None the less it is easy to comprehend why this sort of philosophy, illustrated and punctuated by the keenest criticism and sarcasm on the wrongs and injustice of our existing society, produced a great effect. The commonest incidents of everyday life were made the text for vitriolic sermonising on the shortcomings of statesmen and judges, priests and police, industrial capitalists and mine-owners. Here and there, also, a description of working-class life is given, so accurate, so vivid, so telling that administrators of the easiest conscience were led to feel uncomfortable at the kind of social system with which they had been hitherto satisfied. With no phase of French life is Clemenceau better acquainted than with the habits and customs of the French peasantry. Thus we have a description of the peasant tacked on to a nice little story of a poor fellow who, strolling along the highway on a hot day and feeling thirsty, plucks a few cherries from the branch of a cherry-tree which overhangs the road. The small proprietor is on the look-out for such petty depredations and at once kills the atrocious malefactor who had thus plundered him. The cherry-eater "had despoiled him of two-ha'porth of fruit!" It justified prompt execution of the thief by the owner. That such small robbery did not at once give the latter the power of life and death over the thief is a point of view that the peasant can never take. Why? Because of the penal servitude for life to which he is condemned by the very conditions of his existence, and the greed for property driven into him from birth to death. It is the outcome of private ownership: the result of the fatal saying, "This is mine." "The peasant is the man of one idea, of a sole and solitary love. Bowed, he knows only the earth. His activity has but one end and object: the soil. To acquire it, to own it, that is his life, harsh and rapacious. He speaks of _my_ land, _my_ field, _my_ stones, _my_ thistles. To till, to manure, to sow the land, to mow, to uproot, to prime, to cut what comes from the land, that is the eternal object of his entire physical or intellectual effort. Amusement for him: not a bit of it. He has no other resource than to console himself for the disappointment of to-day with the hope of to-morrow. He is at war with the seasons, the elements, the sun, rain, hail, wind, frost. He fights against the neighbouring intruder, the invading cattle, the birds, the caterpillars, the parasites, the thousand-and-one unknown phenomena which, without any apparent reason, bring down upon him all sorts of unlooked-for ills.