Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/82

 68 same way; on June 27, 1905, the rapporteur of a law on the length of the hours of work in the mines said, in the Chamber of Deputies: "Should the application of the law give rise to disappointment among the workmen, we have undertaken to lay a new bill before the house." This worthy man spoke exactly like the rapporteur of a tariff law.

There are plenty of workmen who understand perfectly well that all the trash of Parliamentary literature only serves to disguise the real motives by which the Government is influenced. The Protectionists succeed by subsidising a few important party leaders or by financing newspapers which support the politics of these party leaders; the workers have no money, but they have at their disposal a much more efficacious means of action; they can inspire fear, and for several years past they have availed themselves of this resource.

At the time of the discussion of the law regulating labour in mines, the question of the threats addressed to the Government cropped up several times: on February 5, 1902, the president of the commission told the Chamber that those in power had "lent an attentive ear to clamourings from without; that they had been inspired by a sentiment of benevolent generosity in allowing themselves to be moved (despite the tone in which they were couched), by the claims of the working classes and the long cry of suffering of the workers in the mines." A little later he added: "We have accomplished a work of social justice, … a work of benevolence also, in going to those who toil and suffer, like friends solely desirous of working in peace and under honourable conditions, and we must not by a brutal and too egotistic refusal to unbend, allow them to give way to impulses which, while not actual revolts, would yet have as many victims." All these confused phrases served