Page:The Commonweal (IA 0544678.0001.001.umich.edu).pdf/13

March, 1885. tion to take their use of his fields of fifty acres, and were firmly decided to carry their resolution into effect. An identical intimation was made to the colonel of the Body Guard, M. Tevkeleff. And the proprietor cannot but resign himself to his fate—the attacks and intrusions being repeated “every day,” as one of the nobleman's representatives declared. The landlords were driven to despair—many of them have abandoned their property to its fate and fled to the towns, awaiting better times and laying complaint of these outrages before the government.

Better times will come to the Uffa nobility; there can be no doubt of it. Stirred by their laments the government will send a number of troops that will put all things right. But will it be for long? Will the peasants desist from attacks after the soldiers retire? And what is much more serious, are not those small disorders merely forerunners of general disorders on the part of peasants who stand face to face with the dilemma of either starving or taking the law into their own hands. Last summer outrages of a similar character occurred in the Don province. They were suppressed by the troops; now they are repeated much more strongly and in quite spontaneous fashion at the other end of Russia. One need not be a prophet to say that if the present conditions of Russia are not changed, they will be repeated again and again.

Russia is marching towards a general revolution, a complete re-organisation of her social conditions. No opposition, no amount of obstinacy or cruelty can prevent it. But a partial revolution has taken the lead; a revolution which we may call a town revolution, a revolution of instructed classes—a political revolution, in a word. Upon the success or unsuccess of this partial revolution, it depends whether the general Russian revolution will be a pacific and humanitarian one, having at its head the most enlightened part of the working classes and the intellectual proletariat—or will be a violent, barbarous, sanguinary one, made by the outburst of despair, which knows no mercy and no laws.STEPNIAK.

police are preparing and contriving plots just as if the Republic and the Monarchy were one and the same thing. It is the Gambettists who have lately in France driven the police into the profession of conspirators. Their first stroke was a master-stroke. The International was suppressed here by the law of the strongest; but the police re-established an imaginary International. They published in the Gambettist journal, the Paris, lists of adherents, rules, etc., which enabled them to arrest Krapotkine, Bernard, and other Anarchists. On the Anarchist journal of Lyons, the Droit Social, they then placed one of their own men, and it was his articles, that breathed nothing but blood and thunder which, read at the trials, contributed to the condemnation of the accused Anarchists, many of whom were sentenced to five years' imprisonment. Proud of their success, they thought they would succeed in insinuating members into Socialist organisations, so as to catch them in its snares. In point of fact they have succeeded in getting agents into all the organisations, men who have had to limit themselves to the simple rôle of informers, having never acquired enough influence to provoke any overt action. It is only in the Anarchist party that these agents can get any influence, as is proved by the case of the policeman Druelle, denounced and exposed publicly some weeks ago: he was one of the Anarchist leaders, and was amongst those who openly preached riot and the pillaging of shops.

But an event has happened which shows that the police no longer hope to reckon on the Anarchists, but intend to get up plots themselves. On very vague information an agent of the police named Br*** was sent to Montceau-les-Mines to discover there a plot which would have just suited the Government for the coming elections. After a week's inquiries on the spot, the policeman was clear that there was no plot. But as they had promised him 5000 frames reward for the discovery of a plot, he found nothing simpler than to organise a plot himself, that he might have the merit of denouncing it. The procured dynamite, daggers and revolvers, enrolled some simple miners, blew up a chapel, and killed a gendarme with a revolver-shot. Twenty-seven persons were arrested on the denunciation of this police conspirator; but he had not taken his measures cleverly enough to escape suspicion of guilt, and Justice had him arrested. Then the police claimed their man. Even the Minister of the Interior, Waldeck-Rousseau, came forward to have him released in the interests of order and the police. But the matter was so serious that the Minister of Justice, Martin Feuilet, had to refuse this satisfaction to his colleague, declaring to him that if the policeman were released it would be impossible to keep under arrest the duped fellow-conspirators of the policeman. So that the man of the police will pay dearly for his plot, to the great despair of the whole French police, which for some time past has seen all its infamies laid bare by the Socialists. Our new Minister of War, General Lewal, who seems, happily, to have had more to do with leaden soldiers than soldiers of flesh and blood, did, however, utter a great truth in his maiden speech. He said that the army could not be kept inactive, and that for this good reason it was absolutely necessary from time to time to make little spurts of war. The police take just the same view as the general: it organises plots from time to time to show that the police is indispensable. If this goes on, the bourgeois order will be menaced not by the revolutionists, but by the official defenders of order themselves. Thus people are beginning seriously to ask if it would not be very useful to organise a counter-police.Author:Paul Lafargue.

“The statement that. . . a ship. . . may. . . be capsized with ease or with difficulty, according to the character or degree of stability it may possess is the veriest scientific truism. . . Yet. . . it has been strangely, almost culpably ignored by many who are responsible for the safety of ships.”—Nature.

church bells were chiming their summons to Sunday worship as your correspondent issued forth on a mission to make a few random notes on how the “day of rest” is passed by the various classes of the population.

My first steps brought me to the belt of squares which constitutes the nucleus of his Grace of Bedford's property east of Tottenham Court Road. This neighborhood is a decayed Belgravia, and although outwardly the houses are hideous, inwardly they are handsome and commodious, faced by broad gardens and backed by trees, and possessing all those hygenic and sanitary conditions which make town life bearable.

