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Title: The Cry for Justice - An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest
Author: Various
Language: English
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[Illustration: THE HEAVY SLEDGE
MAHONRI YOUNG
(_American sculptor, born 1877_)]
THE CRY FOR JUSTICE
An Anthology of the Literature
of Social Protest
THE WRITINGS OF PHILOSOPHERS, POETS, NOVELISTS,
SOCIAL REFORMERS, AND OTHERS WHO HAVE
VOICED THE STRUGGLE AGAINST
SOCIAL INJUSTICE
_SELECTED FROM TWENTY-FIVE LANGUAGES_
Covering a Period of Five Thousand Years
Edited by
UPTON SINCLAIR
_Author of "Sylvia," "The Jungle," Etc._
With an Introduction by
JACK LONDON
_Author of "The Sea Wolf," "The Call of the Wild,"
"The Valley of the Moon," Etc., Etc._
_ILLUSTRATED WITH REPRODUCTIONS
OF SOCIAL PROTEST IN ART_
PUBLISHED BY
UPTON SINCLAIR
NEW YORK CITY AND PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
Dr. John R. Haynes, of Los Angeles, very generously purchased
from the publishers the plates and copyright of this book, in
order to make possible the issuing of this edition. I asked
Dr. Haynes if he would let me make acknowledgment to him in
the book, and he answered: "Dedicate the book to those unknown
ones, who by their dimes and quarters keep the Socialist
movement going; to the poor and obscure people who sacrifice
themselves in order to bring about a better world, which they
may never live to see. Write this as eloquently as you can,
and it will be the best possible dedication to 'The Cry for
Justice'."
I decided, after thinking it over, to combine my own idea with
the idea of Dr. Haynes.
Copyright, 1915, by
THE JOHN C. WINSTON CO.
Introduction by Jack London
This anthology, I take it, is the first edition, the first
gathering together of the body of the literature and art of the
humanist thinkers of the world. As well done as it has been
done, it will be better done in the future. There will be much
adding, there will be a little subtracting, in the succeeding
editions that are bound to come. The result will be a monument
of the ages, and there will be none fairer.
Since reading of the Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud has
enabled countless devout and earnest right-seeking souls to be
stirred and uplifted to higher and finer planes of thought and
action, then the reading of this humanist Holy Book cannot fail
similarly to serve the needs of groping, yearning humans who
seek to discern truth and justice amid the dazzle and murk of
the thought-chaos of the present-day world.
No person, no matter how soft and secluded his own life has
been, can read this Holy Book and not be aware that the
world is filled with a vast mass of unfairness, cruelty, and
suffering. He will find that it has been observed, during
all the ages, by the thinkers, the seers, the poets, and the
philosophers.
And such person will learn, possibly, that this fair world
so brutally unfair, is not decreed by the will of God nor by
any iron law of Nature. He will learn that the world can be
fashioned a fair world indeed by the humans who inhabit it, by
the very simple, and yet most difficult process of coming to
an understanding of the world. Understanding, after all, is
merely sympathy in its fine correct sense. And such sympathy,
in its genuineness, makes toward unselfishness. Unselfishness
inevitably connotes service. And service is the solution of
the entire vexatious problem of man.
He, who by understanding becomes converted to the gospel of
service, will serve truth to confute liars and make of them
truth-tellers; will serve kindness so that brutality will
perish; will serve beauty to the erasement of all that is not
beautiful. And he who is strong will serve the weak that they
may become strong. He will devote his strength, not to the
debasement and defilement of his weaker fellows, but to the
making of opportunity for them to make themselves into men
rather than into slaves and beasts.
One has but to read the names of the men and women whose
words burn in these pages, and to recall that by far more
than average intelligence have they won to their place in
the world's eye and in the world's brain long after the dust
of them has vanished, to realize that due credence must be
placed in their report of the world herein recorded. They were
not tyrants and wastrels, hypocrites and liars, brewers and
gamblers, market-riggers and stock-brokers. They were givers
and servers, and seers and humanists. They were unselfish. They
conceived of life, not in terms of profit, but of service.
Life tore at them with its heart-break. They could not escape
the hurt of it by selfish refuge in the gluttonies of brain
and body. They saw, and steeled themselves to see, clear-eyed
and unafraid. Nor were they afflicted by some strange myopia.
They all saw the same thing. They are all agreed upon what they
saw. The totality of their evidence proves this with unswerving
consistency. They have brought the report, these commissioners
of humanity. It is here in these pages. It is a true report.
But not merely have they reported the human ills. They have
proposed the remedy. And their remedy is of no part of all
the jangling sects. It has nothing to do with the complicated
metaphysical processes by which one may win to other worlds
and imagined gains beyond the sky. It is a remedy for this
world, since worlds must be taken one at a time. And yet, that
not even the jangling sects should receive hurt by the making
fairer of this world for this own world's sake, it is well, for
all future worlds of them that need future worlds, that their
splendor be not tarnished by the vileness and ugliness of this
world.
It is so simple a remedy, merely service. Not one ignoble
thought or act is demanded of any one of all men and women in
the world to make fair the world. The call is for nobility of
thinking, nobility of doing. The call is for service, and, such
is the wholesomeness of it, he who serves all, best serves
himself.
Times change, and men's minds with them. Down the past,
civilizations have exposited themselves in terms of power, of
world-power or of other-world power. No civilization has yet
exposited itself in terms of love-of-man. The humanists have no
quarrel with the previous civilizations. They were necessary
in the development of man. But their purpose is fulfilled, and
they may well pass, leaving man to build the new and higher
civilization that will exposit itself in terms of love and
service and brotherhood.
To see gathered here together this great body of human beauty
and fineness and nobleness is to realize what glorious humans
have already existed, do exist, and will continue increasingly
to exist until all the world beautiful be made over in their
image. We know how gods are made. Comes now the time to make a
world.
HONOLULU, March 6, 1915.
Acknowledgments
The editor has used his best efforts to ascertain what material
in the present volume is protected by copyright. In all such
cases he has obtained the permission of author and publisher
for the use of the material. Such permission applies only to
the present volume, and no one should assume the right to make
any other use of it without seeking permission in turn. If
there has been any failure upon the editor's part to obtain a
necessary consent, it is due solely to oversight, and he trusts
that it may be overlooked. The following publishers have to be
thanked for the permissions which they have kindly granted; the
thanks applying also to the authors of the works.
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
Patrick MacGill, "Songs of the Dead End." Harry Kemp, "The
Cry of Youth." Charles Hanson Towne, "Manhattan." Hjalmar
Bergström, "Lynggaard & Co." Donald Lowrie, "My Life in
Prison." John G. Neihardt, "Cry of the People." Frank Harris,
"The Bomb." Vachel Lindsay, "The Eagle that is Forgotten" and
"To the United States Senate." Frederik van Eeden, "The Quest."
Edwin Davies Schoonmaker, "Trinity Church." Walter Lippman, "A
Preface to Politics." L. Andreyev, "Savva." J. C. Underwood,
"Processionals." Bliss Carman, "The Rough Rider." Percy Adams
Hutchison, "The Swordless Christ."
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.
Frank Norris, "The Octopus." Helen Keller, "Out of the Dark."
Frederik van Eeden, "Happy Humanity." Bouck White, "The Call of
the Carpenter." Alexander Irvine, "From the Bottom Up." John
D. Rockefeller, "Random Reminiscences." G. Lowes Dickinson,
"Letters from a Chinese Official." Ben B. Lindsey and Harvey
J. O'Higgins, "The Beast." Franklin P. Adams, "By and Large."
Edwin Markham, "The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems." Gerald
Stanley Lee, "Crowds." Woodrow Wilson, "The New Freedom."
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN CO.
William Vaughn Moody, "Poems." Vida D. Scudder, "Social
Ideals." Florence Wilkinson Evans, "The Ride Home." Peter
Kropotkin, "Mutual Aid" and "Memoirs of a Revolutionist." Helen
G. Cone, "Today." T. B. Aldrich, "Poems." T. W. Higginson,
"Poems."
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
H. G. Wells, "A Modern Utopia." Björnstjerne Björnson, "Beyond
Human Power." Edith Wharton, "The House of Mirth." John
Galsworthy, "A Motley." Maxim Gorky, "Fóma Gordyéeff." J. M.
Barrie, "Farm Laborers." Walter Wyckoff, "The Workers."
THE MACMILLAN CO.
John Masefield, "Dauber" and "A Consecration." Jack London,
"The People of the Abyss" and "Revolution." Robert Herrick, "A
Life for a Life." Israel Zangwill, "Children of the Ghetto."
Albert Edwards, "A Man's World" and "Comrade Yetta." Walter
Rauschenbusch, "Christianity and the Social Crisis." Winston
Churchill, "The Inside of the Cup." Rabindranath Tagore,
"Gitanjali." Thorstein Veblen, "The Theory of the Leisure
Class." Edward Alsworth Ross, "Sin and Society." W. J. Ghent,
"Socialism and Success." Vachel Lindsay, "The Congo." Wilfrid
Wilson Gibson, "Fires." Percy Mackaye, "The Present Hour."
Robert Hunter, "Violence and the Labor Movement." Ernest Poole,
"The Harbor."
THE CENTURY CO.
Louis Untermeyer, "Challenge." Richard Whiteing, "No. 5 John
Street." George Carter, "Ballade of Misery and Iron." James
Oppenheim, "Songs for the New Age." H. G. Wells, "In the Days
of the Comet." Alex. Irvine, "My Lady of the Chimney Corner."
Edwin Björkman, "Dinner à la Tango."
SMALL, MAYNARD & CO.
Charlotte P. Gilman, "In this Our World" and "Women and
Economics." Finley P. Dunne, "Mr. Dooley."
BRENTANO
G. Bernard Shaw, "Preface to Major Barbara" and "The Problem
Play." Eugene Brieux, "The Red Robe." W. L. George, "A Bed of
Roses."
DUFFIELD & CO.
Elsa Barker, "The Frozen Grail." H. G. Wells, "Tono-Bungay."
B. W. HUEBSCH
James Oppenheim, "Pay Envelopes." Gerhart Hauptmann, "The
Weavers." Maxim Gorky, "Tales of Two Countries."
G. P. PUTNAM SONS
Antonio Fogazzaro, "The Saint." J. L. Jaurès, "Studies in
Socialism."
GEORGE H. DORAN CO.
Will Levington Comfort, "Midstream." Charles E. Russell, "These
Shifting Scenes."
FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.
Robert Tressall, "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists."
Wilhelm Lamszus, "The Human Slaughter House." Olive Schreiner,
"Woman and Labor." Alfred Noyes, "The Wine Press."
MCCLURE PUBLISHING CO.
Dana Burnet, "A Ballad of Dead Girls." Lincoln Steffens, "The
Dying Boss" and "The Reluctant Grafter."
THE "MASSES"
John Amid, "The Tail of the World." Dana Burnet, "Sisters of
the Cross of Shame." Carl Sandburg, "Buttons." J. E. Spingarn,
"Heloise sans Abelard." Louis Untermeyer, "To a Supreme Court
Judge."
JAMES POTT & CO.
David Graham Phillips, "The Reign of Gilt."
BARSE & HOPKINS
R. W. Service, "The Spell of the Yukon."
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
August Bebel, "Memoirs."
CHARLES H. SERGEL CO.
Verhaeren, "The Dawn: Translation by Arthur Symons."
ALBERT AND CHARLES BONI
Horace Traubel, "Chants Communal."
A. C. MCCLURG & CO.
W. E. B. du Bois, "The Souls of Black Folk."
MOTHER EARTH PUBLISHING CO.
A. Berkman, "Prison Memories of an Anarchist." Voltairine de
Cleyre, "Works." Emma Goldman, "Anarchism."
MOFFAT, YARD & CO.
Reginald Wright Kauffman, "The House of Bondage."
JOHN LANE
Anatole France, "Penguin Island." William Watson, "Poems."
BOBBS-MERRILL CO.
Brand Whitlock, "The Turn of the Balance."
E. P. DUTTON & CO.
Patrick MacGill, "Children of the Dead End."
CHARLES H. KERR CO.
"When the Leaves Come Out."
HILLACRE BOOKHOUSE
Arturo Giovannitti, "The Walker."
HENRY HOLT & CO.
Romain Rolland, "Jean-Christophe."
RICHARD G. BADGER (_Poet Lore_)
Andreyev, "King Hunger." Gorky, "A Night's Lodging."
MRS. ARTHUR UPSON
Poems by Arthur Upson.
_New York Times_
Elsa Barker, "Breshkovskaya."
_Collier's Weekly_
Herman Hagedorn, "Fifth Avenue, 1915."
_Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_
F. Kiper Frank, "A Girl Strike Leader."
_Life_
Max Eastman, "To a Bourgeois Litterateur."
WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING CO.
(P. P. SIMMONS CO., New York)
Joseph Skipsey, "Mother Wept." Jethro Bithell's translation of
Verhaeren in "Contemporary Belgian Poetry" and of Dehmel in
"Contemporary German Poetry." Rimbaud's "Waifs and Strays" in
"Contemporary French Poetry."
ELKIN MATHEWS & CO.
William H. Davies, "Songs of Joy."
CONSTABLE & CO.
Harold Monro, "Impressions."
DUCKWORTH & CO.
Hilaire Belloc, "The Rebel."
SWAN, SONNENSCHEIN & CO.
Edward Carpenter, "Towards Democracy."
* * * * *
Acknowledgments have also to be made to the following artists,
who have kindly consented to have their works used in the
volume: Mahonri Young, Wm. Balfour Ker, Ryan Walker, Charles A.
Winter, Abastenia Eberle, John Mowbray-Clarke, Isidore Konti,
Walter Crane, and Will Dyson. Also to _Life_ Publishing Co. and
the _New Age_, London, for permission to use a drawing from
their files.
Contents
BOOK PAGE
I. TOIL 27
II. THE CHASM 73
III. THE OUTCAST 121
IV. OUT OF THE DEPTHS 179
V. REVOLT 227
VI. MARTYRDOM 289
VII. JESUS 345
VIII. THE CHURCH 383
IX. THE VOICE OF THE AGES 431
X. MAMMON 485
XI. WAR 551
XII. COUNTRY 593
XIII. CHILDREN 637
XIV. HUMOR 679
XV. THE POET 725
XVI. SOCIALISM 783
XVII. THE NEW DAY 835
List of Illustrations
THE HEAVY SLEDGE, _Mahonri Young_ Frontispiece
PAGE
THE MAN WITH THE HOE, _Jean François Millet_ 32
THE VAMPIRE, _E. M. Lilien_ 33
KING CANUTE, _William Balfour Ker_ 93
THE HAND OF FATE, _William Balfour Ker_ 92
WITHOUT A KENNEL, _Ryan Walker_ 136
THE WHITE SLAVE, _Abastenia St. Leger Eberle_ 137
COLD, _Roger Bloche_ 200
THE PEOPLE MOURN, _Jules Pierre van Biesbroeck_ 201
THE LIBERATRESS, _Theophile Alexandre Steinlen_ 233
OUTBREAK, _Käthe Kollwitz_ 232
THE END, _Käthe Kollwitz_ 297
THE SURPRISE, _Ilyá Efímovitch Repin_ 296
ECCE HOMO, _Constantin Meunier_ 368
DESPISED AND REJECTED OF MEN, _Sigismund Goetze_ 369
"TO SUSTAIN THE BODY OF THE CHURCH, IF YOU
PLEASE," _Denis Auguste Marie Raffet_ 392
CHRIST, _John Mowbray-Clarke_ 393
THE DESPOTIC AGE, _Isidore Konti_ 456
"COURAGE, YOUR MAJESTY, ONLY ONE STEP MORE!" 457
MARRIAGE À LA MODE, _William Hogarth_ 489
MAMMON, _George Frederick Watts_ 488
WAR, _Arnold Böcklin_ 584
LONDON, _Paul Gustave Doré_ 585
A CITIZEN LOST, _Ryan Walker_ 649
"OLIVER TWIST ASKS FOR MORE," _George Cruikshank_ 648
THE COAL FAMINE, _Thomas Theodor Heine_ 680
MY SOLICITOR SHALL HEAR OF THIS, _Will Dyson_ 681
THE MILITANT, _Charles A. Winter_ 744
THE DEATH OF CHATTERTON, _Henry Wallis_ 745
ONCE YE HAVE SEEN MY FACE YE DARE NOT MOCK 808
JUSTICE, _Walter Crane_ 809
Editor's Preface
When the idea of this collection was first thought of, it was
a matter of surprise that the task should have been so long
unattempted. There exist small collections of Socialist songs
for singing, but apparently this is the first effort that has
been made to cover the whole field of the literature of social
protest, both in prose and poetry, and from all languages and
times.
The reader's first inquiry will be as to the qualifications of
the editor. Let me say that I gave nine years of my life to a
study of literature under academic guidance, and then, emerging
from a great endowed university, discovered the modern movement
of proletarian revolt, and have given fifteen years to the
study and interpretation of that. The present volume is thus
a blending of two points of view. I have reread the favorites
of my youth, choosing from them what now seemed most vital;
and I have sought to test the writers of my own time by the
touchstone of the old standards.
The size of the task I did not realize until I had gone too
far to retreat. It meant not merely the rereading of the
classics and the standard anthologies; it meant going through a
small library of volumes by living writers, the files of many
magazines, and a dozen or more scrap-books and collections of
fugitive verse. At the end of this labor I found myself with
a pile of typewritten manuscript a foot high; and the task of
elimination was the most difficult of all.
To a certain extent, of course, the selection was
self-determined. No anthology of social protest could omit
"The Song of the Shirt," and "The Cry of the Children,"
and "A Man's a Man for A' That"; neither could it omit the
"Marseillaise" and the "Internationale." Equally inevitable
were selections from Shelley and Swinburne, Ruskin, Carlyle
and Morris, Whitman, Tolstoy and Zola. The same was true of
Wells and Shaw and Kropotkin, Hauptmann and Maeterlinck, Romain
Rolland and Anatole France. When it came to the newer writers,
I sought first their own judgment as to their best work; and
later I submitted the manuscript to several friends, the best
qualified men and women I knew. Thus the final version was the
product of a number of minds; and the collection may be said
to represent, not its editor, but a whole movement, made and
sustained by the master-spirits of all ages.
For this reason I may without suspicion of egotism say what I
think about the volume. It was significant to me that several
persons reading the manuscript and writing quite independently,
referred to it as "a new Bible." I believe that it is, quite
literally and simply, what the old Bible was--a selection
by the living minds of a living time of the best and truest
writings known to them. It is a Bible of the future, a Gospel
of the new hope of the race. It is a book for the apostles of a
new dispensation to carry about with them; a book to cheer the
discouraged and console the wounded in humanity's last war of
liberation.
The standards of the book are those of literature. If there has
been any letting down, it has been in the case of old writings,
which have an interest apart from that of style. It brings us
a thrill of wonder to find, in an ancient Egyptian parchment,
a father setting forth to his son how easy is the life of the
lawyer, and what a dog's life is that of the farmer. It amuses
us to read a play, produced in Athens two thousand, two hundred
and twenty-three years ago, in which is elaborately propounded
the question which thousands of Socialist "soap-boxers" are
answering every night: "Who will do the dirty work?" It makes
us shudder, perhaps, to find a Spaniard of the thirteenth
century analyzing the evil devices of tyrants, and expounding
in detail the labor-policy of some present-day great
corporations in America.
Let me add that I have not considered it my function to act
as censor to the process of social evolution. Every aspect of
the revolutionary movement has found a voice in this book.
Two questions have been asked of each writer: Have you had
something vital to say? and Have you said it with some special
effectiveness? The reader will find, for example, one or two
of the hymns of the "Christian Socialists"; he will also find
one of the parodies on Christian hymns which are sung by the
Industrial Workers of the World in their "jungles" in the Far
West. The Anarchists and the apostles of insurrection are also
represented; and if some of the things seem to the reader the
mere unchaining of furies, I would say, let him not blame the
faithful anthologist, let him not blame even the writer--let
him blame himself, who has acquiesced in the existence of
conditions which have driven his fellow-men to the extremes of
madness and despair.
In the preparation of this work I have placed myself under
obligation to so many people that it would take much space to
make complete acknowledgments. I must thank those friends who
went through the bulky manuscript, and gave me the benefit of
their detailed criticism: George Sterling, Max Eastman, Floyd
Dell, Clement Wood, Louis Untermeyer, and my wife. I am under
obligation to a number of people, some of them strangers, who
went to the trouble of sending me scrap-books which represented
years and even decades of collecting: Elizabeth Balch,
Elizabeth Magie Phillips, Frank B. Norman, Frank Stuhlman, J.
M. Maddox, Edward J. O'Brien, and Clement Wood. Among those
who helped me with valuable suggestions were: Edwin Björkman,
Reginald Wright Kauffman, Thomas Seltzer, Jack London, Rose
Pastor Stokes, May Beals, Elizabeth Freeman, Arthur W.
Calhoun, Frank Shay, Alexander Berkman, Joseph F. Gould, Louis
Untermeyer, Harold Monro, Morris Hillquit, Peter Kropotkin, Dr.
James P. Warbasse, and the Baroness von Blomberg. The fullness
of the section devoted to ancient writings is in part due to
the advice of a number of scholars: Dr. Paul Carus, Professor
Crawford H. Toy, Professor William Cranston Lawton, Professor
Charles Burton Gulick, Professor Thomas D. Goodell, Professor
Walton Brooks McDaniels, Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Professor
George F. Moore, Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch, and Professor
Charles R. Lanman.
With regard to the illustrations in the volume, I endeavored
to repeat in the field of art what had been done in the field
of literature: to obtain the best material, both old and new,
and select the most interesting and vital. I have to record
my indebtedness to a number of friends who made suggestions
in this field--Ryan Walker, Art Young, John Mowbray-Clarke,
Martin Birnbaum, Odon Por, and Walter Crane. Also I must thank
Mr. Frank Weitenkampf and Dr. Herman Rosenthal of the New
York Public Library, and Dr. Clifford of the Library of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. To the artists whose copyrighted
work I have used I owe my thanks for their permission: as
likewise to the many writers whose copyrighted books I have
quoted. Elsewhere in the volume I have made acknowledgments to
publishers for the rights they have kindly granted. Let me here
add this general caution: _The copyrighted passages used have
been used by permission, and any one who desires to reprint
them must obtain similar permission._
One or two hundred contemporary authors responded to my
invitation and sent me specimens of their writings. Of these
authors, probably three-fourths will not find their work
included--for which seeming discourtesy I can only offer the
sincere plea of the limitations of space which were imposed
upon me. I am not being diplomatic, but am stating a fact
when I say that I had to leave out much that I thought was of
excellent quality.
What was chosen will now speak for itself. Let my last word be
of the hope, which has been with me constantly, that the book
may be to others what it has been to me. I have spent with
it the happiest year of my lifetime: the happiest, because
occupied with beauty of the greatest and truest sort. If the
material in this volume means to you, the reader, what it has
meant to me, you will live with it, love it, sometimes weep
with it, many times pray with it, yearn and hunger with it,
and, above all, resolve with it. You will carry it with you
about your daily tasks, you will be utterly possessed by it;
and again and again you will be led to dedicate yourself to the
greatest hope, the most wondrous vision which has ever thrilled
the soul of humanity. In this spirit and to this end the book
is offered to you. If you will read it through consecutively,
skipping nothing, you will find that it has a form. You will
be led from one passage to the next, and when you reach the
end you will be a wiser, a humbler, and a more tender-hearted
person.
A Consecration
BY JOHN MASEFIELD
Not of the princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers
Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the years,
Rather the scorned--the rejected--the men hemmed in with the spears;
The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies,
Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries,
The men with the broken heads and the blood running into their eyes.
Not the be-medalled Commander, beloved of the throne,
Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown,
But the lads who carried the koppie and cannot be known.
Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the road,
The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad,
The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load.
The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout,
The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to the shout,
The drowsy man at the wheel and the tired lookout.
Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth,
The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;--
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth!
Theirs be the music, the color, the glory, the gold;
Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould.
Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold--
Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tale be told.
AMEN.
BOOK I
_Toil_
The dignity and tragedy of labor; pictures of the actual
conditions under which men and women work in mills and
factories, fields and mines.
The Man With the Hoe[A]
[A] By permission of Doubleday, Page & Co.
BY EDWIN MARKHAM
(This poem, which was written after seeing Millet's world-famous
painting, was published in 1899 by a California school-principal, and
made a profound impression. It has been hailed as "the battle-cry of
the next thousand years")
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Is this the thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this--
More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed--
More filled with signs and portents for the soul--
More fraught with menace to the universe.
What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?
Country Life
(_From "The Village"_)
BY GEORGE CRABBE
(One of the earliest of English realistic poets, 1754-1832;
called "The Poet of the Poor")
Or will you deem them amply paid in health,
Labor's fair child, that languishes with wealth?
Go then! and see them rising with the sun,
Through a long course of daily toil to run;
See them beneath the dog-star's raging heat,
When the knees tremble and the temples beat;
Behold them, leaning on their scythes, look o'er
The labor past, and toils to come explore;
See them alternate suns and showers engage,
And hoard up aches and anguish for their age;
Through fens and marshy moors their steps pursue,
Where their warm pores imbibe the evening dew;
Then own that labor may as fatal be
To these thy slaves, as thine excess to thee.
An Aged Laborer
BY RICHARD JEFFERIES
(English essayist and nature student, 1848-1887)
For weeks and weeks the stark black oaks stood straight out
of the snow as masts of ships with furled sails frozen and
ice-bound in the haven of the deep valley. Never was such a
long winter.
One morning a laboring man came to the door with a spade,
and asked if he could dig the garden, or try to, at the risk
of breaking the tool in the ground. He was starving; he had
had no work for six months, he said, since the first frost
started the winter. Nature and the earth and the gods did not
trouble about him, you see. Another aged man came once a week
regularly; white as the snow through which he walked. In summer
he worked; since the winter began he had had no employment, but
supported himself by going round to the farms in rotation. He
had no home of any kind. Why did he not go into the workhouse?
"I be afeared if I goes in there they'll put me with the rough
'uns, and very likely I should get some of my clothes stole."
Rather than go into the workhouse, he would totter round in
the face of the blasts that might cover his weak old limbs
with drift. There was a sense of dignity and manhood left
still; his clothes were worn, but clean and decent; he was
no companion of rogues; the snow and frost, the straw of the
outhouses, was better than that. He was struggling against age,
against nature, against circumstances; the entire weight of
society, law and order pressed upon him to force him to lose
his self-respect and liberty. He would rather risk his life in
the snow-drift. Nature, earth and the gods did not help him;
sun and stars, where were they? He knocked at the doors of the
farms and found good in man only--not in Law or Order, but in
individual man alone.
Farm Laborers
BY JAMES MATTHEW BARRIE
(English poet, playwright and novelist, born 1860)
Grand, patient, long-suffering fellows these men were, up at
five, summer and winter, foddering their horses, maybe, hours
before there would be food for themselves, miserably paid,
housed like cattle, and when rheumatism seized them, liable
to be flung aside like a broken graip. As hard was the life
of the women: coarse food, chaff beds, damp clothes their
portion, their sweethearts in the service of masters who were
loath to fee a married man. Is it to be wondered that these
lads who could be faithful unto death drank soddenly on their
one free day; that these girls, starved of opportunities for
womanliness, of which they could make as much as the finest
lady, sometimes woke after a holiday to wish that they might
wake no more?
Helotage
(_From "Sartor Resartus"_)
BY THOMAS CARLYLE
(One of the most famous of British essayists, 1795-1881;
historian of the French Revolution, and master of a vivid and
picturesque prose-style)
It is not because of his toils that I lament for the poor: we
must all toil, or steal (howsoever we name our stealing), which
is worse; no faithful workman finds his task a pastime. The
poor is hungry and athirst; but for him also there is food
and drink: he is heavy-laden and weary; but for him also the
Heavens send sleep, and of the deepest; in his smoky cribs, a
clear dewy haven of rest envelops him, and fitful glitterings
of cloud-skirted dreams. But what I do mourn over is, that
the lamp of his soul should go out; that no ray of heavenly,
or even of earthly, knowledge should visit him; but only, in
the haggard darkness, like two spectres, Fear and Indignation
bear him company. Alas, while the body stands so broad and
brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost
annihilated!, Alas, was this too a Breath of God; bestowed in
heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!--That there should
one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I
call a tragedy, were it to happen more than twenty times in the
minute, as by some computations it does. The miserable fraction
of Science which our united Mankind, in a wide universe of
Nescience, has acquired, why is not this, with all diligence,
imparted to all?
[Illustration: THE VAMPIRE
E. M. LILIEN
(_Contemporary German illustrator_)]
[Illustration:
THE MAN WITH THE HOE
JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
(_French painter of peasant life, 1814-75_)
]
Played Out
(_From "Songs of the Dead End"_)
BY PATRICK MACGILL
(A young Irishman, called the "Navvy poet"; born 1890. From the age of
twelve to twenty a farm laborer, ditch-digger and quarry-man. As this
work goes to press, he is fighting with his regiment in Flanders)
As a bullock falls in the crooked ruts, he fell when the day was o'er,
The hunger gripping his stinted guts, his body shaken and sore.
They pulled it out of the ditch in the dark, as a brute is pulled
from its lair,
The corpse of the navvy, stiff and stark, with the clay on its
face and hair.
In Christian lands, with calloused hands, he labored for others' good,
In workshop and mill, ditchway and drill, earnest, eager, and rude;
Unhappy and gaunt with worry and want, a food to the whims of fate,
Hashing it out and booted about at the will of the goodly and great.
To him was applied the scorpion lash, for him the gibe and the goad--
The roughcast fool of our moral wash, the rugous wretch of the road.
Willing to crawl for a pittance small to the swine of the tinsel sty,
Beggared and burst from the very first, he chooses the ditch to die--
... Go, pick the dead from the sloughy bed, and hide him from
mortal eye.
He tramped through the colorless winter land, or swined in the
scorching heat,
The dry skin hacked on his sapless hands or blistering on his feet;
He wallowed in mire unseen, unknown, where your houses of
pleasure rise,
And hapless, hungry, and chilled to the bone, he builded the edifice.
In cheerless model[A] and filthy pub, his sinful hours were passed,
Or footsore, weary, he begged his grub, in the sough of the
hail-whipped blast,
So some might riot in wealth and ease, with food and wine be crammed,
He wrought like a mule, in muck to his knees, dirty, dissolute, damned.
[A] A "model" is an English resort for wayfarers, maintained by
charity.
Arrogant, adipose, you sit in the homes he builded high;
Dirty the ditch, in the depths of it he chooses a spot to die,
Foaming with nicotine-tainted lips, holding his aching breast,
Dropping down like a cow that slips, smitten with rinderpest;
Drivelling yet of the work and wet, swearing as sinners swear,
Raving the rule of the gambling school, mixing it up with a prayer.
He lived like a brute as the navvies live, and went as the cattle go,
No one to sorrow and no one to shrive, for heaven ordained it so--
He handed his check to the shadow in black, and went to the
misty lands,
Never a mortal to close his eyes or a woman to cross his hands.
_As a bullock falls in the rugged ruts
He fell when the day was o'er,
Hunger gripping his weasened guts,
But never to hunger more_--
_They pulled it out of the ditch in the dark,
The chilling frost on its hair,
The mole-skinned navvy stiff and stark
From no particular where._
Rounding the Horn[A]
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
(_From "Dauber"_)
BY JOHN MASEFIELD
(An English poet who has had a varied career as sailor, laborer and
even bartender upon the Bowery, New York. Born 1873, his narrative
poems of humble life made him famous almost over night)
Then came the cry of "Call all hands on deck!"
The Dauber knew its meaning; it was come:
Cape Horn, that tramples beauty into wreck,
And crumples steel and smites the strong man dumb.
Down clattered flying kites and staysails: some
Sang out in quick, high calls: the fair-leads skirled,
And from the south-west came the end of the world....
"Lay out!" the Bosun yelled. The Dauber laid
Out on the yard, gripping the yard, and feeling
Sick at the mighty space of air displayed
Below his feet, where mewing birds were wheeling.
A giddy fear was on him; he was reeling.
He bit his lip half through, clutching the jack.
A cold sweat glued the shirt upon his back.
The yard was shaking, for a brace was loose.
He felt that he would fall; he clutched, he bent,
Clammy with natural terror to the shoes
While idiotic promptings came and went.
Snow fluttered on a wind-flaw and was spent;
He saw the water darken. Someone yelled,
"Frap it; don't stay to furl! Hold on!" He held.
Darkness came down--half darkness--in a whirl;
The sky went out, the waters disappeared.
He felt a shocking pressure of blowing hurl
The ship upon her side. The darkness speared
At her with wind; she staggered, she careered,
Then down she lay. The Dauber felt her go;
He saw her yard tilt downwards. Then the snow
Whirled all about--dense, multitudinous, cold--
Mixed with the wind's one devilish thrust and shriek,
Which whiffled out men's tears, defeated, took hold,
Flattening the flying drift against the cheek.
The yards buckled and bent, man could not speak.
The ship lay on her broadside; the wind's sound
Had devilish malice at having got her downed....
How long the gale had blown he could not tell,
Only the world had changed, his life had died.
A moment now was everlasting hell.
Nature an onslaught from the weather side,
A withering rush of death, a frost that cried,
Shrieked, till he withered at the heart; a hail
Plastered his oilskins with an icy mail....
"Up!" yelled the Bosun; "up and clear the wreck!"
The Dauber followed where he led; below
He caught one giddy glimpsing of the deck
Filled with white water, as though heaped with snow.
He saw the streamers of the rigging blow
Straight out like pennons from the splintered mast,
Then, all sense dimmed, all was an icy blast
Roaring from nether hell and filled with ice,
Roaring and crashing on the jerking stage,
An utter bridle given to utter vice,
Limitless power mad with endless rage
Withering the soul; a minute seemed an age.
He clutched and hacked at ropes, at rags of sail,
Thinking that comfort was a fairy-tale
Told long ago--long, long ago--long since
Heard of in other lives--imagined, dreamed--
There where the basest beggar was a prince.
To him in torment where the tempest screamed,
Comfort and warmth and ease no longer seemed
Things that a man could know; soul, body, brain,
Knew nothing but the wind, the cold, the pain.
Insouciance in Storm
(_From "The Cry of Youth"_)
BY HARRY KEMP
(A young American poet who has wandered over the world as
sailor, harvest hand and tramp; born 1883)
Deep in an ore-boat's hold
Where great-bulked boilers loom
And yawning mouths of fire
Irradiate the gloom,
I saw half-naked men
Made thralls to flame and steam,
Whose bodies, dripping sweat,
Shone with an oily gleam.
There, all the sullen night,
While waves boomed overhead
And smote the lurching ship,
The ravenous fires they fed;
They did not think it brave:
They even dared to joke!
I saw them light their pipes
And puff calm rings of smoke!
I saw a Passer sprawl
Over his load of coal--
At which a Fireman laughed
Until it shook his soul:
_All this in a hollow shell
Whose half-submerged form
On Lake Superior tossed
'Mid rushing hills of storm!_
FROM THE SAILORS' CATECHISM
Six days shalt thou labor and do all thou art able,
The seventh, holystone the deck and scrub the cable.
Stokers[A]
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
(_From "The Harbor"_)
BY ERNEST POOLE
(American playwright and novelist, born 1880)
We crawled down a short ladder and through low passageways,
dripping wet, and so came into the stokehole.
This was a long narrow chamber with a row of glowing furnace
doors. Wet coal and coal-dust lay on the floor. At either end a
small steel door opened into bunkers that ran along the sides
of the ship, deep down near the bottom, containing thousands of
tons of soft coal. In the stokehole the fires were not yet up,
but by the time the ship was at sea the furnace mouths would
be white hot and the men at work half naked. They not only
shovelled coal into the flames, they had to spread it as well,
and at intervals rake out the "clinkers" in fiery masses on the
floor. On these a stream of water played, filling the chamber
with clouds of steam. In older ships, like this one, a "lead
stoker" stood at the head of the line and set the pace for the
others to follow. He was paid more to keep up the pace. But on
the big new liners this pacer was replaced by a gong.
"And at each stroke of the gong you shovel," said Joe. "You do
this till you forget your name. Every time the boat pitches the
floor heaves you forward, the fire spurts at you out of the
doors, and the gong keeps on like a sledge-hammer coming down
on top of your mind. And all you think of is your bunk and the
time when you're to tumble in."
From the stokers' quarters presently there came a burst of
singing.
"Now let's go back," he ended, "and see how they're getting
ready for this."
As we crawled back, the noise increased, and swelled to a roar
as we entered. The place was pandemonium. Those groups I had
noticed around the bags had been getting out the liquor, and
now at eight o'clock in the morning half the crew were already
well soused. Some moved restlessly about. One huge bull of
a creature with limpid shining eyes stopped suddenly with a
puzzled stare, and then leaned back on a bunk and laughed
uproariously. From there he lurched over the shoulder of a
thin, wiry, sober man who, sitting on the edge of a bunk, was
slowly spelling out the words of a newspaper aeroplane story.
The big man laughed again and spit, and the thin man jumped
half up and snarled.
Louder rose the singing. Half the crew was crowded close around
a little red-faced cockney. He was the modern "chanty man."
With sweat pouring down his cheeks and the muscles of his neck
drawn taut, he was jerking out verse after verse about women.
He sang to an old "chanty" tune, one that I remembered well.
But he was not singing out under the stars, he was screaming at
steel walls down here in the bottom of the ship. And although
he kept speeding up his song, the crowd were too drunk to wait
for the chorus; their voices kept tumbling in over his, and
soon it was only a frenzy of sound, a roar with yells rising
out of it. The singers kept pounding each other's backs or
waving bottles over their heads. Two bottles smashed together
and brought a still higher burst of glee.
"I'm tired!" Joe shouted. "Let's get out!"
I caught a glimpse of his strained frowning face. Again it came
over me in a flash, the years he had spent in holes like this,
in this hideous rotten world of his, while I had lived joyously
in mine. And as though he had read the thought in my disturbed
and troubled eyes, "Let's go up where _you_ belong," he said.
I followed him up and away from his friends. As we climbed
ladder after ladder, fainter and fainter on our ears rose that
yelling from below. Suddenly we came out on deck and slammed an
iron door behind us. And I was where _I_ belonged.
I was in dazzling sunshine and keen, frosty autumn air. I
was among gay throngs of people. Dainty women brushed me by.
I felt the softness of their furs, I breathed the fragrant
scent of them and of the flowers that they wore, I saw their
trim, fresh, immaculate clothes. I heard the joyous tumult of
their talking and their laughing to the regular crash of the
band--all the life of the ship I had known so well.
And I walked through it all as though in a dream. On the dock
I watched it spell-bound--until with handkerchiefs waving and
voices calling down good-byes, that throng of happy travellers
moved slowly out into midstream.
And I knew that deep below all this, down in the bottom of the
ship, the stokers were still singing.
Caliban in the Coal Mines
(_From "Challenge"_)
BY LOUIS UNTERMEYER
(American poet, born 1885)
God, we don't like to complain--
We know that the mine is no lark--
But--there's the pools from the rain;
But--there's the cold and the dark.
God, You don't know what it is--
You, in Your well-lighted sky,
Watching the meteors whizz;
Warm, with the sun always by.
God, if You had but the moon
Stuck in Your cap for a lamp,
Even You'd tire of it soon,
Down in the dark and the damp.
Nothing but blackness above,
And nothing that moves but the cars--
God, if You wish for our love,
Fling us a handful of stars!
The Fertilizer Man
(_From "The Jungle"_)
BY UPTON SINCLAIR
(A novel portraying the lives of the workers in the Chicago
stockyards; published in 1906)
His labor took him about one minute to learn. Before him was
one of the vents of the mill in which the fertilizer was being
ground--rushing forth in a great brown river, with a spray of
the finest dust floating forth in clouds. Jurgis was given a
shovel, and along with half a dozen others it was his task to
shovel this fertilizer into carts. That others were at work he
knew by the sound, and by the fact that he sometimes collided
with them; otherwise they might as well not have been there,
for in the blinding dust-storm a man could not see six feet in
front of his face. When he had filled one cart he had to grope
around him until another came, and if there was none on hand he
continued to grope till one arrived. In five minutes he was,
of course, a mass of fertilizer from head to feet; they gave
him a sponge to tie over his mouth, so that he could breathe,
but the sponge did not prevent his lips and eyelids from caking
up with it and his ears from filling solid. He looked like a
brown ghost at twilight--from hair to shoes he became the color
of the building and of everything in it, and for that matter
a hundred yards outside it. The building had to be left open,
and when the wind blew Durham and Company lost a great deal of
fertilizer.
Working in his shirt-sleeves, and with the thermometer at over
a hundred, the phosphates soaked in through every pore of
Jurgis' skin, and in five minutes he had a headache, and in
fifteen was almost dazed. The blood was pounding in his brain
like an engine's throbbing; there was a frightful pain in
the top of his skull, and he could hardly control his hands.
Still, with the memory of his four jobless months behind him,
he fought on, in a frenzy of determination; and half an hour
later he began to vomit--he vomited until it seemed as if his
inwards must be torn into shreds. A man could get used to the
fertilizer-mill, the boss had said, if he would only make up
his mind to it; but Jurgis now began to see that it was a
question of making up his stomach.
At the end of that day of horror, he could scarcely stand. He
had to catch himself now and then, and lean against a building
and get his bearings. Most of the men, when they came out,
made straight for a saloon--they seemed to place fertilizer
and rattlesnake poison in one class. But Jurgis was too ill to
think of drinking--he could only make his way to the street
and stagger on to a car. He had a sense of humor, and later
on, when he became an old hand, he used to think it fun to
board a street-car and see what happened. Now, however, he was
too ill to notice it--how the people in the car began to gasp
and sputter, to put their handkerchiefs to their noses, and
transfix him with furious glances. Jurgis only knew that a man
in front of him immediately got up and gave him a seat; and
that half a minute later the two people on each side of him
got up; and that in a full minute the crowded car was nearly
empty--those passengers who could not get room on the platform
having gotten out to walk.
Of course Jurgis had made his home a miniature fertilizer-mill
a minute after entering. The stuff was half an inch deep in his
skin--his whole system was full of it, and it would have taken
a week not merely of scrubbing, but of vigorous exercise, to
get it out of him. As it was, he could be compared with nothing
known to man, save that newest discovery of the savants, a
substance which emits energy for an unlimited time, without
being itself in the least diminished in power. He smelt so that
he made all the food at the table taste, and set the whole
family to vomiting; for himself it was three days before he
could keep anything upon his stomach--he might wash his hands,
and use a knife and fork, but were not his mouth and throat
filled with the poison?
And still Jurgis stuck it out! In spite of splitting headaches
he would stagger down to the plant and take up his stand once
more, and begin to shovel in the blinding clouds of dust. And
so at the end of the week he was a fertilizer-man for life--he
was able to eat again, and though his head never stopped
aching, it ceased to be so bad that he could not work.
Pittsburgh
BY JAMES OPPENHEIM
(American poet and novelist; born 1882)
Over his face his gray hair drifting hides his Labor-glory in smoke,
Strange through his breath the soot is sifting, his feet are buried
in coal and coke.
By night hands twisted and lurid in fires, by day hands blackened
with grime and oil,
He toils at the foundries and never tires, and ever and ever his
lot is toil.
He speeds his soul till his body wrestles with terrible tonnage
and terrible time,
Out through the yards and over the trestles the flat-cars clank
and the engines chime,
His mills through windows seem eaten with fire, his high cranes
travel, his ingots roll,
And billet and wheel and whistle and wire shriek with the
speeding up of his soul.
Lanterns with reds and greens a-glisten wave the way and the
head-light glares,
The back-bent laborers glance and listen and out through the
night the tail-light flares--
Deep in the mills like a tipping cradle the huge converter
turns on its wheel
And sizzling spills in the ten-ton ladle a golden water of
molten steel.
Yet screwed with toil his low face searches shadow-edged fires
and whited pits,
Gripping his levers his body lurches, grappling his irons he
prods and hits,
And deaf with the roll and clangor and rattle with its sharp
escaping staccato of steam,
And blind with flame and worn with battle, into his tonnage he
turns his dream.
The world he has builded rises around us, our wonder-cities and
weaving rails,
Over his wires a marvel has found us, a glory rides in our
wheeled mails,
For the Earth grows small with strong Steel woven, and they
come together who plotted apart--
But he who has wrought this thing in his oven knows only toil
and the tired heart.
The Navvy[A]
[A] By permission of E. P. Dutton & Co.
(_From "Children of the Dead End"_)
BY PATRICK MACGILL
(See page 32)
At that time there were thousands of navvies working at
Kinlochleven waterworks. We spoke of waterworks, but only the
contractors knew what the work was intended for. We did not
know, and we did not care. We never asked questions concerning
the ultimate issue of our labors, and we were not supposed to
ask questions. If a man throws red muck over a wall today and
throws it back again tomorrow, what the devil is it to him if
he keeps throwing that same muck over the wall for the rest
of his life, knowing not why nor wherefore, provided he gets
paid sixpence an hour for his labor? There were so many tons
of earth to be lifted and thrown somewhere else; we lifted
them and threw them somewhere else; so many cubic yards of
iron-hard rocks to be blasted and carried away; we blasted and
carried them away, but never asked questions and never knew
what results we were laboring to bring about. We turned the
Highlands into a cinder-heap, and were as wise at the beginning
as at the end of the task. Only when we completed the job, and
returned to the town, did we learn from the newspapers that we
had been employed on the construction of the biggest aluminium
factory in the kingdom. All that we knew was that we had gutted
whole mountains and hills in the operations....
Above and over all, the mystery of the night and the desert
places hovered inscrutable and implacable. All around the
ancient mountains sat like brooding witches, dreaming on their
own story of which they knew neither the beginning nor the end.
Naked to the four winds of heaven and all the rains of the
world, they had stood there for countless ages in all their
sinister strength, undefied and unconquered, until man, with
puny hands and little tools of labor, came to break the spirit
of their ancient mightiness.
And we, the men who braved this task, were outcasts of the
world. A blind fate, a vast merciless mechanism, cut and shaped
the fabric of our existence. We were men despised when we were
most useful, rejected when we were not needed, and forgotten
when our troubles weighed upon us heavily. We were the men
sent out to fight the spirit of the wastes, rob it of all its
primeval horrors, and batter down the barriers of its world-old
defences. Where we were working a new town would spring up some
day; it was already springing up, and then, if one of us walked
there, "a man with no fixed address," he would be taken up and
tried as a loiterer and vagrant.
Even as I thought of these things a shoulder of jagged rock
fell into a cutting far below. There was the sound of a scream
in the distance, and a song died away in the throat of some
rude singer. Then out of the pit I saw men, red with the muck
of the deep earth and redder still with the blood of a stricken
mate, come forth, bearing between them a silent figure. Another
of the pioneers of civilization had given up his life for the
sake of society....
The plaintive sunset waned into a sickly haze one evening, and
when the night slipped upwards to the mountain peaks never a
star came out into the vastness of the high heavens. Next
morning we had to thaw the door of our shack out of the muck
into which it was frozen during the night. Outside the snow
had fallen heavily on the ground, and the virgin granaries of
winter had been emptied on the face of the world.
Unkempt, ragged, and dispirited, we slunk to our toil, the
snow falling on our shoulders and forcing its way insistently
through our worn and battered bluchers. The cuttings were full
of slush to the brim, and we had to grope through them with our
hands until we found the jumpers and hammers at the bottom.
These we held under our coats until the heat of our bodies
warmed them, then we went on with our toil.
At intervals during the day the winds of the mountain put their
heads together and swept a whirlstorm of snow down upon us,
wetting each man to the pelt. Our tools froze until the hands
that gripped them were scarred as if by red-hot spits. We
shook uncertain over our toil, our sodden clothes scalding and
itching the skin with every movement of the swinging hammers.
Near at hand the lean derrick jibs whirled on their pivots
like spectres of some ghoulish carnival, and the muck-barrows
crunched backwards and forwards, all their dirt and rust hidden
in woolly mantles of snow. Hither and thither the little black
figures of the workers moved across the waste of whiteness like
shadows on a lime-washed wall. Their breath steamed out on the
air and disappeared in space like the evanescent and fragile
vapor of frying mushrooms....
When night came on we crouched around the hot-plate and told
stories of bygone winters, when men dropped frozen stiff in the
trenches where they labored. A few tried to gamble near the
door, but the wind that cut through the chinks of the walls
chased them to the fire.
Outside the winds of the night scampered madly, whistling
through every crevice of the shack and threatening to smash all
its timbers to pieces. We bent closer over the hot-plate, and
the many who could not draw near to the heat scrambled into
bed and sought warmth under the meagre blankets. Suddenly the
lamp went out, and a darkness crept into the corners of the
dwelling, causing the figures of my mates to assume fantastic
shapes in the gloom. The circle around the hot-plate drew
closer, and long lean arms were stretched out towards the
flames and the redness. Seldom may a man have the chance to
look on hands like those of my mates. Fingers were missing from
many, scraggy scars seaming along the wrists or across the
palms of others told of accidents which had taken place on many
precarious shifts. The faces near me were those of ghouls worn
out in some unholy midnight revel. Sunken eyes glared balefully
in the dim unearthly light of the fire, and as I looked at them
a moment's terror settled on my soul. For a second I lived in
an early age, and my mates were the cave-dwellers of an older
world than mine. In the darkness, near the door, a pipe glowed
brightly for a moment, then the light went suddenly out and the
gloom settled again.
