DECLARATION OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING MEN’S ASSOCIATION

On the occasion of the last pretended complot, the French Government has not only arrested many members of our Paris and Lyons sections, but insinuated by its organs that the International Working Men’s Association is an accomplice of that pretended complot.

According to the tenor of our Statutes, it is certainly the special mission of all our branches in England, on the Continent, and in the United States, to act not only as centres for the organisation of the working class, but also to aid, in their different countries, all political movements tending to the accomplishment of our ultimate end, viz., the economical emancipation of the working class. At the same time, these Statutes bind all the sections of our Association to act in open daylight. If our Statutes were not formal on that point, the very nature of an Association which identifies itself with the working classes, would exclude from it every form of secret society. If the working classes, who form the great bulk of all nations, who produce all their wealth, and in the name of whom even the usurping powers always pretend to rule, conspire, they conspire publicly, as the sun conspires against darkness, in the full consciousness that without their pale there exists no legitimate power.

If the other incidents of the complot denounced by the French Government are as false and unfounded as its insinuations against the International Working Men’s Association, this last complot will worthily range with its two predecessors of grotesque memory. The noisy and violent measures against our French sections are exclusively intended serving one single purpose— the manipulation of the plebiscite.