of it a class essentially religious. Christianity is its work and will
last as long as this class shall rule society. Seven or eight centuries
before Christ, when the bourgeoisie had its birth in the commercial
and industrial cities of the Mediterranean sea, we may observe the
elaboration of a new religion; the gods of paganism created by warrior
tribes could not be suited to a class consecrated to the production
and sale of merchandise. Mysterious cults (the mysteries of the
Cabiri, of Demeter, of Dionysus, etc.) revive the religious traditions
of the prehistoric matriarchical period; the idea of a soul and its
existence after death revive; the idea of posthumous punishments and
rewards to compensate for acts of social injustice are introduced,
etc. These religious elements, combined with the intellectual data of
Greek philosophy, contribute to form Christianity, the religion, _par
excellence_, of societies which have for their foundation property
belonging to the individual and the class which enrich themselves by
the exploitation of wage labor. For fifteen centuries all the movements
of the bourgeoisie, either for organization, or for self-emancipation,
or for the acquisition of power have been accompanied and complicated
by religious crises; but always Christianity more or less modified
remains the religion of society. The revolutionists of 1789, who in the
ardor of the struggle promised themselves to de-Christianize France,
were eager when the bourgeoisie were victorious to raise again the
altars they had overthrown and to reintroduce the cult that they had
proscribed.
The economic environment which produces the proletariat relieves
it on the contrary from every idea of sentiment. There is not seen
either in Europe nor in America among the laboring masses of the great
industries any anxiety to elaborate a religion to replace Christianity,
nor any desire to reform it. The economic and political organizations
of the working class are completely uninterested as to any doctrinal
discussion of religious and spiritual dogmas, although they combat the
priests of all cults because they are the lackeys of the capitalist
class.
The victory of the proletariat will deliver humanity from the nightmare
of religion. The belief in superior beings to explain the natural
world and the social inequality, and to prolong the dominion of the
ruling class, and the belief in the posthumous existence of the soul
to recompense the inequality of fate will have no more justification
once man, who has already grasped the general causes of the phenomena
of nature, shall live in a communist society from whence shall have
disappeared the inequality and the injustice of capitalistic society.
The militant socialists, following the example of the encyclopedists
of the eighteenth century, have to make a merciless criticism of the
economic, political, historical, philosophical, moral and religious
ideas of the capitalist class in order to prepare in all spheres
of thought the triumph of the new ideology which the proletariat
introduces into the world.
THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN
Capitalist Civilization has endowed the wage-worker with the
metaphysical Rights of Man, but this is only to rivet him more closely
and more firmly to his economic duty.
"I make you free," so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, "free to
earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free
to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you
ten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till
you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough
strength left to gulp down your soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You
have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the
right to pay taxes."
Progress and Civilization may be hard on wage-working humanity, but
they have all a mother's tenderness for the animals which stupid bipeds
call "lower."
Civilization has especially favored the equine race: it would be too
great a task to go through the long list of its benefactions; I will
name but a few, of general notoriety, that I may awaken and inflame the
passionate desires of the workers, now torpid in their misery.
Horses are divided into distinct classes. The equine aristocracy enjoys
so many and so oppressive privileges, that if the human-faced brutes
which serve them as jockeys, trainers, stable valets and grooms were
not morally degraded to the point of not feeling their shame, they
would have rebelled against their lords and masters, whom they rub
down, groom, brush and comb, also making their beds, cleaning up their
excrements and receiving bites and kicks by way of thanks.
Aristocratic horses, like capitalists, do not work; and when they
exercise themselves in the fields they look disdainfully, with a
coupon-clipper's contempt, upon the human animals which plow and seed
the lands, mow and rake the meadows, to provide them with oats, clover,
timothy and other succulent plants.
These four-footed favorites of Civilization command such social
influence that they impose their wills upon the capitalists, their
brothers in privilege; they force the loftiest of them to come with
their beautiful ladies and take tea in the stables, inhaling the acrid
perfumes of their solid and liquid evacuations. And when these lords
consent to parade in public, they require from ten to twenty thousand
men and women to stack themselves up on uncomfortable seats, under the
broiling sun, to admire their exquisitely chiseled forms and their
feats of running and leaping. They respect none of the social dignities
before which the votaries of the Rights of Man bow in reverence.
At Chantilly not long ago one of the favorites for the grand prize
launched a kick at the king of Belgium, because it did not like the
looks of his head. His royal majesty, who adores horses, murmured an
apology and withdrew.
It is fortunate that these horses, who can count more authentic
ancestors than the houses of Orleans and Hohenzollern, have not been
corrupted by their high social station: had they taken it into their
heads to rival the capitalists in aesthetic pretentions, profligate
luxury and depraved tastes, such as wearing lace and diamonds, and
drinking champagne and Chateau-Margaux, a blacker misery and more
overwhelming drudgery would be impending over the class of wage-workers.
