An Appeal to the Voting. 1 5 



onlv degenerate, what remains for me to do - " 



Well, I will tell you : 



A vast and most enthralling task ; a work in which 

 your actions will be in complete harmony with your 

 conscience, an undertaking capable of rousing the 

 noblest and most vigorous natures. 



What work ? — I will now tell you. 



It rests with you either to palter continually with 

 your conscience, and in the end to say one fine da}', 

 " Perish humanity, provided I can have plenty of 

 pleasures and enjoy them to the full, so long as the 

 people are foolish enough to let me," Or, once more 

 the inevitable alternative, to take part with the so- 

 cialists and work with them for the complete trans- 

 formation of society. Such is the irrefragable con- 

 sequence of the analysis we have gone through. That 

 is the logical conclusion which every intelligent man 

 must perforce arrive at, provided that he reasons 

 honestly about what passes around him, and discards 

 the sophisms which his bourgeois education and the 

 interested views of those about him whisper in his ear. 



This conclusion once arrived at, the question, 

 "What is to be done?" is naturally put. 



The answer is easv. 



Leave this environment in which you are placed 

 and where it is the fashion to say that the people 

 are nothing but a lot of brutes, come among these 

 people — and the answer will come of itself. 



You will see that everywhere, in England as well 

 as in France, in Germany as well as in Italy, in 

 Russia as well as in the United States, everywhere 

 where there is a privileged and an oppressed class, 

 there is a tremendous work going on in the midst of 

 the working-class, whose object is to break down for- 

 ever the slavery enforced by the capitalist feudality 

 and to lay the foundation of a society established on 

 the basis of justice and equality. It is no longer 

 enough for the man of the people to-day to pour 



