The record[3] of the great anarchist trial at Lyons in 1883, to which we have already referred, is an historical document of the first importance. Every one who wishes to understand the causes, motives, and aims of the anarchist movement should study it carefully. At the trial a declaration of opinion was signed by the accused. The following extracts which give the purport of this declaration may be useful in elucidating the anarchist position. What they aim at is the most absolute freedom, the most complete satisfaction of human wants, without other limit than the impossibilities of Nature and the wants of their neighbours, equally worthy of respect. They object to all authority and all government on principle, and in all human relations would, in place of legal and administrative control, substitute free contract, perpetually subject to revision and cancelment. But, as no freedom is possible in a society where capital is monopolised by a diminishing minority, they believe that capital, the common inheritance of humanity, since it is the fruit of the co-operation of past and present generations, ought to be at the disposal of all, so that no man be excluded from it, and no man seize part of it to the detriment of the rest. In a word, they wish equality, equality of fact, as corollary, or rather as primordial condition of freedom. From each one according to his faculties; to each one according to his needs. They demand bread for all, science for all, work for all; for all, too, independence and justice. As one of the accused maintained, even a Government based on universal suffrage gives them no scope for effective action in the deliverance of the poor, as of the eight million electors of France only some half a million are in a position to give a free vote. In such a state of affairs, and in view of the continued misery and degradation of the proletariat, they proclaim the sacred right of insurrection as the _ultima ratio servorum_. Perhaps the most striking feature of the trial was the defence of Émile Gautier before the Court of Appeal. Gautier was described by the Public Prosecutor as a serious intelligence gone astray, a licentiate in law who had passed brilliant examinations, a powerful orator who might be considered as the apostle of the anarchist idea in France. He was only twenty-nine years of age. In his defence Gautier described with passionate eloquence how he, the son of a law-officer (_huissier_), had been converted to revolution and anarchism by the sight in court of the daily miseries of debtors and bankrupts and other victims of a capitalist society. As Voltaire is said to have had an attack of fever at every anniversary of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, so he, far away in Brittany, was seized with a fever of rage and of bitter indignation when the calendar brought round the accursed dates at which bills and rents became due.