II

That we are Utopians is well known. So Utopian are we that we go the
length of believing that the Revolution can and ought to assure shelter,
food, and clothes to all--an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class
citizens, whatever their party colour, for they are quite alive to the
fact that it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger
is satisfied.

All the same, we maintain our contention: bread must be found for the
people of the Revolution, and the question of bread must take precedence
of all other questions. If it is settled in the interests of the people,
the Revolution will be on the right road; for in solving the question of
Bread we must accept the principle of equality, which will force itself
upon us to the exclusion of every other solution.

It is certain that the coming Revolution--like in that respect to the
Revolution of 1848--will burst upon us in the middle of a great
industrial crisis. Things have been seething for half a century now, and
can only go from bad to worse. Everything tends that way--new nations
entering the lists of international trade and fighting for possession
of the world's markets, wars, taxes ever increasing. National debts,
the insecurity of the morrow, and huge colonial undertakings in every
corner of the globe.

There are millions of unemployed workers in Europe at this moment. It
will be still worse when Revolution has burst upon us and spread like
fire laid to a train of gunpowder. The number of the out-of-works will
be doubled as soon as the barricades are erected in Europe and the
United States. What is to be done to provide these multitudes with
bread?

We do not know whether the folk who call themselves "practical people"
have ever asked themselves this question in all its nakedness. But we do
know that they wish to maintain the wage system, and we must therefore
expect to have "national workshops" and "public works" vaunted as a
means of giving food to the unemployed.

Because national workshops were opened in 1789 and 1793; because the
same means were resorted to in 1848; because Napoleon III. succeeded in
contenting the Parisian proletariat for eighteen years by giving them
public works--which cost Paris to-day its debt of L80,000,000 and its
municipal tax of three or four pounds a-head;[3] because this excellent
method of "taming the beast" was customary in Rome, and even in Egypt
four thousand years ago; and lastly, because despots, kings