The other Monday walking on Victoriei Road I met "a friend". It is a well-known fact that today any guy you treat to a glass of wine at Fialkowsky's or who is in the delightful habit of bumming two or three lei from you is called a friend. Last year, this guy borrowed my overcoat "for a day" and from that moment on I was no longer blessed with his presence.When he laid eyes on me he first tried to look like he hadn't noticed me or didn't know me at all, stopping within a respectful distance and, observing me with that curiosity mingled with fear usually imprinted on the visage of individuals stricken by a catching disease, he uttered:"You know, my man, you made mincemeat of our youth in your lampoon!""And wasn't I right?" I asked him."Well! It's…it's (and turning his eyes suspiciously all around, only to put on a indeterminate air while apparently scanning a fourth dimension): You see, it's not that you're not right but what will the other countries say. And then you show anti-national sentiments when you attack those who…Well, you'll say that…"At that moment a guy with a sort of an army cap and brass buttons got near us. "The friend" left me instantly, murmuring a song and looking as if he hadn't even dreamt of talking to such a guy so dangerous and so compromised like me.This "friendly" mumble-jumble and many other things prompt me to slip into a quite long digression which was not part of my primitive plan.I have promised, beloved readers, that I'll tell you only the bluntest of truths that wouldn't let me in peace in my quiet solitude and I believe I have kept my promise. As I said last Sunday I wrote this rather for my own satisfaction than for your pleasure.Consequently, you will have to put up, willy-nilly, with all my digressions. My excursion is the more appropriate as the editor of the Literary Truth seems to share the same fears with the friend encountered on Victoriei Road since he deleted from my lampoon some ten or fifteen lines in which I denounced certain doings of our clamorous and "patriotic" youth.The respectable Tony can in no way be suspected of excessive infatuation with our worthy revolutionaries but now even he, poor soul, has started dabbling in politics and diplomacy. It can't be helped! It's the background! A country of gloss and pellagra! Oh, homeland of Hamletian piglets and political pigeons!I was too harsh? Prove me wrong!What will the other countries say? What do we care if we are rotten to the bone? Will we rot less is the other countries ignore it? Hasn't a student during the meeting of the Buzau Congress said that with us the apple is putrid? He has then added that only the seeds are wholesome but that unfortunately these seeds are not "society seeds", they do not come from among the decent ones!Otherwise I wouldn't have plunged into passive vegetation, I wouldn't have shut myself up in a solitary cell. I wouldn't have been hypochondriac, nothing but a hypochondriac observer! You can constrain me to silence but you won't make me bend the truth for the sake of all jingoistic patriotism, empty and flaunting!This dread of the other countries is characteristic. Here is a doctor who exacts illegal fees. The government cries: He must be punished for "what will the other countries say?" A minister takes bribes and the opposition shouts loud: Kick him out for "what will the other countries say?" A gang of thieves robs the citizens and steal the children. We all vociferate: "Catch them for otherwise we'll be compromised before the other countries!"It is not corruption and theft as such that are castigated and arouse protests, not the evil in itself that outrages us but the possibility to be disapproved by the other countries! We are like that man who has no consciousness of his dignity (for who else could know his worth better?) but is very careful that people "don't speak ill of him…" What a contradiction between the real nature and the appearance, between das and Sein das Schein, as a German philosopher would put it! This is another facet of how morally decayed are the superposed layers in this country. This I shall explain in due time.I cannot fail to mention here an insignificant yet characteristic fact which shows how we go about it, "in our country, in our family", how we treat those few merit-worthy people we have when the fear is missing that the indiscreet gaze of other countries will penetrate behind the scene of the national life.A fortnight ago I went to Iasi and I found accommodation at the big Hotel Traian. My eyes were drawn to a marble statue displayed at the ground floor window. It represented Vanity (a young woman barely out of bed since naked, looking into the mirror with pleasure and satisfaction). It was undoubtedly the work of an artist sculptor, not an ordinary craftsman. Thinking that the statue had been brought from a foreign country, in my quality as hypochondriac, I was about to launch into a Philippic against the insane luxury that is our ruin and enables furniture stores to trade in works of genuine art brought from abroad. To my great surprise on the pedestal of the statue I read: Tronescu Iasi, 1893. What? Iasi has original artists sculptors who can support themselves, producing beautiful and original marble statues? Who is Tronescu and how come I don't know him? Alack! Soon I learnt that the marble Vanity did not disown my hypochondria.I