JEAN: Understand, then, that they exist only by your credulity! Your brutalization, they exploit it as a farm -your servitude, they treat it as an income. They grow fat upon your poverty and your ignorance, while you are living; and when you are dead they make a pedestal of your corpses! Is that what you want?

VOICE:-No, no. He is right!

JEAN: The master is at least a man like yourselves! You have him before you-you speak to him-you make him angry—you threaten him-you kill him. At least he has a face, a breast into which you can thrust a knife! But go now, and move that being without a face that is called a politician! Go kill that thing that is known as politics! That slippery and fugitive thing, that you think you have, and that always escapes you that you believe is dead, and it begins once again-that abominable thing by which all has been made vile, all corrupted, all bought, all sold-justice, love, beauty! Which has made of the venality of conscience a national institution of France-which has done worse yet, since with its foul slime it has soiled the august face of the poor-worse yet, since it has destroyed in you the last ideal—the faith in the Revolution! Do you understand what I have desired of you that which I still demand of your energy, your dignity, your intelligence? I have desired, and I desire, that you shall show for once, to the world of political parasites, that new example, fecund and terrible, of a strike made, at last, by yourselves, for yourselves! And if once more you have to die, in this struggle which you have undertaken, know how to die-one time for yourselves, for your sons, for those who will be born of your sons--and no more for those who trade upon your suffering, as always!

MADELEINE (a girl-striker, springs up):-March-march with him, and no longer with those whose hands are red with the blood of the poor! March! The road will be long and hard! You will fall many times upon your broken knees-what matters it? Stand up and march again! Justice is at the end!

A VOICE: We will follow you!

MADELEINE:And do not fear death! Love death! Death is splendid-necessary and divine! It makes life young again! Ah, do not give your tears! Through all the centuries that you have wept, who has seen them, who has heard them flow? Give your blood! If blood is as a hideous spot upon the face of the hangmen, it shines upon the face of martyrs as an eternal sun! Each drop of blood that flows from your veins-every stream of blood that pours from your bosoms-will mean the birth of a hero a saint (pointing to the crucifix)—a god! Ah, would that I had a thousand lives, that I might give them all for you! Would that I had a thousand breasts, so that all that blood of deliverance and love. might pour out upon the ground where you suffer!

The Cultured Classes

BY JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE

(German philosopher, 1762-1814)

IT is particularly to the cultured classes that I wish

to direct my remarks in the present address. I implore these classes to take the initiative in the work of reconstruction, to atone for their past deeds, and to earn the right to continue life in the future. It will

The Children of the Poor

BY VICTOR HUGO

(See pages 182, 267)

(Translated by Algernon Charles Swinburne)

AKE heed of this small child of earth;

TAKE

He is great: he hath in him God most high.

Children before their fleshly birth

Are lights alive in the blue sky.

In our light bitter world of wrong
They come; God gives us them awhile.
His speech is in their stammering tongue,
And his forgiveness in their smile.

Their sweet light rests upon our eyes.
Alas! their right to joy is plain.

If they are hungry, Paradise

Weeps, and, if cold, Heaven thrills with pain.

The want that saps their sinless flower
Speaks judgment on sin's ministers.

Man holds an angel in his power.

Ah! deep in Heaven what thunder stirs,

When God seeks out these tender things
Whom in the shadow where we sleep

He sends us clothed about with wings,
And finds them ragged babes that weep!

I

In a Southern Cotton Mill

BY ELBERT HUBBARD

(American author and lecturer, born 1859; died May 7, 1915)

THOUGHT to lift one of the little toilers to ascertain

his weight. Through his thirty-five pounds of skin and bone there ran a tremor of fear, and he struggled forward to tie a broken thread. I attracted his attention by a touch, and offered him a silver dime. He looked at me dumbly through a face that might have belonged to a man of sixty, so furrowed, tightly drawn, and full of pain it was. He did not reach for the money-he did not know what it was. There were dozens of such children, in this particular mill. A physician who was with me said that they would all be dead probably in two years, and their places filled by others there were plenty more. Pneumonia carries off most of them. Their systems are ripe for disease, and when it comes there is no rebound-no response. Medicine simply does not act-nature is whipped, beaten, discouraged, and the child sinks into a stupor and dies.

The Flower Factory

BY FLORENCE WILKINSON EVANS

(Contemporary American poetess)

IZABETTA, Marianina, Fiametta, Teresina,

LIZ

They are winding stems of roses, one by one, one by

one,

Little children who have never learned to play;

Teresina softly crying that her fingers ache to-day;