The Song of the Wage Slave
(_From "The Spell of the Yukon"_)
BY ROBERT W. SERVICE
(Canadian poet, born 1876. His poems of Alaska and the great
Northwest have attained wide popularity)
When the long, long day is over, and the Big Boss gives me my pay,
I hope that it won't be hell-fire, as some of the parsons say.
And I hope that it won't be heaven, with some of the parsons I've met--
All I want is just quiet, just to rest and forget.
Look at my face, toil-furrowed; look at my calloused hands;
Master, I've done Thy bidding, wrought in Thy many lands--
Wrought for the little masters, big-bellied they be, and rich;
I've done their desire for a daily hire, and I die like a dog
in a ditch....
I, the primitive toiler, half naked and grimed to the eyes,
Sweating it deep in their ditches, swining it stark in their styes;
Hurling down forests before me, spanning tumultuous streams;
Down in the ditch building o'er me palaces fairer than dreams;
Boring the rock to the ore-bed, driving the road through the fen,
Resolute, dumb, uncomplaining, a man in a world of men.
Master, I've filled my contract, wrought in Thy many lands;
Not by my sins wilt Thou judge me, but by the work of my hands.
Master, I've done Thy bidding, and the light is low in the west,
And the long, long shift is over.... Master, I've earned it--Rest.
Manhattan
BY CHARLES HANSON TOWNE
(American poet, born 1877)
Here in the furnace City, in the humid air they faint,
God's pallid poor, His people, with scarcely space for breath;
So foul their teeming houses, so full of shame and taint,
They cannot crowd within them for the frightful fear of Death.
Yet somewhere, Lord, Thine open seas are singing with the rain,
And somewhere underneath Thy stars the cool waves crash and beat;
Why is it here, and only here, are huddled Death and Pain,
And here the form of Horror stalks, a menace in the street!
The burning flagstones gleam like glass at morning and at noon,
The giant walls shut out the breeze--if any breeze should blow;
And high above the smothering town at midnight hangs the moon,
A red medallion in the sky, a monster cameo.
Yet somewhere, God, drenched roses bloom by fountains draped with mist
In old, lost gardens of the earth made lyrical with rain;
Why is it here a million brows by hungry Death are kissed,
And here is packed, one Summer night, a whole world's fiery pain!
A Department-Store Clerk
(_From "The House of Bondage"_)
BY REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN
(American novelist, born 1877)
Katie Flanagan arrived at the Lennox department store every
morning at a quarter to eight o'clock. She passed through the
employees' dark entrance, a unit in a horde of other workers,
and registered the instant of her arrival on a time-machine
that could in no wise be suborned to perjury. She hung up
her wraps in a subterranean cloak-room, and, hurrying to the
counter to which she was assigned, first helped in "laying
out the stock," and then stood behind her wares, exhibiting,
cajoling, selling, until an hour before noon. At that time
she was permitted to run away for exactly forty-five minutes
for the glass of milk and two pieces of bread and jam that
composed her luncheon. This repast disposed of, she returned to
the counter and remained behind it, standing like a war-worn
watcher on the ramparts of a beleaguered city, till the store
closed at six, when there remained to her at least fifteen
minutes more of work before her sales-book was balanced and
the wares covered up for the night. There were times, indeed,
when she did not leave the store until seven o'clock, but those
times were caused rather by customers than by the management of
the store, which could prevent new shoppers from entering the
doors after six, but could hardly turn out those already inside.
The automatic time-machine and a score of more annoying, and
equally automatic, human beings kept watch upon all that she
did. The former, in addition to the floor-walker in her section
of the store, recorded her every going and coming, the latter
reported every movement not prescribed by the regulations
of the establishment; and the result upon Katie and her
fellow-workers was much the result observable upon condemned
assassins under the unwinking surveillance of the Death Watch.
If Katie was late, she was fined ten cents for each offense.
She was reprimanded if her portion of the counter was
disordered after a mauling by careless customers. She was
fined for all mistakes she made in the matter of prices and
the additions on her salesbook; and she was fined if, having
asked the floor-walker for three or five minutes to leave the
floor in order to tidy her hair and hands, in constant need of
attention through the rapidity of her work and the handling of
her dyed wares, she exceeded her time limit by so much as a few
seconds.
There were no seats behind the counters, and Katie, whatever
her physical condition, remained on her feet all day long,
unless she could arrange for relief by a fellow-worker during
that worker's luncheon time. There was no place for rest
save a damp, ill-lighted "Recreation Room" in the basement,
furnished with a piano that nobody had time to play, magazines
that nobody had time to read, and wicker chairs in which
nobody had time to sit. All that one might do was to serve the
whims and accept the scoldings of women customers who knew too
ill, or too well, what they wanted to buy; keep a tight rein
upon one's indignation at strolling men who did not intend to
buy anything that the shop advertised; be servilely smiling
under the innuendoes of the high-collared floor-walkers, in
order to escape their wrath; maintain a sharp outlook for the
"spotters," or paid spies of the establishment; thwart, if
possible, those pretending customers who were scouts sent from
other stores, and watch for shop-lifters on the one hand and
the firm's detectives on the other.
"It ain't a cinch, by no means"--thus ran the departing Cora
Costigan's advice to her successor--"but it ain't nothin'
now to what it will be in the holidays. I'd rather be dead
than work in the toy-department in December--I wonder if the
kids guess how we that sells 'em hates the sight of their
playthings?--and I'd rather be dead _an'_ damned than work in
the accounting department. A girl friend of mine worked there
last year,--only it was over to Malcare's store--an' didn't get
through her Christmas Eve work till two on Christmas morning,
an' she lived over on Staten Island. She overslept on the
twenty-sixth, an' they docked her a half-week's pay.
"An' don't never," concluded Cora, "don't never let 'em
transfer you to the exchange department. The people that
exchange things all belong in the psychopathic ward at
Bellevue--them that don't belong in Sing Sing. Half the goods
they bring back have been used for days, an' when the store
ties a tag on a sent-on-approval opera cloak, the women wriggle
the tag inside, an' wear it to the theatre with a scarf draped
over the string. Thank God, I'm goin' to be married!"
A Cry from the Ghetto
(_From the Yiddish of Morris Rosenfeld_)
(The poet of the East Side Jews of New York City, born 1861. His poems
appeared in Yiddish newspapers and leaflets, and are the genuine voice
of the sweat-shop workers. The following translation is by Charles
Weber Linn)
The roaring of the wheels has filled my ears,
The clashing and the clamor shut me in;
Myself, my soul, in chaos disappears,
I cannot think or feel amid the din.
Toiling and toiling and toiling--endless toil.
For whom? For what? Why should the work be done?
I do not ask, or know. I only toil.
I work until the day and night are one.
The clock above me ticks away the day,
Its hands are spinning, spinning, like the wheels.
It cannot sleep or for a moment stay,
It is a thing like me, and does not feel.
It throbs as tho' my heart were beating there--
A heart? My heart? I know not what it means.
The clock ticks, and below I strive and stare.
And so we lose the hour. We are machines.
Noon calls a truce, an ending to the sound,
As if a battle had one moment stayed--
A bloody field! The dead lie all around;
Their wounds cry out until I grow afraid.
It comes--the signal! See, the dead men rise,
They fight again, amid the roar they fight.
Blindly, and knowing not for whom, or why,
They fight, they fall, they sink into the night.
Trousers[A]
[A] By permission of Charles Scribner's Sons.
(_From "A Motley"_)
BY JOHN GALSWORTHY
(English novelist and dramatist, born 1867)
She held in one hand a threaded needle, in the other a pair
of trousers, to which she had been adding the accessories
demanded by our civilization. One had never seen her without a
pair of trousers in her hand, because she could only manage to
supply them with decency at the rate of seven or eight pairs
a day, working twelve hours. For each pair she received seven
farthings, and used nearly one farthing's worth of cotton;
and this gave her an income, in good times, of six to seven
shillings a week. But some weeks there were no trousers to be
had and then it was necessary to live on the memory of those
which had been, together with a little sum put by from weeks
when trousers were more plentiful. Deducting two shillings
and threepence for rent of the little back room, there was
therefore, on an average, about two shillings and ninepence
left for the sustenance of herself and husband, who was
fortunately a cripple, and somewhat indifferent whether he
ate or not. And looking at her face, so furrowed, and at her
figure, of which there was not much, one could well understand
that she, too, had long established within her such internal
economy as was suitable to one who had been "in trousers"
twenty-seven years, and, since her husband's accident fifteen
years before, in trousers only, finding her own cotton.... He
was a man with a round, white face, a little grey mustache
curving down like a parrot's beak, and round whitish eyes. In
his aged and unbuttoned suit of grey, with his head held rather
to one side, he looked like a parrot--a bird clinging to its
perch, with one grey leg shortened and crumpled against the
other. He talked, too, in a toneless, equable voice, looking
sideways at the fire, above the rims of dim spectacles, and now
and then smiling with a peculiar disenchanted patience.
No--he said--it was no use to complain; did no good! Things
had been like this for years, and so, he had no doubt, they
always would be. There had never been much in trousers; not
this common sort that anybody'd wear, as you might say. Though
he'd never seen anybody wearing such things; and where they
went to he didn't know--out of England, he should think. Yes,
he had been a carman; ran over by a dray. Oh! yes, they had
given him something--four bob a week; but the old man had died
and the four bob had died too. Still, there he was, sixty years
old--not so very bad for his age....
They were talking, he had heard said, about doing something for
trousers. But what could you do for things like these, at half
a crown a pair? People must have 'em, so you'd got to make 'em.
There you were, and there you would be! _She_ went and heard
them talk. They talked very well, she said. It was intellectual
for her to go. He couldn't go himself owing to his leg. He'd
like to hear them talk. Oh, yes! and he was silent, staring
sideways at the fire as though in the thin crackle of the
flames attacking the fresh piece of wood, he were hearing the
echo of that talk from which he was cut off. "Lor' bless you!"
he said suddenly. "They'll do nothing! Can't!" And, stretching
out his dirty hand he took from his wife's lap a pair of
trousers, and held it up. "Look at 'em! Why you can see right
throu' 'em, linings and all. Who's goin' to pay more than 'alf
a crown for that? Where they go to I can't think. Who wears
'em? Some institution I should say. They talk, but dear me,
they'll never do anything so long as there's thousands like us,
glad to work for what we can get. Best not to think about it, I
says."
And laying the trousers back on his wife's lap he resumed his
sidelong stare into the fire.
The Song of the Shirt
BY THOMAS HOOD
(Popular English poet and humorist; 1799-1845)
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread,--
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt;
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the "Song of the Shirt!"
"Work! work! work!
While the cock is crowing aloof!
And work--work--work
Till the stars shine through the roof!
It's O! to be a slave
Along with the barbarous Turk,
Where woman has never a soul to save,
If this is Christian work!
"Work--work--work
Till the brain begins to swim!
Work--work--work
Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Band, and gusset, and seam,--
Till over the buttons I fall asleep,
And sew them on in a dream!
"O Men, with sisters dear!
O Men, with mothers and wives!
It is not linen you're wearing out,
But human creatures' lives!
Stitch--stitch--stitch
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,--
Sewing at once, with a double thread,
A shroud as well as a Shirt!
"But why do I talk of Death--
That phantom of grisly bone?
I hardly fear his terrible shape,
It seems so like my own--
It seems so like my own
Because of the fasts I keep;
O God! that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!
"Work--work--work!
My labor never flags;
And what are its wages? A bed of straw,
A crust of bread--and rags.
That shattered roof--and this naked floor--
A table--a broken chair--
And a wall so blank my shadow I thank
For something falling there!
"Work--work--work!
From weary chime to chime!
Work--work--work
As prisoners work for crime!
Band, and gusset, and seam,
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Till the heart is sick and the brain benumbed,
As well as the weary hand.
"Work--work--work
In the dull December light!
And work--work--work
When the weather is warm and bright!
While underneath the eaves
The brooding swallows cling,
As if to show me their sunny backs
And twit me with the Spring.
"O! but to breathe the breath
Of the cowslip and primrose sweet--
With the sky above my head,
And the grass beneath my feet!
For only one short hour
To feel as I used to feel,
Before I knew the woes of want,
And the walk that costs a meal!
"O! but for one short hour--
A respite however brief!
No blessed leisure for Love or Hope,
But only time for Grief!
A little weeping would ease my heart;
But in their briny bed
My tears must stop, for every drop
Hinders needle and thread!"
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread--
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt;
And still, with a voice of dolorous pitch,
Would that its tone could reach the rich!--
She sang this "Song of the Shirt!"
A London Sweating Den[A]
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
(_From "The People of the Abyss"_)
BY JACK LONDON
(California novelist and Socialist; born 1876. The story of his
life will be found on p. 732. For the work here quoted London
lived among the people whose misery he describes)
A spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement, for all the
world like tadpoles just turned frogs on the bottom of a dry
pond. In a narrow doorway, so narrow that perforce we stepped
over her, sat a woman with a young babe, nursing at breasts
grossly naked and libelling all the sacredness of motherhood.
In the black and narrow hall behind her we waded through a
mess of young life, and essayed an even narrower and fouler
stairway. Up we went, three flights, each landing two feet by
three in area, and heaped with filth and refuse.
There were seven rooms in this abomination called a house.
In six of the rooms, twenty-odd people, of both sexes and
all ages, cooked, ate, slept, and worked. In size the rooms
averaged eight feet by eight, or possibly nine. The seventh
room we entered. It was the den in which five men sweated. It
was seven feet wide by eight long, and the table at which the
work was performed took up the major portion of the space.
On this table were five lasts, and there was barely room for
the men to stand to their work, for the rest of the space was
heaped with cardboard, leather, bundles of shoe uppers, and a
miscellaneous assortment of materials used in attaching the
uppers of shoes to their soles.
In the adjoining room lived a woman and six children. In
another vile hole lived a widow, with an only son of sixteen
who was dying of consumption. The woman hawked sweetmeats on
the street, I was told, and more often failed than not to
supply her son with the three quarts of milk he daily required.
Further, this son, weak and dying, did not taste meat oftener
than once a week; and the kind and quality of this meat cannot
possibly be imagined by people who have never watched human
swine eat.
"The w'y 'e coughs is somethin' terrible," volunteered my
sweated friend, referring to the dying boy. "We 'ear 'im 'ere,
w'ile we're workin', an' it's terrible, I say, terrible!"
And, what of the coughing and the sweetmeats, I found another
menace added to the hostile environment of the children of the
slums.
My sweated friend, when work was to be had, toiled with
four other men in his eight-by-seven room. In the winter a
lamp burned nearly all the day and added its fumes to the
over-loaded air, which was breathed, and breathed, and breathed
again.
In good times, when there was a rush of work, this man told
me that he could earn as high as "thirty bob a week."--"Thirty
shillings! Seven dollars and a half!
"But it's only the best of us can do it," he qualified. "An'
then we work twelve, thirteen, and fourteen hours a day, just
as fast as we can. An' you should see us sweat! Just runnin'
from us! If you could see us, it'd dazzle your eyes--tacks
flyin' out of mouth like from a machine. Look at my mouth."
I looked. The teeth were worn down by the constant friction of
the metallic brads, while they were coal-black and rotten.
"I clean my teeth," he added, "else they'd be worse."
After he had told me that the workers had to furnish their own
tools, brads, "grindery," cardboard, rent, light, and what not,
it was plain that his thirty bob was a diminishing quantity.
"But how long does the rush season last, in which you receive
this high wage of thirty bob?" I asked.
"Four months," was the answer; and for the rest of the year,
he informed me, they average from "half a quid" to a "quid,"
a week, which is equivalent to from two dollars and a half to
five dollars. The present week was half gone, and he had earned
four bob, or one dollar. And yet I was given to understand that
this was one of the better grades of sweating.
_The Hop-pickers_
So far has the divorcement of the worker from the soil
proceeded, that the farming districts, the civilized world
over, are dependent upon the cities for the gathering of the
harvests. Then it is, when the land is spilling its ripe wealth
to waste, that the street folk, who have been driven away from
the soil, are called back to it again. But in England they
return, not as prodigals, but as outcasts still, as vagrants
and pariahs, to be doubted and flouted by their country
brethren, to sleep in jails or casual wards, or under the
hedges, and to live the Lord knows how.
It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the
street people to pick her hops. And out they come, obedient
to the call, which is the call of their bellies and of the
lingering dregs of adventure-lust still in them. Slums, stews,
and ghetto pour them forth, and the festering contents of
slums, stews, and ghetto are undiminished. Yet they overrun
the country like an army of ghouls, and the country does not
want them. They are out of place. As they drag their squat,
misshapen bodies along the highways and byways, they resemble
some vile spawn from underground. Their very presence, the fact
of their existence, is an outrage to the fresh, bright sun
and the green and growing things. The clean, upstanding trees
cry shame upon them and their withered crookedness, and their
rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetness and purity
of nature.
Is the picture overdrawn? It all depends. For one who sees and
thinks life in terms of shares and coupons, it is certainly
overdrawn. But for one who sees and thinks life in terms of
manhood and womanhood, it cannot be overdrawn. Such hordes
of beastly wretchedness and inarticulate misery are no
compensation for a millionaire brewer who lives in a West End
palace, sates himself with the sensuous delights of London's
golden theatres, hobnobs with lordlings and princelings, and is
knighted by the king. Wins his spurs--God forbid! In old time
the great blonde beasts rode in the battle's van and won their
spurs by cleaving men from pate to chin. And, after all, it is
finer to kill a strong man with a clean-slicing blow of singing
steel than to make a beast of him, and of his seed through the
generations, by the artful and spidery manipulation of industry
and politics.
Environment
(_From "Merrie England"_)
BY ROBERT BLATCHFORD
(This book is probably the most widely-circulated of Socialist books
in English. Over two million copies have been sold in Great Britain,
and probably a million in America. The author is the editor of the
London _Clarion_; born 1851)
Some years ago a certain writer, much esteemed for his graceful
style of saying silly things, informed us that the poor remain
poor because they show no efficient desire to be anything else.
Is that true? Are only the idle poor? Come with me and I will
show you where men and women work from morning till night,
from week to week, from year to year, at the full stretch of
their powers, in dim and fetid dens, and yet are poor--aye,
destitute--have for their wages a crust of bread and rags.
I will show you where men work in dirt and heat, using the
strength of brutes, for a dozen hours a day, and sleep at
night in styes, until brain and muscle are exhausted, and
fresh slaves are yoked to the golden car of commerce, and the
broken drudges filter through the poor-house or the prison to
a felon's or a pauper's grave! I will show you how men and
women thus work and suffer and faint and die, generation after
generation; and I will show you how the longer and the harder
these wretches toil the worse their lot becomes; and I will
show you the graves, and find witnesses to the histories of
brave and noble and industrious poor men whose lives were lives
of toil, _and_ poverty, and whose deaths were tragedies.
And all these things are due to sin--but it is to the sin of
the smug hypocrites who grow rich upon the robbery and the ruin
of their fellow-creatures.
Work and Pray
BY GEORG HERWEGH
(German poet, 1817-1875; took part in the attempt at revolution
in Baden in 1848)
Pray and work! proclaims the world;
Briefly pray, for Time is gold.
On the door there knocketh dread--
Briefly pray, for Time is bread.
And ye plow and plant to grow.
And ye rivet and ye sow.
And ye hammer and ye spin--
Say, my people, what ye win.
Weave at loom both day and night,
Mine the coal to mountain height;
Fill right full the harvest horn--
Full to brim with wine and corn.
Yet where is thy meal prepared?
Yet where is thy rest-hour shared?
Yet where is thy warm hearth-fire?
Where is thy sharp sword of ire?
Conventional Lies of Our Civilization
BY MAX NORDAU
(A Hungarian Jewish physician, born 1849, whose work,
"Degeneration," won an international audience)
The modern day laborer is more wretched than the slave of
former times, for he is fed by no master nor any one else, and
if his position is one of more liberty than the slave, it is
principally the liberty of dying of hunger. He is by no means
so well off as the outlaw of the Middle Ages, for he has none
of the gay independence of the free-lance. He seldom rebels
against society, and has neither means nor opportunity to take
by violence or treachery what is denied him by the existing
conditions of life. The rich is thus richer, the poor poorer
than ever before since the beginnings of history.
The Failure of Civilization
BY FREDERIC HARRISON
(English essayist and philosopher, born 1831; President of the
Positivist Society)
I cannot myself understand how any one who knows what the
present manner is can think that it is satisfactory. To me, at
least, it would be enough to condemn modern society as hardly
an advance on slavery or serfdom, if the permanent condition
of industry were to be that which we behold; that ninety per
cent of the actual producers of wealth have no home that they
can call their own beyond the end of the week; have no bit of
soil, or so much as a room that belongs to them; have nothing
of value of any kind, except as much old furniture as will go
in a cart; have the precarious chance of weekly wages, which
barely suffice to keep them in health; are housed for the
most part in places that no man thinks fit for his horse; are
separated by so narrow a margin from destitution that a month
of bad trade, sickness or unexpected loss brings them face
to face with hunger and pauperism. In cities, the increasing
organization of factory work makes life more and more crowded,
and work more and more a monotonous routine; in the country,
the increasing pressure makes rural life continually less
free, healthful and cheerful; whilst the prizes and hopes of
betterment are now reduced to a minimum. This is the normal
state of the average workman in town or country, to which we
must add the record of preventable disease, accident, suffering
and social oppression with its immense yearly roll of death
and misery. But below this normal state of the average workman
there is found the great band of the destitute outcasts--the
camp-followers of the army of industry, at least one-tenth of
the whole proletarian population, whose normal condition is
one of sickening wretchedness. If this is to be the permanent
arrangement of modern society, civilization must be held to
bring a curse on the great majority of mankind.
BOOK II
_The Chasm_
The contrast between riches and poverty; the protest of common
sense against a condition of society where one-tenth of the
people own nine-tenths of the wealth.
Wat Tyler
BY ROBERT SOUTHEY
(One of the so-called "Lake School" of English poets, which included
Wordsworth and Coleridge; 1774-1843. Poet-Laureate for thirty years.
The refrain of this song was the motto of Wat Tyler's rebels, who
marched upon London in 1381)
"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"
Wretched is the infant's lot,
Born within the straw-roof'd cot;
Be he generous, wise, or brave,
He must only be a slave.
Long, long labor, little rest,
Still to toil, to be oppress'd;
Drain'd by taxes of his store,
Punish'd next for being poor:
This is the poor wretch's lot,
Born within the straw-roof'd cot.
While the peasant works,--to sleep,
What the peasant sows,--to reap,
On the couch of ease to lie,
Rioting in revelry;
Be he villain, be he fool,
Still to hold despotic rule,
Trampling on his slaves with scorn!
This is to be nobly born.
"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"
The Poor-Slave Household
(_From "Sartor Resartus"_)
BY THOMAS CARLYLE
(See page 31)
"The furniture of this Caravanserai consisted of a large iron
Pot, two oaken Tables, two Benches, two Chairs, and a Potheen
Noggin. There was a Loft above (attainable by a ladder), upon
which the inmates slept; and the space below was divided by
a hurdle into two apartments; the one for their cow and pig,
the other for themselves and guests. On entering the house we
discovered the family, eleven in number, at dinner; the father
sitting at the top, the mother at the bottom, the children on
each side, of a large oaken Board, which was scooped out in
the middle, like a trough, to receive the contents of their
Pot of Potatoes. Little holes were cut at equal distances to
contain Salt; and a bowl of Milk stood on the table; all the
luxuries of meat and beer, bread, knives and dishes, were
dispensed with." The Poor-Slave himself our Traveller found,
as he says, broad-backed, black-browed, of great personal
strength, and mouth from ear to ear. His Wife was a sun-browned
but well-featured woman; and his young ones, bare and chubby,
had the appetite of ravens. Of their Philosophical or Religious
tenets or observances, no notice or hint.
But now, secondly, of the _Dandiacal Household_:
"A Dressing-room splendidly furnished; violet-colored curtains,
chairs and ottomans of the same hue. Two full-length Mirrors
are placed, one on each side of a table, which supports the
luxuries of the Toilet. Several Bottles of Perfume, arranged
in a peculiar fashion, stand upon a smaller table of
mother-of-pearl; opposite to these are placed the appurtenances
of Lavation richly wrought in frosted silver. A Wardrobe of
Buhl is on the left; the doors of which, being partly open,
discover a profusion of Clothes; Shoes of a singularly small
size monopolize the lower shelves. Fronting the wardrobe a door
ajar gives some slight glimpse of the Bathroom. Folding-doors
in the background.--"Enter the Author," our Theogonist in
person, "obsequiously preceded by a French Valet, in white silk
Jacket and cambric Apron."
* * * * *
Such are the two sects which, at this moment, divide the more
unsettled portion of the British People; and agitate that
ever-vexed country. To the eye of the political Seer, their
mutual relation, pregnant with the elements of discord and
hostility, is far from consoling. These two principles of
Dandiacal Self-worship or Demon-worship, and Poor-Slavish or
Drudgical Earth-worship, or whatever that same Drudgism may
be, do as yet indeed manifest themselves under distant and
nowise considerable shapes: nevertheless, in their roots and
subterranean ramifications, they extend through the entire
structure of Society, and work unweariedly in the secret depths
of English national Existence; striving to separate and isolate
it into two contradictory, uncommunicating masses.
In numbers, and even individual strength, the Poor-Slaves or
Drudges, it would seem, are hourly increasing. The Dandiacal,
again, is by nature no proselytizing Sect; but it boasts of
great hereditary resources, and is strong by union; whereas the
Drudges, split into parties, have as yet no rallying-point;
or at best only co-operate by means of partial secret
affiliations. If, indeed, there were to arise a _Communion
of Drudges_, as there is already a Communion of Saints, what
strangest effects would follow therefrom! Dandyism as yet
affects to look down on Drudgism; but perhaps the hour of
trial, when it will be practically seen which ought to look
down, and which up, is not so distant.
To me it seems probable that the two Sects will one day
part England between them; each recruiting itself from the
intermediate ranks, till there be none left to enlist on either
side. These Dandiacal Manicheans, with the host of Dandyizing
Christians, will form one body; the Drudges, gathering round
them whosoever is Drudgical, be he Christian or Infidel Pagan;
sweeping-up likewise all manner of Utilitarians, Radicals,
refractory Potwallopers, and so forth, into their general mass,
will form another. I could liken Dandyism and Drudgism to two
bottomless boiling Whirlpools that had broken-out on opposite
quarters of the firm land; as yet they appear only disquieted,
foolishly bubbling wells, which man's art might cover-in;
yet mark them, their diameter is daily widening; they are
hollow Cones that boil-up from the infinite Deep, over which
your firm land is but a thin crust or rind! Thus daily is the
intermediate land crumbling-in, daily the empire of the two
Buchan-Bullers extending; till now there is but a foot-plank,
a mere film of Land between them; this too is washed away; and
then--we have the true Hell of Waters, and Noah's Deluge is
outdeluged!
Or better, I might call them two boundless, and indeed
unexampled Electric Machines (turned by the "Machinery of
Society"), with batteries of opposite quality; Drudgism the
Negative, Dandyism the Positive; one attracts hourly towards it
and appropriates all the Positive Electricity of the nation
(namely, the Money thereof); the other is equally busy with the
Negative (that is to say the Hunger) which is equally potent.
Hitherto you see only partial transient sparkles and sputters;
but wait a little, till the entire nation is in an electric
state; till your whole vital Electricity, no longer healthfully
Neutral, is cut into two isolated portions of Positive and
Negative (of Money and of Hunger); and stands there bottled-up
in two World-Batteries! The stirring of a child's finger
brings the two together; and then--What then? The Earth is but
shivered into impalpable smoke by that Doom's-thunderpeal; the
Sun misses one of his Planets in Space, and thenceforth there
are no eclipses of the Moon.
BY CHARLES MAURICE DE TALLEYRAND
(French bishop and statesman, 1754-1838)
Society is divided into two classes; the shearers and the
shorn. We should always be with the former against the latter.
The Lotus Eaters
BY ALFRED TENNYSON
(Probably the most popular of English lyrical poets; 1809-1892.
Made Poet-laureate in 1850, and a baron in 1884)
Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.
For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd
Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd
Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and
fiery sands,
Clanging fights and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and
praying hands.
But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,
Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong;
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;
Till they perish and they suffer--some, 'tis whisper'd--down in hell.
Yeast
BY CHARLES KINGSLEY
(English clergyman and novelist, 1819-1875; founder of the Christian
Socialist movement. In the scene here quoted, a young University man
is taken by a game-keeper to see the degradation of English village
life)
"Can't they read? Can't they practice light and interesting
handicrafts at home, as the German peasantry do?"
"Who'll teach 'em, sir? From the plough-tail to the
reaping-hook, and back again, is all they know. Besides, sir,
they are not like us Cornish; they are a stupid pig-headed
generation at the best, these south countrymen. They're
grown-up babies who want the parson and the squire to be
leading them, and preaching to them, and spurring them on, and
coaxing them up, every moment. And as for scholarship, sir,
a boy leaves school at nine or ten to follow the horses; and
between that time and his wedding-day he forgets every word
he ever learnt, and becomes, for the most part, as thorough a
heathen savage at heart as those wild Indians in the Brazils
used to be."
"And then we call them civilized Englishmen!" said Lancelot.
"We can see that your Indian is a savage, because he wears
skins and feathers; but your Irish cotter or your English
laborer, because he happens to wear a coat and trousers, is to
be considered a civilized man."
"It's the way of the world, sir," said Tregarva, "judging
carnal judgment, according to the sight of its own eyes; always
looking at the outsides of things and men, sir, and never much
deeper. But as for reading, sir, it's all very well for me,
who have been a keeper and dawdled about like a gentleman with
a gun over my arm; but did you ever do a good day's farm-work
in your life? If you had, man or boy, you wouldn't have been
game for much reading when you got home; you'd do just what
these poor fellows do--tumble into bed at eight o'clock, hardly
waiting to take your clothes off, knowing that you must turn
up again at five o'clock the next morning to get a breakfast
of bread, and, perhaps, a dab of the squire's dripping, and
then back to work again; and so on, day after day, sir, week
after week, year after year, without a hope or chance of being
anything but what you are, and only too thankful if you can
get work to break your back, and catch the rheumatism over."
"But do you mean to say that their labor is so severe and
incessant?"
"It's only God's blessing if it is incessant, sir, for if it
stops, they starve, or go to the house to be worse fed than
the thieves in gaol. And as for its being severe, there's many
a boy, as their mothers will tell you, comes home night after
night, too tired to eat their suppers, and tumble, fasting, to
bed in the same foul shirt which they've been working in all
the day, never changing their rag of calico from week's end to
week's end, or washing the skin that's under it once in seven
years."
"No wonder," said Lancelot, "that such a life of drudgery makes
them brutal and reckless."
"No wonder, indeed, sir: they've no time to think; they're born
to be machines, and machines they must be; and I think, sir,"
he added bitterly, "it's God's mercy that they daren't think.
It's God's mercy that they don't feel. Men that write books
and talk at elections call this a free country, and say that
the poorest and meanest has a free opening to rise and become
prime minister, if he can. But you see, sir, the misfortune is,
that in practice he can't; for one who gets into a gentleman's
family, or into a little shop, and so saves a few pounds, fifty
know that they've no chance before them, but day-laborer born,
day-laborer live, from hand to mouth, scraping and pinching to
get not meat and beer even, but bread and potatoes; and then,
at the end of it all, for a worthy reward, half-a-crown-a-week
of parish pay--or the work-house. That's a lively hopeful
prospect for a Christian man!" ...
Into the booth they turned; and as soon as Lancelot's eyes
were accustomed to the reeking atmosphere, he saw seated at
two long temporary tables of board, fifty or sixty of "My
brethren," as clergymen call them in their sermons, wrangling,
stupid, beery, with sodden eyes and drooping lips--interspersed
with more girls and brazen-faced women, with dirty flowers in
their caps, whose sole business seemed to be to cast jealous
looks at each other, and defend themselves from the coarse
overtures of their swains.
Lancelot had been already perfectly astonished at the foulness
of language which prevailed; and the utter absence of anything
like chivalrous respect, almost of common decency, towards
women. But lo! the language of the elder women was quite as
disgusting as that of the men, if not worse. He whispered a
remark on the point to Tregarva, who shook his head.
"It's the field-work, sir--the field-work, that does it all.
They get accustomed there from their childhood to hear words
whose very meanings they shouldn't know; and the elder teach
the younger ones, and the married ones are worst of all. It
wears them out in body, sir, that field-work, and makes them
brutes in soul and in manners...."
Sadder and sadder, Lancelot tried to listen to the conversation
of the men round him. To his astonishment he hardly understood
a word of it. It was half articulate, nasal, guttural, made up
almost entirely of vowels, like the speech of savages. He had
never before been struck with the significant contrast between
the sharp, clearly defined articulation, the vivid and varied
tones of the gentleman, or even of the London street-boy, when
compared with the coarse, half-formed growls, as of a company
of seals, which he heard round him. That single fact struck
him, perhaps, more deeply than any; it connected itself with
many of his physiological fancies; it was the parent of many
thoughts and plans of his after-life. Here and there he could
distinguish a half sentence. An old shrunken man opposite him
was drawing figures in the spilt beer with his pipe-stem, and
discoursing of the glorious times before the great war, "when
there was more food than there were mouths, and more work than
there were hands." "Poor human nature!" thought Lancelot, as he
tried to follow one of those unintelligible discussions about
the relative prices of the loaf and the bushel of flour, which
ended, as usual, in more swearing, and more quarrelling, and
more beer to make it up--"Poor human nature! always looking
back, as the German sage says, to some fancied golden age,
never looking forward to the real one which is coming!"
"But I say, vather," drawled out some one, "they say there's
a sight more money in England now, than there was afore the
war-time."
"Eees, booy," said the old man; "_but it's got into too few
hands_."
"Well," thought Lancelot, "there's a glimpse of practical
sense, at least." And a pedler who sat next him, a bold,
black-whiskered bully from the Potteries, hazarded a joke--
"It's all along of this new sky-and-tough-it farming. They used
to spread the money broad cast, but now they drills it all in
one place, like bone-dust under their fancy plants, and we poor
self-sown chaps gets none."
This garland of fancies was received with great applause;
whereat the pedler, emboldened, proceeded to observe,
mysteriously, that "donkeys took a beating, but horses kicked
at it; and that they'd found out that in Staffordshire long
ago. You want a good Chartist lecturer down here, my covies, to
show you donkeys of laboring men that you have got iron on your
heels, if you only knowed how to use it...."
Blackbird was by this time prevailed on to sing, and burst out
as melodious as ever, while all heads were cocked on one side
in delighted attention.
"I zeed a vire o' Monday night,
A vire both great and high;
But I wool not tell you where, my boys,
Nor wool not tell you why.
The varmer he comes screeching out,
To zave 'uns new brood mare;
Zays I, 'You and your stock may roast,
Vor aught us poor chaps care.'
"Coorus, boys, coorus!"
And the chorus burst out--
"Then here's a curse on varmers all
As rob and grind the poor;
To re'p the fruit of all their works
In ---- for evermoor-r-r-r.
"A blind owld dame come to the vire,
Zo near as she could get;
Zays, 'Here's a luck I warn't asleep,
To lose this blessed hett.
They robs us of our turfing rights
Our bits of chips and sticks,
Till poor folks now can't warm their hands,
Except by varmers' ricks.'
"Then, etc."
And again the boy's delicate voice rang out the ferocious
chorus, with something, Lancelot fancied, of fiendish
exultation, and every worn face lighted up with a coarse laugh,
that indicated no malice--but also no mercy....
Lancelot almost ran out into the night--into a triad of fights,
two drunken men, two jealous wives, and a brute who struck
a poor, thin, worn-out woman, for trying to coax him home.
Lancelot rushed up to interfere, but a man seized his uplifted
arm.
"He'll only beat her all the more when he getteth home."
"She has stood that every Saturday night for the last seven
years, to my knowledge," said Tregarva; "and worse, too, at
times."
"Good God! is there no escape for her from her tyrant?"
"No, sir. It's only you gentlefolks who can afford such
luxuries; your poor man may be tied to a harlot, or your poor
woman to a ruffian, but once done, done for ever."
"Well," thought Lancelot, "we English have a characteristic
way of proving the holiness of the marriage tie. The angel of
Justice and Pity cannot sever it, only the stronger demon of
Money."
Alton Locke
BY CHARLES KINGSLEY
(See page 78)
"What!" shriek the insulted respectabilities, "have we not
paid him his wages weekly, and has he not lived upon them?"
Yes; and have you not given your sheep and horses their daily
wages, and have they not lived on them? You wanted to work
them; and they could not work, you knew, unless they were
alive. But here lies your iniquity; you have given the laborer
nothing but his daily food--not even his lodgings; the pigs
were not stinted of their wash to pay for their sty-room, the
man was; and his wages, thanks to your competitive system,
were beaten down deliberately and conscientiously (for was it
not according to political economy, and the laws thereof?)
to the minimum on which he could or would work, without the
hope or the possibility of saving a farthing. You know how to
invest your capital profitably, dear Society, and to save money
over and above your income of daily comforts; but what has he
saved?--what is he profited by all those years of labor? He
has kept body and soul together--perhaps he could have done
that without you or your help. But his wages are used up every
Saturday night. When he stops working, you have in your pocket
the whole profits of his nearly fifty years' labor, and he has
nothing. And then you say that you have not eaten him!
Looking Backward
BY EDWARD BELLAMY
(One of the classics of the Socialist movement, this book
sold over four hundred thousand copies in the first years of
its publication. Its author was an American school-teacher,
1850-1898)
By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression
of the way people lived together in those days, and especially
of the relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps
I cannot do better than compare society as it then was to a
prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to
and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The
driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace
was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing
the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with
passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents.
The seats on top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out
of the dust their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their
leisure, or critically discuss the merits of the straining
team. Naturally such places were in great demand and the
competition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first
end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to
leave it to his child after him. By the rule of the coach a
man could leave his seat to whom he wished, but on the other
hand there were many accidents by which it might at any time
be wholly lost. For all that they were so easy, the seats were
very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons
were slipping out of them and falling to the ground, where they
were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to
drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly.
It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose
one's seat, and the apprehension that this might happen to them
or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of
those who rode.
But did they think only of themselves? you ask. Was not their
very luxury rendered intolerable to them by comparison with
the lot of their brothers and sisters in the harness, and
the knowledge that their own weight added to their toil! Had
they no compassion for fellow beings from whom fortune only
distinguished them? Oh, yes; commiseration was frequently
expressed by those who rode for those who had to pull the
coach, especially when the vehicle came to a bad place in
the road, as it was constantly doing, or to a particularly
steep hill. At such times, the desperate straining of the
team, their agonized leaping and plunging under the pitiless
lashing of hunger, the many who fainted at the rope and were
trampled in the mire, made a very distressing spectacle, which
often called forth highly creditable displays of feeling on
the top of the coach. At such times the passengers would call
down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them
to patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation
in another world for the hardness of their lot, while others
contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and
injured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach
should be so hard to pull, and there was a sense of general
relief when the specially bad piece of road was gotten over.
This relief was not, indeed, wholly on account of the team, for
there was always some danger at these bad places of a general
overturn in which all would lose their seats.
It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the
spectacle of the misery of the toilers at the rope was to
enhance the passengers' sense of the value of their seats
upon the coach, and to cause them to hold on to them more
desperately than before. If the passengers could only have
felt assured that neither they nor their friends would ever
fall from the top, it is probable that, beyond contributing to
the funds for liniments and bandages, they would have troubled
themselves extremely little about those who dragged the coach.
Rich and Poor
BY LEO TOLSTOY
(Russian novelist and reformer, 1828-1910)
The present position which we, the educated and well-to-do
classes, occupy, is that of the Old Man of the Sea, riding on
the poor man's back; only, unlike the Old Man of the Sea, we
are very sorry for the poor man, very sorry; and we will do
almost anything for the poor man's relief. We will not only
supply him with food sufficient to keep him on his legs, but we
will teach and instruct him and point out to him the beauties
of the landscape; we will discourse sweet music to him and give
him abundance of good advice.
Yes, we will do almost anything for the poor man, anything but
get off his back.
A Tale of Two Cities
BY CHARLES DICKENS
(Celebrated English novelist, 1812-1870. The novel here quoted
deals with the French Revolution, and the scene narrates how
one of Monseigneur's guests drives away from the palace)
Not many people had talked with him at the reception; he had
stood in a little space apart, and Monseigneur might have been
warmer in his manner. It appeared under the circumstances,
rather agreeable to him to see the common people dispersed
before his horses, and often barely escaping from being run
down. His man drove as if he were charging an enemy, and the
furious recklessness of the man brought no check into the face,
or to the lips, of the master. The complaint had sometimes made
itself audible, even in that deaf city and dumb age, that,
in the narrow streets without footways, the fierce patrician
custom of hard driving endangered and maimed the mere vulgar in
a barbarous manner. But few cared enough for that to think of
it a second time, and, in this matter, as in all others, the
common wretches were left to get out of their difficulties as
they could.
With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment
of consideration not easy to be understood in these days,
the carriage dashed through streets and swept round corners,
with women screaming before it, and men clutching each other
and clutching children out of its way. At last, swooping at
a street corner by a fountain, one of its wheels came to a
sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry from a number
of voices, and the horses reared and plunged.
But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage probably would
not have stopped; carriages were often known to drive on, and
leave their wounded behind, and why not? But the frightened
valet had got down in a hurry, and there were twenty hands at
the horses' bridles.
"What has gone wrong?" said Monsieur, calmly looking out.
A tall man in a nightcap had caught up a bundle from among the
feet of the horses, and had laid it on the basement of the
fountain, and was down in the mud and wet, howling over it like
a wild animal.
"Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!" said a ragged and submissive
man, "it is a child."
"Why does he make that abominable noise? Is it his child?"
"Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis--it is a pity--yes."
The fountain was a little removed; for the street opened, where
it was, into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the
tall man suddenly got up from the ground, and came running at
the carriage, Monsieur the Marquis clapped his hand for an
instant on his sword-hilt.
"Killed!" shrieked the man, in wild desperation, extending both
arms at their length above his head, and staring at him. "Dead!"
The people closed round, and looked at Monsieur the Marquis.
There was nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him
but watchfulness and eagerness; there was no visible menacing
or anger. Neither did the people say anything; after the first
cry, they had been silent, and they remained so. The voice of
the submissive man who had spoken, was flat and tame in its
extreme submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes over them
all, as if they had been mere rats come out of their holes.
He took out his purse.
"It is extraordinary to me," said he, "that you people cannot
take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of
you is for ever in the way. How do I know what injury you have
done my horses. See! Give him that."
He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the
heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as
it fell. The tall man called out again with a most unearthly
cry, "Dead!"
Paris
BY ÉMILE ZOLA
(French novelist, 1840-1902, founder of the school of "Naturalism."
The present is one of his later works, in which he indicates his hope
of the regeneration of French society. The hero is a Catholic priest
who first attempts to reform the Church, and then leaves it)
Pierre remembered that frightful house in the Rue des Saules,
where so much want and suffering were heaped up. He saw again
the yard filthy like a quagmire, the evil-smelling staircases,
the sordid, bare, icy rooms, the families fighting for messes
which even stray dogs would not have eaten; the mothers, with
exhausted breasts, carrying screaming children to and fro; the
old men who fell in corners like brute beasts, and died of
hunger amidst filth. And then came his other hours with the
magnificence or the quietude or the gaiety of the _salons_
through which he had passed, the whole insolent display of
financial Paris, and political Paris, and society Paris. And
at last he came to the dusk, and to that Paris-Sodom and
Paris-Gomorrah before him, which was lighting itself up for the
night, for the abominations of that accomplice night which,
like fine dust, was little by little submerging the expanse
of roofs. And the hateful monstrosity of it all howled aloud
under the pale sky where the first pure, twinkling stars were
gleaming.
A great shudder came upon Pierre as he thought of all that
mass of iniquity and suffering, of all that went on below amid
wealth and vice. The _bourgeoisie_, wielding power, would
relinquish naught of the sovereignty which it had conquered,
wholly stolen; while the people, the eternal dupe, silent so
long, clenched its fists and growled, claiming its legitimate
share. And it was that frightful injustice which filled the
growing gloom with anger. From what dark-breasted cloud would
the thunderbolt fall? For years he had been waiting for that
thunderbolt, which low rumbles announced on all points of the
horizon. And if he had written a book full of candour and hope,
if he had gone in all innocence to Rome, it was to avert that
thunderbolt and its frightful consequences. But all hope of
the kind was dead within him; he felt that the thunderbolt was
inevitable, that nothing henceforth could stay the catastrophe.
And never before had he felt it to be so near, amidst the happy
impudence of some, and the exasperated distress of others. It
was gathering, and it would surely fall over that Paris, all
lust and bravado, which, when evening came, thus stirred up its
furnace.
[Illustration: THE HAND OF FATE
WILLIAM BALFOUR KER
(_Contemporary American illustrator_)
_Copyright by J. A. Mitchell._]
[Illustration:
_Copyright by J. A. Mitchell_
KING CANUTE]
King Hunger
BY LEONID ANDREYEV
(Russian novelist and dramatist of social protest; born 1871. In this
grim symbolical drama is voiced the despair of Russia's intellectuals
after the tragic failure of the Revolution. In the first scene King
Hunger is shown inciting the starving factory-slaves to revolt; in the
second, he presides over a gathering of the outcasts of society, who
meet in a cellar to discuss projects of ferocious vengeance upon the
idlers in the ball-room over their heads, but break up in a drunken
brawl instead. In the present scene, King Hunger turns traitor to
his victims, and presides as a judge passing sentence upon them.
The leisure class attend as spectators in the court-room, the women
in evening gowns and jewels, "the men in dress coats and surtouts,
carefully shaven and dressed at the wig-makers")
KING HUNGER:--Show in the first starveling.
(_The first starveling, a ragged old man with lacerated feet,
is conducted into the court-room. A wire muzzle encases his
face._)
KING HUNGER:--Take the muzzle off the starveling. What's your
offense, Starveling?
OLD MAN (_speaking in a broken voice_):--Theft.
KING HUNGER:--How much did you steal?
OLD MAN:--I stole a five-pound loaf, but it was wrested from
me. I had only time to bite a small piece of it. Forgive me, I
will never again----
KING HUNGER:--How? Have you acquired an inheritance? Or won't
you eat hereafter?
OLD MAN:--No. It was wrested from me. I only chewed off a small
piece----
KING HUNGER:--But how won't you steal? Why haven't you been
working?
OLD MAN:--There's no work.
KING HUNGER:--But where's your brood, Starveling? Why don't
they support you?
OLD MAN:--My children died of hunger.
KING HUNGER:--Why did you not starve to death, as they?
OLD MAN:--I don't know. I had a mind to live.
KING HUNGER:--Of what use is life to you, Starveling?
(_Voices of Spectators._)
--Indeed, how do they live? I don't comprehend it.
--To work.
--To glorify God and be confirmed in the consciousness that
life--
--Well, I don't suppose they exalt Him.
--It were better if he were dead.
--A rather wearisome old fellow. And what style of trousers!
--Listen! Listen!
KING HUNGER (_rising, speaks aloud_):--Now, ladies and
gentlemen, we will feign to meditate. Honorable judges, I beg
you to simulate a meditative air.
(_The judges for a brief period appear in deep thought--they
knit their brows, gaze up at the ceiling, prop up their noses,
sigh and obviously endeavor to think. Venerable silence. Then
with faces profoundly solemn and earnest, silent as before,
the judges rise, and simultaneously they turn around facing
Death. And all together they bow low and lingering, stretching
themselves forward._)
KING HUNGER (_with bent head_):--What is your pleasure?
DEATH (_swiftly rising, wrathfully strikes the table with his
clenched fist and speaks in a grating voice_):--Condemned--in
the name of Satan!
(_Then as quickly he sits down and sinks into a malicious
inflexibility. The judges resume their places._)
KING HUNGER:--Starveling, you're condemned.
OLD MAN:--Have mercy!
KING HUNGER:--Put the muzzle over him. Bring the next
starveling....
(_The next starveling is led into the room. She is a graceful,
but extremely emaciated young woman, with a face pallid and
tragic to view. The black, fine eyebrows join over her nose;
her luxuriant hair is negligently tied in a knot, falling down
her shoulders. She makes no bows nor looks around, is as if
seeing nobody. Her voice is apathetic and dull._)
KING HUNGER:--What's your offense, Starveling?
YOUNG WOMAN:--I killed my child.
(_Spectators._)
--Oh, horrors! This woman is altogether destitute of motherly
feelings.
--What do you expect of them? You astonish me.
--How charming she is. There's something tragical about her.
--Then marry her.
--Crimes of infanticide were not regarded as such in ancient
times, and were looked upon as a natural right of parents. Only
with the introduction of humanism into our customs----
--Oh, please, just a second, professor.
--But science, my child----
KING HUNGER:--Tell us, Starveling, how it happened.