found Tronescu in a small, dark and frigid room. In a corner there was a ten-years-old girl who was sewing something and close to the only window in the room the artists was working on the bust of Cobalcescu. Everything decried stark poverty: their less, oh, less than modest attire, the almost complete absence of furniture, their pale and worn-out faces, the artist's gray hair spoke volumes that broke my heart. I could not say a word and I went out in a hurry.He must have thought I was just a curious visitor.Later I was told an extremely melancholy story, in fact, downright tragic.That man had been meanly deceived. He had been sent to Italy to improve his art with a view to having him teach at the beaux arts school in the locality After staying there for several years he returned to the country with an ardent desire to serve in this branch of activity although in Italy he had managed to get an excellent post. When he returned home his position had been shed.Left without any means, facing the most forbidding poverty, after he had depleted his Italian savings he was eventually thrown out in the street. His wife died. He was forced to cut his own wood and bring water from a remote source. The little girl I had seen did the laundry and the cooking.Yet the fire of artistic inspiration had not died in him. Whenever he could extract himself from the daily chores he sculpted something. Now his production sells for next to nothing. His last work, the fruit of eight years, displayed in the window of Hotel Traian has found no buyer although its price is ridiculously small. He has been forgotten and is now an unknown name.I don't know if anything will be done for this man. Unless they fear what other countries might say…O, rubber patriots ready to root even for national failures, aren't you ashamed of yourselves? No, you're not capable of shame…And you dare accuse me of being anti-patriotic and anti-national for the simple reason of having told the truth about those who raise Cain, and fish for banquets and parties, coming short not even of shameful scandals? Yes, I do not wish to have anything to do with the species of Hamletian piglets with budgetary appetites. But you lie when you say I do not love the people on whose work I and my hypochondria live, just like those with an easy conscience chew at the budget, drinking the blood and the sweat of those paying them. You lie when you say that I betray the interests of the masses of Romanians because I castigate the shameful behavior of all hypocrite knaves, and nationalist midgets.There are various types of nationalism.Some dream of a greater and free Romania so that the circle of preferential customs be favorable to the national economy be wider.Others calculate that the double number of tax-payers will two times facilitate their feathering their nests at the expense of the budget, as well as any administrative and constitutional robbery. And still others think of "national glory" (?) if the Romanian king is called the king of Dacia, etc. etc.All this type of "national sentiments" leave me cold because I fail to understand to what extent such goals will foster the happiness and the well-being of our people, to what extent they will actually enhance the capacity of cultural expansion of the Romanian nation.For a certain nation to participate in the progress of mankind it absolutely needs an unhampered development of its national life: this is its lawful right. A people cannot shed its language, its particular way of thinking and feeling without hurting its cultural and civilizing progress Because as long as there exist several nations all the assets of overall human civilization can be accessible only to the extent they are assimilated into the national culture, to the extent they are nationalized.From this point of view the crisis undergone by the Romanian incorporated in the Austro-Hungarian empire (…) is of capital import for the future of our progress and the national question is only a facet of the big question of culture and general progress of the Romanian people.This is what all the honorable revolutionaries fail to understand, and that is why their spurious cries in their rush after banquets and good pay fill me with so much disdain and revulsion. It is they who are the actual anti-patriots and anti-nationalist, not I for all my hypochondria.This is how I replied to all the friendly insinuations of the Hamletian piglets.In the next installments we shall see the motives why the "cultivated" section of the Romanian society, marrowless, debauched and pessimistic can hardly undertake the cultural mission.Do not think I say this with malice pretense for indeed it is a sad thing and gladly would I wish it were different. If my words are harsh it is not because of my hypochondria. None of the conditions that forced the cultivated stratum in Britain or in Russia to acquire a more humane likeness is in place in Romania.Our industrial proletariat is too sparse and the Romanian workers, in general, too meager, unorganized and too remote from the consciousness of its class interest. Thus, these workers were not able to put the scrimp on the bourgeoisie so that, for fear of "the red ghost" as Schofle put it, this class should get humanized and socially repentant in order to save its fine and delicate skin from the claws of the rebellious rabble; nor was