Page:An Appeal to the Young by Kropotkin.djvu/2

 PETER KROPOTKIN

is to the young that I wish to address myself to-day. Let the old—I mean of course the old in heart and mind—lay the pamphlet down without tiring their eyes in reading what will tell them nothing.

I assume that you are about eighteen or twenty years of age, that you have finished your apprenticeship or your studies; that you are just entering on life. I take it for granted that you have a mind free from the superstition which your teachers have sought to force upon you; that you do not fear the devil, and that you do not go to hear parsons and ministers rant. More, that you are not one of the fops, sad products of a society in decay, who display their well-cut trousers and their monkey faces in the park, and who even at their early age have only an insatiable longing for pleasure at any price ... I assume on the contrary that you have a warm heart and for this reason I talk to you.

A first question, I know, occurs to you—you have often asked yourself—"What am I going to be?" In fact when a man is young he understands that after having studied a trade or a science for several years—at the cost of society, mark—he has not done this in order that he should make use of his acquirements as instruments of plunder for his own gain, and he must be depraved indeed and utterly cankered by vice, who has not dreamed that one day he would apply his intelligence, his abilities, his knowledge to help on the enfranchisement of those who to-day grovel in misery and in ignorance.

You are one of those who has had such a vision, are you not? Very well, let us see what you must do to make your dream a reality.

I do not know in what rank you were born. Perhaps, favoured by fortune, you have turned your attention to the study of science; you are to be a doctor, a barrister, a man of letters, or a scientific man; a wide field opens up before you; you enter upon life with extensive knowledge, with a trained intelligence. Or, on the other hand, you are, perhaps, only an honest artisan whose knowledge of science is limited by the little you have learned at school; but you have had the advantage of learning at first hand what a life of exhausting toil is the lot of the worker of our time.