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massacre. All this is excellent, so long as the war, the
exhaustion and oppression of the people are considered as
normal; but when we pretend to pity the men killed in the
war and the sufferers from the famine, would it not be simpler
not to kill, and, consequently, not to invent the means of
healing? not to rob the people of their substance, and all the
time we are so doing pretend to be concerned about their
welfare? For the last thirty years it has become almost fashionable
to profess a love for the people—for ‘our younger brother,’ as
they say. Our society persuades itself and others that they are
greatly concerned about the people’s condition, and express their
concern in mutual reproaches for the lack of sympathy with
‘the younger brother.’ ‘For thirteen years I have reproached
others for their lack of love for the people; what further proof
is needed of my own love for them?’ All this is a lie. Love
of the people does not and cannot exist in our society.
“Between a member of our leisured classes—a gentleman
dressed in a starched shirt, an official, a landlord, a merchant, an
officer, a scientist, an artist, on the one hand, and a peasant on
the other, there is only one link; the one that makes all peasants
—working-men in general, ‘hands,’ as the English call them—
necessary to work for us. We cannot hide what we all know.
“All the interests of each one of us—of science, of our
occupation, of our artistic interests, of our family life—are
such that we have nothing in common with the life of the
people. The people do not understand the ‘gentlemen,’ and
the latter, in spite of their belief to the contrary, neither know
nor understand the life of the people.
“Voltaire said that if people in Paris could kill a mandarin in
China by simply pressing a button, very few Parisians would
deprive themselves of this amusement.
“Not to speak of the generations of workers who perish in the
idiotic, painful, and demoralising work of the factories for the
pleasure of the rich, the entire agricultural population, or at
least an enormous proportion of it, is forced through insufficiency
of land for their maintenance to such a fearfully intense
work that it destroys their physical and moral powers, simply for
the purpose of giving to their masters the possibility of
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