moved amidst clouds of vapour, the
cranes groaned on the wharves, the steamers cut the waters, and the
little barks danced on the waves dragging their nets. None were absent
from work's review. All hurried on, driven by the fear of hunger,
defying danger, not knowing if they would live till night, or if the
sun rising over their heads would be the last in their lives. And that
daily concentration of human energies began with the first light of
day in all parts of the world, wherever men had assembled and built
towns and constituted societies, or even in the deserts to be
reclaimed by their energies.

The stonemason breaks the stone with his hammer, and at every breath
is poisoned by inhaling the invisible particles. The miner descends to
the hell of modern times with no other guide than the glimmer from
his lamp, to wrest from the strata of the earliest ages relics of the
earth's infancy, those carbonised trees that gave shade to prehistoric
animals. Far from the sun and far from life, he defies death, just as
the mason, poised on a slight scaffolding despises giddiness, watched
only by the birds, surprised to see a creature without wings perched
on such a dizzy height.

The workman in the factory, changed by a fatal and mistaken progress
into a slave of machinery, lives fastened to it like another wheel, a
spring of human flesh, struggling with his physical weariness against
the iron muscles that never tire; brutalised daily by the deafening
cadence of pistons and wheels to give us the innumerable products of
industry rendered necessary by the life of civilisation.

And these millions and millions of men who support the existence
of society, who fight for it against the blind and cruel forces of
Nature, who every morning return to the struggle, seeing in this
monotonous and continual sacrifice the sole aim of their existence,
form the immense family of wage-earners, living on the surplus of a
privileged minority, contenting themselves to subsist on the smallest
part of what these reject, submitting to a wretched remuneration,
always the lowest, without hope of saving or of emancipation.

"It is this egotistical minority," said Gabriel, having arrived at
this point, "who have falsified truth, endeavouring to persuade the
majority of workers that work is a virtue, and that the only mission
of man on earth is to work till he perishes. This code, invented, by
the great capitalists, misquotes science, declaring that pe