Seeing the constant interest you take in the questions raised with 
regard to the coming International Working Men’s Congress, I 
hope you will allow a Frenchman and a Member of the so-called 
Marxist Organisation of France (Agglomération Parisienne), to say 
a few words in reply to a circular published in the Bulletin of the 
Paris Labour Exchange and reproduced in English, in Justice of 
April 27th. 

Now the Paris Labour Exchange is an out and out Possibilist 
institution. They have got hold of it with the help of the 
Opportunist and Radical Members *** of the Paris Town Council, 
and every trades union which dares openly oppose Possibilist 
principles and tactics, is at once excluded. This above mentioned 
circular, though issued in the name of 78 Paris Trades Unions, is 
therefore quite as much a Possibilist production as if issued by the 
Possibilist Committee themselves. 

This circular calls upon “all the working class organisations of 
France, without distinction of the shades of Republican or Socialist 
opinion,” to join in the Possibilist Congress. Now this seems fair 
enough. And as our section of the French Socialists has driven the 
Possibilists entirely out of the provinces, so much so that they 
dared not attend their own Congress at Troyes, as soon they 
heard that we were to be admitted, and as our organisations in the 
provinces are by far more numerous than all the Possibilist 
organisations in France put together, no doubt we should have the 
majority of French delegates even in this Possibilist Congress, if a 
fair basis of representation was secured. But there’s the rub. The 
Possibilist Committee have made heaps of regulations for their 
Congress, but this most important point is never mentioned. 

Nobody knows whether each group is to send one, two, or more 
delegates, or whether the number of delegates is to be regulated 
by the number of members in each group. Now, as the Possibilists 
are acknowledged to be strongest in Paris, they might send two or 
three delegates for each group, where we, in our simplicity, send 
only one. They may manufacture as many delegates as they like. 
They have them ready at hand in Paris, and need merely 
nominate them. And thus, with all this apparent fairness, the 
French section of the Congress may be turned into a packed set of 
Possibilists, who might treat us as they liked, unless we had an 
appeal to the Congress. 

For this reason alone we could not give up the sovereignty of | 
the Congress with regard to all its internal concerns, if, indeed, 
that first and fundamental principle could be given up. It is not 
quite forgotten in London yet, I believe, that the Parliamentary 
Committee,*” last November, made it pretty clearly understood 
that they had hired the room, and that the Congress **° was there 
at their sufferance—and we do not want to have that repeated in 
Paris.