An Appeal to the Young. 9 



Or, when workmen have gone out on strike against 

 a master without notice, whicli side will you take? 

 The side of tlie law, that is to say, the part of the 

 master who, taking advantage of a period of crisis, 

 has made outrageous profits, or against the law, but 

 on the side of the workers who received during the 

 whole time only fifty cents a day as wages, and saw 

 their wives and children fade away before their eyes? 

 Will you stand up for that piece of chicanery which 

 consists in affirming "freedom of contract"? Or 

 will you uphold equity, according to which a contract 

 entered into between a man who has dined well and 

 the man who sells his labor for bare subsistence, be- 

 tween the strong and the weak, is not a contract 

 at all? 



Take another case : A man was loitering near a 

 butcher's shop. He stole a beefsteak and ran off 

 with it. Arrested and questioned, it turns out that 

 he is an artisan out of work, and that he and his 

 family have had nothing to eat for four days. The 

 butcher is asked to let the man off, but he is all for 

 the triumph of justice! He prosecutes, and the man 

 is sentenced to six months' imprisonment. Blind 

 Themis so wills it ! Does not your conscience revolt 

 against the law and against society when you hear 

 similar judgments pronounced every day? 



Or, again, will you call for the enforcement of the 

 law against this man who, badly brought up and ill- 

 used from his childhood, has arrived at man's estate 

 without having heard one sympathetic word, and 

 completes his career by murdering his neighbor in 

 order to rob him of twenty-five cents? Will you de- 

 mand his execution, or — worse still — that he should 

 be imprisoned for twenty years, when you know very 

 well that he is rather a madman than a criminal, 

 and, in any case, that his crime is the fault of our 

 entire societv? . . . 



If you reason instead of repeating what is taught 