it able to spare the intellectual proletariat the rush to have more fingers in the budget pie, assuring payment for the services and dedication to the cause of the suffering masses.On the other hand, our cultivated stratum does in no way go through the troubles of that in Russia so that the cries and wailing of the masses can strike an echo in its "tender" heart. On the contrary. In this country it can satisfy all the appetites of the human beast, it can indulge unbridledly in all the yearnings of its "frail and noble" nature, it can, "sans peur ni reproche" cultivate all the beauties of the national balderdash! A former high dignitary under the Liberals told me once: "But this country is heaven on earth!" He said this although under the Conservatories he has to restrain his fleshly lusts…But then the ex-high dignitary is right. The cultivated Romanian bourgeois makes merry like in paradise! But let us take a closer look at this paradise and observe how this person has descended from that bourgeois heaven unto the geographic sausage known as "free Romania".When one studies the history of Romania one is struck from the first by the huge influence on our domestic relations held by the intrusion of various foreign powers. Because of these phenomena obtaining in our national development it is not possible to disentangle from the complex of domestic and foreign relations what is due to the own strengths of this country and what is imposed by others.Among the major reasons accounting for this we can mention:1.The rather backward cultural and economic state of this people; thus, as a rule, economic and social forms were imposed on us, generally devised by more advanced countries.2. Our geographic position in the Orient at the crossroads of political and economic interests of the powerful peoples in the West and in the North, which prompted in them the desire to seize this piece of land.3. The fact that we are a small people deprived us of the ability to forcefully oppose the direct interference in our domestic affairs.But this has always been so. From time out of mind our superposed classes had got used to subject the country to one or another, turning it into the battlefield of international wars. Then in the 19th century when because of the triumphal march of the bourgeois social structure international relations developed and compounded ever more, the influence of various political, economic and social trends from Western Europe waxed stronger and stronger in Romania. (It is no accident that in the Paris Treaty as well as in the Berlin one, the European powers took so much interest in the domestic organization of the Romanian state!)Even the celebrated dates in our history, the ones that we take so much pride in or at least about which we clamor big in newspapers and political meetings, i.e. 1848 and 1864, can at best make up a chapter in the history of our foreign relations rather than be a natural result of our developing national, political, economic and social life.These dates meant the victory won by Western Europe over Russia, they meant the forced destruction of feudal political and social forms and the introduction of the bourgeois ones.The European bourgeoisie, on top of the situation at home could and wanted no longer to bear with an Oriental-feudal Romania. Therefore it introduced here – because of its political and economic interests – a capitalist "civilization" the same way it pushed opium into China, brandy and syphilis in the Polynesian islands…ad majorem gloriam of the progress, belly and pocket of the bourgeoisie.Little did the Western bourgeoisie care about the interests of the Romanian people. It left it to the unquenched appetites of those who consented to be its too obedient instruments and play the role of bourgeois leaven in the feudal society until then.And a very sad thing happened: the household industry was supplanted by cheap European goods. The peasants get ever day more ruined by the American and Indian competition, and the freshly born Romanian bourgeoisie doesn't know how to organize national production on capitalist bases and cannot do it either.And still, although production is going bust, the concentration of riches makes huge progress but not as an effect of capitalization and centralization of production but as an outcome of direct tricks: look for the sources of our billionaires' colossal fortunes that mushroom overnight. Seldom will you find these based on other than sheer fraud, forgery, disreputable speculations, indirect robbery and theft through constitutionally and administratively encroaching on the budget. Look at our political life: it is reduced to fierce battles for dividing the emoluments extracted from the miserable tax-payers. Our historical parties are nothing but gangs organized to concentrate the national riches. To this end, all the crimes and misdemeanors possible are committed daily with exquisite shamelessness and no fear of punishment. Listen to the most abject incriminations hurled by the government in the face of the opposition (irrespective of party) and vice versa from the parliamentary rostrum! And both seem to believe that their recriminations are very well founded.And what could stop them? That flimsy paper in which so many splendid yet vain sentences are written bearing the pompous name of Constitution? The working