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Part 1 /
Part 2
Marxists’
Internet Archive
Written: Saint Pélagie Prison, 1883
Source: The Right To Be Lazy and Other Studies
Translated: Charles Kerr
First Published: Charles Kerr and Co., Co-operative, 1883
Online Version: Lafargue Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000
Transcription/Markup: Sally Ryan & Einde O’Callaghan for the
Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Preface
M. Thiers, at a private session of the commission 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 philosophy which on the contrary bids
man to enjoy.” M. Thiers was stating the ethics of the
capitalist class, whose fierce egoism and narrow intelligence 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 sixteenth centuries, it had
joyfully taken up the pagan tradition and glorified the flesh
and its passions, reproved by Christianity; in our days, gorged
with goods and with pleasures, it denies the teachings of its
thinkers like Rabelais and Diderot, and preaches abstinence to
the wageworkers. 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
condemn 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 action 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-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 appeared in the weekly Egalité, 1880,
second series. - P.L. - Sainte-Pélagie Prison, 1883.
Let us be lazy in everything, except in
loving and drinking, except in being lazy. –
Lessing
Chapter I
A Disastrous Dogma
A strange delusion possesses the working classes 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 presumed to
rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to
be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, 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 bipeds, 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, syphilis and the dogma of work, and
then look at our miserable slaves of machines. [1]
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 prejudices have not vet 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 beggar,
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. [2] The Greeks in their era of greatness had only
contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor:
the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind. 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 handful 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.
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.” Jehovah the
bearded and angry god, gave his worshipers the supreme example
of ideal 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 Galicians, those
Auvergnians of Spain; the Pomeranians, those Auvergnians 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 subterranean 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 humanity from servile toil and will make of the
human animal a free being, – the proletariat, betraying its
instincts, despising its historic mission, has let itself be
perverted by the dogma of work. Rude and terrible has been its
punishment. All its individual and social woes are born of its
passion for work.
Footnotes
[1] European explorers pause in wonder before the physical
beauty and the proud bearing of the men of primitive races, not
soiled by what Paeppig calls “the poisonous breath of
civilization.” Speaking of the aborigines 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 specimen 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 Germans of the communist
tribes which invaded the Roman 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 to civilized Christians: “We are immodest before the
barbarians, who are more chaste than we. Even more, the
barbarians are wounded at our lack of modesty; the Goths do not
permit debauchees of their own nation 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 capitalist civilization are corrupting the savages of the
new world.
M.F. LePlay, whose talent for observation must be recognized,
even if we reject his sociological conclusions, tainted with
philanthropic and Christian pharisaism, says in his hook Les
Ouvriers Europeans (1885): “The Propensity of the Bachkirs for
laziness (the Bachkirs are semi-nomadic shepherds of the Asiatic
slope of the Ural mountains); the leisure of nomadic 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 example of
servile labor in the history of man. According to biblical
tradition, the first criminal, Cain, is a farmer.
[2] The Spanish proverb says: Descanzar es salud. (Rest is
healthful.)
Chapter 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 composing it have by right of birth the privilege of
being freer and more independent than the laborers of any
country in Europe. This idea may have its usefulness for
soldiers, since it stimulates 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 infatuations in a commercial state like ours,
where perhaps seven-eighths of the population have little 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”, 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 fourteen 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 eighteenth century. How
have we outdone this nec 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. [1] And to think that the sons of the heroes of
the Terror have allowed themselves to be degraded by the
religion of work, to the point of accepting, 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 civilization before he
could have conceived such vileness.
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
the mines and factories to bend their backs and exhaust their
nerves. With their own hands they have broken the life 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 cooking, always
singing, always spreading life, engendering 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 disordered stomachs, with languid limbs
... They have never known the pleasure of a healthful passion,
nor would they be capable of telling of it merrily! And the
children? Twelve hours of work for children! 0, misery. But not
all the Jules Simon of the Academy of Moral and Political
Science, not all the Germanys of jesuitism, could have invented
a vice more degrading to the intelligence of the children, more
corrupting of their instincts, more destructive of their
organism than work in the vitiated atmosphere of the capitalist
factory.
Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the
century of pain, misery and corruption.
And all the while the philosophers, the bourgeois 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 miseries to serve as a
somber 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 reckoned us weary of the peasant, such
as La Bruyere described him? Well, here is the brilliant picture
of proletarian delights in the year of capitalist progress 1840,
Penned by one of their own men, Dr. Villermé, member of the
Institute, the same who in 1848 was a member of that scientific
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. Villermé speaks, – the
Alsace of Kestner and Dollfus, 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, inhabiting the town and the surrounding villages, and
almost all owning a house and often a little field.” [2] 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 Villermé 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 together at the signal of the steam whistle.
