Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/17

x embodied by Marx in those stirring appeals to the class-consciousness and class-solidarity of the proletarian masses throughout the world.

This is, we believe, the first time that a complete edition of these imperishable documents, including also, unabridged and carefully translated, Frederick Engels' introduction, has been published in the English language. They are in themselves historic facts; and while it is the unquestionable right of any one to comment upon them, or to produce, in the course of an argument, literal extracts from them, provided always that the sense of the quoted text is not modified by the context, it belongs to nobody to alter them in any way, even if the declared object or tacit purpose of the alteration is to correct a "mistake," or to eliminate a "doubtful statement," or to supply a deficiency."

We deem it here appropriate to insist upon the strict observance of this ethical rule in the treatment of historic papers, because in a French edition of these manifestoes which has lately appeared in Paris the "translator" has deliberately suppressed some important passages. For one of these suppressions he gives appendix the following reasons: "I have thought duty to expunge here a few lines from the English text. They contain imputations which then had currency, but several of which, concerning Jules Favre, Ernest and Arthur Picard, can no longer be justified. Another, against Jules Ferry, is the most inexact of all, but may be explained both by his violent 'moderantism' and his administrative incapacity as mayor of Paris." The "few" lines thus omitted are in our own edition the forty-nine in number, beginning on page 50 with these words, "Shortly after the conclusion of the armistice, etc.," and ending on page 51 with this sentence,