(_With drooping hands and motionless, the woman speaks up dully
and dispassionately._)
YOUNG WOMAN:--One night my baby and I crossed the long bridge
over the river. And since I had long before decided, so then
approaching the middle, where the river is deep and swift, I
said: "Look, baby dear, how the water is a-roaring below." She
said, "I can't reach, mamma, the railing is so high." I said,
"Come, let me lift you, baby dear." And when she was gazing
down into the black deep, I threw her over. That's all.
KING HUNGER:--Did she grip you?
YOUNG WOMAN:--No.
KING HUNGER:--She screamed?
YOUNG WOMAN:--Yes, once.
KING HUNGER:--What was her name?
YOUNG WOMAN:--Baby dear.
KING HUNGER:--No, her name. How was she called?
YOUNG WOMAN:--Baby dear.
KING HUNGER (_covering his face, he speaks in sad, quivering
voice_):--Honorable judges, I beg you to simulate a meditative
air. (_The judges knit their brows, gaze on the ceiling, chew
their lips. Venerable silence. Then they rise and gravely bow
to Death._)
DEATH:--Condemned--in the name of Satan!
KING HUNGER (_rising, speaks aloud, extending his hands to the
woman, as if veiling her in an invisible, black shroud_):--
You're condemned, woman, do you hear? Death awaits you. In
blackest hell you will be tormented and burnt on everlasting,
slakeless fires! Devils will rack your heart with their iron
talons! The most venomous serpents of the infernal abyss will
suck your brain and sting, sting you, and nobody will heed your
agonizing cries, for you'll be silenced. Let eternal night be
over you. Do you hear, Starveling?
YOUNG WOMAN:--Yes.
KING HUNGER:--Muzzle her.
(_The starveling is led away. King Hunger addresses the
spectators in a frank and joyous manner._) Now, ladies and
gentlemen, I propose recess for luncheon. Adjudication is
a fatiguing affair, and we need to invigorate ourselves.
(_Gallantly._) Especially our charming matrons and the young
ladies. Please!
(_Joyful exclamations._)
--To dine! To dine!
--'Tis about time!
--Mamma dear, where are the bonbons?
--Your little mind is only on bonbons!
--Which--is tried? (_Waking up._)
--Dinner is ready, Your Excellency.
--Ah! Why didn't you wake me up before?
(_Everything assumes at once a happy, amiable, homelike
aspect. The judges pull off their wigs, exposing their bald
heads, and gradually they lose themselves in the crowd, shake
hands, and with feigned indifference they look askance,
contemplating the dining. Portly waiters in rich liveries, with
difficulty and bent under the weight of immense dishes, bring
gigantic portions; whole mutton trunks, colossal hams, high,
mountain-like roasts. Before the stout man, on a low stool,
they place a whole roasted pig, which is brought in by three.
Doubtful, he looks at it._)
--Would you assist me, Professor?
--With pleasure, Your Excellency.
--And you, Honorable Judge?
--Although I am not hungry--but with your leave--
--I may, perhaps, be suffered to--(_the Abbot modestly speaks,
his mouth watering._)
(_The four seat themselves about the pig and silently they
carve it greedily with their knives. Occasionally the eyes of
the Professor and of the Abbot meet, and with swollen cheeks,
powerless to chew, they are smitten with reciprocal hatred and
contempt. Then choking, they ardently champ on. Everywhere
small groups eating. Death produces a dry cheese sandwich
from his pocket and eats in solitude. A heavy conversation of
full-crammed mouths. Munching._)
London
BY HEINRICH HEINE
(German poet and essayist, one of the most musical and most
unhappy of singers; 1797-1856)
It is in the dusky twilight that Poverty with her mates, Vice
and Crime, glide forth from their lairs. They shun daylight the
more anxiously, the more cruelly their wretchedness contrasts
with the pride of wealth which glitters everywhere; only Hunger
sometimes drives them at noonday from their dens, and then they
stand with silent, speaking eyes, staring beseechingly at the
rich merchant who hurries along, busy and jingling gold, or at
the lazy lord who, like a surfeited god, rides by on his high
horse, casting now and then an aristocratically indifferent
glance at the mob below, as though they were swarming ants, or,
at all events, a mass of baser beings, whose joys and sorrows
have nothing in common with his feelings....
Poor Poverty! how agonizing must thy hunger be where others
swell in scornful superfluity! And when some one casts with
indifferent hand a crust into thy lap, how bitter must the
tears be wherewith thou moistenest it! Thou poisonest thyself
with thine own tears. Well art thou in the right when thou
alliest thyself to Vice and Crime. Outlawed criminals often
bear more humanity in their hearts than those cold, blameless
citizens of virtue, in whose white hearts the power of evil
is quenched; but also the power of good. I have seen women on
whose cheeks red vice was painted, and in whose hearts dwelt
heavenly purity.
London
BY WILLIAM BLAKE
(English poet and painter of strange and terrible visions.
1757-1827)
I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow;
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlots curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.
A Life for a Life[A]
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
BY ROBERT HERRICK
(American novelist, professor in the University of Chicago; born
1868. In this novel a young American, hungering for success and about
to marry the daughter a great captain of industry, is taken by a
strange man, "the bearded Anarch," and shown the horrors of American
industrialism)
And thus this strange pilgrimage, like another descent into
purgatory and even unto hell, continued,--the shabby bearded
Anarch leading his companion from factory, warehouse, and mill
to mine and railroad and shop, teaching him by the sight of his
own eyes what life means to the silent multitude upon whose
bent shoulders the fabric of society rests,--what that "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness"--brave aspirations of
the forefathers--has brought to the common man in this land of
destiny and desire.
The wanderer breathed the deadly fumes of smelter and glass
works, saw where men were burned in great converters, or torn
limb from limb upon the whirling teeth of swift machines,--done
to death in this way and that, or maimed and cast useless upon
the rubbish heap of humanity,--waste product of the process.
"For," as his guide repeated, "in this country, where Property
is sacred, nothing is cheaper than human life. For, remember,
the supply of raw labor is inexhaustible."
He recalled the words of a sleek and comfortable man of
business, at the end of the day, with his good dinner
comfortably in his belly and a fat cigar between his lips:
"There's too much sentimentalism in the air. Some religion less
effeminate than Christ's is needed to fit the facts of life.
In the struggle the weak must go under, and it is a crime to
interfere with natural law." The weak must go under! Surely if
that were the law, any religion that would offer an anodyne to
the hopeless were a blessing. But again and again the question
rose unanswered to his lips,--who are the weak? And the sleek
one with his cigar said, "Those who go under!" ...
So they passed on their way through squalid factory towns
reeking with human vice and disease, through the network of
railroad terminals crowded with laden cars rolling forth to
satisfy desires. They loitered in busy city stores, in dim
basement holes where bread and clothes were making, in filthy
slaughter-houses where beasts were slain by beasts....
At sunset of a glowing day the two sat upon an upper ridge of
the hills. All the imperial colors of the firmament dyed the
western heavens among the broken peaks of the mountains. Below
in the lonely valleys were the excoriations of the mines, the
refuse, the smudged stains of the rough surface of the earth.
The guide pointed into the distance where the huge smelter of
Senator Dexter's mine sent a yellow cloud upward.
"Near that is the charred debris where the miners blew up the
old works. Below the brow of yonder hills lies that stockade
where miners, with their women and children, were penned for
weeks like wild animals, guarded by the troops of the nation.
Beyond is the edge of the great desert, into whose waterless
waste others were driven to their death. Of these I was one
that escaped. Men were shot and women raped. But I tell over
old tales known to all. In this place it has been truly a life
for a life according to the primitive text--but more honest
than the cunning and hidden ways of the law. Here the eaten is
face to face, at least, with the eater."
The twilight came down like a curtain, hiding the scars of
man's dominion over the earth. The two sat in silent thought.
This was the apex of their journey together, and the end.
Behind this lofty table-land of the continent began the grim
desert, not yet subdued by man, and beyond came other fertile
valleys and other mountains, and finally another ocean. Thither
had been carried the same civilization, the same spirit of
conquest and greed, and that noble aspiration after "life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" bore the same fruit in
the blood of man. Wherever the victorious race had forced its
way, it sowed the seeds of hate and industrial crime. And the
flower must bloom, early or late, upon the lonely cattle ranch,
in the primeval forest, the soft southern grove, or the virgin
valley of the "promised land."
Thus spoke the Anarch.
In the glimmering twilight the fierce eyes of the bearded one
rested upon the wanderer.
"Have you seen enough?"
"Enough! God knows."
"So at last you understand the meaning of it all!"
"Not yet!" And from the depth of his being there flashed the
demand, "Why have you shown me the sore surface of life? What
have you to do with it? And what have I?"
His guide replied, "So you still long for the smooth paths
of prosperity? You would like to shield your eyes from the
disagreeable aspects of a world that is good to you? You would
still have your comfort and your heart's desire? Your ambitious
fancy still turns to the daughter of privilege, dainty and
lovely and sweet to the eyes?"
* * * * *
(The young man returns to the rich woman whom he had meant to
marry.)
He knelt and taking the hem of her garment held it in his hands.
"See!" He crushed the soft fabric in his hand. "Silk with
thread of gold. It is the tears! See!" He touched her girdle
with his hands. "Gold and precious stones. They are the groans!
See!" He put his fingers upon the golden hair. "A wreath of
pure gold! Tears and groans and bloody sweat! You are a tissue
of the lives of others, from feet to the crown upon your
hair.... See!" His hot hands crushed the orchids at her breast.
"Even the flower at your breast is stained with blood.... I see
the tears of others on your robe. I hear their sighs in your
voice. I see defeated desires in the light of your eyes. You
are the Sacrifice of the many--I cannot touch!"
Isabella, or The Pot of Basil
BY JOHN KEATS
(One of the loveliest of English poets, 1795-1821; a chemist's
assistant, who lived unrecognized and died despairing)
With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enrichèd from ancestral merchandise,
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torchèd mines and noisy factories,
And many once proud-quiver'd loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip,--with hollow eyes
Many all day in dazzling river stood,
To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.
For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark;
For them his ears gushed blood; for them in death
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
Lay full of darts; for them alone did seethe
A thousand men in troubles wide and dark;
Half-ignorant, they turn'd an easy wheel,
That set sharp wracks at work, to pinch and peel.
The Sons of Martha
BY RUDYARD KIPLING
(Under this title the English poet has written a striking picture
of the social chasm. He figures the world's toilers as the "Sons of
Martha," who, because their mother "was rude to the Lord, her Guest,"
are condemned forever to unrequited toil. "It is their care in all the
ages to take the buffet and cushion the shock." The poem goes on to
tell of the ignorance and torment in which they live--while the Sons
of Mary, who "have inherited that good part," live in ease upon their
toil.)
"They sit at the Feet--and they hear the Word--they see how
truly the promise runs.
They have cast their burdens upon the Lord, and--the Lord He
lays them on Martha's sons."
On the other hand the sons of Martha have to face reality.
"They do not preach that their God will rouse them an hour
before the nuts work loose,
They do not teach that His pity allows them to leave their work
when they damn-well choose."
The entire poem may be found in the 1918 Collected Edition of Mr.
Kipling's poems.
Reflections Upon Poverty
(_From "The New Grub Street"_)
BY GEORGE GISSING
(Novelist of English middle-class life, 1857-1903. Few have ever
equalled him in the portrayal of the sordid, every-day realities of
poverty. The story of his own tragic life is told in a novel called
"The Private Life of Henry Maitland," by Morley Roberts)
As there was sunshine Amy accompanied her husband for his walk
in the afternoon; it was long since they had been out together.
An open carriage that passed, followed by two young girls on
horseback, gave a familiar direction to Reardon's thoughts.
"If one were as rich as those people. They pass so close to
us; they see us, and we see them; but the distance between
is infinity. They don't belong to the same world as we poor
wretches. They see everything in a different light; they have
powers which would seem supernatural if we were suddenly
endowed with them."
"Of course," assented his companion with a sigh.
"Just fancy, if one got up in the morning with the thought that
no reasonable desire that occurred to one throughout the day
need remain ungratified! And that it would be the same, any day
and every day, to the end of one's life! Look at those houses;
every detail, within and without, luxurious. To have such a
home as that!"
"And they are empty creatures who live there."
"They do _live_, Amy, at all events. Whatever may be their
faculties, they all have free scope. I have often stood staring
at houses like these until I couldn't believe that the people
owning them were mere human beings like myself. The power of
money is so hard to realize, one who has never had it marvels
at the completeness with which it transforms every detail of
life. Compare what we call our home with that of rich people;
it moves one to scornful laughter. I have no sympathy with the
stoical point of view; between wealth and poverty is just the
difference between the whole man and the maimed. If my lower
limbs are paralyzed I may still be able to think, but then
there is no such thing in life as walking. As a poor devil I
may live nobly; but one happens to be made with faculties of
enjoyment, and those have to fall into atrophy. To be sure,
most rich people don't understand their happiness; if they did,
they would move and talk like gods--which indeed they are."
Amy's brow was shadowed. A wise man, in Reardon's position,
would not have chosen this subject to dilate upon.
"The difference," he went on, "between the man with money and
the man without is simply this: the one thinks, 'How shall I
use my life?' and the other, 'How shall I keep myself alive?'
A physiologist ought to be able to discover some curious
distinction between the brain of a person who has never given
a thought to the means of subsistence, and that of one who has
never known a day free from such cares. There must be some
special cerebral development representing the mental anguish
kept up by poverty."
"I should say," put in Amy, "that it affects every function of
the brain. It isn't a special point of suffering, but a misery
that colors every thought."
"True. Can I think of a single object in all the sphere of my
experience without the consciousness that I see it through the
medium of poverty? I have no enjoyment which isn't tainted
by that thought, and I can suffer no pain which it doesn't
increase. The curse of poverty is to the modern world just what
that of slavery was to the ancient. Rich and destitute stand
to each other as free man and bond. You remember the line of
Homer I have often quoted about the demoralizing effect of
enslavement; poverty degrades in the same way."
"It has had its effect upon me--I know that too well," said
Amy, with bitter frankness.
Reardon glanced at her, and wished to make some reply, but he
could not say what was in his thoughts.
The Veins of Wealth
BY JOHN RUSKIN
(English art critic and university professor, 1819-1900; author
of many works upon social questions, and master of perhaps the
greatest English prose style)
Primarily, which is very notable and curious, I observe that
men of business rarely know the meaning of the word "rich." At
least if they know, they do not in their reasonings allow for
the fact, that it is a relative word, implying its opposite
"poor" as positively as the word "north" implies its opposite
"south." Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were
absolute, and it were possible, by following certain scientific
precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power
like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities
or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in
your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your
neighbor's pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no
use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately
upon the need or desire he has for it,--and the art of making
yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist's sense,
is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your
neighbor poor.
Lynggaard & Co.
BY HJALMAR BERGSTRÖM
(Contemporary Danish dramatist, born 1868. The present play deals with
the modern industrial struggle. The wife of a great manufacturer has
become the victim of melancholia after a strike)
MRS. LYNGGAARD (_absorbed in her memories_):--I shall never
forget the day when the people went back to work. I was
watching them from my bedroom window. For four months they had
been starving--starving, do you understand?--they and theirs.
Then they turned up again one winter morning before daylight,
and there they stood and shivered in the yards. They had no
over-clothes, of course, and they were shaking both from cold
and from weakness. And then their faces were all covered with
beards, so that one couldn't recognize them. There they stood
and waited a long time, a very long time.... At last Heymann
[the manager] appeared in the doorway and read something from a
paper. It was the conditions of surrender, I suppose. None of
them looked up. Then, as they were about to walk in and begin
working, Heymann stopped them by holding up his hand, and he
said something I couldn't hear. But after a little while I saw
Olsen [the strike-leader] standing all by himself in a cleared
place. (_A shiver runs through her at the recollection._) Once
I saw a picture of an execution in a prison yard.... It lasted
only a few seconds. Then Olsen said a few words to his comrades
and walked away, looking white as a ghost. The crowd opened up
to let him pass through. Then the rest stood there for a while
looking so strangely depressed and not knowing what to do. And
at last they went in, one by one, bent and broken.
MIKKELSEN:--Olsen wasn't allowed to go back to work?
MRS. LYNGGAARD:--It was he who had been their leader, and it
was his fault that they had held out as long as they did. And
then Olsen began to look for work elsewhere, but none of the
other companies would have anything to do with him.
MIKKELSEN (_shrugging his shoulders_):--War is war.
MRS. LYNGGAARD:--A few months later, as I was taking a walk,
I was stopped on the street by Olsen's wife. I tell you, the
way she looked made my heart shrink within me. Her husband
was completely broken down, she told me. And on top of it all
he had taken to drink. Everything she and the children could
scrape together, he spent on whiskey. She herself was so far
gone with her eighth child that she would soon have to quit
work.... Then I went home to my husband and begged and prayed
him to take Olsen back and make a man of him again. It was the
first time during our marriage that I saw him beside himself
with rage. There came into his eyes such an evil expression
that I wish I had never seen it, for I have never since been
able to forget it entirely. But, of course, I guessed who was
back of it. (_With emphasis._) Then I did the most humiliating
thing I have ever done: I went in secret to Heymann and pleaded
for that discharged workman.
MIKKELSEN:--Well, and Heymann?
MRS. LYNGGAARD:--Since that moment I hate Heymann. There I was,
humbling myself before him. And he measured me with cold eyes
and said: "If I am to be in charge of this plant, madam, I must
ask once for all and absolutely, that no outsiders interfere
with the running of it."
MIKKELSEN:--I don't see that he could have done anything else.
MRS. LYNGGAARD:--What I cannot forgive myself is that I let
myself be imposed upon by that man. I behaved like a coward. At
that moment I should have gone to my husband and said: "This is
what has happened--now you must choose between Heymann and me!"
But I was so cowardly, that I didn't even tell my husband what
I had done.
MIKKELSEN:--Nor was it proper for you to go behind your
husband's back like that.
MRS. LYNGGAARD (_with an expression of abject horror in her
fixed gaze_):--A little afterwards this thing happened. It was
one of the first warm summer days, and I was walking in the
garden with Jacob. At that time a splendid old chestnut tree
was growing in one corner. And there, in the midst of green
leaves, and singing birds, Olsen was hanging, cold and dead.
And the flies were crawling in and out of his face.... (_She
trembles visibly._)
MIKKELSEN:--Yes, life is cruel.
MRS. LYNGGAARD:--And there I perceived for the first time how
utterly poor a human being may become. Anything so pitiful
and miserable I had never seen before. There was no sign of
underclothing between his trousers and the vest. And I don't
know why, but it seemed almost as if this was what hurt me
most--much more than that he had hanged himself.... And since
that day I haven't known a single hour of happiness.
My Religion
BY LEO TOLSTOY
(From an essay in which the Russian novelist and reformer,
1828-1910, has set forth the creed by which he lived)
What is the law of nature? Is it to know that my security
and that of my family, all my amusements and pleasures, are
purchased at the expense of misery, deprivation, and suffering
to thousands of human beings--by the terror of the gallows; by
the misfortune of thousands stifling within prison walls; by
the fears inspired by millions of soldiers and guardians of
civilization, torn from their homes and besotted by discipline,
to protect our pleasures with loaded revolvers against the
possible interference of the famishing! Is it to purchase every
fragment of bread that I put in my mouth and the mouths of my
children by the numberless privations that are necessary to
procure my abundance? Or is it to be certain that my piece of
bread only belongs to me when I know that everyone else has a
share, and that no one starves while I eat?
The Octopus[A]
[A] By permission of Doubleday, Page & Co.
BY FRANK NORRIS
(The young American novelist, 1870-1902, planned this as the first
of a trilogy of novels, the "Epic of the Wheat." The second volume,
"The Pit," was written, but his death interrupted the third. The
present story narrates the long struggle between the farmers of the
San Joaquin valley and the railroad "octopus." The farmers have been
beaten, and several of them killed while resisting eviction from their
homes. The hero is at a dinner party in San Francisco, at the same
time that the widow and child of one of the victims are wandering the
streets outside)
All around the table conversations were going forward gayly.
The good wines had broken up the slight restraint of the
early part of the evening and a spirit of good humor and good
fellowship prevailed. Young Lambery and Mr. Gerard were deep
in reminiscences of certain mutual duck-shooting expeditions.
Mrs. Gerard and Mrs. Cedarquist discussed a novel--a strange
mingling of psychology, degeneracy, and analysis of erotic
conditions--which had just been translated from the Italian.
Stephen Lambert and Beatrice disputed over the merits of a
Scotch collie just given to the young lady. The scene was gay,
the electric bulbs sparkled, the wine flashing back the light.
The entire table was a vague glow of white napery, delicate
china, and glass as brilliant as crystal. Behind the guests the
serving-men came and went, filling the glasses continually,
changing the covers, serving the entrées, managing the dinner
without interruption, confusion, or the slightest unnecessary
noise.
But Presley could find no enjoyment in the occasion. From that
picture of feasting, that scene of luxury, that atmosphere of
decorous, well-bred refinement, his thoughts went back to Los
Muertos and Quien Sabe and the irrigating ditch at Hooven's.
He saw them fall, one by one, Harran, Annixter, Osterman,
Broderson, Hooven. The clink of the wine glasses was drowned
in the explosion of revolvers. The Railroad might indeed be a
force only, which no man could control and for which no man
was responsible, but his friends had been killed, but years
of extortion and oppression had wrung money from all the San
Joaquin, money that had made possible this very scene in which
he found himself. Because Magnus had been beggared, Gerard had
become Railroad King; because the farmers of the valley were
poor, these men were rich.
The fancy grew big in his mind, distorted, caricatured,
terrible. Because the farmers had been killed at the irrigating
ditch, these others, Gerard and his family, fed full. They
fattened on the blood of the People, on the blood of the men
who had been killed at the ditch. It was a half-ludicrous,
half-horrible "dog eat dog," an unspeakable cannibalism.
Harran, Annixter, and Hooven were being devoured there under
his eyes. These dainty women, his cousin Beatrice and little
Miss Gerard, frail, delicate; all these fine ladies with their
small fingers and slender necks, suddenly were transfigured in
his tortured mind into harpies tearing human flesh. His head
swam with the horror of it, the terror of it. Yes, the People
_would_ turn some day, and, turning, rend those who now preyed
upon them. It would be "dog eat dog" again, with positions
reversed, and he saw for an instant of time that splendid house
sacked to its foundations, the tables overturned, the pictures
torn, the hangings blazing, and Liberty, the red-handed Man
in the Street, grimed with powder smoke, foul with the gutter,
rush yelling, torch in hand, through every door.
* * * * *
At ten o'clock Mrs. Hooven fell.
Luckily she was leading Hilda by the hand at the time and the
little girl was not hurt. In vain had Mrs. Hooven, hour after
hour, walked the streets. After a while she no longer made any
attempt to beg; nobody was stirring, nor did she even try to
hunt for food with the stray dogs and cats. She had made up her
mind to return to the park in order to sit upon the benches
there, but she had mistaken the direction, and, following up
Sacramento Street, had come out at length, not upon the park,
but upon a great vacant lot at the very top of the Clay Street
hill. The ground was unfenced and rose above her to form the
cap of the hill, all overgrown with bushes and a few stunted
live-oaks. It was in trying to cross this piece of ground that
she fell....
"You going to sleep, mammy?" inquired Hilda, touching her face.
Mrs. Hooven roused herself a little.
"Hey? Vat you say? Asleep? Yais, I guess I wass asleep."
Her voice trailed unintelligibly to silence again. She was not,
however, asleep. Her eyes were open. A grateful numbness had
begun to creep over her, a pleasing semi-insensibility. She no
longer felt the pain and cramps of her stomach, even the hunger
was ceasing to bite.
* * * * *
"These stuffed artichokes are delicious, Mrs. Gerard, murmured
young Lambert, wiping his lips with a corner of his napkin.
"Pardon me for mentioning it, but your dinner must be my
excuse."
"And this asparagus--since Mr. Lambert has set the bad
example," observed Mrs. Cedarquist, "so delicate, such an
exquisite flavor. How _do_ you manage?"
"We get all our asparagus from the southern part of the State,
from one particular ranch," explained Mrs. Gerard. "We order it
by wire and get it only twenty hours after cutting. My husband
sees to it that it is put on a special train. It stops at this
ranch just to take on our asparagus. Extravagant, isn't it, but
I simply can not eat asparagus that has been cut more than a
day."
"Nor I," exclaimed Julian Lambert, who posed as an epicure. "I
can tell to an hour just how long asparagus has been picked."
"Fancy eating ordinary market asparagus," said Mrs. Gerard,
"that has been fingered by Heaven knows how many hands."
* * * * *
"Mammy, mammy, wake up," cried Hilda, trying to push open Mrs.
Hooven's eyelids, at last closed. "Mammy, don't. You're just
trying to frighten me."
Feebly Hilda shook her by the shoulder. At last Mrs. Hooven's
lips stirred. Putting her head down, Hilda distinguished the
whispered words:
"I'm sick. Go to schleep.... Sick.... Noddings to eat."
* * * * *
The dessert was a wonderful preparation of alternate layers of
biscuit, glacés, ice cream, and candied chestnuts.
"Delicious, is it not?" observed Julian Lambert, partly
to himself, partly to Miss Cedarquist. "This _Moscovite
fouetté_--upon my word, I have never tasted its equal."
"And you should know, shouldn't you?" returned the young lady.
* * * * *
"Mammy, mammy, wake up," cried Hilda. "Don't sleep so. I'm
frightened."
Repeatedly she shook her; repeatedly she tried to raise the
inert eyelids with the point of her finger. But her mother no
longer stirred. The gaunt, lean body, with its bony face and
sunken eye-sockets, lay back, prone upon the ground, the feet
upturned and showing the ragged, worn soles of the shoes, the
forehead and gray hair beaded with fog, the poor, faded bonnet
awry, the poor, faded dress soiled and torn.
Hilda drew close to her mother, kissing her face, twining
her arms around her neck. For a long time she lay that way,
alternately sobbing and sleeping. Then, after a long time,
there was a stir. She woke from a doze to find a police officer
and two or three other men bending over her. Some one carried a
lantern. Terrified, smitten dumb, she was unable to answer the
questions put to her. Then a woman, evidently the mistress of
the house on the top of the hill, arrived and took Hilda in her
arms and cried over her.
"I'll take the little girl," she said to the police officer.
"But the mother, can you save her? Is she too far gone?"
"I've sent for a doctor," replied the other.
* * * * *
Just before the ladies left the table, young Lambert raised
his glass of Madeira. Turning towards the wife of the Railroad
King, he said:
"My best compliments for a delightful dinner."
The doctor, who had been bending over Mrs. Hooven, rose.
"It's no use," he said; "she has been dead some
time--exhaustion from starvation."
BY ANATOLE FRANCE
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as
the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to
steal bread.
Progress and Poverty
BY HENRY GEORGE
(One of the most widely-read treatises upon economics ever published,
this book was the fountain head of the single-tax movement. The writer
was a California journalist, 1839-1897, who devoted all his life to
the propaganda of economic justice)
Unpleasant as it may be to admit it, it is at last becoming
evident that the enormous increase in productive power which
has marked the present century and is still going on with
accelerating ratio, has no tendency to extirpate poverty or
to lighten the burdens of those compelled to toil. It simply
widens the gulf between Dives and Lazarus, and makes the
struggle for existence more intense. The march of invention
has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the
boldest imagination could not have dreamed. But in factories
where labor-saving machinery has reached its most wonderful
development, little children are at work; wherever the new
forces are anything like fully utilized, large classes
are maintained by charity or live on the verge of recourse
to it; amid the greatest accumulations of wealth, men die
of starvation, and puny infants suckle dry breasts; while
everywhere the greed of gain, the worship of wealth, shows the
force of the fear of want. The promised land flies before us
like the mirage. The fruits of the tree of knowledge turn, as
we grasp them, to apples of Sodom that crumble at the touch....
This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma
of our times. It is the central fact from which spring
industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex
the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy
and education grapple in vain. From it come the clouds that
overhang the future of the most progressive and self-reliant
nations. It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to
our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed.
So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress
brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase
luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of
Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot
be permanent. The reaction must come. The tower leans from
its foundations, and every new story but hastens the final
catastrophe. To educate men who must be condemned to poverty,
is but to make them restive; to base on a state of most glaring
social inequality political institutions under which men are
theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex.
BOOK III
_The Outcast_
The life of the underworld, of those thrown upon the scrap-heap of the
modern industrial machine; vivid and powerful passages portraying the
lives of tramps, criminals and prostitutes.
Not Guilty
BY ROBERT BLATCHFORD
(See page 66)
In defending the Bottom Dog I do not deal with hard science
only; but with the dearest faiths, the oldest wrongs and the
most awful relationships of the great human family, for whose
good I strive and to whose judgment I appeal. Knowing, as I do,
how the hard-working and hard-playing public shun laborious
thinking and serious writing, and how they hate to have their
ease disturbed or their prejudices handled rudely, I still make
bold to undertake this task, because of the vital nature of the
problems I shall probe.
The case for the Bottom Dog should touch the public heart
to the quick, for it affects the truth of our religions,
the justice of our laws and the destinies of our children
and our children's children. Much golden eloquence has been
squandered in praise of the successful and the good; much stern
condemnation has been vented upon the wicked. I venture now
to plead for those of our poor brothers and sisters who are
accursed of Christ and rejected of men.
Hitherto all the love, all the honors, all the applause of this
world, and all the rewards of heaven, have been lavished on the
fortunate and the strong; and the portion of the unfriended
Bottom Dog, in his adversity and weakness, has been curses,
blows, chains, the gallows and everlasting damnation. I shall
plead, then, for those who are loathed and tortured and branded
as the sinful and unclean; for those who have hated us and
wronged us, and have been wronged and hated by us. I shall
defend them for right's sake, for pity's sake and for the
benefit of society and the race. For these also are of our
flesh, these also have erred and gone astray, these also are
victims of an inscrutable and relentless Fate.
If it concerns us that the religions of the world are childish
dreams or nightmares; if it concerns us that our penal laws and
moral codes are survivals of barbarism and fear; if it concerns
us that our most cherished and venerable ideas of our relations
to God and to each other are illogical and savage, then the
case for the Bottom Dog concerns us nearly.
If it moves us to learn that disease may be prevented, that
ruin may be averted, that broken hearts and broken lives may
be made whole; if it inspires us to hear how beauty may be
conjured out of loathsomeness and glory out of shame; how
waste may be turned to wealth and death to life, and despair
to happiness, then the case for the Bottom Dog is a case to be
well and truly tried.
Moleskin Joe[A]
[A] By permission of E. P. Dutton & Co.
(_From "Children of the Dead End"_)
BY PATRICK MACGILL
(See pages 32, 47)
'Twas towards the close of a fine day on the following summer
that we were at work in the dead end of a cutting, Moleskin and
I, when I, who had been musing on the quickly passing years,
turned to Moleskin and quoted a line from the Bible.
"Our years pass like a tale that is told," I said.
"Like a tale that is told damned bad," answered my mate,
picking stray crumbs of tobacco from his waistcoat pocket and
stuffing them into the heel of his pipe. "It's a strange world,
Flynn. Here today, gone tomorrow; always waiting for a good
time comin' and knowin' that it will never come. We work with
one mate this evenin', we beg for crumbs with another on the
mornin' after. It's a bad life, ours, and a poor one, when I
come to think of it, Flynn."
"It is all that," I assented heartily.
"Look at me!" said Joe, clenching his fists and squaring his
shoulders. "I must be close on forty years, maybe on the
graveyard side of it, for all I know. I've horsed it ever since
I can mind; I've worked like a mule for years, and what have I
to show for it all today, matey? Not the price of an ounce of
tobacco! A midsummer scarecrow wouldn't wear the duds that I've
to wrap around my hide! A cockle-picker that has no property
only when the tide is out is as rich as I am. Not the price of
an ounce of tobacco! There is something wrong with men like
us, surely, when we're treated like swine in a sty for all the
years of our life. It's not so bad here, but it's in the big
towns that a man can feel it most. No person cares for the
like of us, Flynn. I've worked nearly ev'rywhere; I've helped
to build bridges, dams, houses, ay, and towns! When they were
finished, what happened? Was it for us--the men who did the
buildin'--to live in the homes that we built, or walk through
the streets that we laid down? No earthly chance of that! It
was always, 'Slide! we don't need you any more,' and then a man
like me, as helped to build a thousand houses big as castles,
was hellish glad to get the shelter of a ten-acre field and
a shut-gate between me and the winds of night. I've spent all
my money, have I? It's bloomin' easy to spend all that fellows
like us can earn. When I was in London I saw a lady spend as
much on fur to decorate her carcase with as would keep me in
beer and tobacco for all the rest of my life. And that same
lady would decorate a dog in ribbons and fol-the-dols, and she
wouldn't give me the smell of a crust when I asked her for a
mouthful of bread. What could you expect from a woman who wears
the furry hide of some animal round her neck, anyhow? We are
not thought as much of as dogs, Flynn. By God! them rich buckos
do eat an awful lot. Many a time I crept up to a window just to
see them gorgin' themselves."
"I have looked in at windows too," I said.
"Most men do," answered Joe. "You've heard of old Moses goin'
up the hill to have a bit peep at the Promist Land. He was just
like me and you, Flynn, wantin' to have a peep at the things
which he'd never lay his claws on."
"Those women who sit half-naked at the table have big
appetites," I said.
"They're all gab and guts, like young crows," said Moleskin.
"And they think more of their dogs than they do of men like me
and you. I'm an Antichrist!"
"A what?"
"One of them sort of fellows as throws bombs at kings."
"You mean an Anarchist."
"Well, whatever they are, I'm one. What is the good of kings,
of fine-feathered ladies, of churches, of anything in the
country, to men like me and you?"
The Carter and the Carpenter[A]
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
(_From "The People of the Abyss"_)
BY JACK LONDON
(See page 62)
The Carter, with his clean-cut face, chin beard, and shaved
upper lip, I should have taken in the United States for
anything from a master workman to a well-to-do farmer. The
Carpenter--well, I should have taken him for a carpenter. He
looked it, lean and wiry, with shrewd, observant eyes, and
hands that had grown twisted to the handles of tools through
forty-seven years' work at the trade. The chief difficulty with
these men was that they were old, and that their children,
instead of growing up to take care of them, had died. Their
years had told on them, and they had been forced out of the
whirl of industry by the younger and stronger competitors who
had taken their places.
These two men, turned away from the casual ward of Whitechapel
Workhouse, were bound with me for Poplar Workhouse. Not much of
a show, they thought, but to chance it was all that remained
to us. It was Poplar, or the streets and night. Both men were
anxious for a bed, for they were "about gone," as they phrased
it. The Carter, fifty-eight years of age, had spent the last
three nights without shelter or sleep, while the Carpenter,
sixty-five years of age, had been out five nights.
But, O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, with white
beds and airy rooms waiting you each night, how can I make you
know what it is to suffer as you would suffer if you spent a
weary night on London's streets? Believe me, you would think
a thousand centuries had come and gone before the east paled
into dawn; you would shiver till you were ready to cry aloud
with the pain of each aching muscle; and you would marvel that
you could endure so much and live. Should you rest upon a
bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the policeman
would rouse you and gruffly order you to "move on." You may
rest upon the bench, and benches are few and far between; but
if rest means sleep, on you must go, dragging your tired body
through the endless streets. Should you, in desperate slyness,
seek some forlorn alley, or dark passage-way, and lie down, the
omnipresent policeman will rout you out just the same. It is
his business to rout you out. It is a law of the powers that be
that you shall be routed out.
But when the dawn came, the nightmare over, you would hale you
home to refresh yourself, and until you died you would tell the
story of your adventure to groups of admiring friends. It would
grow into a mighty story. Your little eight-hour night would
become an Odyssey and you a Homer.
Not so with these homeless ones who walked to Poplar Workhouse
with me. And there are thirty-five thousand of them, men and
women, in London Town this night. Please don't remember it as
you go to bed; if you are as soft as you ought to be you may
not rest so well as usual. But for old men of sixty, seventy,
and eighty, ill-fed, with neither meat nor blood, to greet the
dawn unrefreshed, and to stagger through the day in mad search
for crusts, with relentless night rushing down upon them again,
and to do this five nights and days--O dear, soft people, full
of meat and blood, how can you ever understand?
I walked up Mile End Road between the Carter and the Carpenter.
Mile End Road is a wide thoroughfare, cutting the heart of East
London, and there are tens of thousands of people abroad on it.
I tell you this so that you may fully appreciate what I shall
describe in the next paragraph. As I say, we walked along, and
when they grew bitter and cursed the land, I cursed with them,
cursed as an American waif would curse, stranded in a strange
and terrible land. And, as I tried to lead them to believe, and
succeeded in making them believe, they took me for a "seafaring
man," who had spent his money in riotous living, lost his
clothes (no unusual occurrence with seafaring men ashore), and
was temporarily broke while looking for a ship. This accounted
for my ignorance of English ways in general and casual wards in
particular, and my curiosity concerning the same.
The Carter was hard put to keep the pace at which we walked (he
told me that he had eaten nothing that day), but the Carpenter,
lean and hungry, his grey and ragged overcoat flapping
mournfully in the breeze, swung on in a lone and tireless
stride which reminded me strongly of the plains wolf or coyote.
Both kept their eyes upon the pavement as they walked and
talked, and every now and then one or the other would stoop
and pick something up, never missing his stride the while. I
thought it was cigar and cigarette stumps they were collecting,
and for some time took no notice. Then I did notice.
_From the slimy, spittle-drenched sidewalk, they were picking
up bits of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and they
were eating them. The pits of greengage plums they cracked
between their teeth for the kernels inside. They picked up
stray crumbs of bread the size of peas, apple cores so black
and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, and these
things these two men took into their mouths, and chewed them,
and swallowed them; and this, between six and seven o'clock in
the evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the heart
of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world
has ever seen._
These two men talked. They were not fools, they were merely
old. And, naturally, their guts a-reek with pavement offal,
they talked of bloody revolution. They talked as anarchists,
fanatics, and madmen would talk. And who shall blame them?
In spite of my three good meals that day, and the snug bed I
could occupy if I wished, and my social philosophy, and my
evolutionary belief in the slow development and metamorphosis
of things--in spite of all this, I say, I felt impelled to talk
rot with them or hold my tongue. Poor fools! Not of their sort
are revolutions bred. And when they are dead and dust, which
will be shortly, other fools will talk bloody revolution as
they gather offal from the spittle-drenched sidewalk along Mile
End Road to Poplar Workhouse.
BY HORACE GREELEY.
(American editor, 1811-1872; prominent abolitionist)
Morality and religion are but words to him who fishes in
gutters for the means of sustaining life, and crouches behind
barrels in the street for shelter from the cutting blasts of a
winter night.
The Hunt for the Job
(_From "Pay Envelopes"_)
BY JAMES OPPENHEIM
(See page 45)
The Hunt began early next morning--the Hunt for the Job. The
hunter, however, is really the hunted. Now and then he bares
his skin to the unthinking blows of the world, and runs off to
hide himself in the crowd. You may see him bobbing along the
turbulent man-currents of Broadway, a tide-tossed derelict in
the thousand-foot shadows of the sky-scrapers. The mob about
him is lusty with purpose, each unit making his appointed
place, the morning rush to work bearing the stenographer to
her machine, the broker to his ticker, the ironworker to his
sky-dangling beam. In the mighty machine of the city each
has his place, each is provided for, each gets the glow of
sharing in the world's work. The morning rush, splashed at
street crossings with the gold of the Eastern sun, is rippled
with fresh eyes and busy lips. They are all in the machine.
But our young man crouching in a corner of the crowded car
is not of these; slinking down Broadway he is aware that the
machine has thrown him out and he cannot get in. He is an exile
in the midst of his own people. The sense of loneliness and
inferiority eats the heart out of the breast; the good of life
is gone; the blackness soaks across the city and into his home,
his love, his soul.
Some go bitter and are for throwing bombs; some despair and
are for wiping themselves away; some--the rank and file--are
for fighting to the last ditch. Peter pendulated between all
three of these moods. In ordinary times he would have been
all fight; in these hard times, drenched with the broadcast
hopelessness of men, he knew he was foredoomed to defeat. Only
a miracle could save him.
Trudging up Seventy-ninth Street to Third Avenue, fresh with
Annie's kiss and the baby's pranks, he had the last bit of
daring dashed out of him by a strange throng of men. Before
a small Hebrew synagogue, packed in the deep area were forty
unemployed workers, jammed crowd-thick against the windows and
gate. It was fresh weather, not cold, yet the men shivered.
Their bodies had for long been unwarmed by sufficient food
or clothing; there was a grayness about them as of famished
wolves; their lips and fingers were blue; they were unshaved
and frowzy with some vile sleeping place. Hard times had
blotched the city with a myriad of such groups. And as Peter
stopped and imagined himself driven at last among them, he
saw a burly fellow emerge from the house and begin handing
out charity bowls of hot coffee and charity bread. Peter,
independent American workman, was stung at the sight; the souls
of these workers were somehow being outraged; they were eating
out of the hands of the comfortable, like so many gutter dogs.
The rest of the morning Peter dared now and then to present
himself at an office to ask work. At some places he tried
boldness, at others meekness, and at last he begged, "For
God's sake, I have a wife and baby--" He met with various
receptions at the hands of clerks, office boys, and bosses. A
few were sorry, some turned their backs, the rest hurried him
out. Each refusal, each "not wanted in the scheme of things,"
shot him out into the streets, stripped of another bit of
self-reliance. In spite of himself, he began to feel his poor
appearance, his drooping lip, his broken purpose. He was a
failure and the world could not use him. He hardly dared to
look a man in the eyes, to lift his voice above a whisper, to
make a demand, to dare a refusal. He slunk home at last like a
cowed and beaten animal.
The Unemployable
(_From "The Workers"_)
BY WALTER A. WYCKOFF
(A professor in Princeton University who went out and lived
for long periods as a laborer, in order to know the facts of
industry at first hand)
Many of the men were so weakened by the want and hardship of
the winter that they were no longer in condition for effective
labor. Some of the bosses who were in need of added hands
were obliged to turn men away because of physical incapacity.
One instance of this I shall not soon forget. It was when I
overheard, early one morning, at a factory gate, an interview
between a would-be laborer and the boss. I knew the applicant
for a Russian Jew, who had at home an old mother and a wife
and two young children to support. He had had intermittent
employment throughout the winter in a sweater's den, barely
enough to keep them all alive, and, after the hardships of the
cold season, he was again in desperate straits for work.
The boss had all but agreed to take him on for some sort of
unskilled labor, when, struck by the cadaverous look of the
man, he told him to bare his arm. Up went the sleeve of his
coat and his ragged flannel shirt, exposing a naked arm with
the muscles nearly gone, and the blue-white transparent skin
stretched over sinews and the outline of the bones. Pitiful
beyond words were his efforts to give a semblance of strength
to the biceps which rose faintly to the upward movement of
the forearm. But the boss sent him off with an oath and a
contemptuous laugh, and I watched the fellow as he turned
down the street, facing the fact of his starving family with
a despair at his heart which only mortal man can feel and no
mortal tongue can speak.
The Bread Line
BY BERTON BRALEY
(Contemporary American poet)
Well, here they are--they stand and stamp and shiver
Waiting their food from some kind stranger hand,
Their weary limbs with eagerness a-quiver
Hungry and heartsick in a bounteous land.
"Beggars and bums?" Perhaps, and largely worthless.
Shaky with drink, unlovely, craven, low,
With obscene tongues and hollow laughter mirthless;
But who shall give them scorn for being so?
Yes, here they are--with gaunt and pallid faces,
With limbs ill-clad and fingers stiff and blued,
Shuffling and stamping on their pavement places,
Waiting and watching for their bit of food.
We boast of vast achievements and of power,
Of human progress knowing no defeat,
Of strange new marvels every day and hour--
And here's the bread line in the wintry street!
Ten thousand years of war and peace and glory,
Of hope and work and deeds and golden schemes,
Of mighty voices raised in song and story,
Of huge inventions and of splendid dreams;
Ten thousand years replete with every wonder,
Of empires risen and of empires dead;
Yet still, while wasters roll in swollen plunder,
These broken men must stand in line--for bread!
The Unemployed Problem
(_From "Past and Present"_)
BY THOMAS CARLYLE
(See pages 31, 74)
And truly this first practical form of the Sphinx-question,
inarticulately and so audibly put there, is one of the most
impressive ever asked in the world. "Behold us here, so many
thousands, millions, and increasing at the rate of fifty every
hour. We are right willing and able to work; and on the Planet
Earth is plenty of work and wages for a million times as many.
We ask, If you mean to lead us towards work; to try to lead
us,--by ways new, never yet heard of till this new unheard-of
Time? Or if you declare that you cannot lead us? And expect
that we are to remain quietly unled, and in a composed manner
perish of starvation? What is it you expect of us? What is it
you mean to do with us?" This question, I say, has been put in
the hearing of all Britain; and will be again put, and ever
again, till some answer be given it.
An Answer
BY WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT
(Ex-president of the United States; born 1857)
"What is a man to do who is starving, and cannot find work?"
"God knows."
The Parish Workhouse
BY GEORGE CRABBE
(See page 29)
Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapors flagging play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;
There children dwell who know no parents' care;
Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there;
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives and mothers never wed;
Dejected widows with unheeded tears,
And crippled age with more than childhood-fears;
The lame, the blind, and--far the happiest they!--
The moping idiot and the madman gay.
Here too the sick their final doom receive,
Here brought amid the scenes of grief to grieve,
Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow,
Mixed with the clamors of the crowd below;
Here, sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow scan,
And the cold charities of man to man:
Whose laws indeed for ruined age provide,
And strong compulsion plucks the scrap from pride;
But still that scrap is bought with many a sigh,
And pride imbitters what it can't deny.
Say ye, oppressed by some fantastic woes,
Some jarring nerve that baffles your repose;
Who press the downy couch while slaves advance
With timid eye, to read the distant glance;
Who with sad prayers the weary doctor tease,
To name the nameless ever-new disease;
Who with mock patience dire complaints endure,
Which real pain and that alone can cure:
How would ye bear in real pain to lie,
Despised, neglected, left alone to die?
How would ye bear to draw your latest breath
Where all that's wretched paves the way for death?
BY KENKŌ HOSHI
(Japanese Buddhist priest of the Fourteenth Century)
It is desirable for a ruler that no man should suffer from cold
and hunger under his rule. Man cannot maintain his standard of
morals when he has no ordinary means of living.
The Bread of Affliction
(_From "Children of the Ghetto"_)
BY ISRAEL ZANGWILL
(English poet and novelist, born 1864; has written with
tenderness and charm of the struggles of Judaism in contact
with modern commercialism)
At half-past five the stable-doors were thrown open, and
the crowd pressed through a long, narrow white-washed stone
corridor into a barn-like compartment, with a white-washed
ceiling traversed by wooden beams. Within this compartment,
and leaving but a narrow circumscribing border, was a sort
of cattle-pen, into which the paupers crushed, awaiting amid
discomfort and universal jabber the divine moment. The single
jet of gas-light depending from the ceiling flared upon the
strange simian faces, and touched them into a grotesque
picturesqueness that would have delighted Doré.
They felt hungry, these picturesque people; their near and
dear ones were hungering at home. Voluptuously savoring
in imagination the operation of the soup, they forgot its
operation as a dole in aid of wages; were unconscious of the
grave economical possibilities of pauperization and the rest,
and quite willing to swallow their independence with the soup.
Even Esther, who had read much, and was sensitive, accepted
unquestioningly the theory of the universe that was held by
most people about her, that human beings were distinguished
from animals in having to toil terribly for a meagre crust,
but that their lot was lightened by the existence of a small
and semi-divine class called _Takeefim_, or rich people, who
gave away what they didn't want. How these rich people came
to be, Esther did not inquire; they were as much a part of the
constitution of things as clouds and horses. The semi-celestial
variety was rarely to be met with. It lived far away from
the Ghetto, and a small family of it was said to occupy a
whole house. Representatives of it, clad in rustling silks or
impressive broad-cloth, and radiating an indefinable aroma of
super-humanity, sometimes came to the school, preceded by the
beaming Head Mistress; and then all the little girls rose and
curtseyed, and the best of them, passing as average members
of the class, astonished the semi-divine persons by their
intimate acquaintance with the topography of the Pyrenees and
the disagreements of Saul and David, the intercourse of the two
species ending in effusive smiles and general satisfaction. But
the dullest of the girls was alive to the comedy, and had a
good-humored contempt for the unworldliness of the semi-divine
persons, who spoke to them as if they were not going to
recommence squabbling, and pulling one another's hair, and
copying one another's sums, and stealing one another's needles,
the moment the semi-celestial backs were turned.
[Illustration: WITHOUT A KENNEL
RYAN WALKER
(_American Socialist cartoonist, born 1870_)]
[Illustration: THE WHITE SLAVE
ABASTENIA ST. LEGER EBERLE
(_American sculptor, born 1878_)]
No. 5 John Street
BY RICHARD WHITEING
(English author and journalist, born 1840. The volume here
quoted is one of the most amazing pictures of slum-life ever
penned)
After midnight the gangs return in carousal from the gin shops,
the more thoughtful of them with stored liquor for the morning
draft. Now it is three stages of man--no more: man gushing,
confiding, uplifted, as he feels the effect of the lighter
fumes; disputatious, quarrelsome, as the heavier mount in a
second brew of hell; raging with wrath and hate, as the very
dregs send their emanations to the tortured brain.
