduct them to feed in fat pastures, and 
 when the sun parches the plain, they are carried 
 to where they can browse on the tender grass 
 of the mountains. 
 
 The Church, which has burned her heretics, 
 and regrets that she can not again bring up her 
 faithful sons in the love of "mutton," represents 
 Jesus, under the form of a kind shepherd, bear- 
 ing upon his shoulders a weary lamb. 
 
 True, the love for the ram and the ewe is in 
 the last analysis only the love for the leg of mut- 
 ton and the cutlet, just as the Liberty of the 
 Rights of Man is nothing but the slavery of the 
 wage-worker, since our Jesuitical Civilization al- 
 ways disguises capitalist exploitation in eternal 
 principles and bourgeois egoism in noble senti- 
 ments ; yet at least the bourgeois tends qnd fat- 
 tens the sheep up to the day of the sacrifice, 
 while he seizes the laborer still warm from the
 
 164 THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE 
 
 workshop and lean from toil to send him to the 
 shambels of Tonquin or Madagascar. 
 
 Laborers of all crafts, you who toil so hard 
 to create your poverty in producing the wealth 
 of the capitalists, arise, arise ! Since the buf- 
 foons of parliament unfurl the Rights of Man, 
 do you boldly demand for yourselves, your wives 
 and your children the Rights of the Horse. 
 
 THE END.
 
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