The Bad Shepherds
By Octave Mirbeau
(Celebrated French man-of-letters, born 1850. A play, first
produced in 1897, with Sarah Bernhardt in the leading rôle, presenting
the class-struggle from the point of view of the anti-parliamentarian.
At the height of a desperate strike of steel-workers,
the leader of the strikers is addressing a secret gathering in a forest,
near a religious shrine)
Jean:—You reproach me—and this is the worst
charge you bring against me—that I refused the
meeting with the radical and socialist deputies who
wanted to mix up in our affair, and take the direction
of the strike?
Voices:—Yes—yes! Silence! Hear him!
Jean:—Your deputies! Ah, if you had seen them at work! And you, yourselves—have you forgotten the infamous rôle, the pitiful, sinister comedy they played in the last strike? How, having pushed the workers to a desperate resistance, they gave them up weakened, despoiled, bound hands and feet, to the master—the very day where a last effort, a last surge, would have compelled him, perhaps, to surrender? Ah, no indeed! I have not wished that intriguers, under the pretext of defending you, should come to impose upon you combinations—wherein you are nothing but a means to maintain and increase their political power—a prey to satisfy their political appetites! You have nothing in common with those people! Their interests are not any more yours—than those of the usurer and the creditor, of the assassin and his victim!
Voice:—Bravo! It's true! Down with politics! Down with the deputies!
