Читать книгу The Complete Works of Malatesta Vol. III - Errico Malatesta - Страница 30

Translated from “Primo sequestro. Due parole al fisco,”

L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1, no. 5 (April 12, 1897).

You impounded our last issue.155

Those who got the chance to read it will say whether or not there were grounds for that, and the jury will say, too—if you have the nerve and honesty to bring us before a popular jury.

This impoundment was wholly arbitrary, a really unlawful act.

We are not legalitarians, because… well, we shall not tell you the reason why lest it send you into a rage.

Even so, we have no intention of surrendering what few freedoms the people have won.

Too many freedoms have already been snatched from us because we’ve failed to exercise them and have allowed them to fall into disuse!

The law leaves us the right to make a newspaper and we avail of that right; and since we do so with the intention that it should be read rather than furnishing the police offices with waste paper, we strive to abide strictly within the limits of the law.

This has done us no good; you have impounded the abstract and theoretical expression of thought, to which the law takes no exception.

You have violated the law that you are called upon to uphold.

So be it. We have no effective means of requiring you to respect the law. We do have one consolation, though: you are making propaganda by deed against the law better than we ever could.

If in so doing you help educate the people in unlawfulness, you might even have our thanks for that. Will your masters be so thankful for it, though?

155 Besides the two articles cited already, two more articles and three reports were impounded.