masses, pauperized, unconscious, disorganized? "Our statesmen", who regularly trample the Constitution mind the working people just as much as "society ladies", encroaching the seventh command (which, as guardians of the bourgeois morals these ladies very consciously "observe") mind their servants! Can shame there be felt in the face of the vulgus or "the decent people"?"Europe"? Well, bourgeois Europe too often put its feet in our national slate, and its adoptive daughter, the Romanian bourgeoisie knows how to respect it. "Europe" is the watchdog of our lofty requirements of progress and civilization (the boons of the most favored nation) but if there everybody is given their due, "our statesmen" have carte blanche, the only thing being that "appearances be saved". Hence the eternal music "what will the other countries say?"This is the paradise in which the Romanian bourgeoisie revels!How about "the cultivated stratum"?This is flesh of the flesh and bone of the bone of the bourgeoisie. They practically cannot be told apart. Their responsibilities are the same since the cultivated elite in Romania is nothing but the avant-garde of the rabble; it supplies lawyers, magistrates, professors, inspectors, statesmen; bending to catch a piece of the public treasury, more or less fat, it perpetrates and condones every infamy, every theft and direct or indirect larceny by the national bourgeois regime.Such being the case let us fathom for one moment the murky soul of a cultivated youth. He is a trustworthy son of this twilight epoch, a natural emanation of the national bourgeois pilfering impotency. He is irritated, depraved, has an insatiable desire to strike it rich, to occupy a driving seat at life's dinner party. But in Romania "honest work", even in the genre of the European bourgeoisie, simply won't…work. With us, life's dinner party is the party of direct and indirect pilfering and thieving. And for this, he must not shy from any possible dirty aspiration, he must stoop to every kind of humiliation, to every ass-kissing and sneakiness, and pass through the fire and water of moral sordidness.But he simply cannot do all this with an easy consciousness! It's a months of Sundays since the French rabble got down to work to faithfully fulfill the eleventh commandment of the bourgeois king Louis-Philippe: "enrichissez-vous!" Our youth has dabbled in the sources of contemporary European science. Perhaps he has studied abroad. He lives in an epoch when the surging indignation of the working masses, awakened to conscious life, forced even the heirs to thrones and the holders of ministerial portfolios to call themselves socialist. He has in front of him the grandiose edifice of a new social philosophy, coming up the entrails of humankind's historical evolution. This philosophy is placed on such solid bases and it has acquired such a considerable intrinsic power that it imposes itself. He cannot, unless he is an absolute and eternal jackass, fail to recognize its burning truths despite the fact that he is plunged into different social circumstances, and different songs. Deep down he recognizes these truths. He accepts that the claims of the oppressed crowd are just, he sees the ever augmenting revolutionary flow, he knows that the days of the sinful society of today are numbered…He recognizes, admits, sees, "knows it all", understand everything and…his own impotency is bathed in a blinding light!What should he do? His heart is void and frigid, his moral nature is depleted, his cravings unassuaged, and he cannot control them since he is controlled by them. Because they force him to join the rat race, fighting for fat pay checks and dividends for free, for a sinecure with all its sad, destructive consequences. Should he take up the post of social reformer, a specially difficult task, especially in Romania? Should he put up with the oppression, the hatred, misery, abject poverty? No, it's out of the question!Look deep into this devastated soul: think what powerful self depreciation must govern it!Man, whatever they may say, feels the need to respect himself and if this is not possible he makes more-than-human efforts to hide it from people. To delude others and even himself, if possible. And so we see him parading deep pessimism, mocking everything and everybody with terrible cynicism, plunging deep in mud, hoping that thus he may get a tad of justification for his wild, shameless pursuit of a godsend!It seems to me though that the characteristic of the psychic life of the Romanian cultivated stratum is not genuine, sincere pessimism but parade pessimism, more or less brazen, that I called Hamletian roguery.A genuine pessimist can be frank, honest. He is always sad, melancholy. He can preserve the consciousness of his dignity. More, he often feels superior to the other people because he believes he has perfectly realized the vanity of the world. We are familiar with Schopenhauer's proud anger: when his major work Die Welt als Wille was ignored for 30 years he used to say that book of his was above the abilities of his contemporaries, that only after several generations would people be able to read and understand it.A Hamletian rogue actually feels a huge urge to live. He can perfectly indulge in the pleasures of life. He spares nothing to be able to obtain them in as much and as varied an amount and what bugs him is the