Dogs barking through the night. From one farm to another in the heart of the forest they were yelping to one another, never ceasing. The night was stormy. It was not easy to sleep in those days. The wind bore through the air the echoes of so many acts of injustice! … The tale of injustice is unnumbered: in remedying one there is danger of causing others. What is injustice?—To one man it means a shameful peace, the fatherland dismembered. To another it signifies war. To another it means the destruction of the past, the banishment of princes: to another, the spoliation of the Church: to yet another the stifling of the future to the peril of liberty. For the people, injustice lies in inequality: for the upper ten, in equality. There are so many different kinds of injustice that each age chooses its own—the injustice that it fights against, and the injustice that it countenances.
At the present time the mightiest efforts of the world were directed against social injustice—and unconsciously were tending to the production of fresh injustice.
And, in truth, such injustice had waxed great and plain to see since the working-classes, growing in numbers and power, had become part of the essential machinery of the State. But in spite of the declamations of the tribunes and bards of the people, their condition was not worse, but rather better than it had ever been in the past: and the change had come about not because they suffered more, but because they had grown stronger. Stronger by reason of the very power of the hostile ranks of Capital, by the fatality of economic and industrial development which had banded the workers together in armies ready for the fight, and, by the use of machinery, had given weapons into their hands, and had turned every foreman into a master with power over light, lightning, movement, all the energy of the world. From this enormous mass of elementary forces, which only a short time ago the leaders of men were trying to organize, there was given out a white heat, electric waves gradually permeating the whole body of human society.
It was not by reason of its justice, or its novelty, or the force of the ideas bound up in it that the cause of the people was stirring the minds of the intelligent middle-class, although they were fain to think so. Its appeal lay in its vitality.
Its justice? Justice was everywhere and every day violated thousands of times without the world ever giving a thought to it. Its ideas? Scraps of truth, picked up here and there and adjusted to the interests and requirements of one class at the expense of the other classes. Its creed was as absurd as every other creed—the Divine Right of Kings, the Infallibility of the Popes, Universal Suffrage, the Equality of Man—all equally absurd if one only considers them by their rational value and not in the light of the force by which they are animated. What did their mediocrity matter? Ideas have never conquered the world as ideas, but only by the force they represent. They do not grip men by their intellectual contents, but by the radiant vitality which is given off from them at certain periods in history. They give off as it were a rich scent which overpowers even the dullest sense of smell. The loftiest and most sublime idea remains ineffective until the day when it becomes contagious, not by its own merits, but by the merits of the groups of men in whom it becomes incarnate by the transfusion of their blood. Then the withered plant, the rose of Jericho, comes suddenly to flower, grows to its full height, and fills all the air with its powerful aroma.—Some of the ideas which were now the flaming standard under which the working-classes were marching on to the assault upon the capitalistic citadel, emanated from the brains of dreamers of the comfortable classes. While they had been left in their comfortable books, they had lain dead: items in a museum, mummies packed away in glass cases with no one to look at them. But as soon as the people laid hands on them, they had become part and parcel of the people, they had been given their feverish reality, which deformed them while it gave them life, breathing into such abstract reason, their hallucinations, and their hopes, like a burning wind of Hegira. They were quickly spread from man to man. Men succumbed to them without knowing from whom they came or how they had been brought. They were no respecters of persons. The moral epidemic spread and spread: and it was quite possible for limited creatures to communicate it to superior men. Every man was unwittingly an agent in the transmission.
Such phenomena of intellectual contagion are to be observed in all times and in all countries: they make themselves felt even in aristocratic States where there is the endeavor to maintain castes hermetically sealed one against the other. But nowhere are they more electric than in democracies which preserve no sanitary barrier between the elect and the mob. The elect are contaminated at once whatever they do to fight against it. In spite of their pride and intelligence they cannot resist the contagion; for the elect are much weaker than they think. Intelligence is a little island fretted by the tides of humanity, crumbling away and at last engulfed. It only emerges again on the ebb of the tide.—One wonders at the self-denial of the French privileged classes when on the night of they abdicated their rights. Most wonderful of all, no