Thrice happy is it for proletarian humanity that these equine
aristocrats have not taken the fancy of feeding upon human flesh,
like the old Bengal tigers which rove around the villages of India
to carry off women and children; if unhappily the horses had been
man-eaters, the capitalists, who can refuse them nothing, would have
built slaughter-houses for wage-workers, where they could carve out
and dress boy sirloins, woman hams and girl roasts to satisfy their
anthropophagic tastes.
The proletarian horses, not so well endowed, have to work for their
peck of oats, but the capitalist class, through deference for the
aristocrats of the equine race, concedes to the working horses rights
that are far more solid and real than those inscribed in the "Rights of
Man."
The first of rights, the right to existence, which no civilized society
will recognize for laborers, is possessed by horses.
The colt, even before his birth, while still in the fetus state, begins
to enjoy the right to existence; his mother, when her pregnancy has
scarcely begun, is discharged from all work and sent into the country
to fashion the new being in peace and comfort; she remains near him to
suckle him and teach him to choose the delicious grasses of the meadow,
in which he gambols until he is grown.
The moralists and politicians of the "Rights of Man" think it would
be monstrous to grant such rights to the laborers; I raised a tempest
in the Chamber of Deputies when I asked that women, two months before
and two months after confinement, should have the right and the means
to absent themselves from the factory. My proposition upset the ethics
of civilization and shook the capitalist order. What an abominable
abomination—to demand for babies the rights of colts.
As for the young proletarians, they can scarcely trot on their little
toes before they are condemned to hard labor in the prisons of
capitalism, while the colts develop freely under kindly Nature; care is
taken that they be completely formed before they are set to work, and
their tasks are proportioned to their strength with a tender care.
This care on the part of the capitalists follows them all through their
lives. We may still recall the noble indignation of the bourgeois
press when it learned that the omnibus company was using peat and
tannery waste in its stalls as a substitute for straw: to think of the
unhappy horses having such poor litters! The more delicate souls of
the bourgeoisie have in every capitalist country organized societies
for the protection of animals, in order to prove that they can not be
excited by the fate of the small victims of industry. Schopenhauer, the
bourgeois philosopher, in whom was incarnated so perfectly the gross
egoism of the philistine, could not hear the cracking of a whip without
his heart being torn by it.
This same omnibus company, which works its laborers from fourteen
to sixteen hours a day, requires from its dear horses only five to
seven hours. It has bought green meadows in which they may recuperate
from fatigue or indisposition. Its policy is to expend more for the
entertainment of a quadruped than for paying the wages of a biped. It
has never occurred to any legislator nor to any fanatical advocate of
the "Rights of Man" to reduce the horse's daily pittance in order to
assure him a retreat that would be of service to him only after his
death.
The Rights of Horses have not been posted up; they are "unwritten
rights," as Socrates called the laws implanted by Nature in the
consciousness of all men.
The horse has shown his wisdom in contenting himself with these rights,
with no thought of demanding those of the citizen; he has judged that
he would have been as stupid as man if he had sacrificed his mess of
lentils for the metaphysical banquet of Rights to Revolt, to Equality,
to Liberty, and other trivialities which to the proletariat are about
as useful as a cautery on a wooden leg.
Civilization, though partial to the equine race, has not shown herself
indifferent to the fate of the other animals. Sheep, like canons,
pass their days in pleasant and plentiful idleness; they are fed in
the stable on barley, lucerne, rutabagas and other roots, raised by
wage-workers; shepherds conduct them to feed in fat pastures, and when
the sun parches the plain, they are carried to where they can browse on
the tender grass of the mountains.
The Church, which has burned her heretics, and regrets that she can not
again bring up her faithful sons in the love of "mutton," represents
Jesus, under the form of a kind shepherd, bearing upon his shoulders a
weary lamb.
True, the love for the ram and the ewe is in the last analysis only
the love for the leg of mutton and the cutlet, just as the Liberty of
the Rights of Man is nothing but the slavery of the wage-worker, since
our jesuitical Civilization always disguises capitalist exploitation
in eternal principles and bourgeois egoism in noble sentiments; yet at
least the bourgeois tends and fattens the sheep up to the day of the
sacrifice, while he seizes the laborer still warm from the workshop
and lean from toil to send him to the shambels of Tonquin or Madagascar.
Laborers of all crafts, you who toil so hard to create your poverty
in producing the wealth of the capitalists, arise, arise! Since the
buffoons of parliament unfurl the Rights of Man, do you boldly demand
for yourselves, your wives and your children the Rights of the Horse.
THE END.
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│ Italicized words are surrounded by underline characters, _like │
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