lf-preservation--even from a perfectly legal attack, if it threatens
to destroy them or to transfer the government into the hands of the
non-capitalist classes. Of course a capitalist government can pass
"laws," _e.g._ martial law, under which anything it chooses to do
against its opponents becomes "legal" and anything effective its
opponents do becomes illegal. In the present age of general
enlightenment, however, this method does not even deceive Russian
peasants. But the French government is now turning to this device.
Briand explained away his sensational declaration above quoted, and then
proposed a law by which striking on a railway becomes a crime and almost
a felony. This met universal approval in the capitalistic press and
universal denunciation in that of the Socialists and labor unions. The
_Boston Herald_, for example, said: "The Executive must be armed with
greater authority than he now possesses. No Premier must be forced to
say, as M. Briand did recently, that, with or without law, national
supremacy will be preserved in case it is challenged by allied workers
for the State, as well as by other toilers." Here there is no effort to
disguise the fact that the new legal form is the _exact equivalent_ of
the illegal force formerly proposed.

Now the peasants and the lower middle classes of France, as well as the
working people (land and opportunities being more and more difficult to
obtain), are becoming extremely radical. Though they do not send
Socialist deputies to the Chamber, they send representatives who are
very suspicious of arbitrary, undemocratic, and centralized authority.
Only 215 members of the Chamber could be induced to approve of the
government's conduct during the strike of 1910, while more than 200
abstained from voting on this point, and 166 voted in the negative. The
proposed measures of repression were carried by a small majority, but it
is not likely that they can be enforced many years without bringing
about another and far more revolutionary crisis. Briand and his
associates, Millerand and Viviani, were forced to resign, partly on
account of their conduct in this strike, and it is possible that after
another election or two the Chamber will no longer give its consent to
this relegation of workingmen to the status of common soldiers. Only six
months after the strike, Briand's successor, Monis, with the consent of
the Chamber, was bringing governmental pressure to bear on the privately
o