The Conquest of Bread

to the best paid workman, this uncertainty for the morrow, in the midst of all the wealth inherited from the past, and i

sion, which has been the life of the human race before it had learned to subdue the forces of Nature. It is because, taking advantage of alleged rights acquired in the past, these few appropriate to-day two-thirds of the products of human labour, and then squander them in the most stupid and shameful way. It is because, having reduced the masses to a point at which they have not the means of subsisten

roots, have been transformed by generations of culture into succulent vegetables or trees covered with delicious fruits. Thousands of highways and railroads furrow the earth, and pierce the mountains. The shriek of the engine is heard in the wild gorges of the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Himalayas. The rivers have been made navigable; the coasts, carefully surveyed, are easy of access; artificial

ed and ill-treated by their masters, and worn out by toil

. Every rood of soil we cultivate in Europe has been watered by the sweat of several races of men. Every acre has its story of enforced la

ch prop in the underground galleries might be marked as a miner's grave; and who can tell what each of these graves has cost, in tears, in privati

tion of generations of its inhabitants before it could become what it is to-day. And even to-day, the value of each dwelling, factory, and warehouse, which has been created by the accumulated labour of the millions of workers, now dead and buried, is only maintained by the very presence and labour of legions of the men who now inhabit that special corner of the globe. Each of the atoms composing

e pride ourselves to-day. Other millions, scattered through the globe, labour

st and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, h

f our century could never have appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of scholars, of inventors, have themselves been supported by the labour of past centuries. The

genius proclaim the mechanical origin and the unity of the physical forces. And if we, children of the nineteenth century, have at last grasped this idea, if we know now how to apply it, it is again because daily experience has prepared the way. The thinkers of the eighteenth century saw and declared it, but the idea remained undeveloped, because the eighteenth century had not grown up like ours, side by side with the ste

ral generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless.

cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle-all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each inc

ppropriate the least morsel of this immen