very fact that he cannot do it without trampling on his consciousness, without despising himself. His pessimism is nothing but a comfortable cloak recommended by his depraved and irritating egotism. He lays down his arms only when it suits him. From the rostrum he castigates in vibrant words "the Hungarian infamy" and he is the one who also says: "Balderdash! I still want a career! Though everything's a hill of beans!" He sings bellicose songs and raises hell when he is asked to pass an exam to become a reserve officer. He is ready to orchestrate a theft in order to curry the favors of the prefect. He can commit himself a petty robbery right during a patriotic meeting only to drink one more bottle of champagne. In his abject servility before the superior he does not shy from calling corrupt the whole teaching staff, because of doing only what pleases them, yet being deprived of independence and personal dignity. At the same time, he insinuates everything should bore down to ministerial preferences, with a reduction of the teachers' independence, to make their social condition more humiliating. He is the one who translates pessimistic treaties and demoralizes school girls, overstepping his professorial authority. Again and again he puts on airs of salvatore della patria from the plague of socialism and avails himself of his edge (as a political chief) before the government and the magistrates in order to play the faultless advocate. And all this under the mask of pessimism and disdain for life and people!Yes, Hamletian roguery is a much sadder and worrisome social symptom than pessimism. It betrays a festering social and moral state, poisoned right at the sources of social life, and it fills the whole atmosphere of society with unbearable whiffs.What is to be done? Don't ask a hypochondriac about it. He wouldn't be a hypochondriac if he was able to answer this.For more than ten years I have been looking for such an answer, for more than ten years I have tried everything the poor strengths of an ordinary man allowed. To no avail!One cannot expect from a class disinterested abnegation, or dedication to interests alien to it. But the cultivated bourgeois in Romania is so dissolute that he cannot even understand his true class interests. It cannot be denied, for example, that the national question closely touches these interests. Despite this, our nationalism is limited to exclamation and interjection marks at the European public opinion. The cultivated Romanians do not understand that "Europe" couldn't care less about the national interests of the Romanians, that it will take them under consideration only if they hid behind the real and material strengths of the whole people and not some mere disorderly growls from a handful of people… Yet the cultivated Romanians go on pursuing the forefathers' policy pinning all their hopes on diplomatic tricks and "the European flare-up" without thinking at least of the need to improve the material, political and cultural state of the people so that it has a bigger actual power and it gets directly and deeply interested in the free development of the national culture.If the cultivated class did this it would mean it works in its own interest though it would have with it all the wholesome elements still existing in the Romanian nation, capable of honest and disinterested dedication.But all this is a trifle for the patriotic cultivated class. It believes that the thing is whom to join outside: the triple or the double alliance? But when it comes to universal suffrage and direct taxation – reforms that would hugely contribute to the improvement of the economic, political and cultural plight of the people, strengthening its national life by and large – then the so-called nationals and liberals cry: Out! And the cultivated and enthusiastic youth gives them ovations!Oh, how much good faith is involved here and how much sincere belief in… the vital power of the Romanian people, in its future!You understand now, my honorable readers, why I am a hypochondriac and I can no longer put up with the "active life"?Oh, the cultivated socialist stratum! You will see right away what this means and you will realize it could not contribute to healing the wounds of my hypochondriac soul. But enough now for I am loath speaking in vain, and I definitely know I am shooting my mouth in vain! VII Before addressing the cultivated socialist stratum I shall resume what I said in the previous installment since I did not have enough space to do it then.We have seen that all the flowers of our political and social life – with that nose-oppressing perfume, specific and national, that can stifle any fresh man – had to grow necessarily in the forefathers' soil influenced by the living conditions imposed on us by the European bourgeoisie through the destruction of the "local" structures.Following this annihilation plus the removing of tall caps and long coats a handful of new men came to the helm of our national ship, who should form the core of the local bourgeoisie but which could not, did not know how or were not able to organize production on capitalist bases. Thus a social condition flared up in Romania analogue to that is known in sociology under the name of primitive accumulation of riches and is characterized by frightful crimes and spoliation which nobody in modern Western Europe can even