Here are some of the inhabitants of this middle-class region wending their way to church. Notice this group of befurred and beflowetred misses, whose attempts to keep up to every latest fashion have resulted in distorting their bodies and imparting to their gait a camel-like waddle. And see, here come Pater and Materfamilias; evidently the world has used them well, if plumpness is a sign of contentment. These are soon joined by a specimen of the petrified maiden lady type, who carries, in addition to their Church-service, a small pug dog; and judging from the care she bestows upon it, she would not wish to enter the state of heavenly beatitude unaccompanied by her pet.

They merge at the church portals into a well-fed and well-clothed crowd containing many similar types, and settle down in their rented pews to listen to their favourite preacher expatiating on the blessings of poverty. I had noticed the heartless stare or shuddering averted gaze with which these lip-servants of the Nazarene Carpenter greeted the advent of a begaar or tramp if one chanced across their path, and my became filled with indignant thoughts on the condition of things which produces this contrast. I peered down into the kitchen and and saw my class busily preparing the midday meal for the return of these Pharisaical parasites, and I bethought me that whilst in their comfort and affluence they employ a whole army of our brothers and sisters as helots, to minister to their wants and drive them in carriages to the scenes of their mock worship, they insultingly deny the right of the working class to a brighter of better existence even on the seventh day. Where not wholly indifferent to the misery of those who produce their wealth, and to the pressing social questions around, they are feebly and futilely endeavouring to patch the system up by soup-tickets and tract distribution, and the insulting cant of the mission-hall, As I passed through the gates which an aristocratic landlord is allowed to maintain across our public thoroughfares in order that the common herd shall not disturb the quietude of those whom I have just described, I though the Social Revolution will find these people, and their more aristocratic congeners of Belgravia, unready, and overwhelm them.

A short, quick walk soon changes the scene, and I am in the midst of the narrow courts and streets which lie behind the deceptive frontages of Holborn. The narrow street through which I pass is filled with a choking, sooty atmosphere, which seems to begrime all it touches. On my left hand is a succession of courts, all ending in cul-de-sacs. In the centre of some and at the side of others are placed common dustbins, all overflowing with evil-smelling refuse. Barrow-boards and barrows lie about the entrance of the houses, and along the filthy, darksome passages, and on the flags of the narrow and horrible back-yards, is stored in the unsold greenstuff belonging to the costers who rent the lower part of the houses. The intended in close proximity to the sink-hole, down which ever and anon is poured  of odourous slops. In the upper portions of these places there exists— about to write lives—a class of hand vegetable-sellers, too poor to barrows, and their wares are stored in the most convenient place to  as the bedstead covers the largest place in these confined dens, the reader's imagination can supply the rest. These bedstead, by the way, are, like the wooden partitions compromising the rooms, swarming in summer with disgusting vermin. All the efforts which the unfortunate tenants, between their struggles for a hand-to-mouth existence, make for the extirpation of those pests are unavailing, on account of the dilapidated character of the property; and to get drunk in order that they may not be disturbed by these horrible companions is their frequent expedient.

A philanthropist who has dabbled in matters pertaining to the housing of the poor, and been able to reap five per cent. from her efforts, said recently that, after all, the one-room life was not so intolerable as it seemed. The one room here is shared in many cases by two and three families the honest amongst whom strive to maintain an existence by hand-selling and market-jobbing—a class who, when the fight becomes too severe, die by the roadside of want rather than enter the bastiles erected for the punishment of poverty; a class, moreover, whom no efforts of the Trades' Unions as such can affect, and to whom the utterances of a Brassey or Levi as to increased prosperity are a mockery, which some day they may reward as it deserves, if the rich will persist in shutting their eyes to these horrors, and make up their minds to defend what they know to be an iniquity. Amongst, and inextricably mixed with, them are those whose rebellion against the law and order of Society takes the form of prostitution, theft, and violence. And last, but not least, in these places are the stunted and weazened forms of the child-victims of the state of modern civilisation into which, according to religions cant, it has pleased God to call them. Unfortunate children! their homes in these filthy, reeking stones. The full weight of Society's injustice, of man's inhumanity to man, is endured by them; they are foredoomed to the cell, the dock, and the hospital and pauper wards; for Society will not relinquish its right to punish, though the irreparable wrong is committed by society itself.

If you ask who are those who week and maintain these human sites for the rents they produce, whose monopoly of the means of production and financial juggling are responsible for this horrible condition of things, search among the sleek churchgoers I have just left, pretending to be the followers of Him who whipped the money-changers from the temple. They are the comfortabilists whose comfort is purchased at the expense of the misery and degradation I have so inadequately described. How long they will enjoy their comfort so bought is a question for Revolutionary Socialists to answer.

“In the opinion of Mr. George Richardson, the chairman of the North Metropolitan Tramways Company, about sixteen hours a day, with no day of rest in the week, is fair service to exact from a tramway conductor, and about fourpence an hour is a very good wage to pay him. But according to one of two more humane shareholders such hours are intolerable slavery and a reproach to the company. One shareholder, indeed, ventured, in the interests of humanity, to hint that men could not last long, at that rate, and that the hours really worked were eighteen per day, which would give a man about four hours rest per night. No wonder the North Metropolitan Tramways Company pays 9$1⁄2$ per cent.; no wonder Mr. George Richardson thought the discussion of such matters should be avoided at their public meetings.”—Pall Mall Gazette.