they have the value of military demonstrations, and serve to mark the separation of classes. Everything in war is carried on without hatred and without the spirit of revenge: in war the vanquished are not killed; non-combatants are not made to bear the consequences of the disappointments which the armies may have experienced on the fields of battle;[1] force is then displayed according to its own nature, without ever professing to borrow anything from the judicial proceedings which society sets up against criminals.
The more Syndicalism develops, by abandoning the old superstitions which come to it from the Old Régime and from the Church—through the men of letters, professors of philosophy, and historians of the Revolution,—the more will social conflicts assume the character of a simple struggle, similar to those of armies on campaign. We cannot censure too severely those who teach the people that they ought to carry out the highly idealistic decrees of a progressive justice. Their efforts will only result in the maintenance of those ideas about the State which provoked the bloody acts of '93, whilst the idea of a class war, on the contrary, tends to refine the conception of violence.
IV
Syndicalism in France is engaged on an antimilitarist propaganda, which shows clearly the immense distance which separates it from Parliamentary Socialism in its conception of the nature of the State. Many newspapers believe that all this is merely an exaggerated humanitarian movement, provoked by the articles of Hervé; this is a
- ↑ I bring to notice here a fact which is perhaps not very well known: the Spanish war in the time of Napoleon was the occasion of innumerable atrocities, but Colonel Lafaille says that in Catalonia the murders and cruelties were never committed by Spanish soldiers who had been enlisted for some time and had become familiar with the usages of war (Mémoires sur les campagnes de Catalogne de 1808 à 1814, pp. 164–165).