imagine. (Except those who, obviously, have the happy opportunity to see from close up "the civilizing action of Europe" in central Africa or in other colonies, inhabited by "savage" people.) Close to the source of "living water" springing from under the buskins of the peasant, the sole tax payer and producer, there rose our ruling parties fighting for the very beneficent veins of this source fiercely, passionately and obstinately like you have never seen in civilized countries.The bourgeois classes in the various European states are no less to blame for having directly interfered in our party bickering, each having their own favorites and protégés, as dictated by their particular interests. This explains why we so often hear the heads of our parties bandying beautiful epithets like "traitor of the homeland" and "quisling".It cannot be otherwise for our political parties have too little root in the people and cannot be bothered to see to boosting its vital powers.All this led the Romanian bourgeoisie to that demoralizing, to that complete moral putrefaction I presented in these installments and which enabled a foreign traveler to define the Romanian cultivated stratum by the following verses:Les hommes sans honeurLes femmes sans pudeur!Our young but putrid bourgeoisie actually features all the vices of a decaying society and all the savageries of barbarism; it has withered before blossoming.If the smart ones in this rotten stratum, frightened, – in the dazzling light of the grandiose ideals of a future Europe, – by their own moral morass, and also in order to justify themselves, parade a sort of pessimism then they, naturally, find a very favorable ground, admirable prepared by the social conditions I have striven to present, among the multitude of dolts and wimps in whose empty skulls there never has been a single idea, in whose dormant consciousness there has never emerged the vaguest trace of shame or remorse and who, despite all these, perfectly acquire the cynical gesticulation of Hamletian swine! They are the unmoved pillars of "the good order and social peace". The ideals of humankind cannot touch them. They cannot even conceive them because they are sheltered from succumbing to any "subversive ideas".Let us see now what are those "cultivated youths" to whom such ideas and ideals have come through. The socialist cultivated stratum with us is actually nothing but an insignificant ramification of the bourgeois cultivated stratum and it differs very little from it in what regards the moral and intellectual traits and the political and social character.It is not made up of vigorous elements, coming from the working people, like a Bebel, a Cavaignac, a Burns, or a Tom Man nor from the enthusiastic bourgeois, deeply imbued with the workers' interests and leading the popular claims, like a Liebknecht, a Lafargue, a Sidney Webb. For a part of the cultivated bourgeois stratum socialism is nothing but a passing seething of blood in one's prime, a sort of toothing fever before cutting all wisdom teeth.And how fast these tooth grow, how swift the most terrible socialist get wise!The curriculum vitae of a socialist-educated youth can be resumed in a very few words.In the final high school years or in the first year of university "a cultivated a generous youth" reads two or three issues of The Work and two or three socialist brochures, and gets over-enthusiastic.He feels an implacable hatred against the bourgeois social order and can see with his mind's eyes "the future society".His socialist store of knowledge is limited to two or three insufficiently ruminated clichés: "class struggle", "workers unite!", "infamous bourgeoisie". He does not understand very well these words, does not think too much, and does not criticize the real relations to which he would like to apply these. Yet he uses them to carve away at the living flesh of the "capitalist society" making no bones about it if he misses the mark. So, his unfailing logic makes him assert one day that "there is no real bourgeoisie in Romania because there is no capitalist production" and the other that "there is no real working class for the same reason, because peasants and craftsmen are petty bourgeois, some having land the others a small 'capital' (ax, scissors, chisel!)" But never mind this he can operate with a sort of socialism that features no bourgeoisie and no workers, just "a class struggle"! Have you ever suffered, my dear readers, an unpleasant nauseating feeling when listening to a miserable hurdy-gurdy man playing a great opera air that some other time, when performed by a genuine artist actually brought enthusiastic tears to your eyes?Despite this in the first stage of their evolution our socialist-bourgeois or bourgeois-socialist youth still endeavors to read something, to make propaganda. They write as best they can socialist articles, and from the money they usually spend in restaurants they bring their share to the socialist party's till. Graduation exams approach now. Socialism wanes, and guys remember they are poor, and they need their little jobs. So they quiet down, they no longer yell bloody murder, write fewer articles and change their pen-name quite often, chip in less to the party till (they must produce a good impression on those who distribute worldly goods, and never lower their rank), and they stop doing propaganda