Workmen's advocate. (New Haven, Conn.) 1883-1891, 1890-03-22
A CENTURY
REVOLUTION N,
By LUCIEN SANIAL.
Copyright, 1890, by the Author.)
Copyright, 1890, by the Author
(Concluded.)
CHAPTER ii.
By LUCIEN SANIAL.

(Concluded.)
CHAPTER III.
THE EMPIRE-THE NTERNATSoNAL-THE
COMMUNE.
Strange things occur, fateful in ap-
pearance, that some of you, foolish or
wise, call Providential such, for IN
stance, as others might call Evolution,
Logic of Events, Natural Law. We
shall not dispute: hate logomachy.
Here is soldier of fortune, greatest
of captains, mightiest of conquerors,
haughtiest of emperors, just born in
time to make Monsieur Prudhomme king
of the world. Think of it Napoleon
le grand Ndpoleon-again and again
hurting masses of proletaires against the
thrones of Europe, that in the end the
mean bourgeois might say: "Tne Earth is
mine p Queer work, indeed, for Ma
pol6on to do. But he had to do it; and
by his every motion necessarily did it,
though blindly and unconsciously. He
never knew, in fact, what he had done,
even unto the day when, meanest of all,
he died chained to rock for having
done it.
No more than Bonaparte. did Charlie
magne, Caesar, Alexander, know the
nature of their appointment. Giants
selected byFate to stir his hell l-broth have
no conception of what is to come out of
it. A Bismarck drags Germany to Yer.
sailles over bloody roads, and there
triumphantly proclaims the unity of the
-ffatherland; on his return to Berlin he
finds the ghost of the Commune sitting
on the Imperial throne.
Again, by another freak of what you
call Fate, pigmies succeed giants. Un-
.derstand me well. Of the three kings
who basked in the sun of France from
1915 to 1848, while the widows of the
Grand Army were raising a generation
of fatherless proletaires, no account
need be taken. These were neither
pigmies nor giants, but necessary hyph-
ems to connect epochs. In the great
drama of human progress there are acts
and entr'acts. At the end of each act
the curtain falls. And SO, when Napo-
leon took his departure for st. Helena,
a Bourbon curtain, with while lily in
the center and an absurd border of an
tiquated perukes, fell upon the scene
The wind of ridicule blew it away in
1880, and an Orleans tricolor, somewhat
more to the taste of "Boss" Prud homme
and his wife, was substituted. 1t was
behind those two curtains that the great
machinery of intellect was set in notion;
so that in 184S, when the curtain rose
nay, was torn to shreds by stroke of
lightning-the world in breathless atten-
ton beheld new scene and new per-
formance.
For the first time, then, Labor and Cap
ital met in battle array; and have told
you how, in this first duel, Labor fell
bleeding. But Labor, as you know, is i'm
mortal. No dose of lead will ever kill it.
Capital, if driven to madness by loss of
profit, or by mere questioning of its
''sacred right to any privilege, will, of
course, cripple Labor mercilessly Yet,
slaughter, exile and imprisonment of
skill on large scale are disastrous to
wealth, and armed conflicts, if possible,
should be averted. This was plain
enough to the bourgeoisie. In the in
terest, therefore, IF humanity, of pro-
gress, of the general welfare, of good
understanding between masters and
mastered, of the mutual dependence of
rich and poor, 80 much the greater as
the rich is richer and the poor poorer !;
in the interest of all that is grand and
noble in the conception of the capitalist
class, Labor must be terrorized. Chain it.
And who will chain it? The man of
destiny: the pigmy of Fate.
Nonsense Let us see him do it,
Come, pigmy. Thy name 2-Napoleon
le petit.-Thou hast the step of thief
and dark lantern is a fit star for thee.
Crown thyself, mountebank, and act the
part of Emperor. With the rusty sword
of Charlemagne stir the broth in the
caldron of Fate.
And for twelve years the Napoleonic
pigmy kept on stirring, now and then
pouring French blood into the caldron,
yet, as it seemed, to little purpose. But
on the twelfth year something. indeed,
came ont of it quite small at first and