The embrace, the wrangle, and the blow--this is the order
of succession. Till one--to mark it by the clock--we sing,
"'Art to 'art an' 'and to 'and." At about one forty-five you
may expect the tribal row between the gangs, who prey on one
another for recreation, and on society for a living. Our brutes
read the current gospel of the survival of the fittest in
their own way, and they dimly apprehend that mankind is still
organized as a predatory horde. The ever-open door brings us
much trouble from the outside. The unlighted staircase is a
place of rendezvous, and, not unfrequently, of deadly quarrel,
in undertones of concentrated fury, between wretches who seek
seclusion for the work of manslaughter. Our latest returning
inmate, the other night, stumbled over the body of a woman
not known at No. 5. She had been kicked to death within sight
and sound of lodgers who, believing it to be a matrimonial
difference, held interference to be no business of theirs.
The first thud of war between the "Hooligans" is generally for
two sharp. The seconds set to, along with their principals,
as in the older duel. For mark that in most things we are as
our betters were just so many centuries ago, and are simply
belated with our flint age. And now our shapelier waves of
sound break into a mere foam of oath and shriek. At times there
is an interval of silence more awful than the tumult; and you
may know that the knife is at its silent work, and that the
whole meaner conflict is suspended for an episode of tragedy.
If it is a hospital case, it closes the celebration. If it is
not, the entertainment probably dies out in a slanging match
between two of the fair; and the unnamable in invective and
vituperation rises, as in blackest vapor, from our pit to the
sky. At this, every room that holds a remnant of decency closes
its window, and all withdraw, except, perhaps, the little boys
and girls, who are beginning to pair according to the laws of
the ooze and of the slime....
Night in the Slums[A]
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
(_From "The People of the Abyss"_)
BY JACK LONDON
(See pages 62, 125)
I was glad the keepers were there, for I did not have on my
"seafaring" clothes, and I was what is called a "mark" for
the creatures of prey that prowled up and down. At times,
between keepers, these males looked at me sharply, hungrily,
gutter-wolves that they were, and I was afraid of their hands,
of their naked hands, as one may be afraid of the paws of a
gorilla. They reminded me of gorillas. Their bodies were small,
ill-shaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, no
abundant thews and wide-spreading shoulders. They exhibited,
rather, an elemental economy of nature, such as the cave-men
must have exhibited. But there was strength in those meagre
bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength to clutch and tear
and gripe and rend. When they spring upon their human prey they
are known even to bend the victim backward and double its body
till the back is broken. They possess neither conscience nor
sentiment, and they will kill for half a sovereign, without
fear or favor....
The dear soft people of the golden theatres and wonder-mansions
of the West End do not see these creatures, do not dream that
they exist. But they are here, alive, very much alive in their
jungle. And woe the day when England is fighting in her last
trench, and her able-bodied men are on the firing line! For
on that day they will crawl out of their dens and lairs, and
the people of the West End will see them, as the dear soft
aristocrats of Feudal France saw them and asked one another,
"Whence come they?" "Are they men?"
But they were not the only beasts that ranged the menagerie.
They were only here and there, lurking in dark courts and
passing like grey shadows along the walls; but the women from
whose rotten loins they spring were everywhere. They whined
insolently, and in maudlin tones begged me for pennies, and
worse. They held carouse in every boozing den, slatternly,
unkempt, bleary-eyed, and tousled, leering and gibbering,
overspilling with foulness and corruption, and, gone in
debauch, sprawling across benches and bars, unspeakably
repulsive, fearful to look upon.
And there were others, strange, weird faces and forms and
twisted monstrosities that shouldered me on every side,
inconceivable types of sodden ugliness, the wrecks of society,
the perambulating carcasses, the living deaths--women, blasted
by disease and drink till their shame brought not tuppence
in the open mart; and men, in fantastic rags, wrenched by
hardship and exposure out of all semblance of men, their faces
in a perpetual writhe of pain, grinning idiotically, shambling
like apes, dying with every step they took and every breath
they drew. And there were young girls, of eighteen and twenty,
with trim bodies and faces yet untouched with twist and bloat,
who had fetched the bottom of the Abyss plump, in one swift
fall. And I remember a lad of fourteen, and one of six or
seven, white-faced and sickly, homeless, the pair of them, who
sat upon the pavement with their backs against a railing and
watched it all....
The unfit and the unneeded! The miserable and despised
and forgotten, dying in the social shambles. The progeny
of prostitution--of the prostitution of men and women and
children, of flesh and blood, and sparkle and spirit; in
brief, the prostitution of labor. If this is the best that
civilization can do for the human, then give us howling and
naked savagery. Far better to be a people of the wilderness
and desert, of the cave and the squatting place, than to be a
people of the machine and the Abyss.
A Night's Lodging
BY MAXIM GORKY
(A true voice of the Russian masses, born 1868; by turns peddler,
scullery-boy, baker's assistant and tramp, he became all at once the
most widely known of Russian writers. In this play he has portrayed
the misery of the outcasts of his country. The scene is in the cellar
of an inn, the haunt of thieves and tramps. Luka, the aged pilgrim, is
talking to a young girl)
LUKA:--Treat everyone with friendliness--injure no one.
NATASHA:--How good you are, grandfather! How is it that you are
so good?
LUKA:--I am good, you say. Nyah--if it is true, all right. But
you see, my girl--there must be some one to be good. We must
have pity on mankind. Christ, remember, had pity for us all and
so taught us. Have pity when there is still time, believe me,
that is right. I was once, for example, employed as a watchman,
at a country place which belonged to an engineer, not far from
the city of Tomsk, in Siberia. The house stood in the middle
of the forest, an out-of-the-way location; and it was winter
and I was all alone in the country house. It was beautiful
there--magnificent! And once--I heard them scrambling up!
NATASHA:--Thieves?
LUKA:--Yes. They crept higher, and I took my rifle and went
outside. I looked up--two men, opening a window, and so busy
that they did not see anything of me at all. I cried to them:
Hey, there, get out of that! And would you think it, they fell
on me with a hand ax! I warned them. Halt, I cried, or else I
fire! Then I aimed first at one and then at the other. They
fell on their knees saying, Pardon us! I was pretty hot--on
account of the hand ax, you remember. You devils, I cried, I
told you to clear out and you didn't! And now, I said, one of
you go into the brush and get a switch. It was done. And now,
I commanded, one of you stretch out on the ground, and the
other thrash him. And so they whipped each other at my command.
And when they had each had a sound beating, they said to me:
Grandfather, said they, for the sake of Christ give us a piece
of bread. We haven't a bite in our bodies. They, my daughter,
were the thieves who had fallen upon me with the hand ax.
Yes, they were a pair of splendid fellows. I said to them, If
you had asked for bread! Then they answered: We had gotten
past that. We had asked and asked, and nobody would give us
anything. Endurance was worn out. Nyah--and so they remained
with me the whole winter. One of them, Stephen by name, liked
to take the rifle and go into the woods. And the other,
Jakoff, was constantly ill, always coughing. The three of us
watched the place, and when spring came, they said, Farewell,
grandfather, and went away--to Russia.
NATASHA:--Were they convicts, escaping?
LUKA:--They were fugitives--they had left their colony. A pair
of splendid fellows. If I had not had pity on them--who knows
what would have happened? They might have killed me. Then they
would be taken to court again, put in prison, sent back to
Siberia--why all that? You can learn nothing good in prison,
nor in Siberia. But a man, what can he not learn!
The Menagerie
(_Night in a County Workhouse_)
BY UPTON SINCLAIR
Oh come, ye lords and ladies of the realm,
Come from your couches soft, your perfumed halls,
Come watch with me throughout the weary hours.
Here are there sounds to thrill your jaded nerves,
Such as the cave-men, your forefathers, heard,
Crouching in forests of primeval night;
Here tier on tier in steel-barred cages pent
The beasts ye breed and hunt throughout the world.
Hark to that snore--some beast that slumbers deep;
Hark to that roar--some beast that dreams of blood;
Hark to that moan--some beast that wakes and weeps;
And then in sudden stillness mark the sound--
Some beast that rasps his vermin-haunted hide!
Oh come, ye lords and ladies of the realm,
Come keep the watch with me; this show is yours.
Behold the source of all your joy and pride,
The beasts ye harness fast and set to draw
The chariots of your pageantry and pomp!
It is their blood ye shed to make your feasts,
It is their treadmill that moves all your world.
Come gather now, and think how it will be
When God shall send his flaming angel down
And break these bars--so hath he done of yore,
So doeth he to lords and ladies grand--
And loose these beasts to raven in your streets!
A Sentiment on Social Reform
BY EUGENE V. DEBS
(American locomotive engineer; born 1855; president of his
union, and later the best known of American Socialist lecturers)
While there is a lower class, I am in it.
While there is a criminal element, I am of it.
While there is a soul in jail, I am not free.
The "Solitary"
(_From "My Life in Prison"_)
BY DONALD LOWRIE
(The writer of this picture of prison life, after serving a
sentence of fifteen years in San Quentin, has become one of the
leaders in the prison reform movement in California)
He was a thin young man of medium height, with long, straggly
blonde hair and beard. He was garbed in a ragged suit of dirty
stripes. His steel-gray eyes blinked as though the light hurt
them, and yet they were very alert, and there was a defiance,
an indomitableness in their depths. They protruded slightly,
as the eyes of persons who have suffered so frequently do.
The lines radiating from the corners bespoke mental as well
as physical distress, as did the spasmodic twitching of his
mouth. His skin was akin to the color of a thirsty road and
his garments looked as though he had not had them off for
months--the knees and elbows bulged and the frayed edges of the
coat curled under. I was conscious of a warring within me. I
had not yet learned who he was, and still I knew I was gazing
at a human creature who had been through hell....
"Treat Morrell right," admonished the lieutenant as he withdrew
from the room and left us together.
Morrell! The notorious "Ed" Morrell, about whom I had heard so
much, and who had been confined in the "incorrigibles" for five
years!
The majority of the prisoners, as well as the freemen, believed
him innocent of the offence with which he had been charged and
for which he had been subjected to such awful punishment. So
this man was Ed Morrell! No wonder I had been agitated....
He arose from the chair and stood dejectedly while I took the
necessary measurements, and then I led the way to the back
room, where the bathtub was located. I started to return to
the front room for the purpose of marking his clothes, but he
stopped me.
"Wait a minute," he urged. "Wait and see what a man looks like
after five years in hell. I was a husky when I went up there,
hard as nails and full of red blood, but look at me now."
While speaking, he had dropped off the outer rags, and a
moment after stood nude beside the tub of warm water. The
enormity of what he had suffered could not have been more
forcibly demonstrated. His limbs were horribly emaciated, the
knee, elbow, and shoulder bones stood out like huge knots
through the drawn and yellow skin, while his ribs reminded
me of the carcass of a sheep hanging in front of a butcher's
establishment. The hollows between them were deep and dark.
I thought of the picture I had seen of the famine-stricken
wretches of India....
"What are those scars on your back?" I asked as he sank onto
his knees in the water.
"Scars," he laughed, sardonically. "Scars? Those ain't scars.
They're only the marks where the devil prodded me. I was in the
jacket, cinched up so that I was breathing from my throat when
he came and tried to make me 'come through,' and when I sneered
at him he kicked me over the kidneys. I don't know how many
times he kicked; the first kick took my breath away and I saw
black, but after they took me out of the sack I couldn't get
up, and I had running sores down here for months afterwards.
I ain't right down there now; I've got a bad rupture, and
sometimes it feels as if there was a knife being twisted around
inside of me. It wouldn't be so bad if they'd got me right, but
to give a man a deal like that dead wrong is hell, let me tell
you...."
As we stepped into the barber shop there was a noticeable air
of expectancy. The word had passed through the prison that the
new warden had released "Ed" Morrell from "solitary." All but
one of the half dozen barbers were strangers to Morrell. They
had been committed to the prison after his siege of solitary
confinement had begun. The one exception was old Frank, a lifer
with twenty years' service behind him....
He took a step backward and a hush fell over the little group.
"With all due respect, Ed, you're the finest living picture of
Jesus Christ that I've ever seen, so help me God. And, Ed," he
added, hastily, his voice breaking, "we're all Jesus Christs,
if we'd only remember it."
Prisons
BY EMMA GOLDMAN
(Anarchist lecturer and writer; born in Russia, 1869)
Year after year the gates of prison hells return to the world
an emaciated, deformed, will-less shipwrecked crew of humanity,
with the Cain mark on their foreheads, their hopes crushed,
all their natural inclinations thwarted. With nothing but
hunger and inhumanity to greet them, these victims soon sink
back into crime as the only possibility of existence. It is
not at all an unusual thing to find men and women who have
spent half their lives--nay, almost their entire existence--in
prison. I know a woman on Blackwell's Island, who has been in
and out thirty-eight times; and through a friend I learn that
a young boy of seventeen, whom he had nursed and cared for in
the Pittsburgh penitentiary, had never known the meaning of
liberty. From the reformatory to the penitentiary had been
the path of this boy's life, until, broken in body, he died
a victim of social revenge. These personal experiences are
substantiated by extensive data giving overwhelming proof of
the futility of prisons as a means of deterrence or reform.
The Prison System
(_From "Resurrection"_)
BY LEO TOLSTOY
(See pages 88, 110)
"It is just as if a problem had been set: to find the best,
the surest means, of depraving the greatest number of people!"
thought Nehlúdof, while getting an insight into the deeds that
were being done in the prisons and halting-stations. Every year
hundreds of thousands were brought to the highest pitch of
depravity, and when completely depraved they were liberated to
spread broadcast the moral disease they had caught in prison.
In the prisons of Tumén, Ekáterinburg, Tomsk, and at the
halting-stations, Nehlúdof saw how successfully the object
society seemed to have set itself was attained. Ordinary simple
men holding the Russian peasant social and Christian morality
lost this conception, and formed a new, prison, one founded
chiefly on the idea that any outrage to or violation of human
beings is justifiable, if it seems profitable. After living in
prison these people became conscious with the whole of their
being that, judging by what was happening to themselves, all
those moral laws of respect and sympathy for others which
the Church and the moral teachers preach, were set aside in
real life, and that therefore they, too, need not keep these
laws. Nehlúdof noticed this effect of prison life in all the
prisoners he knew. He learnt, during his journey, that tramps
who escape into the marshes will persuade comrades to escape
with them, and will then kill them and feed on their flesh.
He saw a living man who was accused of this, and acknowledged
the act. And the most terrible thing was, that this was
not a solitary case of cannibalism, but that the thing was
continually recurring.
Only by a special cultivation of vice such as was carried
on in these establishments, could a Russian be brought to
the state of these tramps, who excelled Nietzsche's newest
teaching, holding everything allowable and nothing forbidden,
and spreading this teaching, first among the convicts and then
among the people in general.
The only explanation of what was being done was that it aimed
at the prevention of crime, at inspiring awe, at correcting
offenders, and at dealing out to them "lawful vengeance," as
the books said. But in reality nothing in the least resembling
these results came to pass. Instead of vice being put a stop
to, it only spread farther; instead of being frightened, the
criminals were encouraged (many a tramp returned to prison of
his own free will); instead of correction, every kind of vice
was systematically instilled; while the desire for vengeance,
far from being weakened by the measures of Government, was
instilled into the people to whom it was not natural.
"Then why is it done?" Nehlúdof asked himself, and could find
no answer.
FROM THE PSALMS
He hath looked down from the height of his sanctuary ... to
hear the sighing of the prisoner; to loose those that are
appointed to death.
Ballade of Misery and Iron
BY GEORGE CARTER
(Some years ago the _Century Magazine_ received several poems from
an inmate of the State penitentiary of Minnesota. Upon investigation
it was found that the poet, a young Englishman, had been driven to
stealing by starvation. Subsequently his pardon was procured)
Haggard faces and trembling knees,
Eyes that shine with a weakling's hate,
Lips that mutter their blasphemies,
Murderous hearts that darkly wait:
These are they who were men of late,
Fit to hold a plow or a sword.
If a prayer this wall may penetrate,
Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!
Poets sing of life at the lees
In tender verses and delicate;
Of tears and manifold agonies--
Little they know of what they prate.
Out of this silence, passionate
Sounds a deeper, a wilder chord.
If sound be heard through the narrow grate,
Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!
Hark, that wail of the distant breeze,
Piercing ever the close-barred gate,
Fraught with torturing memories
Of eyes that kindle and lips that mate.
Ah, by the loved ones desolate,
Whose anguish never can pen record,
If thou be truly compassionate,
Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!
L'ENVOI
These are pawns that the hand of Fate
Careless sweeps from the checker-board.
Thou that know'st if the game be straight,
Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!
BY KENKŌ HOSHI
(See page 135)
So long as people, being ill-governed, suffer from hunger,
criminals will never disappear. It is extremely unkind to
punish those who, being sufferers from hunger, are compelled to
violate laws.
The Red Robe
BY EUGÈNE BRIEUX
(French dramatist, born 1858; author of a series of powerful dramas
exposing the sources of corruption in French social, political and
business life. The present play has for its theme the law as a snare
for the feet of the poor and friendless. The principal character is a
government prosecuting attorney, driven by professional ambition and
jealousy, and the nagging of his wife and daughters. A murder has been
committed, and the newspapers are scolding because the criminal has
not been caught. Suspicion falls upon a poor wretch of a smuggler, who
is hounded and bullied into incriminating himself. At the last moment,
when the case is in the hands of the jury, the prosecuting attorney's
conscience is troubled, and he realizes that he is sending an innocent
man to the gallows)
MME. VAGRET:--But--these circumstances, how could you have
ignored them up to now?
VAGRET (_his head bowed_):--You think I have ignored
them?--Would I dare to tell you all? I am not a bad man, you'd
grant? I wouldn't desire that anyone should suffer through
my fault. Well!--Oh! but how it shames me to confess it, to
say it aloud, after having confessed it to myself! Well! When
I studied this case, I had got it so fixed in my head, in
advance, that this fellow Etchepare was a criminal, that when
an argument in his favor presented itself to my mind, I kept
it away from me, shrugging my shoulders. As to the facts about
which I am telling you, and from which suddenly my doubt has
been born--at first I sought only to prove to myself that these
facts were false, taking, in the testimony of the witnesses,
only what would combat their exactness, repelling all the rest,
with a frightful _naiveté_ in my bad faith.--And in the end, to
dissipate my last scruples, I said to myself, like you: "It is
the affair of the defense, not mine!" Listen and see to just
what point the exercise of the profession of prosecutor renders
us unjust and cruel; I had, myself--I had a thrill of joy at
first, when I saw that the judge, in his questioning, left in
the shadow the sum of those little facts. There, that is the
trade! you understand, the trade! Ah! poor creatures that we
are, poor creatures!
MME. VAGRET:--Possibly the jury may not condemn him?
VAGRET:--It will condemn him.
MME. VAGRET:--Or that it will admit some extenuating
circumstances.
VAGRET:--No. I urged them too emphatically against this. Was I
not ardent enough, my God! violent enough?
MME. VAGRET:--That's true. Why should you have developed your
argument with so much passion?
VAGRET:--Ah! why! why! Long before the session, it was so well
understood by everyone that the accused was the culprit! And
then, everyone was trying to rouse my dander, trying to make
me drunk! I was the spokesman for humanity, I had to reassure
the country, bring peace to the family--I don't know what all
else! My first demands were comparatively moderate. But when I
saw that famous advocate make the jury weep, I thought I was
lost; I felt that the case was getting away from me. Contrary
to my custom, I made a reply. When I stood up again, I was
like a combattant who goes to meet defeat, and who fights with
desperation. From that moment, Etchepare no longer existed, so
to speak. I no longer had the care to defend society, or to
maintain the accusation--I was fighting against that advocate;
it was a tourney of orators, a contest of actors; I had to
come out the conqueror at all hazards. I had to convince the
jury, to seize it and tear from it the "Yes" of a verdict.
It was no longer a question of Etchepare, I tell you; it was
a question of myself, of my vanity, of my reputation, of my
honor, of my future. It's shameful, I repeat, it's shameful!
At any cost, I wanted to avoid the acquittal which I felt was
certain. And I was possessed by such a fear of not succeeding,
that I employed all the arguments, good and bad--even those
which consisted in representing to those frightened men their
homes in flames, their loved ones assassinated. I spoke of
the vengeance of God upon judges who had no severity. And all
that in good faith--or rather without consciousness, in a fit
of passion, in a fit of passion against the advocate whom I
hated with all my forces.... The success was even greater than
I could have wished; the jury is ready to obey me, and for
myself, my dear--I let myself be congratulated, and I pressed
the hands which were held out to me.--That's what it is to be a
prosecutor!
MME. VAGRET:--Console yourself. There are perhaps not ten men
in France who would have acted otherwise.
VAGRET:--You are right. Only--if one reflects, it is precisely
that which is frightful.
BY KENKŌ HOSHI
(See pages 135, 151)
The governing class should stop their luxurious expenditures in
order to help the governed class. For only when a man has been
provided with the ordinary means of living, and yet steals, may
he be really called a thief.
A Hanging in Prison
(_From "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"_)
BY OSCAR WILDE
(English poet and dramatist, 1856-1900, leader of the so-called
"esthetes." The poem from which these extracts are taken was the fruit
of his long imprisonment, and is one of the most moving and terrible
narratives in English poetry)
With slouch and swing around the ring
We trod the Fools' Parade;
We did not care; we knew we were
The Devil's Own Brigade:
And shaven head and feet of lead
Make a merry masquerade.
We tore the tarry rope to shreds
With blunt and bleeding nails;
We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,
And cleaned the shining rails:
And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,
And clattered with the pails.
We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.
So still it lay that every day
Crawled like a weed-clogged wave;
And we forgot the bitter lot
That waits for fool and knave,
Till once, as we tramped in from work,
We passed an open grave.
With yawning mouth the yellow hole
Gaped for a living thing;
The very mud cried out for blood
To the thirsty asphalt ring:
And we knew that ere one dawn grew fair
Some prisoner had to swing.
Right in we went, with soul intent
On Death and Dread and Doom:
The hangman, with his little bag,
Went shuffling through the gloom:
And each man trembled as he crept
Into his numbered tomb.
That night the empty corridors
Were full of forms of Fear,
And up and down the iron town
Stole feet we could not hear,
And through the bars that hide the stars
White faces seemed to peer....
We were as men who through a fen
Of filthy darkness grope:
We did not dare to breathe a prayer,
Or to give our anguish scope:
Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope.
For Man's grim Justice goes its way,
And will not swerve aside:
It slays the weak, it slays the strong,
It has a deadly stride:
With iron heel it slays the strong,
The monstrous parricide
We waited for the stroke of eight:
Each tongue was thick with thirst:
For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate
That makes a man accursed,
And Fate will use a running noose
For the best man and the worst
We had no other thing to do,
Save to wait for the sign to come:
So, like things of stone in a valley lone,
Quiet we sat and dumb:
But each man's heart beat thick and quick
Like a madman on a drum!
With sudden shock the prison-clock
Smote on the shivering air,
And from all the gaol rose up a wail
Of impotent despair,
Like the sound that frightened marshes hear
From some leper in his lair.
And as one sees most fearful things
In the crystal of a dream,
We saw the greasy hempen rope
Hooked to the blackened beam,
And heard the prayer the hangman's snare
Strangled into a scream.
And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry,
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
There is no chapel on the day
On which they hang a man:
The Chaplain's heart is far too sick,
Or his face is far too wan,
Or there is that written in his eyes
Which none should look upon.
So they kept us close till nigh on noon,
And then they rang the bell,
And the Warders with their jingling keys
Opened each listening cell,
And down the iron stairs we tramped,
Each from his separate Hell.
Out into God's sweet air we went,
But not in wonted way,
For this man's face was white with fear,
And that man's face was grey,
And I never saw sad men who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw sad men who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
We prisoners call the sky,
And at every careless cloud that passed
In happy freedom by....
The Warders strutted up and down,
And kept their herd of brutes,
Their uniforms were spick and span,
And they were their Sunday suits,
But we knew the work they had been at
By the quicklime on their boots.
For where a grave had opened wide
There was no grave at all:
Only a stretch of mud and sand
By the hideous prison-wall,
And a little heap of burning lime,
That the man should have his pall.
For he has a pall, this wretched man,
Such as few men can claim;
Deep down below a prison-yard,
Naked for greater shame,
He lies, with fetters on each foot,
Wrapt in a sheet of flame!...
I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in jail
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
But this I know, that every Law
That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took his brother's life,
And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
With a most evil fan.
This too I know--and wise it were
If each could know the same--
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.
With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun:
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done
That Son of God nor son of Man
Ever should look upon!
The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.
For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.
The Punishment of Thieves
(_From "Utopia"_)
BY SIR THOMAS MORE
(One of the great classic Utopias, written by the English
statesman, 1478-1535; executed upon Tower Hill, for opposing
the will of King Henry VIII)
In this poynte, not you onlye, but also the most part of the
world, be like evyll scholemaisters, which be readyer to
beate, than to teache, their scholers. For great and horrible
punishmentes be appointed for theves, whereas much rather
provision should have ben made, that there were some meanes,
whereby they myght get their livyng, so that no man shoulde be
dryven to this extreme necessitie, firste to steale, and then
to dye.
The Turn of the Balance[A]
[A] Copyright, 1907. Used by special permission of the
publishers, Bobbs-Merrill Co.
BY BRAND WHITLOCK
(American novelist and reformer, born 1869; for many years mayor of
Toledo, Ohio, and now Minister to Belgium. The present novel is the
life-story of Archie Koerner, a boy of the tenements, who is driven to
crime by the evil forces of society)
"All ready, Archie."
Jimmy Ball touched him on the shoulder. He glanced toward the
open grated door, thence across the flagging to the other door,
and tried to take a step. Out there he could see one or two
faces thrust forward suddenly; they peered in, then hastily
withdrew. He tried again to take a step, but one leg had gone
to sleep, it prickled, and as he bore his weight upon it,
it seemed to swell suddenly to elephantine proportions. And
he seemed to have no knees at all; if he stood up he would
collapse. How was he ever to walk that distance?
"Here!" said Ball. "Get on that other side of him, Warden."
Then they started. The Reverend Mr. Hoerr, waiting by the door,
had begun to read something in a strange, unnatural voice, out
of a little red book he held at his breast in both his hands.
"Good-by, Archie!" they called from behind, and he turned,
swayed a little, and looked back over his shoulder.
"Good-by, boys," he said. He had a glimpse of their faces; they
looked gray and ugly, worse even than they had that evening--or
was it that evening when with sudden fear he had seen them
crouching there behind him?
Perhaps just at the last minute the governor would change
his mind. They were walking the long way to the door, six
yards off. The flagging was cold to his bare feet; his slit
trouser-legs flapped miserably, revealing his white calves.
Walking had suddenly become laborious; he had to lift each leg
separately and manage it; he walked much as that man in the
rear rank of Company 21 walked. He would have liked to stop and
rest an instant, but Ball and the warden walked beside him,
urged him resistlessly along, each gripping him at the wrist
and upper arm.
In the room outside, Archie recognized the reporters standing
in the sawdust. What they were to write that night would be
in the newspapers the next morning, but he would not read it.
He heard Beck lock the door of the death chamber, locking it
hurriedly, so that he could be in time to look on. Archie had
no friend in the group of men that waited in silence, glancing
curiously at him, their faces white as the whitewashed wall.
The doctors held their watches in their hands. And there before
him was the chair, its oil-cloth cover now removed, its cane
bottom exposed. But he would have to step up on the little
platform to get to it.
"No--yes, there you are, Archie, my boy!" whispered Ball.
"There!"
He was in it, at last. He leaned back; then, as his back
touched the back of the chair, he started violently. But there
were hands on his shoulders pressing him down, until he could
feel his back touch the chair from his shoulders down to the
very end of his spine. Some one had seized his legs, turned
back the slit trousers from his calves.
"Be quick!" he heard the warden say in a scared voice. He was
at his right where the switch and the indicator were.
There were hands, too, at his head, at his arms--hands all
over him. He took one last look. Had the governor--? Then
the leather mask was strapped over his eyes and it was dark.
He could only feel and hear now--feel the cold metal on his
legs, feel the moist sponge on the top of his head where the
barber had shaved him, feel the leather straps binding his legs
and arms to the legs and the arms of the chair, binding them
tightly, so that they gave him pain, and he could not move.
Helpless he lay there, and waited. He heard the loud ticking
of a watch; then on the other side of him the loud ticking of
another watch; fingers were at his wrists. There was no sound
but the mumble of Mr. Hoerr's voice. Then some one said:
"All ready."
He waited a second, or an age, then, suddenly, it seemed as
if he must leap from the chair, his body was swelling to
some monstrous, impossible, unhuman shape; his muscles were
stretched, millions of hot and dreadful needles were piercing
and pricking him, a stupendous roaring was in his ears, then a
million colors, colors he had never seen or imagined before,
colors beyond the range of the spectra, new, undiscovered,
summoned by some mysterious agency from distant corners of the
universe, played before his eyes. Suddenly they were shattered
by a terrific explosion in his brain--then darkness.
But no, there was still sensation; a dull purple color slowly
spread before him, gradually grew lighter, expanded, and
with a mighty pain he struggled, groping his way in torture
and torment over fearful obstacles from some far distance,
remote as black stars in the cold abyss of the universe; he
struggled back to life--then an appalling confusion, a grasp at
consciousness; he heard the ticking of the two watches--then,
through his brain there slowly trickled a thread of thought
that squirmed and glowed like a white-hot wire....
A faint groan escaped the pale lips below the black leather
mask, a tremor ran through the form in the chair, then it
relaxed and was still.
"It's all over." The doctor, lifting his fingers from Archie's
wrist, tried to smile, and wiped the perspiration from his face
with a handkerchief.
Some one flung up a window, and a draught of cool air
sucked through the room. On the draught was borne from the
death-chamber the stale odor of Russian cigarettes. And then
a demoniacal roar shook the cell-house. The convicts had been
awake.
The Police-Court Reporter
(_From "Midstream"_)
BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
(American novelist and war-correspondent, born 1878)
When I think of prisons; of the men who send other men there;
of chairs of death and hangings, and of all that bring these
things about--it comes to me that the City is organized hell;
that there is no end to our cruelty and stupidity. I bought
from door to door in city streets the stuff that makes murder;
I sat in the forenoon under the corrective forces, which were
quite as blindly stupid and cruel.
The women I passed in the night, appeared often in the morning.
I talked to them in the nights, and heard them weep in the
days; I saw them in the nights with the men who judged them
in the days. Out of all that evil, there was no voice; out of
all the corrective force there was no voice. The City covered
us all. I was one and the other. The women thought themselves
beasts; the men thought themselves men--and, voiceless between
them, the City stood.
The most tragic sentence I ever heard, was from the lips
of one of these women.... I talked with her through the
night. She called it her work; she had an ideal about her
work. Every turning in her life had been man-directed. She
confessed that she had begun with an unabatable passion; that
men had found her sensuousness very attractive when it was
fresh. She had preserved a certain sweetness; through such
stresses that the upper world would never credit. Thousands
of men had come to her; all perversions, all obsessions, all
madness, and drunkenness, to her alone in this little room.
She told of nights when twenty came. Yet there was something
inextinguishable about her--something patient and optimistic.
In the midst of it all, it was like a little girl speaking:
"_I wake up in the morning, and find a man beside me. I am
always frightened, even yet,--until I remember. I remember
who I am and what I am.... Then I try to think what he is
like--what his companions called him--what he said to me. I try
to remember how he looked--because you know in the morning, his
face is always turned away._"
Does it help you to see that we are all one?... Yet I couldn't
have seen then, trained by men and the City. I belonged to the
ranks of the corrective forces in the eyes of the City--and
she, to the destructive.... She would have gone to the pen, I
sitting opposite waiting for something more important to make
a news bulletin.... From the City's point of view, I was at
large, safe and sane....
The extreme seriousness with which men regard themselves as
municipal correctives--as soldiers, lovers, monopolists--has
risen for me into one of the most remarkable facts of life.
The Straight Road
BY PAUL HANNA
(Contemporary American poet)
They got y', kid: they got y'--just like I said they would.
You tried to walk the narrow path,
You tried, and got an awful laugh;
And laughs are all y' did get, kid--they got y' good!
They never knew the little kid--the kid I used to know;
The little bare-legged girl back home,
The little kid that played alone--
They don't know half the things I know, kid, ain't it so?
They got y', kid, they got y'--you know they got y' right;
They waited till they saw y' limp,
Then introduced y' to the pimp--
Ah, you were down then, kid, and couldn't fight!
I guess y' know what some don't know, and others know damn well--
That sweatshops don't grow angels' wings,
That workin' girls is easy things,
And poverty's the straightest road t' Hell!
The "Cadet"
(_From "The House of Bondage"_)
BY REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN
(See page 53)
Wherever there is squalor seeking ease, he is there. Wherever
there is distress crying for succor, discontent complaining for
relief, weariness sighing for rest, there is this missionary,
offering the quack salvation of his temporal church. He knows
and takes subtle advantage of the Jewish sisters sent to work
for the education of Jewish brothers; the Irish, the Germans,
the Russians, and the Syrians ground in one or another economic
mill; the restless neurotic native daughters untrained for work
and spoiled for play. He is at the door of the factory when
it releases its white-faced women for a breath of night air;
he is at the cheap lunch-room where the stenographers bolt
unwholesome noonday food handed about by underpaid waitresses;
he lurks around the corner for the servant and the shop-clerk.
He remembers that these are girls too tired to do household
work in their evenings, too untaught to find continued solace
in books; that they must go out, that they must move about;
and so he passes his own nights at the restaurants and
theaters, the moving-picture shows, the dancing academies,
the dance-halls. He may go into those stifling rooms where
immigrants, long before they learn to make a half-complete
sentence of what they call the American language, learn what
they are told are American dances: the whirling "spiel" with
blowing skirts, the "half-time waltz" with jerking hips. He may
frequent the more sophisticated forms of these places, may even
be seen in the more expensive cafés, or may journey into the
provinces. But he scents poverty from afar.
The Priestess of Humanity
(_From "A History of European Morals"_)
BY WILLIAM E. H. LECKY
(English historian and philosopher, 1838-1903. The following
much quoted passage may be said to represent the Victorian view
of its subject)
Under these circumstances, there has arisen in society a figure
which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects
the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell.
That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who
counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection,
and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is
scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for
the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early
death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the
degradation and sinfulness of man. Herself the supreme type of
vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue.
But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes
would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their
untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder,
would have known the agony of remorse and despair. On that one
degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that
might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while
creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess
of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.
Sisterhood
BY MARY CRAIG SINCLAIR
(Contemporary American writer)
Last night I woke, and in my tranquil bed
I lay, and thanked my God with fervent prayer
That I had food and warmth, a cosy chair
Beside a jolly fire, and roses red
To give my room a touch of light and grace.
And I thanked God, oh thanked Him! that my face
Was beautiful, that it was fair to men:
I thought awhile, then thanked my God again.
For yesterday, on Broadway I had walked,
And I had stopped to watch them as they stalked
Their prey; and I was glad I had no sons
To look with me upon those woeful ones--
Paint on their lips, and from a corpse their hair,
And eyes of simulated lust, astare!
The Woman of the Streets
BY ROBERT BLATCHFORD
(See pages 66, 121)
Consider now the outcast Jezebel of the London pavement. Fierce
and cunning, and false and vile. Ghastly of visage under her
paint and grease. A creature debased below the level of the
brute, with the hate of a devil in her soul and the fire of
hell in her eyes. Lewd of gesture, strident of voice, wanton
of gaze, using language so foul as to shock the pot-house
ruffian, and laughter whose sound makes the blood run cold. A
dreadful spectre, shameless, heartless, reckless, and horrible.
A creature whose touch is contamination, whose words burn like
a flame, whose leers and ogles make the soul sick. A creature
living in drunkenness and filth. A moral blight. A beast of
prey who has cast down many wounded, whose victims fill the
lunatic ward and the morgue; a thief, a liar, a hopeless, lost,
degraded wretch, of whom it has been well said, "Her feet take
hold of hell; her house is the way to the grave, going down to
the chamber of death."
In the Strand
BY ARTHUR SYMONS
(English poet and critic, born 1865)
With eyes and hands and voice convulsively
She craves the bestial wages. In her face
What now is left of woman? whose lost place
Is filled with greed's last eating agony.
She lives to be rejected and abhorred,
Like a dread thing forgotten. One by one
She hails the passers, whispers blindly; none
Heeds now the voice that had not once implored
Those alms in vain. The hour has struck for her,
And now damnation is scarce possible
Here on the earth; it waits for her in hell.
God! to be spurned of the last wayfarer
That haunts a dark street after midnight! Now
Shame's last disgrace is hot upon her brow.
The Bridge of Sighs
BY THOMAS HOOD
(See page 59)
One more Unfortunate
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!
Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion'd so slenderly,
Young, and so fair!
Look at her garments
Clinging like cerements;
Whilst the wave constantly
Drips from her clothing;
Take her up instantly,
Loving, not loathing.
Touch her not scornfully;
Think of her mournfully,
Gently and humanly;
Not of the stains of her--
All that remains of her
Now is pure womanly.
Make no deep scrutiny
Into her mutiny
Rash and undutiful:
Past all dishonor,
Death has left on her
Only the beautiful.
Still, for all slips of hers,
One of Eve's family--
Wipe those poor lips of hers
Oozing so clammily.
Loop up her tresses
Escaped from the comb,
Her fair auburn tresses;
Whilst wonderment guesses
Where was her home?
Who was her father?
Who was her mother?
Had she a sister?
Had she a brother?
Or was there a dearer one
Still, and a nearer one
Yet, than all other?
Alas! for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun!
O! it was pitiful!
Near a whole city full,
Home she had none.
Sisterly, brotherly,
Fatherly, motherly,
Feelings had changed;
Love, by harsh evidence,
Thrown from its eminence;
Even God's providence
Seeming estranged.
Where the lamps quiver
So far in the river,
With many a light
From window and casement,
From garret to basement,
She stood, with amazement,
Houseless by night.
The bleak wind of March
Made her tremble and shiver;
But not the dark arch,
Or the black flowing river:
Mad from life's history,
Glad to death's mystery
Swift to be hurl'd--
Anywhere, anywhere
Out of the world!
In she plunged boldly,
No matter how coldly
The rough river ran;
Over the brink of it,--
Picture it, think of it,
Dissolute Man!
Lave in it, drink of it
Then, if you can!
Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion'd so slenderly,
Young, and so fair!
Ere her limbs frigidly
Stiffen too rigidly,
Decently, kindly,
Smooth and compose them;
And her eyes, close them,
Staring so blindly!
Dreadfully staring
Thro' muddy impurity,
As when with the daring
Last look of despairing
Fix'd on futurity.
Perishing gloomily,
Spurr'd by contumely,
Cold inhumanity,
Burning insanity,
Into her rest.
--Cross her hands humbly
As if praying dumbly,
Over her breast!
Owning her weakness,
Her evil behavior,
And leaving, with meekness,
Her sins to her Saviour!
BOOK IV
_Out of the Depths_
The protest of the soul of man confronted with injustice and
groping for a remedy.
The People's Anthem
BY EBENEZER ELLIOTT
(One of the leaders of the Chartist movement in England,
1781-1849; known as the "Poet of the People," and by his
enemies as the "Corn-law Rhymer")
When wilt thou save the people?
O God of mercy! when?
Not kings and lords, but nations!
Not thrones and crowns, but men!
Flowers of thy heart, O God, are they!
Let them not pass, like weeds, away!
Their heritage a sunless day!
God save the people!
Shall crime bring crime for ever,
Strength aiding still the strong?
Is it thy will, O Father!
That man shall toil for wrong?
"No!" say thy mountains; "No!" thy skies;
"Man's clouded sun shall brightly rise,
And songs be heard instead of sighs."
God save the people!
When wilt thou save the people?
O God of mercy! when?
The people, Lord! the people!
Not thrones and crowns, but men!
God save the people! thine they are;
Thy children, as thy angels fair;
Save them from bondage and despair!
God save the people!
A Hymn
BY GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
(English essayist and poet, born 1874)
O God of earth and altar
Bow down and hear our cry,
Our earthly rulers falter,
Our people drift and die;
The walls of gold entomb us,
The swords of scorn divide,
Take not Thy thunder from us,
But take away our pride.
From all that terror teaches,
From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches
That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation
Of honor and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation,
Deliver us, good Lord.
Tie in a living tether
The priest and prince and thrall,
Bind all our lives together,
Smite us and save us all;
In ire and exultation
Aflame with faith, and free,
Lift up a living nation,
A single sword to Thee.
The World's Way
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(One of the series of sonnets in which the English dramatist,
1564-1616, voiced his inmost soul)
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry--
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honor shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disablèd,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive Good attending captain Ill:--
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my Love alone.
Written in London, September, 1802
BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
(One of the great sonnets of England's poet of nature;
1770-1850. Poet laureate in 1843)
O friend! I know not which way I must look
For comfort, being, as I am, opprest
To think that now our life is only drest
For show; mean handy-work of craftsman, cook,
Or groom!--We must run glittering like a brook
In the open sunshine, or we are unblest;
The wealthiest man among us is the best;
No grandeur now in nature or in book
Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense,
This is idolatry; and these we adore;
Plain living and high thinking are no more:
The homely beauty of the good old cause
Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence,
And pure religion breathing household laws.
The Preface to "Les Miserables"
BY VICTOR HUGO
(The poet and humanitarian of France, 1802-1885, has in this
passage set forth the purpose of one of the half-dozen greatest
novels of the world)
So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom,
a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization,
artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny
that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three
problems of the age--the degradation of man by poverty, the
ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by
physical and spiritual night--are not solved; so long as, in
certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other
words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as
ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be
useless.
Bound
BY MAY BEALS
(Contemporary American writer and lecturer)
Sometimes I feel the tide of life in me
Flood upward, high and higher, till I stand
Tiptoe, aflame with energy, a god,
Young, virile, glorying in my youth and power.
But not for long; the grip of poverty
Seizes me, sets my daily task; the eyes
Of those I love, looking to me for bread
Pierce me like eagles' beaks through very love.
I am Prometheus bound; these cares and fears
Tear at my vitals, leave me broken, spent.
And unavailingly 'tis spent, my life,
My wondrous life, so pregnant with rich powers.
That stuff in me from which heroic deeds,
Great thoughts and noble poems might be made
Is wrenched from me, is coined in wealth, and spent
By others; save that I and mine receive
A mere existence, bare of hope and joy,
Bare even of comfort.
Comrades, stretched and bound
In agony on labor's rock, we live--
And die--to fatten vultures!
To a Foil'd European Revolutionaire
BY WALT WHITMAN
(America's most original and creative poet, 1819-1892; printer and
journalist, during the war an army nurse, and later a government
clerk, discharged for publishing what his superiors considered an
"indecent" book)
Not songs of loyalty alone are these,
But songs of insurrection also;
For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel, the world over,
And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind him,
And stakes his life, to be lost at any moment....
When liberty goes out of a place, it is not the first to go,
nor the second or third to go,
It waits for all the rest to go--it is the last.
When there are no more memories of martyrs and heroes,
And when all life, and all the souls of men and women are
discharged from any part of the earth,
Then only shall liberty, or the idea of liberty, be discharged
from that part of the earth,
And the infidel come into full possession.
Chants Communal
BY HORACE TRAUBEL
(American poet and editor, born 1858; disciple and biographer
of Walt Whitman)
You will long resist me. You will deceive yourself with initial
victories. You will find me weak. You will count me only one
against a million. You will see the world seem to go on just
as it is. One day confirming another. Presidents succeeding
Presidents in unvarying mediocrity. Millionaires dead reborn
in millionaire children. Starvation handing starvation on.
The people innocently played against the people. Demand and
supply cohabited for the production of a blind progeny. The
landlord suborning the land. The moneylord suborning money. The
storelord suborning production. All will seem to go on just as
it is. And you who resist me will be fooled. You will say the
universe is against me. You will say I am cursed. Or you will
in your tenderer moments ask: What's the use? But all this
time I will be keeping on. Doing nothing unusual. Only keeping
on. Asleep or awake, keeping on. Compelled to say the say of
justice all by myself. Willing to wait until you are shaken up
and convinced. Until you will say it to yourself. And say it to
yourself you will.
There are things ahead that will stir you out of your
indifference or lethargy or doubt. Give you an immortal
awakening. So you will never sleep again. I do not know just
what it will be. But something. And you will know it when it
comes. And then you will understand why I am calm. Why I am
not worried by delay. Why I am not defeated by postponements.
Why all the big things that seem to be against me do not seem
to worry the one little thing that is for me. Why my faith
maintains itself against your property. Why my soul maintains
itself against injustice. Why I am willing to say words that
are thought personally unkind for the sake of a result that is
universally sweet. Why I look in your face and see you long
before you are able to see yourself. Why you with all your
fortified rights doubt and despair. Why I without any right
at all am cheerful and confident. Why you tremble when one
little man with one little voice asks you a question. Why I
do not tremble with all the states and churches and political
economies at my heels.
These Populations
(_From "Towards Democracy"_)
BY EDWARD CARPENTER
(English poet and philosopher, born 1844; disciple of Walt
Whitman)
These populations--
So puny, white-faced, machine-made,
Turned out by factories, out of offices, out of drawing-rooms,
by thousands all alike--
Huddled, stitched up, in clothes, fearing a chill, a drop
of rain, looking timidly at the sea and sky as at strange
monsters, or running back so quick to their suburban runs and
burrows,
Dapper, libidinous, cute, with washed-out small eyes--
What are these?
Are they men and women?
Each denying himself, hiding himself?
Are they men and women?
So timorous, like hares--a breath of propriety or custom, a
draught of wind, the mere threat of pain or of danger?
* * * * *
O for a breath of the sea and the great mountains!
A bronzed hardy live man walking his way through it all;
Thousands of men companioning the waves and the storms,
splendid in health, naked-breasted, catching the lion with
their hands;
A thousand women swift-footed and free--owners of themselves,
forgetful of themselves; in all their actions--full of joy and
laughter and action;
Garbed not so differently from the men, joining with them in
their games and sports, sharing also their labors;
Free to hold their own, to grant or withhold their love, the
same as the men;
Strong, well-equipped in muscle and skill, clear of finesse and
affectation--
(The men, too, clear of much brutality and conceit)--
Comrades together, equal in intelligence and adventure,
Trusting without concealment, loving without shame but with
discrimination and continence towards a perfect passion.
* * * * *
O for a breath of the sea!
The necessity and directness of the great elements themselves!
Swimming the rivers, braving the sun, the cold, taming the
animals and the earth, conquering the air with wings, and each
other with love--
The true, the human society!
The Ship of Humanity
(_From "Gloucester Moors"_)
BY WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY
(American poet and dramatist, 1869-1910)
God, dear God! Does she know her port,
Though she goes so far about?
Or blind astray, does she make her sport
To brazen and chance it out?
I watched when her captains passed:
She were better captainless.
Men in the cabin, before the mast,
But some were reckless and some aghast,
And some sat gorged at mess.
By her battened hatch I leaned and caught
Sounds from the noisome hold,--
Cursing and sighing of souls distraught
And cries too sad to be told.
Then I strove to go down and see;
But they said, "Thou art not of us!"
I turned to those on the deck with me
And cried, "Give help!" But they said, "Let be:
Our ship sails faster thus."
Jill-o'er-the-ground is purple blue,
Blue is the quaker-maid,
The alder-clump where the brook comes through
Breeds cresses in its shade.
To be out of the moiling street,
With its swelter and its sin!
Who has given to me this sweet,
And given my brother dust to eat?
And when will his wage come in?
Freedom
BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
(American scholar and poet, 1819-1891, author of many impassioned
poems of human freedom. An ardent anti-slavery advocate, it was said
during the Civil War that his poetry was worth an army corps to the
Union)
Men! whose boast it is that ye
Come of fathers brave and free,
If there breathe on earth a slave,
Are ye truly free and brave?
If ye do not feel the chain
When it works a brother's pain,
Are ye not base slaves indeed,
Slaves unworthy to be freed?
Is true Freedom but to break
Fetters for our own dear sake,
And, with leathern hearts, forget
That we owe mankind a debt?
No! True Freedom is to share
All the chains our brothers wear,
And, with heart and hand, to be
Earnest to make others free!
They are slaves who fear to speak
For the fallen and the weak;
They are slaves who will not choose
Hatred, scoffing and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink
From the truth they needs must think:
They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three.
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
BY THOMAS GRAY
(English poet and scholar, 1716-1771; Cambridge professor. It is said
that Major Wolfe, while sitting in a row-boat on his way to the night
attack upon Quebec, remarked that he would rather have been the author
of this poem than the taker of the city)
Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the Poor.
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth, e'er gave
Await alike th' inevitable hour:--
The paths of glory lead but to the grave....
Can storied urn, or animated bust,
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can honor's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death?
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre;
But knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll;
Chill penury repressed their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Some village Hampden, that, with dauntless breast,
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.
The applause of listening senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation's eyes,
Their lot forbade: nor circumscribed alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind;
The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of luxury and pride
With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
The Land Question
BY CARDINAL MANNING
(English prelate of the Catholic Church, 1808-1892)
The land question means hunger, thirst, nakedness, notice to
quit, labor spent in vain, the toil of years seized upon, the
breaking up of homes; the misery, sickness, deaths of parents,
children, wives; the despair and wildness which springs up in
the hearts of the poor, when legal force, like a sharp harrow,
goes over the most sensitive and vital rights of mankind. All
this is contained in the land question.
