Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/835

 How many on our flesh have fattened! But if the noisome birds of prey Shall vanish from our sky some morning, The blessed sunlight still will stay. (Refrain)

The Syndicalist

(From "The Red Wave")

(See pages 585, 669)

Like a thousand others, Rougemont wanted the daily revolution, which should ferment in the brain, not like a dream, but like an energy, should manifest itself by a discipline and a method, by daily exercises to keep it in condition. It was no longer a question of brandishing the torch. It was necessary to understand and to will, to organize social experience, to wage petty warfare—sallies, raids, ambuscades; to entertain cold hatreds, logical and continuous, to haggle over wages as the Norman peasant haggles over chickens, and above all to create a sort of happy excitement, a fraternal exaltation which would bring to the gatherings ideas of security, of trust, of mutual aid.

The strikes will be beautiful schools of social struggle. They will open the path for magnanimous instincts, heroic and adventurous, which air the human soul. Always better organized, they will no longer reduce the artisan to famine, they will demand of him only to undergo some privations which the beauty of revolt will render almost joyous. They will develop generosity,