ice as against social
justice. Still, in the present case I am against abstention. I say that
when a lucky chance brings us an affair like this we should be fools not
to profit by it.

"How? We are given an opportunity of striking terrible, perhaps
fatal, blows against militarism. And am I to fold my arms? I tell you,
comrades, I am not a fakir, I have never been a fakir, and if there are
fakirs here let them not count on me. To sit in meditation is a policy
without results and one which I shall never adopt.

"A party like ours ought to be continually asserting itself. It ought to
prove its existence by continual action. We will intervene in the Pyrot
affair but we will intervene in it in a revolutionary manner; we
will adopt violent action. . . . Perhaps you think that violence is
old-fashioned and superannuated, to be scrapped along with diligences,
hand-presses and aerial telegraphy. You are mistaken. To-day as
yesterday nothing is obtained except by violence; it is the one
efficient instrument. The only thing necessary is to know how to use it.
You ask what will our action be? I will tell you: it will be to stir up
the governing classes against one another, to put the army in conflict
with the capitalists, the government with the magistracy, the nobility
and clergy with the Jews, and if possible to drive them all to destroy
one another. To do this would be to carry on an agitation which would
weaken government in the same way that fever wears out the sick.

"The Pyrot affair, little as we know how to turn it to advantage,
will put forward by ten years the growth of the Social party and the
emancipation of the proletariat, by disarmament, the general strike, and
revolution."

The leaders of the party having each expressed a different opinion, the
discussion was continued, not without vivacity. The orators, as always
happens in such a case, reproduced the arguments they had already
brought forward, though with less order and moderation than before. The
dispute was prolonged and none changed his opinion. These opinions, in
the final analysis, were reduced to two: that of Sapor and Lapersonne
who advised abstention, and that of Phoenix and Larrivee, who wanted
intervention. Even these two contrary opinions were united in a common
hatred of the heads of the army and of their justice, and in a common
belief in Pyrot's innocence. So that public opinion was hardly mistaken
in regarding all the Socialist leaders as perni