A great number, – says Villermé – five thousand out of seventeen
thousand, were obliged by high rents to lodge in neighboring
villages. Some of them lived three or four miles from the
factory 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 walking 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 carried 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 day – at least
fifteen hours – is added for these wretches the fatigue of the
painful daily journeys. Consequently they reach home overwhelmed
by the need of sleep, and next day they rise before they are
completely rested in order 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 Mulhouse 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 upper
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, Villermé 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 cotton spinning factories”.
And as to the duration of the work Villermé observes, that the
convicts in prisons work but ten hours, the slaves in the west
Indies work but nine hours, while there existed in France after
its Revolution 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.”
[3]
What a miserable abortion of the revolutionary principles of the
bourgeoisie! What woeful gifts from its god Progress! The
philanthropists hail as benefactors of humanity those who having
done nothing to become rich, give work to the poor. Far better
were it to scatter pestilence and to poison the springs than to
erect a capitalist factory in the midst of a rural population.
Introduce factory work, and farewell joy, health and liberty;
farewell to all that makes life beautiful and worth living. [4]
And the economists go on repeating to the laborers, “Work, to
increase social wealth”, and nevertheless an economist, Destutt
de Tracy, answers: “It 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 contribute to the
event which sooner or later must deprive them of a part of their
wages”. But deafened and stupefied by their own howlings, the
economists answer: “Work, 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
also provokes to the most powerful efforts.” Work, work,
proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual
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 production.
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 convulse the social
organism. Then because there is a plethora of merchandise and a
dearth of purchasers, the shops are closed and hunger scourges
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 themselves
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, nevertheless, who harvested the
wheat and gathered the grapes.” They do not besiege the
warehouse of Bonnet, or Jujurieux, the inventor of industrial
convents, and cry out: “M. Bonnet, 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 time 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 circulation, – here are
consumers ready at hand. Give them unlimited credit. You are
simply compelled 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 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. With 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 industry profit by their
lockouts to manufacture at lower cost.
If industrial crises follow periods of overwork as inevitably as
night follows day, bringing 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
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. [5]
But before reaching this decision, the manufacturers travel the
world over in search of markets for the goods which are heaping
up. They force their government to annex Congo, 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 England as to which
should have the exclusive privilege 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 eighteenth centuries.
There is a surplus of capital as well as of goods. The
financiers no longer know where to place it. Then they go among
the happy nations who are leafing 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 hair-pulling to
decide which usurers shall be paid first. Or it ends with wars
like that in Mexico where French soldiers are sent to play the
part of constables to collect bad debts. [6]
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. 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 metaphysical lawyers of the bourgeois revolution. 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 inoculated into it is wicked, that
the unbridled work to which it has given itself up for the last
hundred years is the most terrible 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 organism only when
wisely regulated and limited to a maximum of three hours a day;
this is an arduous task beyond my strength. Only communist
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 reproductive
power it is necessary to curb the extravagant passion of the
laborers for work and to oblige them to consume the goods which
they produce.
Footnotes
[1] At the first Congress of Charities held at Brussels in 1817
one of the richest manufacturers of Marquette, near Lille, M.
Scrive, to the plaudits of the members of the congress declared
with the noble satisfaction of a duty performed: “We have
introduced certain methods of diversion for the children. We
teach them to sing during their work, also to count while
working.” That distracts them and makes them accept bravely
“those twelve hours of labor which are necessary to procure
their means of existence.” Twelve hours of labor, and such
labor, imposed on children less than twelve years old! The
materialists will always regret that there is no hell in which
to confine these Christian philanthropic murderers of childhood.
[2] Speech delivered before the International Society of
Practical Studies in Social Economics, at Paris in May 1863, and
published in the French Economist or the same epoch.
[3] L.R. Villermé. Tableau de L'état physique et moral des
ouvriers dans les fabriques de coton, de laine et de soie
(1840). It is not because Dollfus, Koechlin and other Alsacian
manufacturers were republicans, 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 delightfully with all political and religious
convictions.
[4] The Indians of the warlike tribes of Brazil kill their
invalids and old people; they show their affection for them by
putting an end to a life which is no longer enlivened by combats,
feasts and dances. All primitive peoples have given these proofs
of affection 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!
[5] At the Industrial Congress held in Berlin in Jan. 21st, 1879
the losses in the iron industry of Germany during the last
crisis were estimated at $109,056,000.
[6] M. Clemenceau’s Justice said on April 6. 1880 in its
financial department: “We have heard this opinion maintained,
that even without pressure the billions of the war of 1870 would
have been equally lost for France, that is under the form of
loans periodically put out to balance the budgets of foreign
countries; this is also our opinion.” The loss of English
capital on loans of South American Republics is estimated 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 drawers, who brought on the war and the rout.
Nevertheless they still have one shred of consolation: these
billions will not bring on a war of reprisal.
Part 1 /
Part 2
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