The Lady Poverty
BY JACOB FISHER
(Contemporary American poet)
I met her on the Umbrian Hills,
Her hair unbound, her feet unshod;
As one whom secret glory fills
She walked alone--with God.
I met her in the city street;
Oh, changed her aspect then!
With heavy eyes and weary feet
She walked alone--with men.
Preface to "Major Barbara"
BY G. BERNARD SHAW
(Irish dramatist and critic, born 1856; recognized as one of
the world's most brilliant advocates of Socialism)
The thoughtless wickedness with which we scatter sentences of
imprisonment, torture in the solitary cell and on the plank
bed, and flogging, on moral invalids and energetic rebels, is
as nothing compared to the stupid levity with which we tolerate
poverty as if it were either a wholesome tonic for lazy people
or else a virtue to be embraced as St. Francis embraced it.
If a man is indolent, let him be poor. If he is drunken, let
him be poor. If he is not a gentleman, let him be poor. If he
is addicted to the fine arts or to pure science instead of to
trade and finance, let him be poor. If he chooses to spend his
urban eighteen shillings a week or his agricultural thirteen
shillings a week on his beer and his family instead of saving
it up for his old age, let him be poor. Let nothing be done
for "the undeserving": let him be poor. Serves him right!
Also--somewhat inconsistently--blessed are the poor!
Now what does this Let Him Be Poor mean? It means let him be
weak. Let him be ignorant. Let him become a nucleus of disease.
Let him be a standing exhibition and example of ugliness and
dirt. Let him have rickety children. Let him be cheap and let
him drag his fellows down to his price by selling himself to do
their work. Let his habitations turn our cities into poisonous
congeries of slums. Let his daughters infect our young men with
the diseases of the streets and his sons revenge him by turning
the nation's manhood into scrofula, cowardice, cruelty,
hypocrisy, political imbecility, and all the other fruits of
oppression and malnutrition. Let the undeserving become still
less deserving; and let the deserving lay up for himself, not
treasures in heaven, but horrors in hell upon earth. This being
so, is it really wise to let him be poor? Would he not do ten
times less harm as a prosperous burglar, incendiary, ravisher,
or murderer, to the utmost limits of humanity's comparatively
negligible impulses in these directions? Suppose we were to
abolish all penalties for such activities, and decide that
poverty is the one thing we will not tolerate--that every adult
with less than, say, £365 a year, shall be painlessly but
inexorably killed, and every hungry half naked child forcibly
fattened and clothed, would not that be an enormous improvement
on our existing system, which has already destroyed so many
civilizations, and is visibly destroying ours in the same way?
The Jungle
BY UPTON SINCLAIR
(See pages 43, 143)
Now the dreadful winter was come upon them. In the forests,
all summer long, the branches of the trees do battle for
light, and some of them lose and die; and then come the raging
blasts, and the storms of snow and hail, and strew the ground
with these weaker branches. Just so it was in Packingtown;
the whole district braced itself for the struggle that was an
agony, and those whose time was come died off in hordes. All
the year round they had been serving as cogs in the great
packing-machine; and now was the time for the renovating of
it, and the replacing of damaged parts. There came pneumonia
and grippe, stalking among them, seeking for weakened
constitutions; there was the annual harvest of those whom
tuberculosis had been dragging down. There came cruel cold, and
biting winds, and blizzards of snow, all testing relentlessly
for failing muscles and impoverished blood. Sooner or later
came the day when the unfit one did not report for work;
and then, with no time lost in waiting, and no inquiries or
regrets, there was a chance for a new hand....
Home was not a very attractive place--at least not this winter.
They had only been able to buy one stove, and this was a small
one, and proved not big enough to warm even the kitchen in the
bitterest weather. This made it hard for Teta Elzbieta all
day, and for the children when they could not get to school.
At night they would sit huddled around this stove, while they
ate their supper off their laps; and then Jurgis and Jonas
would smoke a pipe, after which they would all crawl into their
beds to get warm, after putting out the fire to save the coal.
Then they would have some frightful experiences with the cold.
They would sleep with all their clothes on, including their
overcoats, and put over them all the bedding and spare clothing
they owned; the children would sleep all crowded into one bed,
and yet even so they could not keep warm. The outside ones
would be shivering and sobbing, crawling over the others and
trying to get down into the center, and causing a fight. This
old house with the leaky weather-boards was a very different
thing from their cabins at home, with great thick walls
plastered inside and outside with mud; and the cold which
came upon them was a living thing, a demon-presence in the
room. They would waken in the midnight hours, when everything
was black; perhaps they would hear it yelling outside, or
perhaps there would be deathlike stillness--and that would be
worse yet. They could feel the cold as it crept in through
the cracks, reaching out for them with its icy, death-dealing
fingers; and they would crouch and cower, and try to hide from
it, all in vain. It would come, and it would come; a grisly
thing, a spectre born in the black caverns of terror; a power
primeval, cosmic, shadowing the tortures of the lost souls
flung out to chaos and destruction. It was cruel, iron-hard;
and hour after hour they would cringe in its grasp, alone,
alone. There would be no one to hear them if they cried out;
there would be no help, no mercy. And so on until morning--when
they would go out to another day of toil, a little weaker, a
little nearer to the time when it would be their turn to be
shaken from the tree.
The Sad Sight of the Hungry
BY LI HUNG CHANG
(A poem by the Chinese statesman, 1823-1901; known as the
"Bismarck of Asia," and said to have been the richest man in
the world)
'Twould please me, gods, if you would spare
Mine eyes from all this hungry stare
That fills the face and eyes of men
Who search for food o'er hill and glen.
Their eyes are orbs of dullest fire,
As if the flame would mount up higher;
But in the darkness of their glow
We know the fuel's burning low.
Such looks, O gods, are not from thee!
No, they're the stares of misery!
They speak of hunger's frightful hold
On lips a-dry and stomachs cold.
"Bread, bread," they cry, these weary men,
With wives and children from the glen!
O, they would toil the live-long day
But for a meal, their lives to stay.
But where is it in all the land?
Unless the gods with gen'rous hand
Send sweetsome rice and strength'ning corn
To these vast crowds to hunger born!
The Right to be Lazy
BY PAUL LAFARGUE
(A well-known Socialist writer of France. He and his wife,
finding themselves helpless from old age and penury, committed
suicide together)
Does any one believe that, because the toilers of the time of
the mediæval guilds worked five days out of seven in a week,
they lived upon air and water only, as the deluding political
economists tell us? Go to! They had leisure to taste of earthly
pleasure, to cherish love, to make and to keep open house in
honor of the great God, _Leisure_. In those days, that morose,
hypocritically Protestant England was called "Merrie England."
Rabelais, Quevedo, Cervantes, the unknown authors of the
spicy novels of those days, make our mouths water with their
descriptions of those enormous feasts, at which the peoples
of that time regaled themselves, and towards which "nothing
was spared." Jordaens and the Dutch school of painters have
portrayed them for us, in their pictures of jovial life. Noble,
giant stomachs, what has become of you? Exalted spirits, ye
who comprehended the whole of human thought, whither are ye
gone? We are thoroughly degenerated and dwarfed. Tubercular
cows, potatoes, wine made with fuchsine, beer from saffron, and
Prussian whiskey in wise conjunction with compulsory labor have
weakened our bodies and dulled our intellects. And at the same
time that mankind ties up its stomach, and the productivity
of the machine goes on increasing day by day, the political
economists wish to preach to us Malthusian doctrine, the
religion of abstinence and the dogma of work!
The First Machine
BY ANTIPAROS
(Greek, First Century, A. D. The poet celebrates the invention
of the water-mill for grinding corn)
The goddess has commanded the work of the girls to be done by
the Nymphs; and now these skip lightly over the wheels, so
that the shaken axles revolve with the spokes, and pull around
the load of the revolving stones. Let us live the life of our
fathers, and let us rest from work and enjoy the gifts that the
goddess has sent us!
BY JOHN STUART MILL
(English philosopher, 1806-1873)
Hitherto, it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions
yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.
The Man Under the Stone
(_From "The Man with the Hoe and other Poems"_)
BY EDWIN MARKHAM
(See page 27)
When I see a workingman with mouths to feed,
Up, day after day, in the dark before the dawn,
And coming home, night after night, thro' the dusk,
Swinging forward like some fierce silent animal,
I see a man doomed to roll a huge stone up an endless steep.
He strains it onward inch by stubborn inch,
Crouched always in the shadow of the rock....
See where he crouches, twisted, cramped, misshapen!
He lifts for their life;
The veins knot and darken--
Blood surges into his face....
Now he loses--now he wins--
Now he loses--loses--(God of my soul!)
He digs his feet into the earth--
There's a movement of terrified effort....
It stirs--it moves!
Will the huge stone break his hold
And crush him as it plunges to the Gulf?
The silent struggle goes on and on,
Like two contending in a dream.
BY BOETHIUS
(Roman philosopher, 470-524)
Though the goddess of riches should bestow as much as the sand
rolled by the wind-tossed sea, or as many as the stars that
shine, the human race will not cease to wail.
[Illustration: COLD
ROGER BLOCHE (_French sculptor; from the Luxembourg Museum_)]
[Illustration: THE PEOPLE MOURN
JULES PIERRE VAN BIESBROECK
(_Sculptor of the Belgian Socialist and co-operative movements;
born 1873_)]
The Wolf at the Door
BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
(America's most brilliant woman poet and critic; born 1860)
There's a haunting horror near us
That nothing drives away;
Fierce lamping eyes at nightfall,
A crouching shade by day;
There's a whining at the threshold,
There's a scratching at the floor.
To work! To work! In Heaven's name!
The wolf is at the door!
The day was long, the night was short,
The bed was hard and cold;
Still weary are the little ones,
Still weary are the old.
We are weary in our cradles
From our mother's toil untold;
We are born to hoarded weariness
As some to hoarded gold.
We will not rise! We will not work!
Nothing the day can give
Is half so sweet as an hour of sleep;
Better to sleep than live!
What power can stir these heavy limbs?
What hope these dull hearts swell?
What fear more cold, what pain more sharp
Than the life we know so well?...
The slow, relentless, padding step
That never goes astray--
The rustle in the underbrush--
The shadow in the way--
The straining flight--the long pursuit--
The steady gain behind--
Death-wearied man and tireless brute,
And the struggle wild and blind!
There's a hot breath at the keyhole
And a tearing as of teeth!
Well do I know the bloodshot eyes
And the dripping jaws beneath!
There's a whining at the threshold--
There's a scratching at the floor--
To work! To work! In Heaven's name!
The wolf is at the door!
BY ROBERT HERRICK
(Old English lyric poet, 1591-1674)
To mortal man great loads allotted be;
But of all packs, no pack like poverty.
Each Against All
BY CHARLES FOURIER
(One of the early French Utopian writers, 1772-1837; author of
a theory of social co-operation which is still known by his
name)
The present social order is a ridiculous mechanism, in which
portions of the whole are in conflict and acting against the
whole. We see each class in society desire, from interest,
the misfortune of the other classes, placing in every way
individual interest in opposition to public good. The lawyer
wishes litigations and suits, particularly among the rich;
the physician desires sickness. (The latter would be ruined
if everybody died without disease, as would the former if
all quarrels were settled by arbitration.) The soldier wants
a war, which will carry off half his comrades and secure
him promotion; the undertaker wants burials; monopolists
and forestallers want famine, to double or treble the price
of grain; the architect, the carpenter, the mason, want
conflagrations, that will burn down a hundred houses to give
activity to their branches of business.
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
(English essayist and poet, 1822-1888)
Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our
middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
Fomá Gordyéeff
BY MAXIM GORKY
(A novel in which the Russian has portrayed the spiritual
agonies of his race. In this scene a poor school-teacher voices
his despair)
Yozhov drank his tea at one draught, thrust the glass on the
saucer, placed his feet on the edge of the chair, and clasping
his knees in his hands, rested his chin upon them. In this
pose, small sized and flexible as rubber, he began:
"The student Sachkov, my former teacher, who is now a doctor
of medicine, a whist player and a mean fellow all around, used
to tell me whenever I knew my lesson well: 'You're a fine
fellow, Kolya! You are an able boy. We proletarians, plain and
poor people, coming from the backyard of life, we must study
and study, in order to come to the front, ahead of everybody.
Russia is in need of wise and honest people. Try to be such,
and you will be master of your fate and a useful member of
society. On us commoners rest the best hopes of the country.
We are destined to bring into it light, truth,' and so on. I
believed him, the brute. And since then about twenty years
have elapsed. We proletarians have grown up, but have neither
appropriated any wisdom nor brought light into life. As before,
Russia is suffering from its chronic disease--a superabundance
of rascals; while we, the proletarians, take pleasure in
filling their dense throngs."
Yozhov's face wrinkled into a bitter grimace, and he began to
laugh noiselessly, with his lips only. "I, and many others
with me, we have robbed ourselves for the sake of saving up
something for life. Desiring to make myself a valuable man,
I have underrated my individuality in every way possible. In
order to study and not die of starvation, I have for six years
in succession taught blockheads how to read and write, and had
to bear a mass of abominations at the hands of various papas
and mammas, who humiliated me without any constraint. Earning
my bread and tea, I could not, I had not the time to earn my
shoes, and I had to turn to charitable institutions with humble
petitions for loans on the strength of my poverty. If the
philanthropists could only reckon up how much of the spirit
they kill in man while supporting the life of his body! If
they only knew that each rouble they give for bread contains
ninety-nine copecks worth of poison for the soul! If they could
only burst from excess of their kindness and pride, which they
draw from their holy activity! There is no one on earth more
disgusting and repulsive than he who gives alms. Even as there
is no one so miserable as he who accepts them."
The Sight of Inequality
(_From "The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe"_)
BY DANIEL DEFOE
(English novelist and pamphleteer, 1661-1731; many times
imprisoned for satires upon the authorities)
I saw the world round me, one part laboring for bread, and
the other part squandering in vile excess or empty pleasures,
equally miserable, because the end they proposed still fled
from them; for the man of pleasure every day surfeited of his
vice, and heaped up work for sorrow and repentance; and the
man of labor spent his strength in daily struggling for bread
to maintain the vital strength he labored with; so living in a
daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and working
but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of a wearisome
life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread.
Settlement Work[A]
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
(_From "A Man's World"_)
BY ALBERT EDWARDS
(Pen-name of Arthur Bullard, American novelist and
war-correspondent)
After all, what good were these settlement workers doing? Again
and again this question demanded an answer. Sometimes I went
out with Mr. Dawn to help in burying the dead. I could see no
adequate connection between his kindly words to the bereaved
and the hideous dragon of tuberculosis which stalked through
the crowded district. What good did Dawn's ministrations do?
Sometimes I went out with Miss Bronson, the kindergartner, and
listened to her talk to uncomprehending mothers about their
duties to their children. What could Miss Bronson accomplish
by playing a few hours a day with the youngsters who had to
go to filthy homes? They were given a wholesome lunch at the
settlement. But the two other meals a day they must eat poorly
cooked, adulterated food. Sometimes I went out with Miss Cole,
the nurse, to visit her cases. It was hard for me to imagine
anything more futile than her single-handed struggle against
unsanitary tenements and unsanitary shops.
I remember especially one visit I made with her. It was the
crisis for me. The case was a child-birth. There were six other
children, all in one unventilated room; its single window
looked out on a dark, choked airshaft; and the father was a
drunkard. I remember sitting there, after the doctor had gone,
holding the next youngest baby on my knee, while Miss Cole was
bathing the puny newcomer.
"Can't you make him stop crying for a minute?" Miss Cole asked
nervously.
"No," I said with sudden rage. "I can't. I wouldn't if I could.
Why shouldn't he cry? Why don't the other little fools cry? Do
you want them to laugh?"
She stopped working with the baby and offered me a flask of
brandy from her bag. But brandy was not what I wanted. Of
course I knew men sank to the very dregs. But I had never
realized that some are born there.
When she had done all she could for the mother and child, Miss
Cole put her things back in the bag and we started home. It was
long after midnight, but the streets were still alive.
"What good does it do?" I demanded vehemently. "Oh, I know--you
and the doctor saved the mother's life--brought a new one into
the world and all that. But what good does it do? The child
will die--it was a girl--let's get down on our knees right here
and pray the gods that it may die soon--not grow up to want and
fear--and shame." Then I laughed. "No, there's no use praying.
She'll die all right! They'll begin feeding her beer out of
a can before she's weaned. No. Not that. I don't believe the
mother will be able to nurse her. She'll die of skimmed milk.
And if that don't do the trick there's T. B. and several other
things for her to catch. Oh, she'll die all right! And next
year there'll be another. For God's sake, what's the use? What
good does it do?" Abruptly I began to swear.
"You mustn't talk like that," Miss Cole said in a strained
voice.
"Why shouldn't I curse?" I said fiercely, turning on her
challengingly, trying to think of some greater blasphemy to
hurl at the muddle of life. But the sight of her face, livid
with weariness, her lips twisting spasmodically from nervous
exhaustion, showed me one reason not to. The realization that I
had been so brutal to her shocked me horribly.
"Oh, I beg your pardon," I cried.
She stumbled slightly. I thought she was going to faint and I
put my arm about her to steady her. She was almost old enough
to be my mother, but she put her head on my shoulder and
cried like a little child. We stood there on the sidewalk--in
the glare of a noisy, loathsome saloon--like two frightened
children. I don't think either of us saw any reason to go
anywhere. But we dried our eyes at last and from mere force of
habit walked blindly back to the children's house. On the steps
she broke the long silence.
"I know how you feel--everyone's like that at first, but you'll
get used to it. I can't tell 'why.' I can't see that it does
much good. But it's got to be done. You mustn't think about it.
There are things to do, today, tomorrow, all the time. Things
that must be done. That's how we live. So many things to do,
we can't think. It would kill you if you had time to think.
You've got to work--work.
"You'll stay too. I know. You won't be able to go away. You've
been here too long. You won't ever know 'why.' You'll stop
asking if it does any good. And I tell you if you stop to think
about it, it will kill you. You must work."
She went to her room and I across the deserted courtyard and up
to mine. But there was no sleep. It was that night that I first
realized that I also _must_. I had seen so much I could never
forget. It was something from which there was no escape. No
matter how glorious the open fields, there would always be the
remembered stink of the tenements in my nostrils. The vision of
a sunken-cheeked, tuberculosis-ridden pauper would always rise
between me and the beauty of the sunset. A crowd of hurrying
ghosts--the ghosts of the slaughtered babies--would follow me
everywhere, crying "Coward," if I ran away. The slums had taken
me captive.
Concerning Women
(_From "Aurora Leigh"_)
BY ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
(English poetess, 1806-1861; wife of Robert Browning, and an
ardent champion of the liberties of the Italian people)
I call you hard
To general suffering. Here's the world half blind
With intellectual light, half brutalized
With civilization, having caught the plague
In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west
Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain
And sin too!... does one woman of you all,
(You who weep easily) grow pale to see
This tiger shake his cage?--does one of you
Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls,
And pine and die because of the great sum
Of universal anguish?--Show me a tear
Wet as Cordelia's, in eyes bright as yours,
Because the world is mad. You cannot count,
That you should weep for this account, not you!
You weep for what you know. A red-haired child
Sick in a fever, if you touch him once,
Though but so little as with a finger-tip,
Will set you weeping; but a million sick--
You could as soon weep for the rule of three
Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world,
Uncomprehended by you.--Women as you are,
Mere women, personal and passionate,
You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives,
Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints!
We get no Christ from you,--and verily
We shall not get a poet, in my mind.
Women and Economics
BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
(See page 200)
Recognizing her intense feeling on moral lines, and seeing in
her the rigidly preserved virtues of faith, submission, and
self-sacrifice--qualities which in the dark ages were held
to be the first of virtues,--we have agreed of late years
to call woman the moral superior of man. But the ceaseless
growth of human life, social life, has developed in him new
virtues, later, higher, more needful; and the moral nature of
woman, as maintained in this rudimentary stage by her economic
dependence, is a continual check to the progress of the human
soul. The main feature of her life--the restriction of her
range and duty to the love and service of her own immediate
family--acts upon us continually as a retarding influence,
hindering the expansion of the spirit of social love and
service on which our very lives depend. It keeps the moral
standard of the patriarchal era still before us, and blinds our
eyes to the full duty of man.
The Wrongfulness of Riches
BY GRANT ALLEN
(English essayist and nature student, 1848-1899)
If you are on the side of the spoilers, then you are a bad man.
If you are on the side of social justice, then you are a good
one. There is no effective test of high morality at the present
day save this.
Critics of the middle-class type often exclaim, of reasoning
like this, "What on earth makes him say it? What has _he_ to
gain by talking in that way? What does he expect to get by it?"
So bound up are they in the idea of a self-interest as the
one motive of action that they never even seem to conceive of
honest conviction as a ground for speaking out the truth that
is in one. To such critics I would answer, "The reason why I
write all this is because I profoundly believe it. I believe
the poor are being kept out of their own. I believe the
rich are for the most part selfish and despicable. I believe
wealth has been generally piled up by cruel and unworthy
means. I believe it is wrong in us to acquiesce in the wicked
inequalities of our existing social state, instead of trying
our utmost to bring about another, where right would be done
to all, where poverty would be impossible. I believe such a
system is perfectly practicable, and that nothing stands in its
way save the selfish fears and prejudices of individuals. And
I believe that even those craven fears and narrow prejudices
are wholly mistaken; that everybody, including the rich
themselves, would be infinitely happier in a world where no
poverty existed, where no hateful sights and sounds met the
eye at every turn, where all slums were swept away, and where
everybody had their just and even share of pleasures and
refinements in a free and equal community."
Despair
BY LADY WILDE
(Irish poetess, mother of Oscar Wilde; wrote under the pen-name
of Speranza)
Before us dies our brother, of starvation;
Around are cries of famine and despair!
Where is hope for us, or comfort or salvation--
Where--oh! where?
If the angels ever hearken, downward bending,
They are weeping, we are sure,
At the litanies of human groans ascending
From the crushed hearts of the poor.
We never knew a childhood's mirth and gladness,
Nor the proud heart of youth free and brave;
Oh, a death-like dream of wretchedness and sadness
Is life's weary journey to the grave!
Day by day we lower sink, and lower,
Till the God-like soul within
Falls crushed beneath the fearful demon power
Of poverty and sin.
So we toil on, on with fever burning
In heart and brain;
So we toil on, on through bitter scorning,
Want, woe, and pain.
We dare not raise our eyes to the blue heavens
Or the toil must cease--
We dare not breathe the fresh air God has given
One hour in peace.
Inequality of Wealth
BY G. BERNARD SHAW
(See page 193)
I am not bound to keep my temper with an imposture so
outrageous, so abjectly sycophantic, as the pretence that the
existing inequalities of income correspond to and are produced
by moral and physical inferiorities and superiorities--that
Barnato was five million times as great and good a man as
William Blake, and committed suicide because he lost two-fifths
of his superiority; that the life of Lord Anglesey has
been on a far higher plane than that of John Ruskin; that
Mademoiselle Liane de Pougy has been raised by her successful
sugar speculation to moral heights never attained by Florence
Nightingale; and that an arrangement to establish economic
equality between them by duly adjusted pensions would be
impossible. I say that no sane person can be expected to treat
such impudent follies with patience, much less with respect.
The Two Songs
BY WILLIAM BLAKE
(See page 98)
I heard an Angel singing
When the day was springing:
"Mercy, pity, and peace,
Are the world's release."
So he sang all day
Over the new-mown hay,
Till the sun went down,
And haycocks looked brown
I heard a Devil curse
Over the heath and the furze:
"Mercy could be no more
If there were nobody poor,
And pity no more could be
If all were happy as ye:
And mutual fear brings peace.
Misery's increase
Are mercy, pity, peace."
At his curse the sun went down,
And the heavens gave a frown.
BY JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
(English historian, 1818-1894)
The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the
marvel of human society.
Savva
BY LEONID ANDREYEV
(In this strange drama, which might be called a symbolic tragi-comedy,
the Russian writer has set forth the plight of the educated people
of his country, confronted by the abject superstition of the
peasantry. Savva, a fanatical revolutionist, endeavors to wipe out
this superstition by blowing up a monastery full of drunken monks.
But the plot is revealed to the monks, who carry out the ikon, or
sacred image, before the explosion, and afterwards carry it back into
the ruins. The peasants, arriving on the scene and finding the ikon
uninjured, hail a supreme miracle; the whole country is swept by a
wave of religious frenzy, in the course of which Savva is trampled to
death by a mob.
In the following scene Savva argues with his sister, a religious
believer. The tramp of pilgrims is heard outside)
SAVVA (_smiling_):--The tramp of death!
LIPA:--Remember that each one of these would consider himself
happy in killing you, in crushing you like a reptile. Each one
of these is your death. Why, they beat a simple thief to death,
a horse thief. What would they not do to you? You who wanted to
steal their God!
SAVVA:--Quite true. That's property too.
LIPA:--You still have the brazenness to joke? Who gave you the
right to do such a thing? Who gave you the power over people?
How dare you meddle with what to them is right? How dare you
interfere with their life?
SAVVA:--Who gave me the right? You gave it to me. Who gave
me the power? You gave it to me--you with your malice, your
ignorance, your stupidity! You with your wretched impotence!
Right! Power! They have turned the earth into a sewer, an
outrage, an abode of slaves. They worry each other, they
torture each other, and they ask: "Who dares to take us by the
throat?" I! Do you understand? I!
LIPA:--But to destroy all! Think of it!
SAVVA:--What could you do with them? What would _you_ do? Try
to persuade the oxen to turn away from their bovine path?
Catch each one by his horn and pull him away? Would you put
on a frock-coat and read a lecture? Haven't they had plenty
to teach them? As if words and thought had any significance
to them! Thought--pure, unhappy thought! They have perverted
it. They have taught it to cheat and defraud. They have made
it a salable commodity, to be bought at auction in the market.
No, sister, life is short, and I am not going to waste it in
arguments with oxen. The way to deal with them is by fire.
That's what they require--fire!
LIPA:--But what do you want? What do you want?
SAVVA:--What do I want? To free the earth, to free mankind.
Man--the man of today--is wise. He has come to his senses.
He is ripe for liberty. But the past eats away his soul like
a canker. It imprisons him within the iron circle of things
already accomplished. I want to do away with everything behind
man, so that there is nothing to see when he looks back. I want
to take him by the scruff of his neck and turn his face toward
the future!
The Man Forbid
BY JOHN DAVIDSON
(Scotch poet and dramatist, 1857-1909; after struggling for many years
in London against poverty and ill-health, committed suicide, leaving
some of the most striking and original poetry of the present age)
This Beauty, this Divinity, this Thought,
This hallowed bower and harvest of delight
Whose roots ethereal seemed to clutch the stars,
Whose amaranths perfumed eternity,
Is fixed in earthly soil enriched with bones
Of used-up workers; fattened with the blood
Of prostitutes, the prime manure; and dressed
With brains of madmen and the broken hearts
Of children. Understand it, you at least
Who toil all day and writhe and groan all night
With roots of luxury, a cancer struck
In every muscle: out of you it is
Cathedrals rise and Heaven blossoms fair;
You are the hidden putrefying source
Of beauty and delight, of leisured hours,
Of passionate loves and high imaginings;
You are the dung that keeps the roses sweet.
I say, uproot it; plough the land; and let
A summer-fallow sweeten all the World.
Peasantry
(_From "Death and the Child"_)
BY STEPHEN CRANE
(American novelist and poet, 1870-1900)
These stupid peasants, who, throughout the world, hold
potentates on their thrones, make statesmen illustrious,
provide generals with lasting victories, all with ignorance,
indifference, or half-witted hatred, moving the world
with the strength of their arms, and getting their heads
knocked together, in the name of God, the king, or the stock
exchange--immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses, who surrender
their reason to the care of a shining puppet, and persuade some
toy to carry their lives in his purse.
An Italian Restaurant
(_From "A Bed of Roses"_)
BY W. L. GEORGE
(Contemporary English novelist)
They sat at a marble topped table, flooded with light by
incandescent gas. In the glare the waiters seemed blacker,
smaller and more stunted than by the light of day. Their faces
were pallid, with a touch of green: their hair and moustaches
were almost blue black. Their energy was that of automata.
Victoria looked at them, melting with pity.
"There's a life for you," said Farwell, interpreting her look.
"Sixteen hours' work a day in an atmosphere of stale food. For
meals, plate scourings. For sleep and time to get to it, eight
hours. For living, the rest of the day."
"It's awful, awful," said Victoria. "They might as well be
dead."
"They will be soon," said Farwell, "but what does that matter?
There are plenty of waiters. In the shadow of the olive groves
tonight in far-off Calabria, at the base of the vine-clad
hills, couples are walking hand in hand, with passion flashing
in their eyes. Brown peasant boys are clasping to their breast
young girls with dark hair, white teeth, red lips, hearts that
beat and quiver with ecstasy. They tell a tale of love and
hope. So we shall not be short of waiters."
Tonight
BY CARLOS WUPPERMAN
(Contemporary American poet)
Tonight the beautiful, chaste moon
From heaven's height
Scatters over the bridal earth
Blossoms of white;
And spring's renewed glad charms unfold
Endless delight.
Such mystic wonder the hushed world wears,
Evil has fled
Far, far away; in every heart
God reigns instead....
Tonight a starving virgin sells
Her soul for bread.
A South-Sea Islander
BY FRANCIS ADAMS
(English poet and rebel, 1862-1893; his life, a brief struggle
with poverty and disease, was ended by his own hand)
Aloll in the warm clear water,
On her back with languorous limbs
She lies. The baby upon her breast
Paddles and falls and swims.
With half-closed eyes she smiles,
Guarding it with her hands;
And the sob swells up in my heart--
In my heart that understands.
_Dear, in the English country,
The hatefullest land on earth,
The mothers are starved and the children die
And death is better than birth!_
Out of the Dark
BY HELEN KELLER
(America's most famous blind girl, born 1880, who has come to
see more than most people with normal eyes)
Step by step my investigation of blindness led me into
the industrial world. And what a world it is! I must face
unflinchingly a world of facts--a world of misery and
degradation, of blindness, crookedness, and sin, a world
struggling against the elements, against the unknown, against
itself. How reconcile this world of fact with the bright
world of my imagining? My darkness had been filled with the
light of intelligence, and, behold, the outer day-lit world
was stumbling and groping in social blindness. At first I was
most unhappy; but deeper study restored my confidence. By
learning the sufferings and burdens of men, I became aware as
never before of the life-power that has survived the forces of
darkness--the power which, though never completely victorious,
is continuously conquering. The very fact that we are still
here carrying on the contest against the hosts of annihilation
proves that on the whole the battle has gone for humanity.
The world's great heart has proved equal to the prodigious
undertaking which God set it. Rebuffed, but always persevering;
self-reproached, but ever regaining faith; undaunted,
tenacious, the heart of man labors towards immeasurably distant
goals. Discouraged not by difficulties without, or the anguish
of ages within, the heart listens to a secret voice that
whispers: "Be not dismayed; in the future lies the Promised
Land."
Heirs of Time
BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
(American poet and essayist, 1823-1911; a vehement anti-slavery
agitator, he was colonel of the first negro regiment during the
Civil War, and in later life became a devoted Socialist)
From street and square, from hill and glen,
Of this vast world beyond my door,
I hear the tread of marching men,
The patient armies of the poor.
Not ermine-clad or clothed in state,
Their title-deeds not yet made plain,
But waking early, toiling late,
The heirs of all the earth remain.
The peasant brain shall yet be wise,
The untamed pulse grow calm and still;
The blind shall see, the lowly rise,
And work in peace Time's wondrous will.
Some day, without a trumpet's call
This news will o'er the world be blown:
"The heritage comes back to all;
The myriad monarchs take their own."
Beyond Human Might
BY BJÖRNSTJERNE BJÖRNSON
(Next to Ibsen, the greatest of Norwegian dramatists, 1832-1910. In
the following scene, from a two-part symbolic drama of the problem of
labor and capital, a young clergyman is speaking to a crowd of miners
in the midst of a bitterly fought strike)
BRATT:--Here it is dark and cold. Here few work hopefully, and
no one joyfully. Here the children won't thrive--they yearn for
the sea and the daylight. They crave the sun. But it lasts only
a little while, and then they give up. They learn that among
those who have been cast down here there is rarely one who can
climb up again.
SEVERAL:--That's right!...
BRATT:--What is there to herald the coming of better things?
A new generation up there? Listen to what their young people
answer for themselves: "We want a good time!" And their books?
The books and the youth together make the future. And what do
the books say? Exactly the same as the youth: "Let us have a
good time! Ours are the light and the lust of life, its colors
and its joys!" That's what the youth and their books say.--They
are right! It is all theirs! There is no law to prevent their
taking life's sunlight and joy away from the poor people. For
those who have the sun have also made the law.--But then the
next question is whether we might not scramble up high enough
to take part in the writing of a new law. (_This is received
with thundering cheers._) What is needed is that one generation
makes an effort strong enough to raise all coming generations
into the vigorous life of full sunlight.
MANY:--Yes, yes!
BRATT:--But so far every generation has put it off on the next
one. Until at last _our_ turn has come--to bear sacrifices and
sufferings like unto those of death itself!
Weavers
BY HEINRICH HEINE
(See page 97)
Their eyelids are drooping, no tears lie beneath;
They stand at the loom and grind their teeth;
"We are weaving a shroud for the doubly dead,
And a threefold curse in its every thread--
We are weaving, still weaving.
"A curse for the Godhead to whom we have bowed
In our cold and our hunger, we weave in the shroud;
For in vain have we hoped and in vain have prayed;
He has mocked us and scoffed at us, sold and betrayed--
We are weaving, still weaving.
"A curse for the king of the wealthy and proud,
Who for us had no pity, we weave in the shroud;
Who takes our last penny to swell out his purse,
While we die the death of a dog--yea, a curse--
We are weaving, still weaving.
"A curse for our country, whose cowardly crowd
Hold her shame in high honor, we weave in the shroud;
Whose blossoms are blighted and slain in the germ,
Whose filth and corruption engender the worm--
We are weaving, still weaving.
"To and fro flies our shuttle--no pause in its flight,
'Tis a shroud we are weaving by day and by night;
We are weaving a shroud for the worse than dead,
And a threefold curse in its every thread--
We are weaving--still weaving."
Alton Locke
BY CHARLES KINGSLEY
(See pages 78, 84)
Yes, it was true. Society had not given me my rights. And woe
unto the man on whom that idea, true or false, rises lurid,
filling all his thoughts with stifling glare, as of the pit
itself. Be it true, be it false, it is equally a woe to believe
it; to have to live on a negation; to have to worship for our
only idea, as hundreds of thousands of us have this day, the
hatred of the things which are. Ay, though one of us here and
there may die in faith, in sight of the promised land, yet
is it not hard, when looking from the top of Pisgah into
"the good time coming," to watch the years slipping away one
by one, and death crawling nearer and nearer, and the people
wearying themselves in the fire for very vanity, and Jordan
not yet passed, the promised land not yet entered? While our
little children die around us, like lambs beneath the knife,
of cholera and typhus and consumption, and all the diseases
which the good time can and will prevent; which, as science
has proved, and you the rich confess, might be prevented at
once, if you dared to bring in one bold and comprehensive
measure, and not sacrifice yearly the lives of thousands to the
idol of vested interests, and a majority in the House. Is it
not hard to men who smart beneath such things to help crying
aloud--"Thou cursed Moloch-Mammon, take my life if thou wilt;
let me die in the wilderness, for I have deserved it; but
these little ones in mines and factories, in typhus cellars
and Tooting pandemoniums, what have they done? If not in their
fathers' cause, yet still in theirs, were it so great a sin to
die upon a barricade?"
BOOK V
_Revolt_
The struggle to do away with injustice; the battle-cries of the
new army which is gathering for the deliverance of humanity.
A Man's a Man for a' That
BY ROBERT BURNS
(Scotland's most popular poet, 1759-1796)
Is there, for honest poverty,
That hangs his head, and a' that?
The coward slave, we pass him by,
We daur be puir, for a' that!
For a' that, and a' that,
Our toils obscure and a' that,
The rank is but the guinea's stamp--
The man's the gowd for a' that.
What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin-grey and a' that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine--
A man's a man for a' that.
For a' that, and a' that,
Their tinsel show and a' that,
The honest man, though e'er sae puir,
Is king o' men for a' that.
Ye see yon birkie, ca'ed a lord,
Wha struts, and stares, and a' that;
Though hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a coof for a' that:
For a' that, and a' that,
His riband, star, and a' that;
The man of independent mind,
He looks and laughs at a' that.
A king can make a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, and a' that;
But an honest man's aboon his might,
Gude faith, he maunna fa' that!
For a' that, and a' that,
Their dignities and a' that,
The pith o' sense and pride o' worth
Are higher rank than a' that.
Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that)
That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth,
May bear the gree and a' that.
For a' that, and a' that--
It's coming yet, for a' that,
When man to man, the warld o'er,
Shall brithers be for a' that.
BY THOMAS JEFFERSON
(President of the United States and author of the Declaration
of Independence, 1743-1826)
All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The
general spread of the light of science has already laid open to
every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not
been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted
and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of
God.
A Vindication of Natural Society
BY EDMUND BURKE
(British statesman and orator, 1729-1797; defended the American
colonies in Parliament during the Revolutionary War)
Ask of politicians the ends for which laws were originally
designed, and they will answer that the laws were designed as a
protection for the poor and weak, against the oppression of the
rich and powerful. But surely no pretence can be so ridiculous;
a man might as well tell me he has taken off my load, because
he has changed the burden. If the poor man is not able to
support his suit according to the vexatious and expensive
manner established in civilized countries, has not the rich as
great an advantage over him as the strong has over the weak in
a state of nature?...
The most obvious division of society is into rich and poor,
and it is no less obvious that the number of the former bear a
great disproportion to those of the latter. The whole business
of the poor is to administer to the idleness, folly, and luxury
of the rich, and that of the rich, in return, is to find the
best methods of confirming the slavery and increasing the
burdens of the poor. In a state of nature it is an invariable
law that a man's acquisitions are in proportion to his labors.
In a state of artificial society it is a law as constant and
invariable that those who labor most enjoy the fewest things,
and that those who labor not at all have the greatest number
of enjoyments. A constitution of things this, strange and
ridiculous beyond expression! We scarce believe a thing when
we are told it which we actually see before our eyes every day
without being in the least surprised. I suppose that there
are in Great Britain upwards of an hundred thousand people
employed in lead, tin, iron, copper, and coal mines; these
unhappy wretches scarce ever see the light of the sun; they are
buried in the bowels of the earth; there they work at a severe
and dismal task, without the least prospect of being delivered
from it; they subsist upon the coarsest and worst sort of
fare; they have their health miserably impaired, and their
lives cut short, by being perpetually confined in the close
vapors of these malignant minerals. An hundred thousand more at
least are tortured without remission by the suffocating smoke,
intense fires, and constant drudgery necessary in refining and
managing the products of those mines. If any man informed us
that two hundred thousand innocent persons were condemned to so
intolerable slavery, how should we pity the unhappy sufferers,
and how great would be our just indignation against those who
inflicted so cruel and ignominious a punishment! This is an
instance--I could not wish a stronger--of the numberless things
which we pass by in their common dress, yet which shock us when
they are nakedly represented....
In a misery of this sort, admitting some few lenitives, and
those too but a few, nine parts in ten of the whole race
of mankind drudge through life. It may be urged, perhaps,
in palliation of this, that at least the rich few find a
considerable and real benefit from the wretchedness of the
many. But is this so in fact?...
The poor by their excessive labor, and the rich by their
enormous luxury, are set upon a level, and rendered equally
ignorant of any knowledge which might conduce to their
happiness. A dismal view of the interior of all civil society!
The lower part broken and ground down by the most cruel
oppression; and the rich by their artificial method of life
bringing worse evils on themselves than their tyranny could
possibly inflict on those below them.
The Antiquity of Freedom
BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
(American poet and editor, 1794-1878; author of "Thanatopsis")
O freedom! thou art not, as poets dream,
A fair young girl, with light and delicate limbs,
And wavy tresses gushing from the cap
With which the Roman master crowned his slave
When he took off the gyves. A bearded man,
Armed to the teeth, art thou; one mailed hand
Grasps the broad shield, and one the sword; thy brow,
Glorious in beauty though it be, is scarred
With tokens of old wars; thy massive limbs
Are strong with struggling. Power at thee has launched
His bolts, and with his lightnings smitten thee;
They could not quench the life thou hast from heaven.
Merciless Power has dug thy dungeon deep,
And his swart armorers, by a thousand fires,
Have forged thy chain; yet, while he deems thee bound,
The links are shivered, and the prison walls
Fall outward; terribly thou springest forth,
As springs the flame above a burning pile,
And shoutest to the nations, who return
Thy shoutings, while the pale oppressor flies.
BY LORD BYRON
(English poet of liberty, 1788-1824; died while taking part in
the war for the liberation of Greece)
Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
By their right arms the conquest must be wrought?
Concerning Moderation
BY LAFCADIO HEARN
(A writer of Irish and Greek parentage, 1850-1904; became a
lecturer on English in the University of Tokio. Japan's ablest
interpreter to the western world)
Permit me to say something in opposition to a very famous and
very popular Latin proverb--In medio tutissimus ibis--"Thou
wilt go most safely by taking the middle course." In speaking
of two distinct tendencies in literature, you might expect me
to say that the aim of the student should be to avoid extremes,
and to try not to be either too conservative or too liberal.
But I should certainly never give any such advice. On the
contrary, I think that the proverb above quoted is one of the
most mischievous, one of the most pernicious, one of the most
foolish, that ever was invented in the world. I believe very
strongly in extremes--in violent extremes; and I am quite
sure that all progress in this world, whether literary, or
scientific, or religious, or political, or social, has been
obtained only with the assistance of extremes. But remember
that I say, "With the assistance,"--I do not mean that
extremes alone accomplish the aim: there must be antagonism,
but there must also be conservatism. What I mean by finding
fault with the proverb is simply this--that it is very bad
advice for a young man. To give a young man such advice is
very much like telling him not to do his best, but only to do
half of his best--or, in other words, to be half-hearted in
his undertaking.... It is not the old men who ever prove great
reformers: they are too cautious, too wise. Reforms are made by
the vigor and courage and the self-sacrifice and the emotional
conviction of young men, who did not know enough to be afraid,
and who feel much more deeply than they think. Indeed great
reforms are not accomplished by reasoning, but by feeling.
[Illustration: OUTBREAK
KÄTHE KOLLWITZ
(_Contemporary German etching; from the "Peasant-cycle"_)]
[Illustration: THE LIBERATRESS
THÉOPHILE ALEXANDRE STEINLEN
(_French illustrator, born 1859_)]
The First Issue of "The Liberator"
(_January 1, 1831_)
BY WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
(America's most ardent anti-slavery agitator, 1805-1879.
The following pronouncement marked the beginning of the
anti-slavery campaign)
I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but
is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as Truth,
and as uncompromising as Justice. On this subject I do not
wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No!
Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm;
tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the
ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe
from the fire into which it has fallen--but urge me not to use
moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest--I will
not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single
inch--and I will be heard. The apathy of the people is enough
to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the
resurrection of the dead.
Working and Taking
(_From the Lincoln-Douglas debates, 1858_)
BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN
That is the real issue that will continue in this country when
these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent.
It is the eternal struggle between these two principles, right
and wrong, throughout the world. They are the two principles
that have stood face to face from the beginning of time. The
one is the common right of humanity, the other the divine
right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it
develops itself. It is the same spirit that says "you toil and
work and earn bread and I'll eat it."
Address to President Lincoln
BY THE INTERNATIONAL WORKINGMEN'S ASSOCIATION
(_Drafted by Karl Marx_)
When an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders, for
the first time in the annals of the world, dared to inscribe
"Slavery" on the banner of armed revolt; when on the very spot
where hardly a century ago the idea of one great democratic
republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of
the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to
the European revolution of the eighteenth century, when on that
very spot the counter-revolution cynically proclaimed property
in man to be "the corner-stone of the new edifice"--then
the working classes of Europe understood at once that the
slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general
holy war of property against labor; and that for the men
of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past
conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the
other side of the Atlantic.
Boston Hymn
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON
(American essayist, philosopher and poet. The two stanzas following,
which may be said to sum up the revolutionary view of the subject of
"confiscation," are taken from a poem read in Boston on Emancipation
day, January 1, 1863)
Today unbind the captive,
So only are ye unbound;
Lift up a people from the dust,
Trump of their rescue, sound!
Pay ransom to the owner
And fill the bag to the brim.
Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
And ever was. Pay him.
Battle Hymn of the Chinese Revolution (1912)
(_From the Chinese_)
Freedom, one of the greatest blessings of Heaven,
United to Peace, thou wilt work on this earth ten thousand
wonderful new things.
Grave as a spirit, great as a giant rising to the very skies,
With the clouds for a chariot and the wind for a steed,
Come, come to reign over the earth!
For the sake of the black hell of our slavery,
Come, enlighten us with a ray of thy sun!...
In this century we are working to open a new age.
In this century, with one voice, all virile men
Are calling for a new making of heaven and earth.
Hin-Yun, our ancestor, guide us!
Spirit of Freedom, come and protect us!
The Revolution
BY RICHARD WAGNER
(It is not generally recalled that the composer of the world's
greatest music-dramas, 1813-1883, was an active revolutionist, who
took part in street fighting in the German Revolution of 1848, and
escaped a long imprisonment only by flight. The following is from his
contributions to the Dresden _Volksblätter_)
I am the secret of perpetual youth, the everlasting creator of
life; where I am not, death rages. I am the comfort, the hope,
the dream of the oppressed. I destroy what exists; but from the
rock whereon I light new life begins to flow. I come to you
to break all chains which bear you down; to free you from the
embrace of death, and instill a new life into your veins. All
that exists must perish; that is the eternal condition of life,
and I the all-destroying fulfil that law to create a fresh, new
existence. I will renovate to the very foundations the order of
things in which you live, for it is the offspring of sin, whose
blossom is misery and whose fruit is crime. The grain is ripe,
and I am the reaper. I will dissipate every delusion which
has mastery over the human race. I will destroy the authority
of the one over the many; of the lifeless over the living;
of the material over the spiritual. I will break into pieces
the authority of the great; of the law of property. Let the
will of each be master of mankind, one's own strength be one's
one property, for the freeman is the sacred man, and there is
nothing sublimer than he....
I will destroy the existing order of things which divides one
humanity into hostile peoples, into strong and weak, into
privileged and outlawed, into rich and poor; for that makes
unfortunate creatures of one and all. I will destroy the order
of things which makes millions the slaves of the few, and
those few the slaves of their own power, of their own wealth.
I will destroy the order of things which severs enjoyment from
labor, which turns labor into a burden and enjoyment into a
vice, which makes one man miserable through want and another
miserable through super-abundance. I will destroy the order of
things which consumes the vigor of manhood in the service of
the dead, of inert matter, which sustains one part of mankind
in idleness or useless activity, which forces thousands to
devote their sturdy youth to the indolent pursuits of soldiery,
officialism, speculation and usury, and the maintenance of
such like despicable conditions, while the other half, by
excessive exertion and sacrifice of all the enjoyment of life,
bears the burden of the whole infamous structure. I will
destroy even the very memory and trace of this delirious order
of things which, pieced together out of force, falsehood,
trouble, tears, sorrow, suffering, need, deceit, hypocrisy and
crime, is shut up in its own reeking atmosphere, and never
receives a breath of pure air, to which no ray of pure joy ever
penetrates....
Arise, then, ye people of the earth, arise, ye sorrow-stricken
and oppressed. Ye, also, who vainly struggle to clothe the
inner desolation of your hearts, with the transient glory of
riches, arise! Come and follow in my track with the joyful
crowd, for I know not how to make distinction between those
who follow me. There are but two peoples from henceforth on
earth--the one which follows me, and the one which resists me.
The one I will lead to happiness, but the other I will crush
in my progress. For I am the Revolution, I am the new creating
force. I am the divinity which discerns all life, which
embraces, revives, and rewards.
Cry of the People
BY JOHN G. NEIHARDT
(Western poet and novelist, born 1881)
Tremble before your chattels,
Lords of the scheme of things!
Fighters of all earth's battles,
Ours is the might of kings!
Guided by seers and sages,
The world's heart-beat for a drum,
Snapping the chains of ages,
Out of the night we come!
Lend us no ear that pities!
Offer no almoner's hand!
Alms for the builders of cities!
When will you understand?
Down with your pride of birth
And your golden gods of trade!
A man is worth to his mother, Earth,
All that a man has made!
We are the workers and makers!
We are no longer dumb!
Tremble, O Shirkers and Takers!
Sweeping the earth--we come!
Ranked in the world-wide dawn,
Marching into the day!