all in all.Here they are with a diploma in their pocket. But where are those happy days! The race for a more consistent pay has started! When one has hundreds, one needs thousands. When one has thousands one needs "a yet safer position". They have become so tame. It is to no avail that the management of the Labor magazine appeals desperately to the "cultivated stratum", to no avail that the General Council of the socialist-democratic party of the workers in Romania declares that all those who fail to pay their share will be excluded from the party. Labor gets filled with highly topical articles, with fanciful articles on burning issues such as bees, or Karl Marx's speech on free trade, or classes with the Jews by Zetterbaum, and the till of the General Council stays empty.What is left of the valiant socialists of yore? Very little: sovereign disdain for "the infamous bourgeoisie" and guarded criticism of al those who are doing something. ("he could do everything better even with his eyes shut, etc., etc.)In any other respect there is no difference between himself and any other punk from the cultivated bourgeois stratum: the same manner of life, the same cynicism and dissolution, the same absence of guiding principles in the daily life, the same appetites and the same means to satisfy them.I have seen clerks who call themselves socialist and during work hours they slap a farmer or two; I have seen socialists in the countryside who, taking advantage of their social position sleep with women and girls in villages like a mean uncultivated tenant. I have seen socialists who can break plates in the heads of their servants like any grocer or a retired army captain. I have seen socialists playing the role of electoral agents under order from some corrupt and obedient policeman…What do you want? As a socialist he is above all the bourgeois parties since for him all these are the same. So even during police meetings he can speak in favor of the government and against the opposition! But in his intimate circle he is still a socialist, and preserves the right to "toast a glass to the health of the social revolution."All this is quite comfortable, isn't it? It seems that for this sort of "cultivated youths" the purpose of socialist etiquette is to perpetrate every "bourgeois infamy" possible with more peace of mind than an actual bourgeois. And if it becomes at all an obstacle on the way of promotion then one can declare without feeling the least embarrassed that one is a socialist only in ideal, while by party one is with the Youth faction, whereas in political action one is conservatory (if the Conservatory are in power, naturally.) And what if this doesn't work any longer and you want to become a statesman? Then you take one step more: you simply become a Hamletian pig. You have tried and tried and finally have come to the conclusion that in this sinful country "nothing can be done". "Socialism with us cannot be a practical solution", so beware public treasury, here I come! The wisdom teeth have grown so big by now!And you know how the simple, humbled people judge the whole socialist party according to this category of "cultivated socialists?"I once had a conversation with a poor postman who brought me the paper."To what political party do you belong?" I asked him among others. "For whom do you vote?""Well, governor, to none. And I vote as the postmaster tells me.""Why, my brother, don't you think some are better and others are worse?""Well, bless you, the Liberals seem a little wilder than the government. The radicals are even more feisty, the socialist even more than the radicals, but they all, bless your soul, steal when they are in power, and raise hell when in the opposition…""Exactly, my man, but when did you see socialists steal? You know any socialist?""They don't steal because they're not in the driving seat. I know a socialist. I live close to Mr. X. When he speaks to you about the bourgeoisie, how they fleece you, my hair stands on end..""Who's this Mr. X?""A professor who lives with the wife of the landlord, hi-hi-hi. The man is not any the wiser but you should see the money the woman spends on her lover…"So gentlemen, do not talk to me about "Byzantine morality", fanaticism and sectarianism. Do not talk to me about the influence of the milieu, that in the present society one cannot live without making concessions because one has to eat, etc., etc.I understand we cannot ask anyone to become a martyr. But at least be modest if you are sincere. Don't speak arrogantly of "the role of the cultivated stratum for the transformation of society", every day trampling human morality, basic human morals in the chase after life's pleasures, after thousands of easy picks! You come before the working masses in sackcloth and ashes. You are allowed only one language before these masses: "We know that we are sinful, rotten. We cannot do our duty fully, we cannot renounce the sweetness of our boyar life so receive us as we are. Do not turn down the contribution we make. You should believe that deep in our dark consciousness there is an inkling of shame and social repentance."Oh, you have a wax nose and you don't want to do anything!I don't understand a socialist who does not feel an elementary respect for human dignity, a burst of love for the actual people around him. I do not believe in the honesty of
