lo An Appeal to the Youtig. 



you ; if you analyze the law and strip off those cloudy 

 fictions with which it has been draped in order to 

 conceal its real origin, which is the right of the 

 stronger, and its substance, which has ever been the 

 consecration of all the tyrannies handed down to 

 mankind through its long and bloody history ; when 

 you have comprehended this, your contempt for the 

 law will be profound indeed. You will understand 

 that to remain the servant of the written law is to 

 place yourself every day in opposition to the law of 

 conscience, and to make a bargain on the wrong 

 side; and, since this struggle cannot go on forever, 

 you will either silence your conscience and become 

 a scoundrel, or you will break with tradition, and 

 vou will work with us for the utter destruction of 

 all this injustice, economical, social, and political. 



But then you will be a socialist, you will be a rev- 

 olutionist. 



And you, young engineer, you who dream of im- 

 proving the lot of the workeis by the application of 

 science to industry — what a sad disappointment, 

 what terrible disillusions await you ! You devote 

 the useful energy of your mind to working out the 

 scheme of a railway which, running along the brink 

 of precipices and burrowing into the ver}' heart of 

 mountains of granite, will ' bind together two coun- 

 tries which nature has separated. But, once at work, 

 you see whole regiments of workers decimated by 

 privations and sickness in this dark tunnel ; you see 

 others of them returning home, carrying with them, 

 may be, a few cents and the undoubted seeds of con- 

 sumption ; you see human corpses — the results of a 

 groveling greed — as landmarks along each yard of 

 your road; and, when the railroad is finished, you 

 see, lastly, that it becomes the highway for the artil- 

 lery of an invading army. . . . 



You have given up the prime of your youth to per- 

 fect an invention which will facilitate production. 



