Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/18

Rh "The day on which he [Ferry] would have to give an account of his maladministration would be the day of his conviction."

It falls under the sense that the only proper way for the scrupulous translator to act in this matter, was to give the full text of Marx's specific charges against the men involved, and to produce in footnote, or in his appendix, the evidence (or at least the references thereto) upon which he declared that "several" of these charges were unfounded, thus at the same time leaving untouched and standing those that were "justified." As we write, we understand that the forgeries of Favre on the birth registers of a mairie, and the interested care which Ernest Picard took of his blackleg brother, are facts which have never been successfully controverted; while in the light of the stupendous jobbery which in later years, when Jules Ferry was prime minister, attended his policy of colonial expansion, we dare say that "the integrity of his incapacity" on any previous occasion would have to be strongly demonstrated before Karl Marx himself, if he were still alive, would permit his own words to be retracted for him by any translator.

Another omission—entirely unexplained and even passed over without so much as a dotted line to indicate it—is to be noticed in the following sentence (page 67), the words here in brackets being those that were suppressed: "Galliffet, [the kept man of his wife, so notorious for her shameless exhibitions at the orgies of the Second Empire,] boasted in a proclamation of having commanded the murder of a small troop of National Guards," etc. Is not this true, every word of it? And if all of it is terrible truth, was it Galliffet or his wife that the translator generously considered in suppressing that part of it? Surely the licentious marchioness