_The night is gone and the sword is drawn
And the scabbard is thrown away!_
Woman's Right
(_From "Woman and Labor"_)
BY OLIVE SCHREINER
(South African novelist, born 1859. In the preface to this book one
learns that it is only a faint sketch from memory of part of a great
work, the manuscript of which was destroyed during the Boer war)
Thrown into strict logical form, our demand is this: We do not
ask that the wheels of time should reverse themselves, or the
stream of life flow backward. We do not ask that our ancient
spinning-wheels be again resuscitated and placed in our hands;
we do not demand that our old grindstones and hoes be returned
to us, or that man should again betake himself entirely to
his ancient province of war and the chase, leaving to us all
domestic and civil labor. We do not even demand that society
shall immediately so reconstruct itself that every woman may be
again a childbearer (deep and overmastering as lies the hunger
for motherhood in every virile woman's heart!); neither do we
demand that the children we bear shall again be put exclusively
into our hands to train. This, we know, cannot be. The past
material conditions of life have gone for ever; no will of man
can recall them. But _this_ is our demand: We demand that,
in that strange new world that is arising alike upon the man
and the woman, where nothing is as it was, and all things are
assuming new shapes and relations, that in this new world we
also shall have our share of honored and socially useful human
toil, our full half of the labor of the Children of Woman. We
demand nothing more than this, and will take nothing less.
_This is our_ "WOMAN'S RIGHT!"
Ladies in Rebellion
BY ABIGAIL ADAMS
(Wife of one president of the United States, and mother of
another. From a letter to her husband written in 1774, during
the session of the first Continental Congress)
I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And in
the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for
you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be
more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.... If
particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are
determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves
bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
A Doll's House
BY HENRIK IBSEN
(Norwegian dramatist, 1828-1906. A play which may be called the
source of the modern Feminist movement. In the following scene
a young wife announces her revolt)
NORA:--While I was at home with father, he used to tell me his
opinions, and I held the same opinions. If I had others, I
concealed them, because he wouldn't have liked it. He used to
call me his doll-child, and played with me as I played with my
dolls. Then I came to live in your house--
HELMER:--What an expression to use about our marriage!
NORA (_undisturbed_):--I mean I passed from father's hands into
yours. You settled everything according to your taste; and I
got the same tastes as you; or I pretended to--I don't know
which--both ways, perhaps. When I look back on it now, I seem
to have been living here like a beggar, from hand to mouth. I
lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald. But you would have
it so. You and father have done me a great wrong. It is your
fault that my life has been wasted.
HELMER:--Why, Nora, how unreasonable and ungrateful you are.
Haven't you been happy here?
NORA:--No, only merry. And you have always been so kind to
me. But your house has been nothing but a play-room. Here I
have been your doll-wife, just as at home I used to be papa's
doll-child. And the children, in their turn, have been my
dolls. I thought it fun when you played with me, just as
the children did when I played with them. That has been our
marriage, Torvald.... And that is why I am now leaving you!
HELMER (_jumping up_):--What--do you mean to say--
NORA:--I must stand quite alone, to know myself and my
surroundings; so I can't stay with you.
HELMER:--Nora! Nora!
NORA:--I am going at once. Christina will take me for tonight.
HELMER:--You are mad! I shall not allow it. I forbid it.
NORA:--It is no use your forbidding me anything now. I shall
take with me what belongs to me. From you I will accept
nothing, either now or afterwards....
HELMER:--To forsake your home, your husband, and your children!
You don't consider what the world will say.
NORA:--I can pay no heed to that. I only know what I must do.
HELMER:--It is exasperating! Can you forsake your holiest
duties in this world?
NORA:--What do you call my holiest duties?
HELMER:--Do you ask me that? Your duties to your husband and
your children.
NORA:--I have other duties equally sacred.
HELMER:--Impossible! What duties do you mean?
NORA:--My duties towards myself.
HELMER:--Before all else you are a wife and a mother.
NORA:--That I no longer believe. I think that before all else I
am a human being, just as much as you are--or at least I will
try to become one.
A Girl Strike-Leader
BY FLORENCE KIPER FRANK
(American poetess, born 1886)
A white-faced, stubborn little thing
Whose years are not quite twenty years,
Eyes steely now and done with tears,
Mouth scornful of its suffering--
The young mouth!--body virginal
Beneath the cheap, ill-fitting suit,
A bearing quaintly resolute,
A flowering hat, satirical.
A soul that steps to the sound of the fife
And banners waving red to war,
Mystical, knowing scarce wherefore--
A Joan in a modern strife.
Comrade Yetta[A]
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
BY ALBERT EDWARDS
(The story of an East Side sweat-shop worker who becomes
a strike-leader. The present scene describes a meeting in
Carnegie Hall)
Yetta stood there alone, the blood mounting to her cheeks,
looking more and more like an orchid, and waited for the storm
to pass.
"I'm not going to talk about this strike," she said when she
could make herself heard. "It's over. I want to tell you about
the next one--and the next. I wish very much I could make you
understand about the strikes that are coming....
"Perhaps there's some of you never thought much about strikes
till now. Well. There's been strikes all the time. I don't
believe there's ever been a year when there wasn't dozens here
in New York. When we began, the skirt-finishers was out. They
lost their strike. They went hungry just the way we did, but
nobody helped them. And they're worse now than ever. There
ain't no difference between one strike and another. Perhaps
they are striking for more pay or recognition or closed shops.
But the next strike'll be just like ours. It'll be people
fighting so they won't be so much slaves like they was before.
"The Chairman said perhaps I'd tell you about my experience.
There ain't nothing to tell except everybody has been awful
kind to me. It's fine to have people so kind to me. But I'd
rather if they'd try to understand what this strike business
means to all of us workers--this strike we've won and the ones
that are coming....
"I come out of the workhouse today, and they tell me a lady
wants to give me money to study, she wants to have me go to
college like I was a rich girl. It's very kind. I want to
study. I ain't been to school none since I was fifteen. I
guess I can't even talk English very good. I'd like to go to
college. And I used to see pictures in the papers of beautiful
rich women, and of course it would be fine to have clothes like
that. But being in a strike, seeing all the people suffer,
seeing all the cruelty--it makes things look different.
"The Chairman told you something out of the Christian Bible.
Well, we Jews have got a story too--perhaps it's in your
Bible--about Moses and his people in Egypt. He'd been brought
up by a rich Egyptian lady--a princess--just like he was her
son. But as long as he tried to be an Egyptian he wasn't no
good. And God spoke to him one day out of a bush on fire. I
don't remember just the words of the story, but God said:
'Moses, you're a Jew. You ain't got no business with the
Egyptians. Take off those fine clothes and go back to your own
people and help them escape from bondage.' Well. Of course, I
ain't like Moses, and God has never talked to me. But it seems
to me sort of as if--during this strike--I'd seen a BLAZING
BUSH. Anyhow I've seen my people in bondage. And I don't want
to go to college and be a lady. I guess the kind princess
couldn't understand why Moses wanted to be a poor Jew instead
of a rich Egyptian. But if you can understand, if you can
understand why I'm going to stay with my own people, you'll
understand all I've been trying to say.
"We're a people in bondage. There's lots of people who's kind
to us. I guess the princess wasn't the only Egyptian lady that
was kind to the Jews. But kindness ain't what people want who
are in bondage. Kindness won't never make us free. And God
don't send any more prophets nowadays. We've got to escape all
by ourselves. And when you read in the papers that there's a
strike--it don't matter whether it's street-car conductors or
lace-makers, whether it's Eyetalians or Polacks or Jews or
Americans, whether it's here or in Chicago--it's my People--the
People in Bondage who are starting out for the Promised Land."
She stopped a moment, and a strange look came over her face--a
look of communication with some distant spirit. When she spoke
again, her words were unintelligible to most of the audience.
Some of the Jewish vest-makers understood. And the Rev. Dunham
Denning, who was a famous scholar, understood. But even those
who did not were held spellbound by the swinging sonorous
cadence. She stopped abruptly.
"It's Hebrew," she explained. "It's what my father taught me
when I was a little girl. It's about the Promised Land--I can't
say it in good English--I----"
"Unless I've forgotten my Hebrew," the Reverend Chairman said,
stepping forward, "Miss Rayefsky has been repeating God's words
to Moses as recorded in the third chapter of Exodus. I think
it's the seventh verse:--
"'And the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my
people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason
of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows;
"'And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the
Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land unto a good
land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey.'"
"Yes. That's it," Yetta said. "Well, that's what strikes mean.
We're fighting for the old promises."
"New" Women
BY OLIVE SCHREINER
(See page 240)
We are not new! If you would understand us, go back two
thousand years, and study our descent; our breed is our
explanation. We are the daughters of our fathers as well as our
mothers. In our dreams we still hear the clash of the shields
of our forebears, as they struck them together before battle
and raised the shout of "Freedom!" In our dreams it is with us
still, and when we wake it breaks from our own lips. We are the
daughters of these men.
Bread and Roses
BY JAMES OPPENHEIM
(In a parade of the strikers of Lawrence, Mass., some young
girls carried a banner inscribed, "We want Bread, and Roses
too!")
As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing, "Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses."
As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men--
For they are women's children and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes--
Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses!
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew--
Yes, it is bread we fight for--but we fight for Roses, too.
As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days--
The rising of the women means the rising of the race--
No more the drudge and idler--ten that toil where one reposes--
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses!
The Great Strike[A]
[A] By permission of Doubleday, Page & Co.
(_From "Happy Humanity"_)
BY FREDERIK VAN EEDEN
(The Dutch physician, poet and novelist has here told for
American readers a personal experience in the labor struggles
of his own country)
About forty of us were sent as delegates to different towns to
lead and encourage the strikers there. The password was given
and a date and hour secretly appointed. On Monday morning, the
sixth of April, 1903, no train was to run on any railway in the
Netherlands.
Sunday evening I set out, as one of the forty delegates, on the
warpath. I took leave of my family, filled a suitcase with
pamphlets and fly-leaves, and arrived in the middle of the
night at the little town of Amersfoort, an important railway
junction, to bring my message from headquarters that a strike
would be declared that night in the whole country. Expecting
the Government to be very active and energetic and not unlikely
to arrest me, I took an assumed name, and was dressed like a
laborer....
I stayed a week in that little town, living in the houses of
the strikers, sharing their meals and their hours of suspense
and anxiety. There was a dark, dingy meeting-room where they
all preferred to gather, rather than stay at home. The women
also regularly attended these meetings, sometimes bringing
their children, and they all sought the comfort of being in
company, talking of hopes and fears, cheering each other up
by songs, and trying to raise each other's spirits during the
long days of inaction. I addressed them, three or four times
a day, trying to give them sound notions on social conditions
and preparing them for the defeat which I soon knew to be
inevitable. I may say, however, that, though I was of all the
forty delegates the least hopeful of ultimate success, my
little party was the last to surrender and showed the smallest
percentage of fugitives.
I saw in those days of strife that of the two contending
parties, the stronger, the victorious one, was by far the
least sympathetic in its moral attitude and methods. The
strikers were pathetically stupid and ignorant about the
strength of their opponents and their own weakness. If they had
unexpectedly gained a complete victory they would have been
utterly unable to use it. If the political power had shifted
from the hands of the Government to those of the leading staff
of that general strike, the result would have been a terrible
confusion. There was no mind strong enough, no hand firm
enough among them to rule and reorganize that mass of workers,
unaccustomed to freedom, untrained to self-control, unable to
work without severe authority and discipline. Yet the feelings
and motives of that multitude were fair and just--they showed
a chivalry, a generosity, an idealism and an enthusiasm with
which the low methods of their powerful opponents contrasted
painfully.
Every striker had to fight his own fight at home. Every evening
he had to face the worn and anxious face of his wife, the sight
of his children in danger of starvation and misery. He had to
notice the hidden tears of the woman, or to answer her doubts
and reproaches, with a mind itself far from confident. He had
to fight in his own heart the egotistical inclination to save
himself and give up what he felt to be his best sentiment,
solidarity, the faith towards his comrades.
I believe no feeling man of the leisure class could have gone
through a week in those surroundings and taken part in a
struggle like this without acquiring a different conception of
the ethics of socialism and class war.
For on the other side there were the Government, the companies,
the defendants of existing order, powerful by their wealth,
by their routine, by their experience, and supported by the
servility of the great public and the army. They had not to
face any real danger (the strikers showed no inclination to
deeds of violence), and the arms they used were intimidation
and bribery. The only thing for them to do was to demoralize
the striker, to make him an egoist, a coward, a traitor to his
comrades. And this was done quietly and successfully.
Demoralizing the enemy may be the lawful object of every
war--the unavoidable evil to prevent a greater wrong; yet in
this case, where the method of corruption could be used only
on one side, it showed the ugly character of the conflict.
This was no fair battle with common moral rules of chivalry
and generosity; it was a pitiful and hopeless struggle between
a weak slave and a strong usurper, between an ill-treated,
revolting child and a brutal oppressor, who cared only for the
restoration of his authority, not for the morals of the child.
What Meaneth a Tyrant, and how he Useth his Power in a Kingdom
When he hath Obtained it
(_From "Las Siete Partidas"_)
BY ALFONSO THE WISE
(A Spanish king of great learning; 1226-1284)
A tyrant doth signify a cruel lord, who, by force or by craft,
or by treachery, hath obtained power over any realm or country;
and such men be of such nature, that when once they have grown
strong in the land, they love rather to work their own profit,
though it be to the harm of the land, than the common profit of
all, for they always live in an ill fear of losing it. And that
they may be able to fulfil this their purpose unencumbered,
the wise of old have said that they use their power against
the people in three manners. The first is, that they strive
that those under their mastery be ever ignorant and timorous,
because, when they be such, they may not be bold to rise
against them, nor to resist their wills; and the second is,
that their victims be not kindly and united among themselves,
in such wise that they trust not one another, for while they
live in disagreement, they shall not dare to make any discourse
against their lord, for fear faith and secrecy should not be
kept among themselves; and the third way is, that they strive
to make them poor, and to put them upon great undertakings,
which they can never finish, whereby they may have so much harm
that it may never come into their hearts to devise anything
against their ruler. And above all this, have tyrants ever
striven to make spoil of the strong and to destroy the wise;
and have forbidden fellowship and assemblies of men in their
land, and striven always to know what men said or did; and do
trust their counsel and the guard of their person rather to
foreigners, who will serve at their will, than to them of the
land, who serve from oppression.
An Open Letter to the Employers
BY "A.E." (GEORGE W. RUSSELL)
(This remarkable piece of eloquence, published in the Dublin _Times_
at the time of the great strike of 1913, is said to have completely
revolutionized public opinion on the question. The author, born
1867, is one of Ireland's greatest poets, and an ardent advocate of
agricultural co-operation)
Sirs:--I address this warning to you, the aristocracy of
industry in this city, because, like all aristocracies, you
tend to grow blind in long authority, and to be unaware that
you and your class and its every action are being considered
and judged day by day by those who have power to shake or
overturn the whole social order, and whose restlessness in
poverty today is making our industrial civilization stir like a
quaking bog. You do not seem to realize that your assumption
that you are answerable to yourselves alone for your actions in
the industries you control is one that becomes less and less
tolerable in a world so crowded with necessitous life. Some of
you have helped Irish farmers to upset a landed aristocracy
in the island, an aristocracy richer and more powerful in its
sphere than you are in yours, with its roots deep in history.
They, too, as a class, though not all of them, were scornful
or neglectful of the workers in the industry by which they
profited; and to many who knew them in their pride of place and
thought them all-powerful they are already becoming a memory,
the good disappearing with the bad. If they had done their duty
by those from whose labor came their wealth, they might have
continued unquestioned in power and prestige for centuries to
come. The relation of landlord and tenant is not an ideal one,
but any relations in a social order will endure if there is
infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy which
qualifies life for immortality. Despotisms endure while they
are benevolent, and aristocracies while "_noblesse oblige_" is
not a phrase to be referred to with a cynical smile. Even an
oligarchy might be permanent if the spirit of human kindness,
which harmonizes all things otherwise incompatible, were
present....
Those who have economic power have civic power also, yet you
have not used the power that was yours to right what was wrong
in the evil administration of this city. You have allowed
the poor to be herded together so that one thinks of certain
places in Dublin as of a pestilence. There are twenty thousand
rooms, in each of which live entire families, and sometimes
more, where no functions of the body can be concealed, and
delicacy and modesty are creatures that are stifled ere they
are born. The obvious duty of you in regard to these things
you might have left undone, and it be imputed to ignorance or
forgetfulness; but your collective and conscious action as a
class in the present labor dispute has revealed you to the
world in so malign an aspect that the mirror must be held up to
you, so that you may see yourself as every humane person sees
you.
The conception of yourselves as altogether virtuous and wronged
is, I assure you, not at all the one which onlookers hold of
you.... The representatives of labor unions in Great Britain
met you, and you made of them a preposterous, an impossible
demand, and because they would not accede to it you closed
the Conference; you refused to meet them further; you assumed
that no other guarantees than those you asked were possible,
and you determined deliberately, in cold anger, to starve out
one-third of the population of this city, to break the manhood
of the men by the sight of the suffering of their wives and the
hunger of their children. We read in the Dark Ages of the rack
and thumbscrew. But these iniquities were hidden and concealed
from the knowledge of men in dungeons and torture-chambers.
Even in the Dark Ages humanity could not endure the sight of
such suffering, and it learnt of such misuse of power by slow
degrees, through rumor, and when it was certain it razed its
Bastilles to their foundations. It remained for the twentieth
century and the capital city of Ireland to see an oligarchy of
four hundred masters deciding openly upon starving one hundred
thousand people, and refusing to consider any solution except
that fixed by their pride. You, masters, asked men to do that
which masters of labor in any other city in these islands had
not dared to do. You insolently demanded of these men who were
members of a trade union that they should resign from that
union; and from those who were not members you insisted on a
vow that they would never join it.
Your insolence and ignorance of the rights conceded to workers
universally in the modern world were incredible, and as great
as your inhumanity. If you had between you collectively a
portion of human soul as large as a three-penny bit, you would
have sat night and day with the representatives of labor,
trying this or that solution of the trouble, mindful of the
women and children, who at least were innocent of wrong against
you. But no! You reminded labor you could always have your
three square meals a day while it went hungry. You went into
conference again with representatives of the State, because,
dull as you are, you knew public opinion would not stand your
holding out. You chose as your spokesman the bitterest tongue
that ever wagged in this island, and then, when an award was
made by men who have an experience in industrial matters a
thousand times transcending yours, who have settled disputes
in industries so great that the sum of your petty enterprises
would not equal them, you withdraw again, and will not agree
to accept their solution, and fall back again on your devilish
policy of starvation. Cry aloud to Heaven for new souls! The
souls you have got cast upon the screen of publicity appear
like the horrid and writhing creatures enlarged from the insect
world, and revealed to us by the cinematograph.
You may succeed in your policy and ensure your own damnation by
your victory. The men whose manhood you have broken will loathe
you, and will always be brooding and scheming to strike a fresh
blow. The children will be taught to curse you. The infant
being molded in the womb will have breathed into its starved
body the vitality of hate. It is not they--it is you who are
blind Samsons pulling down the pillars of the social order.
You are sounding the death-knell of autocracy in industry.
There was autocracy in political life, and it was superseded
by democracy. So surely will democratic power wrest from you
the control of industry. The fate of you, the aristocracy of
industry, will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land if
you do not show that you have some humanity still among you.
Humanity abhors, above all things, a vacuum in itself, and your
class will be cut off from humanity as the surgeon cuts the
cancer and alien growth from the body. Be warned ere it is too
late.
God and the Strong Ones
BY MARGARET WIDDEMER
(Contemporary American poet)
"We have made them fools and weak!" said the Strong Ones:
"We have bound them, they are dumb and deaf and blind;
We have crushed them in our hands like a heap of crumbling sands,
We have left them naught to seek or find:
They are quiet at our feet!" said the Strong Ones;
"We have made them one with wood and stone and clod;
Serf and laborer and woman, they are less than wise or human!----"
_"I shall raise the weak!" saith God._
"They are stirring in the dark!" said the Strong Ones,
"They are struggling, who were moveless like the dead;
We can hear them cry and strain hand and foot against the chain,
We can hear their heavy upward tread....
What if they are restless?" said the Strong Ones;
"What if they have stirred beneath the rod?
Fools and weak and blinded men, we can tread them down again----"
_"Shall ye conquer Me?" saith God._
"They will trample us and bind!" said the Strong Ones;
"We are crushed beneath the blackened feet and hands;
All the strong and fair and great they will crush from out the state;
They will whelm it with the weight of pressing sands--
They are maddened and are blind!" said the Strong Ones;
"Black decay has come where they have trod;
They will break the world in twain if their hands are on the rein--"
_"What is that to me?" saith God._
_"Ye have made them in their strength, who were Strong Ones,
Ye have only taught the blackness ye have known:
These are evil men and blind?--Ay, but molded to your mind!
How shall ye cry out against your own?
Ye have held the light and beauty I have given
Far above the muddied ways where they must plod:
Ye have builded this your lord with the lash and with the sword--
Reap what ye have sown!" saith God._
The Weavers
BY GERHART HAUPTMANN
(German dramatist and poet, born 1862. The present play is a wonderful
picture of the lives of the weavers of Silesia, driven to revolt by
starvation. Moritz, a soldier, has just come home to his friends)
ANSORGE:--Come, then, Moritz, tell us your opinion, you that's
been out and seen the world. Are things at all like improving
for us weavers, eh?
MORITZ:--They would need to.
ANSORGE:--We're in an awful state here. It's not livin' an'
it's not dyin'. A man fights to the bitter end, but he's bound
to be beat at last--to be left without a roof over his head,
you may say without ground under his feet. As long as he can
work at the loom he can earn some sort o' poor, miserable
livin'. But it's many a day since I've been able to get that
sort o' job. Now I tries to put a bite into my mouth with this
here basket-makin'. I sits at it late into the night, and by
the time I tumbles into bed I've earned twelve pfennig. I put
it to you if a man can live on that, when everything's so dear?
Nine marks goes in one lump for house tax, three marks for land
tax, nine marks for mortgage interest--that makes twenty-one
marks. I may reckon my year's earnin's at just double that
money, and that leaves me twenty-one marks for a whole year's
food, an' fire, an' clothes, an' shoes; and I've got to keep
up some sort of place to live in. Is it any wonder that I'm
behind-hand with my interest payments?
OLD BAUMERT:--Some one would need to go to Berlin an' tell the
King how hard put to it we are.
MORITZ:--Little good that would do, Father Baumert. There's
been plenty written about it in the newspapers. But the rich
people, they can turn and twist things round--as cunning as the
devil himself.
OLD BAUMERT (_shaking his head_):--To think they've no more
sense than that in Berlin!
ANSORGE:--And is it really true, Moritz? Is there no law to
help us? If a man hasn't been able to scrape together enough to
pay his mortgage interest, though he's worked the very skin off
his hands, must his house be taken from him? The peasant that's
lent the money on it, he wants his rights--what else can you
look for from him? But what's to be the end of it all, I don't
know.--If I'm put out o' the house.... (_In a voice choked by
tears._) I was born here, and here my father sat at his loom
for more than forty years. Many was the time he said to mother:
Mother, when I'm gone, the house'll still be here. I've worked
hard for it. Every nail means a night's weaving, every plank a
year's dry bread. A man would think that....
MORITZ:--They're quite fit to take the last bite out of your
mouth--that's what they are.
ANSORGE:--Well, well, well! I would rather be carried out
than have to walk out now in my old days. Who minds dyin'? My
father, he was glad to die. At the very end he got frightened,
but I crept into bed beside him, an' he quieted down again. I
was a lad of thirteen then. I was tired and fell asleep beside
him--I knew no better--and when I woke he was quite cold....
(_They eat the food which the soldier has brought, but the old
man Baumert is too far exhausted to retain it, and has to run
from the room. He comes back crying with rage._)
BAUMERT:--It's no good! I'm too far gone! Now that I've at
last got hold of somethin' with a taste in it, my stomach won't
keep it. (_He sits down on the bench by the stove crying._)
MORITZ (_with a sudden violent ebullition of rage_):--And
yet there are people not far from here, justices they call
themselves too, over-fed brutes, that have nothing to do all
the year round but invent new ways of wasting their time. And
these people say that the weavers would be quite well off if
only they weren't so lazy.
ANSORGE:--The men as say that are no men at all, they're
monsters.
MORITZ:--Never mind, Father Ansorge; we're making the place
hot for 'em. Becker and I have been and given Dreissiger (_the
master_) a piece of our mind, and before we came away we sang
him "Bloody Justice."
ANSORGE:--Good Lord! Is that the song?
MORITZ:--Yes; I have it here.
ANSORGE:--They call it Dreissiger's song, don't they?
MORITZ:--I'll read it to you.
MOTHER BAUMERT:--Who wrote it?
MORITZ:--That's what nobody knows. Now listen. (_He reads,
hesitating like a schoolboy, with incorrect accentuation, but
unmistakably strong feeling. Despair, suffering, rage, hatred,
thirst for revenge, all find utterance._)
The justice to us weavers dealt
Is bloody, cruel, and hateful;
Our life's one torture, long drawn out:
For lynch law we'd be grateful.
Stretched on the rack day after day,
Hearts sick and bodies aching,
Our heavy sighs their witness bear
To spirit slowly breaking.
(_The words of the song make a strong impression on Old
Baumert. Deeply agitated, he struggles against the temptation
to interrupt Moritz. At last he can keep quiet no longer._)
OLD BAUMERT (_to his wife, half laughing, half crying,
stammering_):--"Stretched on the rack day after day." Whoever
wrote that, mother, knew the truth. You can bear witness ...
eh, how does it go? "Our heavy sighs their witness bear" ...
what's the rest?
MORITZ:--"To spirit slowly breaking."
OLD BAUMERT:--You know the way we sigh, mother, day and night,
sleepin' an' wakin'.
(_Ansorge has stopped working, and cowers on the floor,
strongly agitated. Mother Baumert and Bertha wipe their eyes
frequently during the course of the reading._)
MORITZ (_continues to read_):--
The Dreissigers true hangmen are,
Servants no whit behind them;
Masters and men with one accord
Set on the poor to grind them.
You villains all, you brood of hell----
OLD BAUMERT (_trembling with rage, stamping on the
floor_):--Yes, brood of hell!!!
MORITZ (_reads_):--
You fiends in fashion human,
A curse will fall on all like you,
Who prey on man and woman.
ANSORGE:--Yes, yes, a curse upon them!
OLD BAUMERT (_clenching his fist, threateningly_):--You prey on
man and woman.
MORITZ (_reads_):--
Then think of all our woe and want,
O ye who hear this ditty!
Our struggle vain for daily bread
Hard hearts would move to pity.
But pity's what you've never known,--
You'd take both skin and clothing,
You cannibals, whose cruel deeds
Fill all good men with loathing.
OLD BAUMERT (_jumps up, beside himself with excitement_):--Both
skin and clothing. It's true, it's all true! Here I stand,
Robert Baumert, master-weaver of Kaschbach. Who can bring up
anything against me?... I've been an honest, hard-working man
all my life long, an' look at me now! What have I to show for
it? Look at me! See what they've made of me! Stretched on the
rack day after day. (_He holds out his arms._) Feel that! Skin
and bone! "You villains all, you brood of hell!!" (_He sinks
down on a chair, weeping with rage and despair._)
ANSORGE (_flings his basket from him into a corner, rises, his
whole body trembling with rage, gasps_):--And the time's come
now for a change, I say. We'll stand it no longer! We'll stand
it no longer! Come what may!
Alton Locke's Song: 1848
BY CHARLES KINGSLEY
(See pages 78, 84, 223)
Weep, weep, weep and weep
For pauper, dolt and slave!
Hark! from wasted moor and fen
Feverous alley, stifling den,
Swells the wail of Saxon men--
Work! or the grave!
Down, down, down and down,
With idler, knave, and tyrant!
Why for sluggards cark and moil?
He that will not live by toil
Has no right on English soil!
God's word's our warrant!
Up, up, up and up!
Face your game and play it!
The night is past, behold the sun!
The idols fall, the lie is done!
The Judge is set, the doom begun!
Who shall stay it?
BY G. BERNARD SHAW
Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter
with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the Rich is
Uselessness.
BY ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
(American lawyer and lecturer, 1883-1899)
Whoever produces anything by weary labor, does not need a
revelation from heaven to teach him that he has a right to the
thing produced.
Labor
(A parody upon a poem by Rudyard Kipling; author unknown. The
poem is frequently, but incorrectly, attributed to Mr. Kipling)
We have fed you all for a thousand years,
And you hail us still unfed,
Tho' there's never a dollar of all your wealth
But marks the workers' dead.
We have yielded our best to give you rest,
And you lie on crimson wool;
For if blood be the price of all your wealth
Good God, we ha' paid in full!
There's never a mine blown skyward now
But we're buried alive for you;
There's never a wreck drifts shoreward now
But we are its ghastly crew;
Go reckon our dead by the forges red,
And the factories where we spin.
If blood be the price of your cursed wealth
Good God, we ha' paid it in!
We have fed you all for a thousand years,
For that was our doom, you know,
From the days when you chained us in your fields
To the strike of a week ago.
You ha' eaten our lives and our babies and wives,
And we're told it's your legal share;
But, if blood be the price of your lawful wealth,
Good God, we ha' bought it fair!
The Two "Reigns of Terror"
(_From "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"_)
(America's favorite humorist, 1837-1910)
There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it
and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the
other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the
other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon
ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but
our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror,
the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror
of swift death by the axe, compared with life-long death from
hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? What is swift
death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the
stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by
that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught
to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly
contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror--that
unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been
taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
(Quoted by special permission of Harper & Brothers.)
In Trafalgar Square
(_From "Songs of the Army of the Night"_)
BY FRANCIS W. L. ADAMS
(See page 219)
The stars shone faint through the smoky blue;
The church-bells were ringing;
Three girls, arms laced, were passing through,
Tramping and singing.
Their heads were bare; their short skirts swung
As they went along;
Their scarf-covered breasts heaved up, as they sung
Their defiant song.
It was not too clean, their feminine lay,
But it thrilled me quite
With its challenge to task-master villainous day
And infamous night,
With its threat to the robber rich, the proud,
The respectable free.
And I laughed and shouted to them aloud,
And they shouted to me!
"_Girls, that's the shout, the shout we will utter
When, with rifles and spades,
We stand, with the old Red Flag aflutter,
On the barricades!_"
The Orator on the Barricade
(_From "Les Miserables"_)
BY VICTOR HUGO
(See page 182)
Friends, the hour in which we live, and in which I speak to
you, is a gloomy hour, but of such is the terrible price of
the future. A revolution is a toll-gate. Oh! the human race
shall be delivered, uplifted and consoled! We affirm it on this
barricade. Whence shall arise the shout of love, if it be not
from the summit of sacrifice? O my brothers, here is the place
of junction between those who think and those who suffer; this
barricade is made neither of paving-stones, nor of timbers,
nor of iron; it is made of two mounds, a mound of ideas and a
mound of sorrows. Misery here encounters the ideal. Here day
embraces night, and says: I will die with thee and thou shalt
be born again with me. From the pressure of all desolations
faith gushes forth. Sufferings bring their agony here, and
ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are
to mingle and compose our death. Brothers, he who dies here
dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a grave
illumined by the dawn.
Europe: The 72nd and 73rd Years of These States
BY WALT WHITMAN
(The European revolutions of 1848-49)
Suddenly out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves,
Like lightning it le'pt forth half startled at itself,
Its feet upon the ashes and the rags, its hands tight to the
throats of kings.
O hope and faith!
O aching close of exiled patriots' lives!
O many a sicken'd heart!
Turn back unto this day, and make yourselves afresh.
And you, paid to defile the People! you liars, mark!
Not for numberless agonies, murders, lusts,
For court thieving in its manifold mean forms, worming from his
simplicity the poor man's wages,
For many a promise sworn by royal lips, and broken, and laugh'd
at in the breaking,
Then in their power, not for all these, did the blows strike
revenge, or the heads of the nobles fall;
The People scorn'd the ferocity of kings.
But the sweetness of mercy brew'd bitter destruction, and the
frighten'd monarchs come back;
Each comes in state, with his train--hangman, priest, tax-gatherer,
Soldier, lawyer, lord, jailer, and sycophant.
Yet behind all, lowering, stealing--lo, a Shape,
Vague as the night, draped interminable, head, front, and form,
in scarlet folds,
Whose face and eyes none may see,
Out of its robes only this--the red robes, lifted by the arm,
One finger, crook'd, pointed high over the top, like the head
of a snake appears.
Meanwhile, corpses lie in new-made graves--bloody corpses of
young men;
The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of princes
are flying, the creatures of power laugh aloud,
And all these things bear fruits--and they are good.
Those corpses of young men,
Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets--those hearts pierc'd
by the gray lead,
Cold and motionless as they seem, live elsewhere with
unslaughter'd vitality.
They live in other young men, O kings!
They live in brothers again ready to defy you!
They were purified by death--they were taught and exalted.
Not a grave of the murder'd for freedom, but grows seed for
freedom, in its turn to bear seed,
Which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the
snows nourish.
Not a disembodied spirit can the weapons of tyrants let loose,
But it stalks invisibly over the earth, whispering,
counselling, cautioning.
Liberty! let others despair of you! I never despair of you.
Is the house shut? Is the master away?
Nevertheless, be ready--be not weary of watching;
He will return soon--his messengers come anon.
The Dead to the Living
BY FERDINAND FREILIGRATH
(German revolutionary poet, 1810-1876. Part of a poem written after
the uprising of 1848, in Berlin, when the people marched past the
palace-gates with their slain, and compelled the king to stand upon
the balcony and take off his hat to the bodies)
With bullets through and through our breast--our forehead split
with pike and spear,
So bear us onward shoulder high, laid dead upon a blood-stained bier;
Yea, shoulder-high above the crowd, that on the man that bade us die,
Our dreadful death-distorted face may be a bitter curse for aye;
That he may see it day and night, or when he wakes, or when he sleeps,
Or when he opes his holy book, or when with wine high revel keeps;
That always each disfeatured face, each gaping wound his sight
may sear,
And brood above his bed of death, and curdle all his blood with fear!
Free Speech
BY SIR LESLIE STEPHEN
(English essayist and critic, 1832-1904)
I, for one, am fully prepared to listen to any arguments
for the propriety of theft or murder, or if it be possible,
of immorality in the abstract. No doctrine, however well
established, should be protected from discussion. If, as a
matter of fact, any appreciable number of persons are so
inclined to advocate murder on principle, I should wish them to
state their opinions openly and fearlessly, because I should
think that the shortest way of exploding the principle and of
ascertaining the true causes of such a perversion of moral
sentiment. Such a state of things implies the existence of
evils which cannot be really cured till their cause is known,
and the shortest way to discover the cause is to give a hearing
to the alleged reasons.
BY WENDELL PHILLIPS
(American anti-slavery agitator, 1811-1884)
If there is anything that cannot bear free thought, let it
crack.
The Mask of Anarchy
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
(English poet of nature and human liberty, 1792-1822, whose
whole life was a cry for beauty and freedom. He died in obloquy
and neglect, and today is known as "the Poets' Poet")
Men of England, Heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty mother,
Hopes of her, and one another!
Rise, like lions after slumber,
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew,
Which in sleep had fall'n on you.
Ye are many, they are few.
What is Freedom! Ye can tell
That which Slavery is too well,
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.
'Tis to work, and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs as in a cell
For the tyrants' use to dwell:
So that ye for them are made,
Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade;
With or without your own will, bent
To their defence and nourishment.
'Tis to see your children weak
With their mothers pine and peak,
When the winter winds are bleak:--
They are dying whilst I speak.
'Tis to hunger for such diet
As the rich man in his riot
Casts to the fat dogs that lie
Surfeiting beneath his eye.
'Tis to be a slave in soul,
And to hold no strong control
Over your own wills, but be
All that others make of ye.
Real Liberty
BY HENRIK IBSEN
(See page 241)
Away with the State! I will take part in that revolution.
Undermine the whole conception of a state, declare free choice
and spiritual kinship to be the only all-important conditions
of any union, and you will have the commencement of a liberty
that is worth something.
Christmas in Prison
(_From "The Jungle"_)
BY UPTON SINCLAIR
(See pages 43, 143, 194)
In the distance there was a church-tower bell that tolled the
hours one by one. When it came to midnight Jurgis was lying
upon the floor with his head in his arms, listening. Instead
of falling silent at the end, the bell broke out into a sudden
clangor. Jurgis raised his head; what could that mean--a fire?
God! suppose there were to be a fire in this jail! But then he
made out a melody in the ringing; there were chimes. And they
seemed to waken the city--all around, far and near, there were
bells, ringing wild music; for fully a minute Jurgis lay lost
in wonder, before, all at once, the meaning of it broke over
him--that this was Christmas Eve!
Christmas Eve--he had forgotten it entirely! There was a
breaking of flood-gates, a whirl of new memories and new
griefs rushing into his mind. In far Lithuania they had
celebrated Christmas; and it came to him as if it had been
yesterday--himself a little child, with his lost brother and
his dead father in the cabin in the deep black forest, where
the snow fell all day and all night and buried them from the
world. It was too far off for Santa Claus in Lithuania, but
it was not too far for peace and good-will to men, for the
wonder-bearing vision of the Christ-child.
But no, their bells were not ringing for him--their Christmas
was not meant for him, they were simply not counting him at
all. He was of no consequence, like a bit of trash, the carcass
of some animal. It was horrible, horrible! His wife might be
dying, his baby might be starving, his whole family might be
perishing in the cold--and all the while they were ringing
their Christmas chimes! And the bitter mockery of it--all this
was punishment for him! They put him in a place where the snow
could not beat in, where the cold could not eat through his
bones; they brought him food and drink--why, in the name of
heaven, if they must punish him, did they not put his family in
jail and leave him outside--why could they find no better way
to punish him than to leave three weak women and six helpless
children to starve and freeze?
That was their law, that was their justice! Jurgis stood
upright, trembling with passion, his hands clenched and his
arms upraised, his whole soul ablaze with hatred and defiance.
Ten thousand curses upon them and their law! Their justice--it
was a lie, a sham and a loathsome mockery. There was no
justice, there was no right, anywhere in it--it was only
force, it was tyranny, the will and the power, reckless and
unrestrained!
These midnight hours were fateful ones to Jurgis; in them
was the beginning of his rebellion, of his outlawry and his
unbelief. He had no wit to trace back the social crime to its
far sources--he could not say it was the thing men have called
"the system" that was crushing him to the earth; that it was
the packers, his masters, who had bought up the law of the
land, and had dealt out their brutal will to him from the seat
of justice. He only knew that he was wronged, and that the
world had wronged him; that the law, that society, with all its
powers, had declared itself his foe. And every hour his soul
grew blacker, every hour he dreamed new dreams of vengeance, of
defiance, of raging, frenzied hate.
Robbers and Governments
BY LEO TOLSTOY
(See pages 88, 110, 148)
The robber generally plundered the rich, the governments
generally plunder the poor and protect those rich who assist in
their crimes. The robber doing his work risked his life, while
the governments risk nothing, but base their whole activity
on lies and deception. The robber did not compel anyone to
join his band, the governments generally enrol their soldiers
by force.... The robber did not intentionally vitiate people,
but the governments, to accomplish their ends, vitiate whole
generations from childhood to manhood with false religions and
patriotic instruction.
"Gunmen" in Israel
(_From "A Sociological Study of the Bible"_)
BY LOUIS WALLIS
We saw that the great revolt under David was put down by the
assistance of mercenary troops, or hired "strong men," and
that by their aid Solomon was elevated to the throne against
the wishes of the peasantry. In the Hebrew text, these men of
power are called _gibborim_. They were among the principal
tools used by the kings in maintaining the government. It was
the _gibborim_ who garrisoned the royal strongholds that held
the country in awe. In cases where the peasants refused to
submit, bands of _gibborim_ were sent out by the kings and the
great nobles. Through them the peasantry were "civilized";
and through them, apparently, the Amorite law was enforced in
opposition to the old justice.
Hence the prophets were very bitter against these tools of the
ruling class. Hosea writes: "Thou didst trust in thy way, in
the multitude of thy _gibborim_; therefore shall a tumult arise
against thy people; and all thy fortresses shall be destroyed."
Amos, the shepherd, says that when Jehovah shall punish the
land, the _gibborim_ shall fall: "Flight shall perish from the
swift ... neither shall the _gibbor_ deliver himself; neither
shall he stand that handeth the bow; and he that is swift of
foot shall not deliver himself; ... and he that is courageous
among the _gibborim_ shall flee away naked in that day, saith
Jehovah."
"Gunmen" in West Virginia
("_When the Leaves Come Out_")
BY A PAINT CREEK MINER
(Written during the terrible strike of 1911-12)
The hills are very bare and cold and lonely;
I wonder what the future months will bring.
The strike is on--our strength would win, if only--
O, Buddy, how I'm longing for the spring!
They've got us down--their martial lines enfold us;
They've thrown us out to feel the winter's sting,
And yet, by God, those curs can never hold us,
Nor could the dogs of hell do such a thing!
It isn't just to see the hills beside me
Grow fresh and green with every growing thing;
I only want the leaves to come and hide me,
To cover up my vengeful wandering.
I will not watch the floating clouds that hover
Above the birds that warble on the wing;
I want to use this GUN from under cover--
O, Buddy, how I'm longing for the spring!
You see them there, below, the damned scab-herders!
Those puppets on the greedy Owners' String;
We'll make them pay for all their dirty murders--
We'll show them how a starveling's hate can sting!
They riddled us with volley after volley;
We heard their speeding bullets zip and ring,
But soon we'll make them suffer for their folly--
O, Buddy, how I'm longing for the spring!
FROM ECCLESIASTES
Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad.
Political Violence
(From an Anarchist pamphlet published in London; author unknown)
Under miserable conditions of life, any vision of the
possibility of better things makes the present misery more
intolerable, and spurs those who suffer to the most energetic
struggles to improve their lot; and if these struggles only
result in sharper misery, the outcome is sheer desperation. In
our present society, for instance, an exploited wage worker,
who catches a glimpse of what life and work ought to be, finds
the toilsome routine and the squalor of his existence almost
intolerable; and even when he has the resolution and courage
to continue steadily working his best, and waiting until new
ideas have so permeated society as to pave the way for better
times, the mere fact that he has such ideas and tries to spread
them, brings him into difficulties with his employers. How
many thousands of Socialists, and above all Anarchists, have
lost work and even the chance of work, solely on the ground of
their opinions. It is only the specially gifted craftsman who,
if he be a zealous propagandist, can hope to retain permanent
employment. And what happens to a man with his brain working
actively with a ferment of new ideas, with a vision before
his eyes of a new hope dawning for toiling and agonizing men,
with the knowledge that his suffering and that of his fellows
in misery is not caused by the cruelty of fate, but by the
injustice of other human beings,--what happens to such a man
when he sees those dear to him starving, when he himself is
starved? Some natures in such a plight, and those by no means
the least social or the least sensitive, will become violent,
and will even feel that their violence is social and not
anti-social, that in striking when and how they can, they are
striking, not for themselves, but for human nature, outraged
and despoiled in their persons and in those of their fellow
sufferers. And are we, who ourselves are not in this horrible
predicament, to stand by and coldly condemn those piteous
victims of the Furies and Fates? Are we to decry as miscreants
these human beings who act with heroic self-devotion,
sacrificing their lives in protest, where less social and
less energetic natures would lie down and grovel in abject
submission to injustice and wrong? Are we to join the ignorant
and brutal outcry which stigmatizes such men as monsters of
wickedness, gratuitously running amuck in a harmonious and
innocently peaceful society? No! We hate murder with a hatred
that may seem absurdly exaggerated to apologists for Matabele
massacres, to callous acquiescers in hangings and bombardments;
but we decline in such cases of homicide, or attempted
homicide, as those of which we are treating, to be guilty of
the cruel injustice of flinging the whole responsibility of
the deed upon the immediate perpetrator. The guilt of these
homicides lies upon every man and woman who, intentionally or
by cold indifference, helps to keep up social conditions that
drive human beings to despair. The man who flings his whole
life into the attempt, at the cost of his own life, to protest
against the wrongs of his fellow-men, is a saint compared to
the active and passive upholders of cruelty and injustice, even
if his protest destroys other lives besides his own. Let him
who is without sin in society cast the first stone at such an
one.
The Bomb
BY FRANK HARRIS
(The English author, born 1855, author of "The Man Shakespeare," has
in this novel told the inside story of the Haymarket explosion in
Chicago in 1886. The following passage describes the treatment which
the strikers received from the police)
A meeting was called on a waste space in Packingtown, and
over a thousand workmen came together. I went there out of
curiosity. Lingg, I may say here, always went alone to these
strike meetings. Ida told me once that he suffered so much at
them that he could not bear to be seen, and perhaps that was
the explanation of his solitary ways. Fielden, the Englishman,
spoke first, and was cheered to the echo; the workmen knew
him as a working-man and liked him; besides, he talked in a
homely way, and was easy to understand. Spies spoke in German
and was cheered also. The meeting was perfectly orderly
when three hundred police tried to disperse it. The action
was ill-advised, to say the best of it, and tyrannical; the
strikers were hurting no one and interfering with no one.
Without warning or reason the police tried to push their way
through the crowd to the speakers; finding a sort of passive
resistance and not being able to overcome it, they used their
clubs savagely. One or two of the strikers, hot-headed, bared
their knives, and at once the police, led on by that madman,
Schaack, drew their revolvers and fired. It looked as if the
police had been waiting for the opportunity. Three strikers
were shot dead on the spot, and more than twenty were wounded,
several of them dangerously, before the mob drew sullenly away
from the horrible place. A leader, a word, and not one of the
police would have escaped alive; but the leader was not there,
and the word was not given, so the wrong was done, and went
unpunished.
I do not know how I reached my room that afternoon. The sight
of the dead men lying stark there in the snow had excited me to
madness. The picture of one man followed me like an obsession;
he was wounded to death, shot through the lungs; he lifted
himself up on his left hand and shook the right at the police,
crying in a sort of frenzy till the spouting blood choked him--
"Bestien! Bestien!" ("Beasts! Beasts!")
I can still see him wiping the blood-stained froth from his
lips; I went to help him; but all he could gasp was, "Weib!
Kinder! (Wife, children!)" Never shall I forget the despair in
his face. I supported him gently; again and again I wiped the
blood from his lips; every breath brought up a flood; his poor
eyes thanked me, though he could not speak, and soon his eyes
closed; flickered out, as one might say, and he lay there still
enough in his own blood; "murdered," as I said to myself when I
laid the poor body back; "murdered!"
(_As a result of this police action, the narrator goes to the
next meeting of the strikers with a bomb in his pocket._)
The crowd began to drift away at the edges. I was alone and
curiously watchful. I saw the mayor and the officials move
off towards the business part of the town. It looked for a
few minutes as if everything was going to pass over in peace;
but I was not relieved. I could hear my own heart beating,
and suddenly I felt something in the air; it was sentient
with expectancy. I slowly turned my head. I was on the very
outskirts of the crowd, and as I turned I saw that Bonfield
had marched out his police, and was minded to take his own way
with the meeting now that the mayor had left. I felt personal
antagonism stiffen my muscles.... It grew darker and darker
every moment. Suddenly there came a flash, and then a peal of
thunder. At the end of the flash, as it seemed to me, I saw
the white clubs falling, saw the police striking down the men
running along the sidewalk. At once my mind was made up. I put
my left hand on the outside of my trousers to hold the bomb
tight, and my right hand into the pocket, and drew the tape.
I heard a little rasp. I began to count slowly, "One, two,
three, four, five, six, seven;" as I got to seven the police
were quite close to me, bludgeoning every one furiously. Two or
three of the foremost had drawn their revolvers. The crowd were
flying in all directions. Suddenly there was a shot, and then
a dozen shots, all, it seemed to me, fired by the police. Rage
blazed in me.
I took the bomb out of my pocket, careless whether I was seen
or not, and looked for the right place to throw it; then I
hurled it over my shoulder high in the air, towards the middle
of the police, and at the same moment I stumbled forward, just
as if I had fallen, throwing myself on my hands and face, for
I had seen the spark. It seemed as if I had been on my hands
for an eternity, when I was crushed to the ground, and my ears
split with the roar. I scrambled to my feet again, gasping.
Men were thrown down in front of me, and were getting up on
their hands. I heard groans and cries, and shrieks behind me.
I turned around; as I turned a strong arm was thrust through
mine, and I heard Lingg say--
"Come, Rudolph, this way;" and he drew me to the sidewalk, and
we walked past where the police had been.
"Don't look," he whispered suddenly; "don't look."
But before he spoke I had looked, and what I saw will be before
my eyes till I die. The street was one shambles; in the very
center of it a great pit yawned, and round it men lying, or
pieces of men, in every direction, and close to me, near the
side-walk as I passed, a leg and foot torn off, and near by
two huge pieces of bleeding red meat, skewered together with a
thigh-bone. My soul sickened; my senses left me; but Lingg held
me up with superhuman strength, and drew me along.
"Hold yourself up, Rudolph," he whispered; "come on, man,"
and the next moment we had passed it all, and I clung to him,
trembling like a leaf. When we got to the end of the block I
realized that I was wet through from head to foot, as if I had
been plunged in cold water.
"I must stop," I gasped. "I cannot walk, Lingg."
"Nonsense," he said; "take a drink of this," and he thrust
a flask of brandy into my hand. The brandy I poured down my
throat set my heart beating again, allowed me to breathe, and I
walked on with him.
