erybody rushed to play it, and, as it was said, many ruined themselves,
rendered their families miserable, lost other people's money, and
government funds, and committed suicide; and the game was prohibited, and
it remains prohibited to this day.

I remember to have seen old and unsentimental gamblers, who told me that
this game was particularly pleasing because you did not see from whom you
were winning, as is the case in other games; a lackey brought, not money,
but chips; each man lost a little stake, and his disappointment was not
visible . . . It is the same with roulette, which is everywhere
prohibited, and not without reason.

It is the same with money. I possess a magic, inexhaustible ruble; I cut
off my coupons, and have retired from all the business of the world. Whom
do I injure,--I, the most inoffensive and kindest of men? But this is
nothing more than playing at loto or roulette, where I do not see the man
who shoots himself, because of his losses, after procuring for me those
coupons which I cut off from the bonds so accurately with a strictly
right-angled corner.

I have done nothing, I do nothing, and I shall do nothing, except cut off
those coupons; and I firmly believe that money is the representative of
labor! Surely, this is amazing! And people talk of madmen, after that!
Why, what degree of lunacy can be more frightful than this? A sensible,
educated, in all other respects sane man lives in a senseless manner, and
soothes himself for not uttering the word which it is indispensably
necessary that he should utter, with the idea that there is some sense in
his conclusions, and he considers himself a just man. Coupons--the
representatives of toil! Toil! Yes, but of whose toil? Evidently not
of the man who owns them, but of him who labors.

Slavery is far from being suppressed. It has been suppressed in Rome and
in America, and among us: but only certain laws have been abrogated; only
the word, not the thing, has been put down. Slavery is the freeing of
ourselves alone from the toil which is necessary for the satisfaction of
our demands, by the transfer of this toil to others; and wherever there
exists a man who does not work, not because others work lovingly for him,
but where he possesses the power of not working, and forces others to
work for him, there slavery exists. There too, where, as in all European
societies, there are people who make use of the labor of thousands of
men, and r