Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/81

 sophism of our enemies. 'What,' says the Libre Parole softly, 'these are Socialists, revolutionaries, who are troubled about legality!'

"I have but one word to answer. There are two sides to capitalist and bourgeois legality. There is a whole mass of laws destined to protect the fundamental iniquity of our society; there are laws which consecrate the privileges of capitalist property, the exploitation of the wage-earner by the possessors. These laws we wish to change, even by Revolution if it is necessary, to abolish capitalist legality so that another order may arise. But by the side of these laws of privilege and of rapine made by a class for itself, there are others which sum up the meagre progress of humanity, modest guarantees that it has little by little acquired by the long effort of centuries and the long series of revolutions.

"Well, among these laws the one which does not permit a man, whoever he may be, to be condemned without debating the charge with him, is perhaps the most essential of all. Unlike the Nationalists who want to keep all that part of the bourgeois legality which protects Capital, and give up to the generals all that which protects man, we revolutionary Socialists wish to abolish the capitalist part of the legality of to-day and save the human part. We defend the legal guarantees against the decorated judges who throw them away, as we would defend the