"How you are shaking," he said. "Strange, you neurotic people;
you do everything perfectly, splendidly, and then break down
like women. Come, I am not going to leave you; but for God's
sake throw off that shaken, white look. Drink some more."
I tried to; but the flask was empty. He put it back in his
pocket.
"Here is the bottle," he said. "I have brought enough; but we
must get to the depot."
We saw fire engines with police on them, galloping like madmen
in the direction whence we had come. The streets were crowded
with people, talking, gesticulating, like actors. Every one
seemed to know of the bomb already, and to be talking about it.
I noticed that even here, fully a block away, the pavement was
covered with pieces of glass; all the windows had been broken
by the explosion.
As we came in front of the depot, just before we passed into
the full glare of the arc-lamps, Lingg said--
"Let me look at you," and as he let go my arm, I almost fell;
my legs were like German sausages; they felt as if they had no
bones in them, and would bend in any direction; in spite of
every effort they would shake.
"Come, Rudolph," he said, "we'll stop and talk; but you must
come to yourself. Take another drink, and think of nothing. I
will save you; you are too good to lose. Come, dear friend,
don't let them crow over us."
My heart seemed to be in my mouth, but I swallowed it down. I
took another swig of brandy, and then a long drink of it. It
might have been water for all I tasted; but it seemed to do me
some little good. In a minute or so I had got hold of myself.
"I'm all right," I said; "what is there to do now?"
"Simply to go through the depot," he said, "as if there were
nothing the matter, and take the train."
BOOK VI
_Martyrdom_
Messages and records of the heroes of past and present who have
sacrificed themselves for the sake of the future.
Social Ideals
BY VIDA D. SCUDDER
(Professor at Wellesley College, Mass.; born 1861)
Deeper than all theories, apart from all discussion, the mighty
instinct for social justice shapes the hearts that are ready to
receive it. The personal types thus created are the harbingers
of the victory of the cause of freedom. The heralds of freedom,
they are also its martyrs. The delicate vibrations of their
consciousness thrill through the larger social self which more
stolid people still ignore, and the pain of the world is their
own. Not for one instant can they know an undimmed joy in art,
in thought, in nature while part of their very life throbs
in the hunger of the dispossessed. All this by no virtue, no
choice of their own. So were they born: the children of the
new age, whom the new intuition governs. In every country, out
of every class, they gather: men and women vowed to simplicity
of life and to social service; possessed by a force mightier
than themselves, over which they have no control; aware of the
lack of social harmony in our civilization, restless with pain,
perplexity, distress, yet filled with deep inward peace as they
obey the imperative claim of a widened consciousness. By active
ministry, and yet more by prayer and fast and vigil, they seek
to prepare the way for the spiritual democracy on which their
souls are set.
Le Père Perdrix
BY CHARLES-LOUIS PHILIPPE
(A poor and obscure clerk of the municipality of Paris, 1875-1909,
who wrote seven volumes of fiction which have placed his name among
the masters of French literature. He wrote of the poor whose lives he
knew, and his work is characterized by fidelity to truth, beauty of
sentiment, and rare charm of style. The following scene is in the home
of a workingman, who by heavy sacrifice has succeeded in educating his
only son. One day unexpectedly the son returns home)
Pierre Bousset said, "How does it happen that you come to-day?"
Jean sat down with slowness enough, and one saw yet another
thing sit down in the house. The mother said, "I guess you
haven't eaten. I'll make a little chocolate before noon-time."
Jean's tongue was loosed. "Here it is. There is something new.
It is necessary to tell you: I have left my place!"
"How! You have left your place!" They sat up all three--Pierre
Bousset with his apron and his back of labor; and Jean saw
that he had gray hair. The mother held a saucepan in her
hand, careful like a kitchen-servant, but with feelings as if
the saucepan were about to fall. Marguerite, the sister, was
already weeping: "Ah, my God! I who was so proud!"
Pierre Bousset said, "And how did you manage that clever
stroke?"
It was then that Jean felt his soul wither, and there rose up
from the depths of his heart all the needs, all the mists of
love. It was necessary that they should live side by side and
understand one another, and it was necessary that someone
should begin to weaken. He said, "Does one ever know what one
does?"
"Ah, indeed!" said the father. "You don't know what you do?"
"There are moments," answered Jean, "when one loses his head,
and afterwards I don't say one should not have regrets."
"For the matter of losing one's head, I know only one thing:
It is that they pay you, and it is up to you always to obey
whatever they command."
The mother watched the chocolate, from which the steam rose
with a warmth of strong nutriment. They loved that in the
family, like a Sunday morning indulgence, like a bourgeois
chocolate for holiday folk. She said, "Anyhow, let it be as it
will, he's got to eat."
Jean went on to speak. His blue eyes had undergone the first
transformation which comes in a man's life, when he is no
longer Jean, son of Pierre, pupil at the Central school, but
Jean Bousset, engineer of applied chemistry. There remained in
them, however, the shining of a young girl, that emotion which
wakens two rays of sunlight in a spring. And now they kept a
sort of supplication, like the sweetness of a naked infant.
"Oh, I know everything that you are going to say. You cannot
excuse me, because you are not in my place, and I cannot
condemn a movement of my heart. You know--I wrote it to
you--the workers were about to go on strike. At once I said
to myself that these were matters which did not concern me;
because, when you are taking care of yourself, it is not
necessary to look any farther. But Cousin François explained it
all to me."
"Ah, I told you so!" cried Pierre Bousset. "When you wanted
to take Cousin François into your factory, I said to you:
'Relatives, it is necessary always to keep them at a distance.
They push themselves forward, and sometimes, to excuse them one
is led to commit whole heaps of lowness.'"
"In truth," said Jean, "I would never have had to complain of
him. On the contrary, he wore his heart on his sleeve."
"Oh, all drunkards are like that. One says: 'They wear their
hearts on their sleeve,' and one does not count all the times
when they lead the others away."
"Ah, I have understood many things, father. How can I explain
everything that I have understood! There are moments still
when, to see and to realize--that makes in my head a noise as
if the world would not stay in place. I tell you again it was
François who made me understand. I saw, in the evenings. I
would say to him: 'I am bored, I haven't even a comrade, and I
eat at hotel-tables a dinner too well served.' He said: 'Come
to my house. You don't know what it is to eat good things,
because you don't work, and because hunger makes a part of
work. You will have some soup with us, and we will tell you
at least that you are happy to be where you are, and to look
upon the workingman while playing the amateur.' I said to him:
'But I work, also. To see, to understand, to analyze, to be an
engineer! You, it's your arms; me, it's my head and my heart
that ache.' He laughed: 'Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! When I come home
in the evening with my throat dry and I eat my soup, I also
have a headache, and I laugh at you with your heart-ache. I am
as tired as a wolf. What's that you call your heart?'"
"Yes, he was right there," said Pierre Bousset. "For my part, I
don't understand at all how you are going to pull through. You
have understood a lot of things! As for me, I understand but
one thing, which is you are unhappy over being too happy."
Jean went on speaking, with his blue eyes, like a madness, like
a ribbon, like a rosette without any reason which a young girl
puts on her forehead. A sweetness came out of his heart to
spread itself in the room, where the furniture gave off angular
and waxy reflections. Marguerite listened, with restlessness,
listened to her father, like a child whose habit it is to be
guided by her parents. The mother saw to the chocolate, in a
state of confusion, shaking her head.
"Yesterday I was in the office of the superintendent. It
was then that the delegation arrived. It seems to me that I
see them again. There were three workingmen. They had taken
to white shirts, and they had just washed their hands. You
know how the poor come into the homes of the rich. There was
a great racket, and their steps were put down with so much
embarrassment that one felt in the hearts of the three men
the shame of crushed things. I had already thought about that
poverty which, knowing that it soils, hides itself, and dares
not even touch an object. They said: 'Well, Mr. Superintendent,
we have been sent to talk to you. For more than ten years now
we have worked in the factory. We get seventy cents a day.
That's not much to tell about. We have wives and children,
and our seventy cents hardly carries us farther than a glass
of brandy and a little plate of soup. We understand that you
also have expenses. But we should like to get eighty cents a
day, and for us to explain every thing to you, it is necessary
that you should consent, because money gives courage to the
workingman.' The other received them with that assurance of the
rich, sitting straight up in his chair and holding his head as
if it dominated your own. He would not have had much trouble,
with his education, his habits of a master, his stability as a
man of affairs, to put them all three ill at ease. 'Gentlemen,
from the first word I say to you: No. The company cannot take
account of your wishes. We pay you seventy cents a day, and we
judge that it is up to you to lower your life to your wages.
As for your insinuations, I shall employ such means as please
me to fortify your courage. For the rest, our profits are not
what you imagine, you who know neither our efforts nor our
disappointments.' It was then, father, that I felt myself your
son, and that I recalled your hands, your back which toils, and
the carriage wheels that you make. The three workingmen seemed
three children in their father's home, with hearts that swell
and can feel no more. Ah, it was in vain I thought myself an
engineer! On the benches of the school I imagined that my head
was full of science, and that that sufficed. But all the blood
of my father, the days that I passed in your shop, the storms
which go to one's head and seem to come from far off, all that
cried out like a grimace, like a lock, like a key.[A] I took
up the argument. 'Mr. Superintendent, I know these men. There
is my cousin who works in the factory. Do you understand what
it is, the life of acids, and that of charcoal?' If you could
have seen him! He looked at me with eyes, as if their pupils
had turned to ice. 'Mr. Engineer, I don't permit either you,
who are a child, or these, who are workingmen, a single word to
discuss my sayings and my actions! Gentlemen, you may retire.'
I went straight off the handle. A door opened at a single
burst. We have at least insolence, we poor, and blows of the
mouth, since their weapons stop our blows of the teeth. I went
away like them. They lowered their heads and thought. For my
part I cried out, I turned about and cried, 'You be hanged!'"
[A] _Tout cela criait comme une grimace, comme une serrure,
comme une clé._
"Ah, now, indeed! I didn't expect anything like that," said
Pierre Bousset. "One raises children to make gentle-folk of
them, so that they will work a little less than you. Now then,
in God's name! go and demand a place of those for whom you have
lost your own!"
The Duty of Civil Disobedience
BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU
(The New England essayist, 1817-1862, author of "Walden," went to
prison because he refused to pay taxes to a government which returned
fugitive slaves to the South. It is narrated that Emerson came to
him and asked, "Henry, what are you doing in here?" "Waldo," was the
answer, "what are you doing out of here?")
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place
for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the
only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and
less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and
locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already
put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the
fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the
Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them;
on that separate but more free and honorable ground, where
the State places those who are not _with_ her but _against_
her--the only house in a slave State in which a free man can
abide with honor.
If any think that their influence would be lost there, and
their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they
would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know
by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more
eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has
experienced a little in his own person.
[Illustration: THE SURPRISE
ILYÁ EFÍMOVITCH REPIN
(_Russian painter, born 1844_)]
[Illustration: THE END
KÄTHE KOLLWITZ
(_Contemporary German etching; from the "Weaver-cycle"_)]
Address to the Jury
BY ARTURO M. GIOVANNITTI
(Italian student and clergyman, born 1884, who left the Church for the
labor movement. During the strike at Lawrence, Mass., he was arrested
upon a charge of "constructive murder." He spoke in his own defense at
Salem Court House, November 23, 1912)
MR. FOREMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY:--
It is the first time in my life that I speak publicly in your
wonderful language, and the most solemn moment in my life. I
know not if I will go to the end of my remarks. The District
Attorney and the other gentlemen here who are used to measure
all human emotions with the yardstick may not understand the
tumult that is going on in my soul at this moment. But my
friends and my comrades before me, these gentlemen here who
have been with me for the last seven or eight months, know
exactly, and if my words will fail before I reach the end
of this short statement to you, it will be because of the
superabundance of sentiments that are flooding to my heart.
I speak to you not because I want to review this evidence at
all. I shall not enter into the evidence that has been offered
here, as I feel that you gentlemen of the jury have by this
time a firm and set conviction; by this time you ought to know,
you ought to have realized whether I said or whether I did
not say those words that have been put into my mouth by those
two detectives. You ought to know whether it is possible, not
for a man like me but for any living human being to say those
atrocious, those flagitious words that have been attributed to
me. I say only this in regard to the evidence that has been
introduced in this case, that if there is or ever has been
murder in the heart of any man that is in this courtroom today,
gentlemen of the jury, that man is not sitting in this cage.
We had come to Lawrence, as my noble comrade Mr. Ettor said,
because we were prompted by something higher and loftier than
what the District Attorney or any other man in this presence
here may understand and realize. Were I not afraid that I
was being somewhat sacrilegious, I would say that to go and
investigate into the motives that prompted and actuated us
to go into Lawrence would be the same as to inquire, why did
the Saviour come on earth, or why was Lloyd Garrison in this
very Commonwealth, in the city of Boston, dragged through the
streets with a rope around his neck? Why did all the other
great men and masters of thought--why did they go to preach
this new gospel of fraternity and brotherhood? It is just that
truth should be ascertained, it is right that the criminal
should be brought before the bar of justice. But one side
alone of our story has been told here. There has been brought
only one side of this great industrial question, the method
and the tactics. But what about, I say, the ethical part of
this question? What about the human and humane part of our
ideas? What about the grand condition of tomorrow as we see
it, and as we foretell it now to the workers at large, here
in this same cage where the felon has sat, in this same cage
where the drunkard, where the prostitute, where the hired
assassin has been? What about the better and nobler humanity
where there shall be no more slaves, where no man will ever
be obliged to go on strike in order to obtain fifty cents a
week more, where children will not have to starve any more,
where women no more will have to go and prostitute themselves;
where at last there will not be any more slaves, any more
masters, but one great family of friends and brothers. It may
be, gentlemen of the jury, that you do not believe in that. It
may be that we are dreamers; it may be that we are fanatics,
Mr. District Attorney. But so was a fanatic Socrates, who
instead of acknowledging the philosophy of the aristocrats of
Athens, preferred to drink the poison. And so was a fanatic
the Saviour Jesus Christ, who instead of acknowledging that
Pilate, or that Tiberius was emperor of Rome, and instead of
acknowledging his submission to all the rulers of the time and
all the priestcraft of the time, preferred the cross between
two thieves.
BY JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
(German philosopher and poet, 1749-1832)
All those who oppose intellectual truths merely stir up the
fire; the cinders fly about and set fire to that which else
they had not touched.
Essay on Liberty
BY JOHN STUART MILL
(English philosopher and economist, 1806-1873)
Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was once
a man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities
and public opinion of his time, there took place a memorable
collision. Born in an age and country abounding in individual
greatness, this man has been handed down to us by those who
best knew both him and the age, as the most virtuous man in it;
while _we_ know him as the head and prototype of all subsequent
teachers of virtue, the source equally of the lofty inspiration
of Plato and the judicious utilitarianism of Aristotle, the
two headsprings of ethical as of all other philosophy. This
acknowledged master of all the eminent thinkers who have since
lived--whose fame, still growing after more than two thousand
years, all but outweighs the whole remainder of the names
which make his native city illustrious--was put to death by
his countrymen, after a judicial conviction, for impiety and
immorality. Impiety, in denying the Gods recognized by the
State; indeed his accusers asserted (see the "Apologia") that
he believed in no gods at all. Immorality, in being, by his
doctrines and instructions, a "corrupter of youth." Of these
charges the tribunal, there is every ground for believing,
honestly found him guilty, and condemned the man who probably
of all then born had deserved best of mankind to be put to
death as a criminal.
FROM THE EPISTLE OF JAMES
So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law
of liberty.
The Walker
BY ARTURO M. GIOVANNITTI
(See page 296)
I hear footsteps over my head all night.
They come and they go. Again they come and they go all night.
They come one eternity in four paces and they go one eternity
in four paces, and between the coming and the going there is
Silence and the Night and the Infinite.
For infinite are the nine feet of a prison cell, and endless is
the march of him who walks between the yellow brick wall and
the red iron gate, thinking things that cannot be chained and
cannot be locked, but that wander far away in the sunlit world,
each in a wild pilgrimage after a destined goal.
* * * * *
Throughout the restless night I hear the footsteps over my head.
Who walks? I know not. It is the phantom of the jail, the
sleepless brain, a man, the man, the Walker.
One--two--three--four: four paces and the wall.
One--two--three--four: four paces and the iron gate.
He has measured his space, he has measured it accurately,
scrupulously, minutely, as the hangman measures the rope and
the grave-digger the coffin--so many feet, so many inches, so
many fractions of an inch for each of the four paces.
One--two--three--four. Each step sounds heavy and hollow over
my head, and the echo of each step sounds hollow within my head
as I count them in suspense and in dread that once, perhaps,
in the endless walk, there may be five steps instead of four
between the yellow brick wall and the red iron gate.
But he has measured the space so accurately, so scrupulously,
so minutely that nothing breaks the grave rhythm of the slow,
fantastic march....
* * * * *
All the sounds of the living beings and inanimate things, and
all the noises of the night I have heard in my wistful vigil.
I have heard the moans of him who bewails a thing that is dead
and the sighs of him who tries to smother a thing that will not
die;
I have heard the stifled sobs of the one who weeps with his
head under the coarse blanket, and the whisperings of the one
who prays with his forehead on the hard, cold stone of the
floor;
I have heard him who laughs the shrill, sinister laugh of folly
at the horror rampant on the yellow wall and at the red eyes of
the nightmare glaring through the iron bars;
I have heard in the sudden icy silence him who coughs a dry,
ringing cough, and wished madly that his throat would not
rattle so and that he would not spit on the floor, for no sound
was more atrocious than that of his sputum upon the floor;
I have heard him who swears fearsome oaths which I listen to
in reverence and awe, for they are holier than the virgin's
prayer;
And I have heard, most terrible of all, the silence of two
hundred brains all possessed by one single, relentless,
unforgiving, desperate thought.
All this I have heard in the watchful night,
And the murmur of the wind beyond the walls,
And the tolls of a distant bell,
And the woeful dirge of the rain,
And the remotest echoes of the sorrowful city,
And the terrible beatings, wild beatings, mad beatings of the
One Heart which is nearest to my heart.
All this have I heard in the still night;
But nothing is louder, harder, drearier, mightier, more awful
than the footsteps I hear over my head all night....
* * * * *
All through the night he walks and he thinks. Is it more
frightful because he walks and his footsteps sound hollow over
my head, or because he thinks and speaks not his thoughts?
But does he think? Why should he think? Do I think? I only hear
the footsteps and count them. Four steps and the wall. Four
steps and the gate. But beyond? Beyond? Where goes he beyond
the gate and the wall?
He does not go beyond. His thought breaks there on the iron
gate. Perhaps it breaks like a wave of rage, perhaps like a
sudden flow of hope, but it always returns to beat the wall
like a billow of helplessness and despair.
He walks to and fro within the narrow whirlpit of this ever
storming and furious thought. Only one thought--constant,
fixed, immovable, sinister, without power and without voice.
A thought of madness, frenzy, agony and despair, a hell-brewed
thought, for it is a natural thought. All things natural are
things impossible while there are jails in the world--bread,
work, happiness, peace, love.
But he thinks not of this. As he walks he thinks of the most
superhuman, the most unattainable, the most impossible thing in
the world:
He thinks of a small brass key that turns just half around and
throws open the red iron gate.
* * * * *
That is all the Walker thinks, as he walks throughout the night.
And that is what two hundred minds drowned in the darkness and
the silence of the night think, and that is also what I think.
Wonderful is the supreme wisdom of the jail that makes all
think the same thought. Marvelous is the providence of the law
that equalizes all, even in mind and sentiment. Fallen is the
last barrier of privilege, the aristocracy of the intellect.
The democracy of reason has leveled all the two hundred minds
to the common surface of the same thought.
I, who have never killed, think like the murderer;
I, who have never stolen, reason like the thief;
I think, reason, wish, hope, doubt, wait like the hired
assassin, the embezzler, the forger, the counterfeiter, the
incestuous, the raper, the drunkard, the prostitute, the pimp,
I, I who used to think of love and life and flowers and song
and beauty and the ideal.
A little key, a little key as little as my little finger, a
little key of shining brass.
All my ideas, my thoughts, my dreams are congealed in a little
key of shiny brass.
All my brain, all my soul, all the suddenly surging latent
powers of my deepest life are in the pocket of a white-haired
man dressed in blue.
He is great, powerful, formidable, the man with the white hair,
for he has in his pocket the mighty talisman which makes one
man cry, and one man pray, and one laugh, and one cough, and
one walk, and all keep awake and listen and think the same
maddening thought.
Greater than all men is the man with the white hair and the
small brass key, for no other man in the world could compel two
hundred men to think for so long the same thought. Surely when
the light breaks I will write a hymn unto him which shall hail
him greater than Mohammed and Arbues and Torquemada and Mesmer,
and all the other masters of other men's thoughts. I shall call
him Almighty, for he holds everything of all and of me in a
little brass key in his pocket.
Everything of me he holds but the branding iron of contempt
and the claymore of hatred for the monstrous cabala that can
make the apostle and the murderer, the poet and the procurer,
think of the same gate, the same key and the same exit on the
different sunlit highways of life.
* * * * *
My brother, do not walk any more.
It is wrong to walk on a grave. It is a sacrilege to walk four
steps from the headstone to the foot and four steps from the
foot to the headstone.
If you stop walking, my brother, no longer will this be a
grave, for you will give me back that mind that is chained to
your feet and the right to think my own thoughts.
I implore you, my brother, for I am weary of the long vigil,
weary of counting your steps, and heavy with sleep.
Stop, rest, sleep, my brother, for the dawn is well nigh and it
is not the key alone that can throw open the gate.
BY GEORGE WASHINGTON
(First president of the United States, 1732-1799)
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence--it is force!
Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never
for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
Forcible Feeding
(_From "The Suffragette"_)
BY E. SYLVIA PANKHURST
(English militant leader)
She was then surrounded and held down, whilst the chair was
tilted backwards. She clenched her teeth, but the doctor pulled
her mouth away to form a pouch and the wardress poured in milk
and brandy, some of which trickled in through the crevices.
Later in the day the doctors and wardresses again appeared.
They forced her down on to the bed and held her there. One
of the doctors then produced a tube two yards in length with
a glass junction in the center and a funnel at one end. He
forced the other end of the tube up her nostril, hurting her so
terribly that the matron and two of the wardresses burst into
tears and the second doctor interfered. At last the tube was
pushed down into the stomach. She felt the pain of it to the
end of the breast bone. Then one of the doctors stood upon a
chair holding the funnel end of the tube at arm's length, and
poured food down whilst the wardress and the other doctor all
gripped her tight. She felt as though she would suffocate.
There was a rushing, burning sensation in her head, the drums
of her ears seemed to be bursting. The agony of pain in the
throat and breast bone continued. The thing seemed to go on for
hours. When at last the tube was withdrawn, she felt as though
all the back of her nose and throat were being torn out with it.
Then almost fainting she was carried back to the punishment
cell and put to bed. For hours the pain in the chest, nose and
ears continued and she felt terribly sick and faint. Day after
day the struggle continued; she used no violence, but each
time resisted and was overcome by force of numbers. Often she
vomited during the operation. When the food did not go down
quickly enough the doctor pinched her nose with the tube in it,
causing her even greater pain.
The Subjection of Women
BY JOHN STUART MILL
(See pages 199, 299)
In struggles for political emancipation, everybody knows how
often its champions are bought off by bribes, or daunted by
terrors. In the case of women, each individual of the subject
class is in a chronic state of bribery and intimidation
combined. In setting up the standard of resistance, a large
number of the leaders, and still more of the followers, must
make an almost complete sacrifice of the pleasures or the
alleviations of their own individual lot. If ever any system of
privilege and enforced subjection had its yoke tightly riveted
on the necks of those who are kept down by it, this has.
The Old Suffragist
BY MARGARET WIDDEMER
(See page 256)
She could have loved--her woman-passions beat
Deeper than theirs, or else she had not known
How to have dropped her heart beneath their feet
A living stepping-stone:
The little hands--did they not clutch her heart?
The guarding arms--was she not very tired?
Was it an easy thing to walk apart,
Unresting, undesired?
She gave away her crown of woman-praise,
Her gentleness and silent girlhood grace
To be a merriment for idle days,
Scorn for the market-place:
She strove for an unvisioned, far-off good,
For one far hope she knew she should not see:
These--not _her_ daughters--crowned with motherhood
And love and beauty--free.
Going to the People
(_From "Memoirs of a Revolutionist"_)
BY PETER KROPOTKIN
(The Russian author and scientist, born 1842, who renounced
the title of prince and spent many years in a dungeon for his
faith, has here told his life story)
"It is bitter, the bread that has been made by slaves," our
poet Nekrasoff wrote. The young generation actually refused
to eat that bread, and to enjoy the riches that had been
accumulated in their fathers' houses by means of servile labor,
whether the laborers were actual serfs or slaves of the present
industrial system.
All Russia read with astonishment, in the indictment which
was produced at the court against Karakozoff and his friends,
that these young men, owners of considerable fortunes, used
to live three or four in the same room, never spending more
than ten roubles (five dollars) apiece a month for all
their needs, and giving at the same time their fortunes for
co-operative associations, co-operative workshops (where they
themselves worked), and the like. Five years later, thousands
and thousands of the Russian youth--the best part of it--were
doing the same. Their watch-word was, "V naród!" (To the
people; be the people.) During the years 1860-65 in nearly
every wealthy family a bitter struggle was going on between
the fathers, who wanted to maintain the old traditions, and
the sons and daughters, who defended their right to dispose
of their life according to their own ideals. Young men left
the military service, the counter and the shop, and flocked
to the university towns. Girls, bred in the most aristocratic
families, rushed penniless to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and
Kieff, eager to learn a profession which would free them
from the domestic yoke, and some day, perhaps, also from the
possible yoke of a husband. After hard and bitter struggles,
many of them won that personal freedom. Now they wanted to
utilize it, not for their own personal enjoyment, but for
carrying to the people the knowledge that had emancipated them.
In every town of Russia, in every quarter of St. Petersburg,
small groups were formed for self-improvement and
self-education; the works of the philosophers, the writings of
the economists, the researches of the young Russian historical
school, were carefully read in these circles, and the reading
was followed by endless discussions. The aim of all that
reading and discussion was to solve the great question which
rose before them: In what way could they be useful to the
masses? Gradually, they came to the idea that the only way was
to settle among the people and to live the people's life. Young
men went into the villages as doctors, doctors' assistants,
teachers, village scribes, even as agricultural laborers,
blacksmiths, woodcutters, and so on, and tried to live there
in closest contact with the peasants. Girls passed teachers'
examinations, learned midwifery or nursing, and went by the
hundred into the villages, devoting themselves entirely to the
poorest part of the population....
Here and there, small groups of propagandists had settled
in towns and villages in various capacities. Blacksmiths'
shops and small farms had been started, and young men of the
wealthier classes worked in the shops or on the farms, to be in
daily contact with the toiling masses. At Moscow, a number of
young girls, of rich families, who had studied at the Zurich
university and had started a separate organization, went even
so far as to enter cotton factories, where they worked from
fourteen to sixteen hours a day, and lived in the factory
barracks the miserable life of the Russian factory girls. It
was a grand movement, in which, at the lowest estimate, from
two to three thousand persons took an active part, while twice
or thrice as many sympathizers and supporters helped the active
vanguard in various ways. With a good half of that army our St.
Petersburg circle was in regular correspondence--always, of
course, in cipher.
The literature which could be published in Russia under a
rigorous censorship--the faintest hint of Socialism being
prohibited--was soon found insufficient, and we started a
printing office of our own abroad. Pamphlets for the workers
and the peasants had to be written, and our small "literary
committee," of which I was a member, had its hands full of
work. Serghei wrote a couple of such pamphlets--one in the
Lammenais style, and another containing an exposition of
Socialism in a fairy tale--and both had a wide circulation. The
books and pamphlets which were printed abroad were smuggled
into Russia by thousands, stored at certain spots, and sent
out to the local circles, which distributed them amongst the
peasants and the workers. All this required a vast organization
as well as much traveling about, and a colossal correspondence,
particularly for protecting our helpers and our bookstores from
the police. We had special ciphers for different provincial
circles, and often, after six or seven hours had been passed
in discussing all details, the women, who did not trust to our
accuracy in the cipher correspondence, spent all the night in
covering sheets of paper with cabalistic figures and fractions.
The Revolutionist
BY IVAN TURGÉNEV
(Russian writer, 1818-1883, one of the masters of the novel form. He
was imprisoned and later exiled. In the original the present extract
is a prose poem. The versification is by Arthur Guiterman)
I saw a spacious house. O'erhung with pall,
A narrow doorway pierced the sombre wall.
Within was chill, impenetrable shade;
Without there stood a maid--a Russian maid,
To whom the icy dark sent forth a slow
And hollow-sounding Voice:
"And dost thou know,
When thou hast entered, what awaits thee here?"
"I know," she said, "and knowing do not fear."
"Cold, hunger, hatred, Slander's blighting breath,"
The Voice still chanted, "suffering--and Death?"
"I know," she said.
"Undaunted, wilt thou dare
The sneers of kindred? Art thou steeled to bear
From those whom most thou lovest, spite and scorn?"
"Though Love be paid with Hate, that shall be borne,"
She answered.
"Think! Thy doom may be to die
By thine own hand, with none to fathom why,
Unthanked, unhonored, desolate, alone,
Thy grave unmarked, thy toil, thy love unknown,
And none in days to come shall speak thy name."
She said: "I ask no pity, thanks or fame."
"Art thou prepared for crime?"
She bowed her head:
"Yes, crime, if that shall need," the maiden said.
Now paused the Voice before it asked anew:
"But knowest thou that all thou holdest true
Thy soul may yet deny in bitter pain,
So thou shalt deem thy sacrifice in vain?"
"E'en this I know," she said, "and yet again
I pray thee, let me enter."
"Enter then!"
That hollow Voice replied. She passed the door.
A sable curtain fell--and nothing more.
"A fool!" snarled some one, gnashing. Like a prayer
"A saint!" the whispered answer thrilled the air.
In a Russian Prison
(_From "Memoirs of a Revolutionist"_)
BY PETER KROPOTKIN
(See page 308)
One day in the summer of 1875, in the cell that was next to
mine I distinctly heard the light steps of heeled boots, and
a few minutes later I caught fragments of a conversation.
A feminine voice spoke from the cell, and a deep bass
voice--evidently that of the sentry--grunted something in
reply. Then I recognized the sound of the colonel's spurs,
his rapid steps, his swearing at the sentry, and the click of
the key in the lock. He said something, and a feminine voice
loudly replied: "We did not talk. I only asked him to call the
non-commissioned officer." Then the door was locked, and I
heard the colonel swearing in whispers at the sentry.
So I was alone no more. I had a lady neighbor, who at once
broke down the severe discipline which had hitherto reigned
among the soldiers. From that day the walls of the fortress,
which had been mute during the last fifteen months, became
animated. From all sides I heard knocks with the foot on the
floor: one, two, three, four, ... eleven knocks; twenty-four
knocks, fifteen knocks; then an interruption, followed by three
knocks, and a long succession of thirty-three knocks. Over and
over again these knocks were repeated in the same succession,
until the neighbor would guess at last that they were meant for
"Kto vy?" (Who are you?), the letter v being the third letter
in our alphabet. Thereupon conversation was soon established,
and usually was conducted in the abridged alphabet; that is,
the alphabet being divided into six rows of five letters, each
letter marked by its row and its place in the row.
I discovered with great pleasure that I had at my left my
friend Serdukóff, with whom I could soon talk about everything,
especially when we used our cipher. But intercourse with men
brought its sufferings as well as its joys. Underneath me was
lodged a peasant, whom Serdukóff knew. He talked to him by
means of knocks; and even against my will, often unconsciously
during my work, I followed their conversations. I also spoke
to him. Now, if solitary confinement without any sort of
work is hard for educated men, it is infinitely harder for a
peasant who is accustomed to physical work, and not at all
wont to spend years in reading. Our peasant friend felt quite
miserable, and having been kept for nearly two years in another
prison before he was brought to the fortress--his crime was
that he had listened to Socialists--he was already broken
down. Soon I began to notice, to my terror, that from time to
time his mind wandered. Gradually his thoughts grew more and
more confused, and we two perceived, step by step, day by day,
evidences that his reason was failing, until his talk became
at last that of a lunatic. Frightful noises and wild cries
came next from the lower story; our neighbor was mad, but was
still kept for several months in the casemate before he was
removed to an asylum, from which he never emerged. To witness
the destruction of a man's mind, under such conditions, was
terrible. I am sure it must have contributed to increase the
nervous irritability of my good and true friend Serdukóff.
When, after four years' imprisonment, he was acquitted by the
court and released, he shot himself.
Batuschka
BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
(New England poet and journalist, 1836-1907)
From yonder gilded minaret
Beside the steel-blue Neva set,
I faintly catch, from time to time,
The sweet, aerial midnight chime--
"God save the Tsar!"
Above the ravelins and the moats
Of the white citadel it floats;
And men in dungeons far beneath
Listen, and pray, and gnash their teeth--
"God save the Tsar!"
The soft reiterations sweep
Across the horror of their sleep,
As if some demon in his glee
Were mocking at their misery--
"God save the Tsar!"
In his red palace over there,
Wakeful, he needs must hear the prayer.
How can it drown the broken cries
Wrung from his children's agonies?--
"God save the Tsar!"
Father they called him from of old--
Batuschka!... How his heart is cold!
Wait till a million scourgèd men
Rise in their awful might, and then--
"God save the Tsar!"
Breshkovskaya
BY ELSA BARKER
(Contemporary American poet and novelist. Catherine Breshkovsky,
called "Little Mother" by the Russian peasants, was sentenced to a
long term of exile in Siberia when seventy-seven years of age)
How narrow seems the round of ladies' lives
And ladies' duties in their smiling world,
The day this Titan woman, gray with years,
Goes out across the void to prove her soul!
Brief are the pains of motherhood that end
In motherhood's long joy; but she has borne
The age-long travail of a cause that lies
Still-born at last on History's cold lap.
And yet she rests not; yet she will not drink
The cup of peace held to her parching lips
By smug Dishonor's hand. Nay, forth she fares,
Old and alone, on exile's rocky road--
That well-worn road with snows incarnadined
By blood-drops from her feet long years agone.
Mother of power, my soul goes out to you
As a strong swimmer goes to meet the sea
Upon whose vastness he is like a leaf.
What are the ends and purposes of song,
Save as a bugle at the lips of Life
To sound reveille to a drowsing world
When some great deed is rising like the sun?
Where are those others whom your deeds inspired
To deeds and words that were themselves a deed?
Those who believe in death have gone with death
To the gray crags of immortality;
Those who believed in life have gone with life
To the red halls of spiritual death.
And you? But what is death or life to you?
Only a weapon in the hand of faith
To cleave a way for beings yet unborn
To a far freedom you will never share!
Freedom of body is an empty shell
Wherein men crawl whose souls are held with gyves;
For Freedom is a spirit, and she dwells
As often in a jail as on the hills.
In all the world this day there is no soul
Freer than you, Breshkovsky, as you stand
Facing the future in your narrow cell.
For you are free of self and free of fear,
Those twin-born shades that lie in wait for man
When he steps out upon the wind-blown road
That leads to human greatness and to pain.
Take in your hand once more the pilgrim's staff--
Your delicate hand misshapen from the nights
In Kara's mines; bind on your unbent back
That long has borne the burdens of the race,
The exile's bundle, and upon your feet
Strap the worn sandals of a tireless faith.
You are too great for pity. After you
We send not sobs, but songs; and all our days
We shall walk bravelier knowing where you are.
In Siberia
BY KATHERINE BRESHKOVSKY
(_Reported by Ernest Poole_)
As punishment for my attempt at escape I was sentenced to four
years' hard labor in Kara and to forty blows of the lash. Into
my cell a physician came to see if I were strong enough to live
through the agony. I saw at once that, afraid to flog a woman
"political" without precedent, by this trick of declaring me
too sick to be punished they wished to establish the precedent
of the sentence in order that others might be flogged in the
future. I insisted that I was strong enough, and that the court
had no right to record such a sentence unless they flogged me
at once. The sentence was not carried out.
A few weeks later eight of the men politicals escaped in pairs,
leaving dummies in their places. As the guards never took
more than a hasty look into that noisome cell, they did not
discover the ruse for weeks. Then mounted Cossacks rode out.
The man-hunt spread. Some of the fugitives struggled through
jungles, over mountains and through swamps a thousand miles to
Vladivostok, saw the longed-for American vessels, and there on
the docks were re-captured. All were brought back to Kara.
For this we were all punished. One morning the Cossack guards
entered our cells, seized us, tore off our clothes, and dressed
us in convict suits alive with vermin. That scene cannot be
described. One of us attempted suicide. Taken to an old prison
we were thrown into the "black holes"--foul little stalls
off a low grimy hall which contained two big stoves and two
little windows. Each of us had a stall six feet by five. On
winter nights the stall doors were left open for heat, but in
summer each was locked at night in her own black hole. For
three months we did not use our bunks, but fought with candles
and pails of scalding water, until at last the vermin were
all killed. We had been put on the "black hole diet" of black
bread and water. For three years we never breathed the outside
air. We struggled constantly against the outrages inflicted
on us. After one outrage we lay like a row of dead women for
nine days without touching food, until certain promises were
finally exacted from the warden. This "hunger strike" was used
repeatedly. To thwart it we were often bound hand and foot,
while Cossacks tried to force food down our throats.
Kara grew worse after I left. To hint at what happened I
tell briefly the story of my dear friend Maria, a woman of
broad education and deep refinement. Shortly after my going,
Maria saw Madame Sigida strike an official who had repeatedly
insulted the women. Two days later she watched Sigida die,
moaning and bleeding from the lash; that night she saw three
women commit suicide as a protest to the world; she knew that
twenty men attempted suicide on the night following, and she
determined to double the protest by assassinating the Governor
of Trans-Baikal, who had ordered Sigida's flogging. At this
time Maria was pregnant. Her prison term over, she left her
husband and walked hundreds of miles to the Governor's house
and shot him. She spent three months in a cold, dirty, "secret
cell" not long enough to lie down in or high enough to stand
up in, wearing the cast-off suit of a convict, sleeping on the
bare floor and tormented by vermin. She was then sentenced
to be hanged. She hesitated now whether to save the life of
her unborn child. She knew that if she revealed her condition
her sentence would be changed to imprisonment. She decided to
keep silence and sacrifice her child, that when the execution
was over and her condition was discovered, the effect on
Russia might be still greater. Her condition, however, became
apparent, and she was started off to the Irkutsk prison. It was
midwinter, forty degrees below zero. She walked. She was given
no overcoat and no boots, until some common criminals in the
column gave her theirs. Her child was born dead in prison, and
soon after she too died.
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
BY ALEXANDER BERKMAN
(The life-story of a man who served a fourteen-year sentence
in the Western Penitentiary of Pennsylvania for an attempt at
assassination)
(_Introduction by Hutchins Hapgood_)
Not only has this book the interest of the human document, but
it is also a striking proof of the power of the human soul.
Alexander Berkman spent fourteen years in prison, under perhaps
more than commonly harsh and severe conditions. Prison life
tends to destroy the body, weaken the mind and pervert the
character. Berkman consciously struggled with these adverse,
destructive conditions. He took care of his body. He took care
of his mind. He did so strenuously. It was a moral effort. He
felt insane ideas trying to take possession of him. Insanity is
a natural result of prison life. It always tends to come. This
man felt it, consciously struggled against it, and overcame it.
That the prison affected him is true. It always does. But he
saved himself, essentially. Society tried to destroy him, but
failed.
If people will read this book carefully it will tend to do
away with prisons. The public, once vividly conscious of what
prison life is and must be, would not be willing to maintain
prisons. This is the only book that I know which goes deeply
into the corrupting, demoralizing psychology of prison life.
It shows, in picture after picture, sketch after sketch, not
only the obvious brutality, stupidity, ugliness permeating the
institution, but, very touching, it shows the good qualities
and instincts of the human heart perverted, demoralized,
helplessly struggling for life; beautiful tendencies basely
expressing themselves. And the personality of Berkman goes
through it all; idealistic, courageous, uncompromising,
sincere, truthful; not untouched, as I have said, by his
surroundings, but remaining his essential self....
The Russian Nihilistic origin of Berkman, his Anarchistic
experience in America, his attempt on the life of Frick--an
attempt made at a violent industrial crisis, an attempt made as
a result of a sincere if fanatical belief that he was called
on by his destiny to strike a psychological blow for the
oppressed of the community--this part of the book will arouse
extreme disagreement and disapproval of his ideas and his act.
But I see no reason why this, with the rest, should not rather
be regarded as an integral part of a human document, as part
of the record of a life, with its social and psychological
suggestions and explanations. Why not try to understand an
honest man even if he feels called on to kill? There, too, it
may be deeply instructive. There, too, it has its lessons. Read
it not in a combative spirit. Read to understand. Do not read
to agree, of course, but read to see.
_The Dungeon_
In the storeroom I am stripped of my suit of dark gray, and
clad in the hateful stripes. Coatless and shoeless, I am led
through hallways and corridors, down a steep flight of stairs,
and thrown into the dungeon.
* * * * *
Total darkness. The blackness is massive, palpable--I feel its
hand upon my head, my face. I dare not move, lest a misstep
thrust me into the abyss. I hold my hand close to my eyes--I
feel the touch of my lashes upon it, but I cannot see its
outline. Motionless I stand on the spot, devoid of all sense
of direction. The silence is sinister; it seems to me I can
hear it. Only now and then the hasty scrambling of nimble feet
suddenly rends the stillness, and the gnawing of invisible
river rats haunts the fearful solitude.
Slowly the blackness pales. It ebbs and melts; out of the
sombre gray, a wall looms above; the silhouette of a door
rises dimly before me, sloping upward and growing compact and
impenetrable.
The hours drag in unbroken sameness. Not a sound reaches me
from the cell-house. In the maddening quiet and darkness I am
bereft of all consciousness of time, save once a day when the
heavy rattle of keys apprises me of the morning: the dungeon is
unlocked, and the silent guards hand me a slice of bread and a
cup of water. The double doors fall heavily to, the steps grow
fainter and die in the distance, and all is dark again in the
dungeon.
The numbness of death steals upon my soul. The floor is cold
and clammy, the gnawing grows louder and nearer, and I am
filled with dread lest the starving rats attack my bare feet. I
snatch a few unconscious moments leaning against the door; and
then again I pace the cell, striving to keep awake, wondering
whether it be night or day, yearning for the sound of a human
voice.
Utterly forsaken! Cast into the stony bowels of the
underground, the world of man receding, leaving no trace
behind.... Eagerly I strain my ear--only the ceaseless, fearful
gnawing. I clutch the bars in desperation--a hollow echo mocks
the clanking iron. My hands tear violently at the door--"Ho,
there! Any one here?" All is silent. Nameless terrors quiver
in my mind, weaving nightmares of mortal dread and despair.
Fear shapes convulsive thoughts: they rage in wild tempest,
then become calm, and again rush through time and space in a
rapid succession of strangely familiar scenes, wakened in my
slumbering consciousness.
Exhausted and weary I droop against the wall. A slimy creeping
on my face startles me in horror, and again I pace the cell.
I feel cold and hungry. Am I forgotten? Three days must have
passed, and more. Have they forgotten me?...
The clank of keys sends a thrill of joy to my heart. My tomb
will open--oh, to see the light, and breathe the air again....
"Officer, isn't my time up yet?"
"What's your hurry? You've only been here one day."
The doors fall to. Ravenously I devour the bread, so small and
thin, just a bite. Only _one_ day! Despair enfolds me like a
pall. Faint with anguish, I sink to the floor....
_The Sick Line_
One by one the men augment the row; they walk slowly, bent and
coughing, painfully limping down the steep flights. From every
range they come; the old and decrepit, the young consumptives,
the lame and asthmatic, a tottering old negro, an idiotic white
boy. All look withered and dejected,--a ghastly line, palsied
and blear-eyed, blanched in the valley of death.
The rotunda door opens noisily, and the doctor enters,
accompanied by Deputy Warden Graves and Assistant Deputy
Hopkins. Behind them is a prisoner, dressed in dark gray and
carrying a medicine box. Dr. Boyce glances at the long line,
and knits his brows. He looks at his watch, and the frown
deepens. He has much to do. Since the death of the senior
doctor, the young graduate is the sole physician of the big
prison. He must make the rounds of the shops before noon, and
visit the hospital before the Warden or the Deputy drops in.
Mr. Greaves sits down at the officers' desk, near the hall
entrance. The Assistant Deputy, pad in hand, places himself at
the head of the sick line. The doctor leans against the door of
the rotunda, facing the Deputy. The block officers stand within
call, at respectful distances.
"Two-fifty-five!" the Assistant Deputy calls out.
A slender young man leaves the line and approaches the doctor.
He is tall and well featured, the large eyes lustrous in the
pale face. He speaks in a hoarse voice:
"Doctor, there is something the matter with my side. I have
pains, and I cough bad at night, and in the morning----"
"All right," the doctor interrupts, without looking up from his
note book. "Give him some salts," he adds, with a nod to his
assistant.
"Next!" the Deputy calls.
"Will you please excuse me from the shop for a few days?" the
sick prisoner pleads, a tremor in his voice.
The physician glances questioningly at the Deputy. The latter
cries, impatiently, "Next, next man!" striking the desk twice,
in quick succession, with the knuckles of his hand.
"Return to the shop," the doctor says to the prisoner.
"Next," the Deputy calls, spurting a stream of tobacco juice
in the direction of the cuspidor. It strikes sidewise, and
splashes over the foot of the approaching new patient, a young
negro, his neck covered with bulging tumors.
"Number?" the doctor inquires.
"One-thirty-seven, A one-thirty-seven!" the Deputy mumbles, his
head thrown back to receive a fresh handful of "scrap" tobacco.
"Guess Ah's got de big neck, Ah is, Mistah Boyce," the negro
says hoarsely.
"Salts. Return to work. Next!"
"A one-twenty-six!"
A young man with parchment-like face, sere and yellow, walks
painfully from the line.
"Doctor, I seem to be gettin' worser, and I'm afraid----"
"What's the trouble?"
"Pains in the stomach. Gettin' so turrible, I----"
"Give him a plaster. Next!"
"Plaster hell!" the prisoner breaks out in a fury, his face
growing livid. "Look at this, will you?" With a quick motion he
pulls his shirt up to his head. His chest and back are entirely
covered with porous plasters; not an inch of skin is visible.
"Damn your plasters," he cries with sudden sobs, "I ain't got
no more room for plasters. I'm putty near dyin', an' you won't
do nothin' fer me."
The guards pounce upon the man, and drag him into the rotunda.
_The Keepers_
The comparative freedom of the range familiarizes me with the
workings of the institution, and brings me in close contact
with the authorities. The personnel of the guards is of
very inferior character. I find their average intelligence
considerably lower than that of the inmates. Especially does
the element recruited from the police and the detective service
lack sympathy with the unfortunates in their charge. They
are mostly men discharged from city employment because of
habitual drunkenness, or flagrant brutality and corruption.
Their attitude toward the prisoners is summed up in coercion
and suppression. They look upon the men as will-less objects
of iron-handed discipline, exact unquestioning obedience
and absolute submissiveness to peremptory whims, and
harbor personal animosity toward the less pliant. The more
intelligent among the officers scorn inferior duties, and
crave advancement. The authority and remuneration of a Deputy
Wardenship is alluring to them, and every keeper considers
himself the fittest for the vacancy. But the coveted prize
is awarded to the guard most feared by the inmates, and most
subservient to the Warden,--a direct incitement to brutality on
the one hand, to sycophancy on the other....
Daily I behold the machinery at work, grinding and pulverizing,
brutalizing the officers, dehumanizing the inmates. Far removed
from the strife and struggle of the larger world, I yet witness
its miniature replica, more agonizing and merciless within the
walls. A perfected model it is, this prison life, with its
apparent uniformity and dull passivity. But beneath the torpid
surface smolder the fires of being, now crackling faintly under
a dun smothering smoke, now blazing forth with the ruthlessness
of despair. Hidden by the veil of discipline rages the struggle
of fiercely contending wills, and intricate meshes are woven in
the quagmire of darkness and suppression.
Intrigue and counter-plot, violence and corruption, are rampant
in cell-house and shop. The prisoners spy upon each other, and
in turn upon the officers. The latter encourage the trusties in
unearthing the secret doings of the inmates, and the stools
enviously compete with each other in supplying information to
the keepers. Often they deliberately inveigle the trustful
prisoner into a fake plot to escape, help and encourage him in
the preparations, and at the critical moment denounce him to
the authorities. The luckless man is severely punished, usually
remaining in utter ignorance of the intrigue. The _provocateur_
is rewarded with greater liberty and special privileges.
Frequently his treachery proves the stepping-stone to freedom,
aided by the Warden's official recommendation of the "model
prisoner" to the State Board of Pardons.
BY FREDERIC HARRISON
(English philosopher, born 1831)
Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never
forgives the preaching of a new gospel.
The Seven That Were Hanged
BY LEONID ANDREYEV
(One of the most famous of the Russian writer's stories, in which he
describes the execution of a group of Terrorists, analyzing their
sensations in their separate cells, and on their journey together to
the foot of the gallows)
The Unknown, surnamed Werner, was a man fatigued by struggle.
