everywhere, even from those who did not dislike the tendency of our paper, I received the same reply: “We could not live without work from the government, and we should have none if we undertook to print Le Révolté.”

I returned to Geneva in very low spirits; but Dumartheray was only the more ardent and hopeful. “It’s all very simple,” he said. “We buy our own printing-plant on a three months’ credit, and in three months we shall have paid for it.” “But we have no money, only a few hundred francs,” I objected. “Money, nonsense! We shall have it! Let us only order the type at once and immediately issue our next number⁠—and money will come!” Once more his judgment was quite right. When our next number came out from our own “Imprimerie Jurassienne,” and we had told our difficulties and printed a couple of small pamphlets besides⁠—all of us helping in the printing⁠—the money came in; mostly in coppers and small silver coins, but it came. Over and over again in my life I have heard complaints among the advanced parties about the want of money; but the longer I live, the more I am persuaded that our chief difficulty is not so much a lack of money as of men who will march firmly and steadily towards a given aim in the right direction, and inspire others. For twenty-one years our paper has now continued to live from hand to mouth⁠—appeals for funds appearing on the front page in almost every number; but as long as there is a man who sticks to it and puts all his energy into it, as Herzig and Dumartheray did at Geneva, and as Grave has done for the last sixteen years at Paris, the money comes in, and a yearly debit of about eight hundred pounds is made up⁠—mainly out of the pennies and small silver coins of the workers⁠—to cover the yearly expenditure for printing the paper and the pamphlets. For a paper, as for everything else, men are of an infinitely greater value than money.

We started our printing-office in a tiny room, and our compositor was a man from Little Russia, who undertook to put our paper in type for the very modest sum of sixty francs a month. If he could only have his modest dinner every day, and the possibility of going occasionally to the opera, he cared for nothing more. “Going to the Turkish bath, John?” I asked him once as I met him at Geneva in the street, with a brown-paper parcel under his arm. “No, removing to a new lodging,” he replied, in his usual melodious voice, and with his customary smile.

Unfortunately, he knew no French. I used to write my manuscript in the best of my handwriting⁠—often thinking with regret of the time I had wasted in the classes of our good Ebert at school⁠—but John could read French only indifferently well, and instead of “immédiatement” he would read “immidiotermut” or “inmuidiatmunt,” and set up in type such wonderful words as these; but as he “kept the space,” and the length of the line did not have to be altered in making the corrections, there were only four or five letters to be corrected in such uncouth words as the above, and but one or two in each of the shorter ones; thus we managed pretty well. We were on the best possible terms with him, and I soon learned a little typesetting under his direction. The composition was always finished in time to take the proofs to a Swiss comrade who was the responsible editor, and to whom we submitted them before going to press, and then one of us carted all the forms to a printing-office. Our “Imprimerie Jurassienne” soon became widely known for its publications, especially for its pamphlets, which Dumartheray would never allow to be sold at more than one penny. Quite a new style had to be worked out for such pamphlets. I must say that I was often wicked enough to envy those writers who could use any number of pages for developing their ideas, and were allowed to make the well-known excuse of Talleyrand: “I have not had the time to be brief.” When I had to condense the results of several months’ work⁠—upon, let me say, the origins of law⁠—into a penny pamphlet, I had to take the time to be brief. But we wrote for the workers, and twenty centimes for a pamphlet is often too much for the average worker. The result was that our penny and halfpenny pamphlets sold by the scores of thousands, and were reproduced in many other countries in translations. My leaders of that period were published later on, while I was in prison, by Elisée Reclus, under the title of The Words of a Rebel⁠—Paroles d’un Révolté.

France was always the chief object of our aims; but Le Révolté was severely prohibited in France, and the smugglers had so many good things to import into France from Switzerland that they did not care to meddle with our paper. I went once with them, crossing in their company the French frontier, and found that they were very brave and reliable men, but I could not induce them to undertake the smuggling of our paper. All we could do, therefore, was to send it in sealed envelopes to about a hundred persons in France. We charged nothing for postage, counting upon voluntary contributions from our subscribers to cover our extra expenses⁠—which they always did⁠—but we often thought that the French police were missing a splendid opportunity for ruining our paper by subscribing to a hundred copies and sending no voluntary contributions.

For the first year we had to rely entirely upon ourselves; but gradually Elisée Reclus took a greater interest in the work, and finally gave more life than ever to the paper

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