the paltry pay of twenty centimes. Young
women of eighteen or twenty also work fifteen hours daily, for a
mockery of remuneration. And that happens not only to my fellow
countrymen, but to all the workers, who sweat the whole day long for
a crust of bread, while their labor produces wealth in abundance.
The workers are obliged to live under the most wretched conditions,
and their food consists of a little bread, a few spoonfuls of rice,
and water; so by the time they are thirty or forty years old, they
are exhausted, and go to die in the hospitals. Besides, in
consequence of bad food and overwork, these unhappy creatures are, by
hundreds, devoured by pellagra--a disease that, in my country,
attacks, as the physicians say, those who are badly fed and lead a
life of toil and privation.

"I have observed that there are a great many people who are hungry,
and many children who suffer, whilst bread and clothes abound in the
towns. I saw many and large shops full of clothing and woolen
stuffs, and I also saw warehouses full of wheat and Indian corn,
suitable for those who are in want. And, on the other hand, I saw
thousands of people who do not work, who produce nothing and live on
the labor of others; who spend every day thousands of francs for
their amusement; who debauch the daughters of the workers; who own
dwellings of forty or fifty rooms; twenty or thirty horses, many
servants; in a word, all the pleasures of life.

"I believed in God; but when I saw so great an inequality between
men, I acknowledged that it was not God who created man, but man who
created God. And I discovered that those who want their property to
be respected, have an interest in preaching the existence of paradise
and hell, and in keeping the people in ignorance.

"Not long ago, Vaillant threw a bomb in the Chamber of Deputies, to
protest against the present system of society. He killed no one,
only wounded some persons; yet bourgeois justice sentenced him to
death. And not satisfied with the condemnation of the guilty man,
they began to pursue the Anarchists, and arrest not only those who
had known Vaillant, but even those who had merely been present at any
Anarchist lecture.

"The government did not think of their wives and children. It did
not consider that the men kept in prison were not the only ones who
suffered, and that their little ones cried for bread. Bourgeois
justice did not trouble itself about these innocent ones, who