Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 7.djvu/253

 CLEMENCEAU I say that those who act against the working class are those who encourage it to believe that it can do no wrong, and that it suffices for it to visit upon others the oppressions from which it has itself suffered.

I say that those who act against the working class are those who thus retard its education, because education is not by words, as pedagogs profess and believe, but is achieved by deeds. We shall know that the working class is worthy to govern the democracy, as you desire and as I myself heartily wish, on the day when of its own free will it shall conform its acts to the right it demands.

Such is the education which must be given it. It learns nothing by discourses; could discourses teach the world, the Sermon on the Mount would have been realized long ago.

Without doubt, M. Jaurès, you dominate me from all the heights of your socialistic conceptions. You have the magic power of evoking fairy palaces with your wand, while I am as some modest laborer on a cathedral who obscurely carries a stone to the august edifice he shall never see. At the first puff of reality the fairy palace will vanish, whereas the republican cathedral will some day rear its spire into the skies.

Individual property, I assert, will be evolved for a long time to come; I assert that the relations of individual property and of social property will not remain as they now are ; and when I say that I say nothing that any one can not 217