He had loved life, the theatre, society, art, literature,
passionately. Endowed with an excellent memory, he spoke
several languages perfectly. He was fond of dress, and had
excellent manners. Of the whole group of terrorists he was
the only one who was able to appear in society without risk of
recognition.
For a long time already, and without his comrades having
noticed it, he had entertained a profound contempt for men.
More of a mathematician than a poet, ecstasy and inspiration
had remained so far things unknown to him; at times he would
look upon himself as a madman seeking to square the circle in
seas of human blood. The enemy against which he daily struggled
could not inspire him with respect; it was nothing but a
compact network of stupidities, treasons, falsehoods, base
deceits....
Werner understood that the execution was not simply death, but
also something more. In any case, he was determined to meet it
calmly, to live until the end as if nothing had happened or
would happen. Only in this way could he repress the profoundest
contempt for the execution and preserve his liberty of mind.
His comrades, although knowing well his cold and haughty
intrepidity, would perhaps not have believed it themselves; but
in the courtroom he thought not of life or of death: he played
in his mind a difficult game of chess, giving it his deepest
and quietest attention. An excellent player, he had begun this
game on the very day of his imprisonment, and he had kept it
up continually. And the verdict that condemned him did not
displace a single piece on the invisible board.
Now he was shrugging his shoulders and feeling his pulse. His
heart beat fast, but tranquilly and regularly, with a sonorous
force. Like a novice thrown into prison for the first time, he
examined attentively the cell, the bolts, the chair screwed to
the wall, and said to himself:
"Why have I such a sensation of joy, of liberty? Yes, of
liberty; I think of to-morrow's execution, and it seems to me
it does not exist. I look at the walls, and they seem to me not
to exist either. And I feel as free as if, instead of being in
prison, I had just come out of another cell in which I had been
confined all my life."
Werner's hands began to tremble, a thing unknown to him. His
thought became more and more vibrant. It seemed to him that
tongues of fire were moving in his head, trying to escape from
his brain to lighten the still obscure distance. Finally the
flame darted forth, and the horizon was brilliantly illuminated.
The vague lassitude that had tortured Werner during the last
two years had disappeared at sight of death; his beautiful
youth came back. It was even something more than beautiful
youth. With the astonishing clearness of mind that sometimes
lifts man to the supreme heights of meditation, Werner saw
suddenly both life and death; and the majesty of this new
spectacle struck him. He seemed to be following a path as
narrow as the edge of a blade, on the crest of the loftiest
mountain. On one side he saw life, and on the other he saw
death; and they were like two seas, sparkling and beautiful,
melting into each other at the horizon in a single infinite
extension.
"What is this, then? What a divine spectacle!" said he slowly.
He arose involuntarily and straightened up, as if in presence
of the Supreme Being. And, annihilating the walls, annihilating
space and time, by the force of his all-penetrating look, he
cast his eyes into the depths of the life that he had quitted.
And life took on a new aspect. He no longer tried, as of old,
to translate into words that he was; moreover, in the whole
range of human language, still so poor and miserly, he found
no words adequate. The paltry, dirty and evil things that
suggested to him contempt and sometimes even disgust at the
sight of men had completely disappeared, just as, to people
rising in a balloon, the mud and filth of the narrow streets
become invisible, and ugliness changes into beauty.
With an unconscious movement Werner walked toward the table and
leaned upon it with his right arm. Haughty and authoritative by
nature, he had never been seen in a prouder, freer, and more
imperious attitude; never had his face worn such a look, never
had he so lifted up his head, for at no previous time had he
been as free and powerful as now, in this prison, on the eve of
execution, at the threshold of death.
In his illuminated eyes men wore a new aspect, an unknown
beauty and charm. He hovered above time, and never had this
humanity, which only the night before was howling like a
wild beast in the forest, appeared to him so young. What had
heretofore seemed to him terrible, unpardonable and base,
became suddenly touching and naïve, just as we cherish in
the child the awkwardness of its behavior, the incoherent
stammerings in which its unconscious genius glimmers, its
laughable errors and blunders, its cruel bruises.
"My dear friends!" ...
What mysterious path had he followed to pass from a feeling of
unlimited and haughty liberty to this passionate and moving
pity? He did not know. Did he really pity his comrades, or did
his tears hide something more passionate, something really
greater? His heart, which had suddenly revived and reblossomed,
could not tell him. Werner wept, and whispered:
"My dear comrades! My dear comrades!"
And in this man who wept, and who smiled through his tears, no
one--not the judges, or his comrades, or himself--would have
recognized the cold and haughty Werner, sceptical and insolent.
A Woman's Execution
BY EDWARD KING
(After the Paris Commune of 1871, the leaders of the people
were led out and slaughtered by thousands. The author of this
poem was an American journalist, 1848-1896)
Sweet-breathed and young,
The people's daughter,
No nerves unstrung,
Going to slaughter!
"Good morning, friends,
You'll love us better,--
Make us amends:
We've burst your fetter!
"How the sun gleams!
(Women are snarling):
Give me your beams,
Liberty's darling!
"Marie's my name;
Christ's mother bore it.
The badge? No shame:
Glad that I wore it!"
(Hair to the waist,
Limbs like a Venus):
Robes are displaced:
"Soldiers, please screen us!
"He at the front?
That is my lover:
Stood all the brunt;--
Now--the fight's over.
"Powder and bread
Gave out together:
Droll to be dead
In this bright weather!
"Jean, boy, we might
Have married in June!
This is the wall? Right!
_Vive la Commune!_"
BY THOMAS JEFFERSON
(See page 228)
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with
the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
These Shifting Scenes
BY CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL
(American editor and Socialist lecturer, born 1860. In the
following paragraphs he has given a newspaper reporter's
reminiscences of the Chicago Anarchists)
After so many years the passions and prejudices of the
half-forgotten struggle ought to have died away, and men may
now speak candidly and without restraint of these things as
they really were. Let me then record my deliberate conviction
that Albert Parsons never entertained the thought of harm
against any human being, for I have seldom met a man of a more
genuine kindness of heart; and if the men he denounced in his
speeches had been in actual danger before him I am certain
he would have been the first to rush to their defense from
physical harm. And while I am on this subject, I may add an
expression of a wonder growing upon me for many years, that
no one has ever paid an adequate tribute to this man. I have
not the slightest sympathy with his doctrines, if he believed
in the violence he seemed sometimes to preach, which I could
never tell. I have lived in the world long enough to know that
the social wrongs that moved him to protest can never be cured
by violence. Say, then, that the man erred grievously; if his
error had been ten times as great it ought to have been wiped
from human recollection by his sacrifice, and there should
remain but the one image of him, leaving his place of safety
and voluntarily entering the prisoner's dock. I doubt if that
magnanimous act has its parallel in history. A hundred men have
been elevated to be national heroes for deeds far less heroic.
The fact that after all these years it is still obscured
and men hesitate to speak about it is marvelous testimony to
the power of the press to produce enduring impressions. Even
the other staggering fact that in the history of American
courts this is the only man that ever came voluntarily and
gave himself up and then was hanged, even that seems to be
eliminated from the little consideration that is ever bestowed
upon a figure of courage so extraordinary.
Similarly I wondered while all these events were passing before
me and wonder now, that no one ever stopped to inquire why such
men as Parsons and Fielden were in revolt. Granted freely that
their idea of the best manner of making a protest was utterly
wrong and impossible; granted that they went not the best way
to work. But what was it that drove them into attack against
the social order as they found it? They and thousands of other
men that stood with them were not bad men, nor depraved, nor
bloodthirsty, nor hard-hearted, nor criminal, nor selfish,
nor crazy. Then what was it that evoked a complaint so bitter
and deep-seated? In all the clamor that filled the press for
the execution of the law and the supremacy of order not one
writer ever stopped to ask this obvious question. No one ever
contemplated the simple fact that men do not band themselves
together to make a protest without the belief that they have
something to protest about, and that in any organized state of
society a widespread protest is something for grave inquiry. I
thought then and I think now that a few words devoted to this
suggestion would have been of far greater service to society
than the insensate demand for blood and more blood with which
the journals of Chicago were mostly filled.
The Eagle that is Forgotten
BY VACHEL LINDSAY
(Poet and minstrel of Springfield, Illinois, born 1879; has tramped
over many parts of the United States with his leaflet of "Rhymes to be
Traded for Bread." He has rediscovered the Homeric chant, and poured
into it the life of the Middle West. The following poem is addressed
to John P. Altgeld, once Governor of Illinois, who, having convinced
himself that the so-called Chicago Anarchists were innocent of the
crime charged against them, pardoned them, and thereby sacrificed his
political career)
Sleep softly ... eagle forgotten ... under the stone.
Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.
"We have buried him now," thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced.
They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced.
They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you, day after day,
Now you were ended. They praised you ... and laid you away.
The others, that mourned you in silence and terror and truth,
The widow bereft of her crust, and the boy without youth,
The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor,
That should have remembered forever ... remember no more.
Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call,
The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall?
They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones,
A hundred white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons.
The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began,
The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man.
Sleep softly ... eagle forgotten ... under the stone.
Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.
Sleep on, O brave-hearted, O wise man that kindled the flame--
To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name,
To live in mankind, far, far more ... than to live in a name.
Immortality
(_From the Will of Francisco Ferrer_)
(Spanish educator and radical, 1859-1909, executed after the Barcelona
riots by a plot of his clerical enemies)
I also wish my friends to speak little or not at all about
me, because idols are created when men are praised, and this
is very bad for the future of the human race. Acts alone, no
matter by whom committed, ought to be studied, praised, or
blamed. Let them be praised in order that they may be imitated
when they seem to contribute to the common weal; let them be
censured when they are regarded as injurious to the general
well-being, so that they may not to be repeated.
I desire that on no occasion, whether near or remote, nor for
any reason whatsoever, shall demonstrations of a political or
religious character be made before my remains, as I consider
the time devoted to the dead would be better employed in
improving the condition of the living, most of whom stand in
great need of this.
Light Upon Waldheim
BY VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE
(American anarchist writer, 1866-1912. Waldheim is a cemetery in
Chicago, where the executed Anarchists were buried. Upon the monument
is the figure of a woman holding a dying man upon her knees, with one
hand pressing a crown upon his forehead, and with the other drawing a
dagger)
Light upon Waldheim! And the earth is gray;
A bitter wind is driving from the north;
The stone is cold, and strange cold whispers say:
"What do ye here with Death? Go forth! Go forth!"
Is this thy word, O Mother, with stern eyes,
Crowning thy dead with stone-caressing touch?
May we not weep o'er him that martyred lies,
Slain in our name, for that he loved us much?
May we not linger till the day is broad?
Nay, none are stirring in this stinging dawn--
None but poor wretches that make no moan to God:
What use are these, O thou with dagger drawn?
"Go forth, go forth! Stand not to weep for these,
Till, weakened with your weeping, like the snow
Ye melt, dissolving in a coward peace!"
Light upon Waldheim! Brother, let us go!
Assassination
BY AUGUSTE VAILLANT
(From the speech before the French Chamber of Deputies, 1894,
prior to receiving sentence of death for a political crime)
Ah, gentlemen, if the governing classes could go down among
the unfortunates! But no, they prefer to remain deaf to their
appeals. It seems that a fatality impels them, like the royalty
of the eighteenth century, toward the precipice which will
engulf them; for woe be to those who remain deaf to the cries
of the starving, woe to those who, believing themselves of
superior essence, assume the right to exploit those beneath
them! There comes a time when the people no longer reason; they
rise like a hurricane, and rush onward like a torrent. Then we
see bleeding heads impaled on pikes.
Among the exploited, gentlemen, there are two classes of
individuals. Those of one class, not realizing what they
are and what they might be, take life as it comes, believe
that they are born to be slaves, and content themselves with
the little that is given them in exchange for their labor.
But there are others, on the contrary, who think, who study
and, looking about them, discover social iniquities. Is it
their fault if they see clearly and suffer at seeing others
suffer? Then they throw themselves into the struggle, and make
themselves the bearers of the popular claims.
I know very well that I shall be told that I ought to have
confined myself to speech for the vindication of the people's
claims. But what can you expect! It takes a loud voice to
make the deaf hear. Too long have they answered our voices by
imprisonment, the rope, and rifle-volleys. Make no mistake;
the explosion of my bomb is not only the cry of the rebel
Vaillant, but the cry of an entire class which vindicates its
rights, and which will soon add acts to words. For, be sure of
it, in vain will they pass laws. The ideas of the thinkers will
not halt!
Beyond Human Might
BY BJÖRNSTJERNE BJÖRNSON
(A drama of modern industry. See page 221. The masters meet in a great
castle, the home of one of them, to plan the destruction of the labor
unions; whereupon a group of conspirators blow up the castle with
dynamite. In the scene following the author gives his reflections upon
this event, in the words of the grief-stricken sister of the chief
conspirator)
HALDEN:--Suppose what has happened should arouse the conscience
of the people?
RACHEL:--Why, that's what he was saying--his very words, I
think--Arouse the conscience of the people! After all these
thousands of years that we have been subject to the influence
of the family and of religion, can it be possible that we
are unable to arouse the people's conscience except by--O ye
silent and exalted witnesses, who hear without answering and
see without reflecting what you see, why don't you show me how
to reach the upward road? For in the midst of all this misery
there is no road that leads upward--nothing but an endless
circling around the same spot, by which I perish!
HALDEN:--Upward means forward.
RACHEL:--But there is no forward in this! We have been thrown
back into sheer barbarism! Once more all faith in a happy
future has been wiped out. Just ask a few questions around
here!... And then the sun, the spring--ever since that dreadful
night--nothing but fine weather, night and day--a stretch of
it the like of which I cannot recall. Is it not as if nature
itself were crying out to us: "Shame! shame! You sprinkle my
leaves with blood, and mingle death-cries with my song. You
darken the air for me with your gruesome complaints." That's
what it is saying to us. "You are soiling the spring for me.
Your diseases and your evil thoughts are crouching in the
woods and on the greenswards. Everywhere a stink of misery is
following you like that of rotting waters." That's what it is
telling us. "Your greed and your envy are a pair of sisters
who have fought each other since they were born"--that's what
it says. "Only my highest mountain peaks, only my sandy wastes
and icy deserts, have not seen those sisters; every other part
of the earth has been filled by them with blood and brutal
bawling. In the midst of eternal glory mankind has invented
Hell and manages to keep it filled. And men, who should stand
for perfection, harbor among them what is worthless and foul."
Chillon
BY LORD BYRON
(Bonnivard, a patriot of Switzerland, was imprisoned with his
sons in Chillon Castle. The story is told in Byron's longer
poem, "The Prisoner of Chillon")
Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty, thou art--
For there thy habitation is the heart--
The heart which love of thee alone can bind;
And when thy sons to fetters are consign'd--
To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom--
Their country conquers with their martyrdom,
And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind.
Chillon! thy prison is a holy place,
And thy sad floor an altar; for 'twas trod
Until his very steps have left a trace
Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod,
By Bonnivard! May none those marks efface!
For they appeal from tyranny to God.
BOOK VII
_Jesus_
"The martyred Christ of the working class, the inspired evangel of the
downtrodden masses, the world's supreme revolutionary leader, whose
love for the poor and the children of the poor hallowed all the days
of his consecrated life, lighted up and made forever holy the dark
tragedy of his death, and gave to the ages his divine inspiration and
his deathless name."--_Debs._
Jesus
BY EUGENE V. DEBS
(See page 144)
The martyred Christ of the working class, the inspired evangel
of the downtrodden masses, the world's supreme revolutionary
leader, whose love for the poor and the children of the poor
hallowed all the days of his consecrated life, lighted up and
made forever holy the dark tragedy of his death, and gave to
the ages his divine inspiration and his deathless name.
Crusaders
BY ELIZABETH WADDELL
(Contemporary American writer)
They have taken the tomb of our Comrade Christ--
Infidel hordes that believe not in Man;
Stable and stall for his birth sufficed,
But his tomb is built on a kingly plan.
They have hedged him round with pomp and parade,
They have buried him deep under steel and stone--
But we come leading the great Crusade
To give our Comrade back to his own.
Jesus the Revolutionist
(_From "Christianity and the Social Crisis"_[A])
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
BY WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH
(Theologian, born 1861; professor in Rochester Theological
Seminary)
There was a revolutionary consciousness in Jesus; not, of
course, in the common use of the word "revolutionary," which
connects it with violence and bloodshed. But Jesus knew that
he had come to kindle a fire on earth. Much as he loved peace,
he knew that the actual result of his work would be not peace
but the sword. His mother in her song had recognized in her own
experience the settled custom of God to "put down the proud
and exalt them of low degree," to "fill the hungry with good
things and to send the rich empty away." King Robert of Sicily
recognized the revolutionary ring in those phrases, and thought
it well that the Magnificat was sung only in Latin. The son of
Mary expected a great reversal of values. The first would be
last and the last would be first. He saw that what was exalted
among man was an abomination before God, and therefore these
exalted things had no glamour for his eye. This revolutionary
note runs even through the beatitudes, where we should least
expect it. The point of them is that henceforth those were to
be blessed whom the world had not blessed, for the kingdom of
God would reverse their relative standing. Now the poor and the
hungry and sad were to be satisfied and comforted; the meek
who had been shouldered aside by the ruthless would get their
chance to inherit the earth, and conflict and persecution would
be inevitable in the process.
We are apt to forget that his attack on the religious leaders
and authorities of his day was of revolutionary boldness and
thoroughness. He called the ecclesiastical leaders hypocrites,
blind leaders who fumbled in their casuistry, and everywhere
missed the decisive facts in teaching right and wrong. Their
piety was no piety; their law was inadequate; they harmed
the men whom they wanted to convert. Even the publicans and
harlots had a truer piety than theirs. If we remember that
religion was still the foundation of the Jewish State, and
that the religious authorities were the pillars of existing
society, much as in mediæval Catholic Europe, we shall realize
how revolutionary were his invectives. It was like Luther
anathematizing the Catholic hierarchy.
His mind was similarly liberated from spiritual subjection
to the existing civil powers. He called Herod, his own liege
sovereign, "that fox." When the mother of James and John tried
to steal a march on the others and secure for her sons a pledge
of the highest places in the Messianic kingdom, Jesus felt
that this was a backsliding into the scrambling methods of the
present social order, in which each tries to make the others
serve him, and he is greatest who can compel service from
most. In the new social order, which was expressed in his own
life, each must seek to give the maximum of service, and he
would be greatest who would serve utterly. In that connection
he sketched with a few strokes the pseudo-greatness of the
present aristocracy: "Ye know that they which are supposed
to rule over the nations lord it over them, and their great
ones tyrannize over them. Thus shall it not be among you."
The monarchies and aristocracies have always lived on the
fiction that they exist for the good of the people, and yet
it is an appalling fact how few kings have loved their people
and have lived to serve. Usually the great ones have regarded
the people as their oyster. In a similar saying reported by
Luke, Jesus wittily adds that these selfish exploiters of the
people graciously allow themselves to be called "Benefactors."
His eyes were open to the unintentional irony of the titles
in which the "majesties," "excellencies," and "holinesses" of
the world have always decked themselves. Every time the inbred
instinct to seek precedence cropped up among his disciples he
sternly suppressed it. They must not allow themselves to be
called Rabbi or Father or Master, "for all ye are brothers."
Christ's ideal of society involved the abolition of rank
and the extinction of those badges of rank in which former
inequality was incrusted. The only title to greatness was to
be distinguished service at cost to self. All this shows the
keenest insight into the masked selfishness of those who hold
power, and involves a revolutionary consciousness, emancipated
from reverence for things as they are.
To the "Christians"
BY FRANCIS ADAMS
(See pages 219, 266)
Take, then, your paltry Christ,
Your gentleman God.
We want the carpenter's son,
With his saw and hod.
_We_ want the man who loved
The poor and the oppressed,
Who hated the Rich man and King
And the Scribe and the Priest.
_We_ want the Galilean
Who knew cross and rod.
It's your "good taste" that prefers
A bastard "God!"
Life of Jesus
BY ERNEST RENAN
(French philosopher and historian, 1823-1892)
The chosen flock presented in fact a very mixed character, and
one likely to astonish rigorous moralists. It counted in its
fold men with whom a Jew, respecting himself, would not have
associated. Perhaps Jesus found in this society, unrestrained
by ordinary rules, more mind and heart than in a pedantic
and formal middle class, proud of its apparent morality....
He appreciated conditions of soul only in proportion to the
love mingled therein. Women with tearful hearts, and disposed
through their sins to feelings of humanity, were nearer to his
kingdom than ordinary natures, who often have little merit in
not having fallen. We may conceive on the other hand that these
tender souls, finding in their conversion to the sect an easy
means of restoration, would passionately attach themselves to
Him. Far from seeking to soothe the murmurs stirred up by his
disdain for the social susceptibilities of the time, He seemed
to take pleasure in exciting them. Never did anyone avow more
loftily this contempt for the "world," which is the essential
condition of great things and great originality. He pardoned a
rich man, but only when the rich man, in consequence of some
prejudice, was disliked by society. He greatly preferred men
of equivocal life and of small consideration in the eyes of
the orthodox leaders. "The publicans and the harlots go into
the kingdom of God before you. For John came unto you and ye
believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed
him." We can understand how galling the reproach of not having
followed the good example set by prostitutes must have been to
men making a profession of seriousness and rigid morality.
FROM THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUKE
And as he spake, a certain Pharisee besought him to dine
with him: and he went in, and sat down to meat. And when the
Pharisee saw it, he marvelled that he had not first washed
before dinner.
And the Lord said unto him, "Now do ye Pharisees make clean
the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part
is full of ravening and wickedness. Ye fools, did not he, that
made that which is without, make that which is within also? But
rather give alms of such things as ye have; and, behold, all
things are clean unto you. But woe unto you, Pharisees! for
ye tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over
judgment and the love of God; these ought ye to have done, and
not to leave the other undone. Woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye
love the uppermost seats in the synagogues, and greetings in
the markets. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
for ye are as graves which appear not, and the men that walk
over them are not aware of them."
Then answered one of the lawyers, and said unto him, "Master,
thus saying thou reproachest us also."
And he said, "Woe unto you, also, ye lawyers, for ye lade men
with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not
the burdens with one of your fingers. Woe unto you! for ye
build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed
them.... Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key
of knowledge; ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were
entering in ye hindered."
And as he said these things unto them, the scribes and the
Pharisees began to urge him vehemently, and to provoke him to
speak of many things: laying wait for him, and seeking to catch
something out of his mouth, that they might accuse him.
A Tramp's Confession
(_From "The Cry of Youth"_)
BY HARRY KEMP
(See page 37)
We huddled in the mission
Fer it was cold outside,
An' listened to the preacher
Tell of the Crucified;
Without, a sleety drizzle
Cut deep each ragged form,--
An' so we stood the talkin'
Fer shelter from the storm
They sang of God an' angels,
An' heaven's eternal joy,
An' things I stopped believin'
When I was still a boy;
They spoke of good an' evil,
An' offered savin' grace--
An' some showed love for mankin'
A-shinin' in their face,
An' some their graft was workin'
The same as me an' you:
But most was urgin' on us
Wot they believed was true.
We sang an' dozed an' listened,
But only feared, us men,
The time when, service over,
We'd have to mooch again
An' walk the icy pavements
An' breast the snowstorm gray
Till the saloons was opened
An' there was hints of day.
So, when they called out "Sinners,
Won't you come!" I came ...
But in my face was pallor
And in my heart was shame ...
An' so forgive me, Jesus,
Fer mockin' of thy name--
Fer I was cold an' hungry!
They gave me grub an' bed
After I kneeled there with them
An' many prayers was said.
An' so fergive me, Jesus,
I didn't mean no harm--
An' outside it was zero,
An' inside it was warm....
Yes, I was cold an' hungry,--
An', O Thou Crucified,
Thou friend of all the Lowly,
Fergive the lie I lied!
The Call of the Carpenter[A]
[A] By permission of Doubleday, Page & Co.
BY BOUCK WHITE
(American Congregational clergyman, born 1874; imprisoned for
protesting in a church against the Colorado massacres)
Jesus held that self-respect required of the rich young man
that he refuse to accept too long a handicap over his fellows
in the race of life, and start as near as may be from the
same mark with them. But he went also a step further. He
exacted of the young man that he de-class himself. "Come,
follow me." This was the staggerer. To stay in his own set
and invest his fortune in works of charity, would have been
comparatively easy. Philanthropy has been fashionable in every
age. Charity takes the insurrectionary edge off of poverty.
Therefore the philanthropic rich man is a benefactor to his
fellow magnates, and is made to feel their gratitude; to him
all doors of fashion swing. But Jesus issued a veto. He denied
the legitimacy of alms-giving as a plaster for the deep-lying
sore in the social tissue. Neighborly help, man to man, was
acceptable to him, and he commended it. But philanthropy as a
substitute for justice--he would have none of it. Charity is
twice cursed--it hardens him that gives and softens him that
takes. It does more harm to the poor than exploitation, because
it makes them willing to be exploited. It breeds slavishness,
which is moral suicide. The only thing Jesus would permit a
swollen fortune to do was to give itself to revolutionary
propaganda, in order that swollen fortunes might be forever
after impossible. Patchwork reformers are but hewing at a
hydra. Confronted with this imperative, the rich young ruler
made the great refusal. To give up his fashionable set and join
himself to this company of working-class Galileans, was a moral
heroism to which he was unequal. Therefore he was sorrowful; he
went away, for he had a great social standing.
Something of the same brand of atonement was evidently
in the mind of Dives when he awoke to the mistake he had
made--desirous to send from hell and tell his five brothers
to use the family fortune in erecting a "Dives Home for the
Hungry," belike with the family name and coat of arms over
the front portal. Jesus would concede no such privilege. He
referred those "five brethren" to "Moses and the prophets; let
them hear them"--Moses being the leader of the labor movement
which had given to the slaves in the Goshen brick-yards
their long-deferred rights; and the prophets being those
ardent Old Testament tribunes of the people who had so
hotly contended for the family idea of society against the
exploiters and graspers at the top. Dante's idea that each sin
on earth fashions its own proper punishment in hell receives
confirmation in this parable. "The great gulf fixed," which
constituted Dives's hell, was the gulf which he himself had
brought about. For the private fortune he amassed had broken
up the solidarity of society--had introduced into it a chasm
both broad and deep. The gulf between him and Lazarus in this
world exists in the world to come to plague him. The thirst
which parched Dives's tongue, "being in torments," was the
thirst for companionship, the healing contact once more with
his fellows, from whom his fortune had sundered him like a
butcher's cleaver. Jesus had so exalted a notion of the working
class, their absence of cant, their rugged facing of the facts,
their elemental simplicities, their first-hand contact with the
realities of life, that he regarded any man who should draw
himself off from them in a fancied superiority, as immeasurably
the loser thereby, and as putting himself "in torments."
Lazarus
(_From the London "Spectator"_)
ANONYMOUS
Still he lingers, where wealth and fashion
Meet together to dine or play--
Lingers, a matter of vague compassion,
Out in the darkness across the way;
Out beyond the warmth and the glitter,
The light where luxury's laughter rings,
Lazarus waits, where the wind is bitter,
Receiving his evil things.
Still ye find him when, breathless, burning,
Summer flames upon square and street,
When the fortunate ones of the earth are turning
Their thoughts to meadows and meadow-sweet;
Far away from the wide green valley,
The bramble patch where the white-throat sings,
Lazarus sweats in his crowded alley,
Receiving his evil things....
In the name of Knowledge the race grows healthier,
In the name of Freedom the world grows great;
And men are wiser, and men are wealthier,
But--Lazarus lies at the rich man's gate.
Lies as he lay through human history,
Fame of heroes and pomp of kings,
At the rich man's gate, an abiding mystery,
Receiving his evil things.
A Parable
BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
(See page 189)
Said Christ our Lord, "I will go and see
How the men, my brethren, believe in me."
He passed not again through the gate of birth,
But made himself known to the children of earth.
Then said the chief priests, and rulers, and kings,
"Behold, now, the Giver of all good things;
Go to, let us welcome with pomp and state
Him who alone is mighty and great."
With carpets of gold the ground they spread
Wherever the Son of Man should tread,
And in palace chambers lofty and rare
They lodged him, and served him with kingly fare.
Great organs surged through arches dim
Their jubilant floods in praise of him;
And in church, and palace, and judgment-hall,
He saw his image high over all.
But still, wherever his steps they led,
The Lord in sorrow bent down his head,
And from under the heavy foundation-stones
The son of Mary heard bitter groans.
And in church, and palace, and judgment-hall,
He marked great fissures that rent the wall,
And opened wider and yet more wide
As the living foundation heaved and sighed.
"Have ye founded your thrones and altars, then,
On the bodies and souls of living men?
And think ye that building shall endure,
Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?
"With gates of silver and bars of gold
Ye have fenced my sheep from their Father's fold;
I have heard the dropping of their tears
In heaven these eighteen hundred years."
"O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,
We build but as our fathers built;
Behold thine images, how they stand,
Sovereign and sole, through all our land.
"Our task is hard,--with sword and flame
To hold thine earth forever the same,
And with sharp crooks of steel to keep
Still, as thou leftest them, thy sheep."
Then Christ sought out an artisan,
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin
Pushed from her faintly want and sin.
These set he in the midst of them,
And as they drew back their garment-hem,
For fear of defilement, "Lo, here," said he,
"The images ye have made of me!"
FROM THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW
Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, "Come, ye
blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from
the foundation of the world: For I was a hungered, and ye gave
me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger,
and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye
visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me."
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, "Lord, when saw we
thee a hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
when saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and
clothed thee? or when saw we thee sick or in prison, and came
unto thee?"
And the King shall answer and say unto them, "Verily I say unto
you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these
my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, "Depart from
me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil
and his angels: for I was a hungered, and ye gave me no meat;
I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and
ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not; sick, and in
prison, and ye visited me not."
Then shall they also answer him, saying, "Lord, when saw we
thee a hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick,
or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?"
Then shall he answer them, saying, "Verily I say unto you,
inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did
it not to me."
The Easter Children
(_From "The Frozen Grail and other Poems"_)
BY ELSA BARKER
(See page 315)
"Christ the Lord is risen!"
Chant the Easter children,
Their love-moulded faces
Luminous with gladness,
And their costly raiment
Gleaming like the lilies.
But last night I wandered
Where Christ had not risen,
Where love knows no gladness,
Where the lord of Hunger
Leaves no room for lilies,
And no time for childhood.
And today I wonder
Whether I am dreaming;
For above the swelling
Of their Easter music
I can hear the murmur,
"Suffer _all_ the children."
Nay, the world is dreaming!
And my seeing spirit
Trembles for its waking,
When their Saviour rises
To restore the lilies
To the outcast children.
The Quest
BY FREDERIK VAN EEDEN
(The most widely read of modern Dutch novels, this story of the life
of "Little Johannes" is perhaps the most successful of the many
attempts that have been made to portray the coming of Jesus into the
modern world. Johannes is a boy of good family, who meets a strange,
homeless workingman, to whom he becomes devoted, and whom he calls his
"Brother." The present selection narrates how Johannes was taken to
church.)
"You see, Father," said the countess, "we have come to seek
Jesus. Johannes, also."
"He is waiting for you," replied the priest, solemnly, pointing
out the great crucifix above the altar. Then he disappeared
into the sacristy.
Johannes immediately fastened his eyes upon that figure, and
continued to contemplate it while the people were taking their
places.
It hung in the strongest light of the shadowy church.
Apparently it was of wood stained to a pale rose, with peculiar
blue and brown shadows. The wounds in the side and under the
thorns on the forehead were distinct to exaggeration--all
purple and swollen, with great streaks of blood like dark-red
sealing-wax. The face, with its closed eyes, wore a look of
distress, and a large circle of gold and precious stones
waggishly adorned the usual russet-colored, cork-screwy,
woodeny locks. The cross itself was of shining gold, and each
of its four extremities was ornamented, while a nice, wavy
paper above the head bore the letters I. N. R. I. One could
see that it was all brand-new, and freshly gilded and painted.
Wreaths and bouquets of paper flowers embellished the altar.
For a long time--perhaps a quarter of an hour--Johannes
continued to look at the image. "That is Jesus," he muttered
to himself, "He of whom I have so often heard. Now I am going
to learn about Him, and He is to comfort me. He it is who has
redeemed the world."
But however often he might repeat this, trying seriously
to convince himself--because he would have been glad to be
convinced and also to be redeemed--he could nevertheless see
nothing except a repulsive, ugly, bloody, prinked-up wooden
doll. And this made him feel doubly sorrowful and disheartened.
Fully fifteen minutes had he sat there, looking and musing,
hearing the people around him chatting--about the price they
had paid for their places, about the keeping on or taking
off of women's hats, and about the reserved seats for the
first families. Then the door of the sacristy opened, and the
choir-boys with their swinging censers, and the sacristan, and
the priests in their beautiful, gold-bordered garments, came
slowly and majestically in. And as the congregation kneeled,
Johannes kneeled with them.
And when Johannes, as well as the others, looked at the
incoming procession, and then again turned his eyes to the high
altar, behold! there, to his amazement, kneeling before the
white altar, he saw a dark form. It was in plain sight, bending
forward in the twilight, the arms upon the altar, and the face
hidden in the arms. A man it was, in the customary dark clothes
of a laborer. No one--neither Johannes nor probably any one
else in the church--had seen whence he came. But he was now in
the full sight of all, and one could hear whisperings and a
subdued excitement run along the rows of people and pass on to
the rear, like a gust of wind over a grain-field.
As soon as the procession of choir-boys and priests came
within sight of the altar, the sacristan stepped hastily out
of line and went forward to the stranger, to assure him that,
possibly from too deep absorption in devotion, or from lack
of familiarity with ecclesiastical ceremony, he was guilty of
intrusion.
He touched the man's shoulder, but the man did not stir. In the
breathless stillness that followed, while everyone expectantly
awaited the outcome, a deep, heartrending sob was heard.
"A penitent!" "A drunken man!" "A convert!" were some of the
whispered comments of the people.
The perplexed sacristan turned round, and beckoned Father
Canisius, who, with impressive bearing, stepped up in his
white, gold-threaded garb, as imposingly as a full-sailed
frigate moves.
"Your place is not here," said the priest, in his deep voice.
He spoke kindly, and not particularly loudly. "Go to the back
of the church."
There was no reply, and the man did not move; yet, in the still
more profound silence, his weeping was so audible that many
people shuddered.
"Do you not hear me?" said the priest, raising his voice a
little, and speaking with some impatience. "It is well that
you are repentant, but only the consecrated belong here--not
penitents."
So saying, he grasped the shoulder of the stranger with his
large, strong hand.
Then, slowly, very slowly, the kneeling man raised his head
from his arms, and turned his face toward the priest.
What followed, perhaps each one of the hundreds of witnesses
would tell differently; and of those who heard about it later,
each had a different idea. But I am going to tell you what
Johannes saw and heard--heard quite as clearly as you have seen
and heard the members of your own household, today.
He saw his Brother's face, pale and illumined, as if his head
were shone upon by beams of clearest sunlight. And the sadness
of that face was so deep and unutterable, so bitter and yet so
gentle, that Johannes felt forced, through pain, to press both
hands upon his heart, and to set his teeth, while he gazed with
wide, tear-filled eyes, forgetting everything save that shining
face so full of grief.
For a time it was as still as death, while man and priest
regarded each other. At last the man spoke, and said:
"Who are you, and in whose name are you here?"
When two men stand thus, face to face, and address each other
with all earnestness in the hearing of many others, one of them
is always immediately recognized to be the superior--even if
the listeners are unable to gauge the force of the argument.
Every one feels that superiority, although later many forget
or deny it. If that dominance is not very great, it arouses
spitefulness and fury; but if it is indeed great, it brings,
betimes, repose and submissiveness.
In this case the ascendency was so great that the priest lost
even the air of authority and assurance with which he had
come forward, and did that for which, later, he reproached
himself--he stopped to explain:
"I am a consecrated priest of the Triune God, and I speak in
the name of our Lord Jesus Christ--our Saviour and Redeemer."
There ensued a long silence, and Johannes saw nothing but the
shining, human face and the eyes, which, full of sorrow and
compassion, continued to regard the richly robed priest with a
bitter smile. The priest stood motionless, with hanging hands
and staring eyes, as if uncertain what next to say or do; but
he listened silently for what was coming, as did Johannes and
all the others in the church--as if under an overpowering spell.
Then came the following words, and so long as they sounded no
one could think of anything else--neither of the humble garb of
him who spoke, nor of the incomprehensible subjection of his
gorgeously arrayed listener:
"But you are not yet a man! Would you be a priest of the Most
High?
"You are not yet redeemed, nor are these others with you
redeemed, although you make bold to say so in the name of the
Redeemer.
"Did your Saviour when upon earth wear cloth of silver and of
gold?
"There is no redemption yet--neither for you nor for any of
yours. The time is not come for the wearing of garments of gold.
"Mock not, nor slander. Your ostentation is a travesty of the
Most High, and a defamation of your Saviour.
"Do you esteem the kingdom of God a trifle, that you array
yourself and rejoice, while the world still lies in despair and
in shackles?...
"You are so commanded to serve your Father in spirit and in
truth, and you have served Him with the letter and with lies.
"His prophets, who loved the truth better than their lives, you
have burned at the stake, and have made them martyrs....
"You pull the carriage of prince and moneyed man, and make
grimaces before the powerful.
"They build your churches, and you say masses for them,
although they be Satan himself....
"What have you done for the sheep committed to your care--for
the poor and bereaved--for the oppressed and the disinherited?
"Submission you have taught them--ay--submission to Mammon. You
have taught them to bow meekly to Satan.
"God's light--the light of knowledge--you have withheld from
them. Woe be to you!
"You have taught them to beg, and to kiss the rod that smote
them. You have cloaked the shame of alms-receiving, and have
prated of honor in servitude.
"Thus have you humbled man, and disfigured the human soul....
"Of the love of the Father you have made commerce--a sinful
merchandise. Not because you love virtue do you preach it, but
because of the sweet profit. You promise deliverance to all
who follow your counsel; but as well can you make a present of
moon and stars.
"Are you not told to recompense evil with good? And is God less
than man that He should do otherwise?
"It is well for you that He does not do otherwise, for where
then were your salvation?
"For you, and you only, are the brood of vipers against whom
is kindled the wrath of Him who was gentle with adulterers and
murderers."
While speaking, the man had risen to his full height, and he
now appeared, to all there assembled, impressively tall.
When he had spoken, reaching his right hand backward he grasped
the foot of the great golden crucifix. It snapped off like
glass, and he threw it on the marble floor at the feet of the
priest. The fragment broke into many bits. It was apparently
not wood, but plaster.
"Sacrilege!" cried the priest, in a stifled voice, as if
the sound were wrung from his throat. His eyes seemed to be
starting out of his great purple face.
The man quietly replied:
"No, but my right; for you are the sacrilegist and the
blasphemer who makes of the Son of man a hideous caricature."
Then the priest stepped forward, and gripped Markus by the
wrist. The latter made no resistance, but cried in a loud voice
that reverberated through the church:
"Do your work, Caiaphas!"
After that he suffered himself to be led away to the sacristy.
The Image in the Forum
BY ROBERT BUCHANAN
(English novelist and dramatist, 1814-1901)
Not Baal, but Christus-Jingo! Heir
Of him who once was crucified!
The red stigmata still are there,
The crimson spear-wounds in the side;
But raised aloft as God and Lord,
He holds the Money-bag and Sword.
See, underneath the Crown of Thorn,
The eye-balls fierce, the features grim!
And merrily from night to morn
We chaunt his praise and worship him
Great Christus-Jingo, at whose feet
Christian and Jew and Atheist meet!
A wondrous god! most fit for those
Who cheat on 'Change, then creep to prayer;
Blood on his heavenly altar flows,
Hell's burning incense fills the air,
And Death attests in street and lane
The hideous glory of his reign.
O gentle Jew, from age to age
Walking the waves thou could'st not tame,
This god hath ta'en thy heritage,
And stolen thy sweet and stainless Name!
To him we crawl and bend the knee,
Naming thy Name, but scorning Thee!
The Quest
BY FREDERIK VAN EEDEN
(Sequel to the scene quoted on page 360. Jesus has been held
for examination as to his sanity)
"Does he often have those whims, Johannes," asked Dr. Cijfer,
"when he will not speak?"
"He has no whims," said Johannes, stoutly.
"Why, then, will he not reply?"
"I think you would not answer me," returned Johannes, "if I
were to ask you if you were mad."
The two learned men exchanged smiles.
"That is a somewhat different situation," said Bommeldoos,
haughtily.
"He was not questioned in such a blunt manner as that,"
explained Doctor Cijfer. "I asked about his extraction, his
age, the health of his father and mother, about his own youth,
and so forth--the usual memory promptings. Will you not give
us some further information concerning him? Remember, it is of
real importance to your brother."
"Mijnheer," said Johannes, "I know as little as yourself about
all that...."
There was a knock at the door. The nurse came and said, "Here
is the patient." Then he let Markus in....
Markus had on a dark-blue linen blouse, such as all the
patients of the working-class wear. He stood tall and erect,
and Johannes observed that his face was less pale and sad than
usual. The blue became his dark curling hair, and Johannes felt
happy and confident as he looked at him--standing there so
proud and calm and handsome.
"Take a seat," said Dr. Cijfer.
But Markus seemed not to have heard, and remained standing,
while he nodded kindly and reassuringly to Johannes.
"Observe his pride," said Professor Bommeldoos, in Latin to Dr.
Cijfer.
"The proud find pride, and the gloomy, gloom; but the glad find
gladness, and the lowly, humility," said Markus.
Dr. Cijfer stood up, and took his measuring instrument from the
table. Then, in a quiet, courteous tone, he said:
"Will you not permit us, Mijnheer, to take your head measure?
It is for a scientific purpose?"
"It gives no pain," added Bommeldoos.
"Not to the body," said Markus.
Said Dr. Cijfer, "There is nothing in it to offend one. I have
had it done to myself many a time."
"There is a kind of opinionativeness and denseness that offend."
Bommeldoos flushed. "Opinionativeness and denseness! Mine,
perchance? Am I such an ignoramus? Opinionated and stupid!"
"Colleague!" exclaimed Dr. Cijfer, in gentle expostulation.
And then, as he enclosed Markus's head with the shining
craniometer, he gave the measurement figures. A considerable
time passed, nothing being heard save the low voice of the
doctor dictating the figures. Then, as if proceeding with his
present occupation, taking advantage of what he considered a
compliant mood of the patient, the crafty doctor fancied he saw
his opportunity, and said:
"Your parents certainly dwelt in another country--one more
southerly and more mountainous."
But Markus removed the doctor's hand, with the instrument, from
his head, and looked at him piercingly.
"Why are you not sincere?" he then asked, with gentle stress.
"How can truth be found through untruth?"
Dr. Cijfer hesitated, and then did exactly what Father Canisius
had done--something which, later, he was of the opinion he
ought not to have done: he argued with him.
"But if you will not give me a direct reply I am obliged to get
the truth circuitously."
Said Markus, "A curved sword will not go far into a straight
scabbard."
Professor Bommeldoos grew impatient, and snapped at the doctor
aside, in a smothered voice: "Do not argue, Colleague, do not
argue! Megalomaniacs are smarter, and sometimes have subtler
dialectic faculties than you have. Just let _me_ conduct the
examination."
And then, after a loud "h'm! h'm!" he said to Markus:
" ... Now just tell me, frankly, my friend, are you a prophet?
An apostle? Are you perhaps the King? Or are you God himself?"
Markus was silent.
"Why do you not answer now?"
"Because I am not being questioned."
"Not being questioned! What, then, am I now doing?"
"Raving," said Markus.
Bommeldoos flushed, and lost his composure.
"Be careful, my friend. You must not be impertinent. Remember
that we may decide your fate here."
Markus lifted his head, with a questioning air, so earnest that
the professor held his peace.
"With whom rests the decision of our fate?" asked Markus. Then,
pointing with his finger: "Do you consider yourself the one to
decide?"
After that he uttered not a word. Dr. Cijfer questioned with
gentle stress, Professor Bommeldoos with vehement energy; but
Markus was silent, and seemed not to notice that there were
others in the room.
"I adhere to my diagnosis, Colleague," said Bommeldoos.
Dr. Cijfer rang, and ordered the nurse to come.
"Take the patient to his ward again. He will remain, for the
present, under observation."
Markus went, after making a short but kindly inclination of the
head to Johannes.
"Will you not tell us now, Johannes, what you know of this
person?" asked Dr. Cijfer.
"Mijnheer," replied Johannes, "I know but little more of him
than you do yourself. I met him two years ago, and he is my
dearest friend; but I have seen him rarely, and have never
inquired about his life nor his origin."
"Remarkable!" exclaimed Dr. Cijfer.
"Once again, Colleague, I stand by my diagnosis," said
Bommeldoos. "Initial paranoia, with megalomaniacal symptoms, on
the basis of hereditary inferiority, with vicarious genius."
[Illustration: ECCE HOMO
CONSTANTIN MEUNIER
(_Belgian sculptor, 1831-1905_)]
[Illustration: DESPISED AND REJECTED OF MEN
SIGISMUND GOETZE
(_Contemporary German painter_)]
The Swordless Christ
BY PERCY ADAMS HUTCHISON
(American poet, born 1875)
"_Vicisti Galilaee_"
Ay, down the years behold he rides,
The lowly Christ, upon an ass;
But conquering? Ten shall heed the call,
A thousand idly watch him pass:
They watch him pass, or lightly hold
In mock lip-loyalty his name:
A thousand--were they his to lead!
But meek, without a sword, he came.
A myriad horsemen swept the field
With Attila, the whirlwind Hun;
A myriad cannon spake for him,
The silent, dread Napoleon.
For these had ready spoil to give,
Had reeking spoil for savage hands;
Slaves, and fair wives, and pillage rare:
The wealth of cities: teeming lands.
And if the world, once drunk with blood,
Sated, has turned from arms to peace,
Man hath not lost his ancient lusts;
The weapons change; war doth not cease.
The mother in the stifling den,
The brain-dulled child beside the loom,
The hordes that swarm and toil and starve--
We laugh, and tread them to their doom.
They shriek, and cry their prayers to Christ;
And lift wan faces, hands that bleed:
In vain they pray, for what is Christ?
A leader--without men to lead.
Ah, piteous Christ afar he rides!
We see him, but the face is dim;
We that would leap at crash of drums
Are slow to rise and follow him.
How Long, O Lord
BY HALL CAINE
(English novelist and dramatist, born 1853)
Look down, O Lord, look down. Are the centuries a waste? Nigh
upon two thousand years have gone since Thou didst walk the
world, and the face of things is not unchanged. In _Thy_ Name
now doth the Pharisee give alms in the street to the sound of a
trumpet going before him. In Thy Name now doth the Levite pass
by on the other side when a man hath fallen among thieves. In
Thy Name now doth the lawyer lay on the poor burdens grievous
to be borne. In Thy Name now doth the priest buy and sell the
glad tidings of the kingdom, giving for the gospel of God
the commandments of men, living in rich men's houses, faring
sumptuously every day, praying with his lips, "Give us this day
our daily bread," but saying to his soul, "Soul, thou hast much
goods laid up for many years: take thine ease, eat, drink, and
be merry."
Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Is it this
Thy gospel that yields that Thy fruit? Then will the master of
the vineyard come shortly and say, "Cut it down; why cumbereth
it the ground?"
In a Siberian Prison Church
(_From "Resurrection"_)
BY LEO TOLSTOY
(See pages 88, 110, 148, 276)
The service began.
It consisted of the following. The priest, having dressed
himself up in a strange and very inconvenient garb of gold
cloth, cut and arranged little bits of bread on a saucer and
then put most of them in a cup with wine, repeating at the same
time different names and prayers. Meanwhile the deacon first
read Slavonic prayers, difficult to understand in themselves,
and rendered still more incomprehensible by being read very
fast; he then sang them turn and turn about with the convicts.
The essence of the service consisted in the supposition that
the bits of bread cut up by the priest and put into the wine,
when manipulated and prayed over in a certain way, turned into
the flesh and blood of God.
These manipulations consisted in the priest, hampered by the
gold cloth sack he had on, regularly lifting and holding up
his arms and then sinking to his knees and kissing the table
and all that was on it; but chiefly in his taking a cloth by
two of its corners and waving it rhythmically and softly over
the silver saucer and the golden cup. It was supposed that at
this point the bread and the wine turned into flesh and blood;
therefore this part of the service was performed with the
utmost solemnity. And the convicts made the sign of the cross,
and bowed, first at each sentence, then after every two, and
then after three; and all were very glad when the glorification
ended and the priest shut the book with a sigh of relief and
retired behind the partition. One last act remained. The priest
took from a table a large gilt cross with enamel medallions
at the ends, and came out into the center of the church with
it. First the inspector came up and kissed the cross, then
the jailers, and then the convicts, pushing and jostling, and
abusing each other in whispers. The priest, talking to the
inspector, pushed the cross and his hand, now against the
mouths and now against the noses of the convicts, who were
trying to kiss both the cross and the hand of the priest. And
thus ended the Christian service, intended for the comfort and
edification of these brothers who had gone astray.
And none of these present, from the inspector down, seemed
conscious of the fact that this Jesus, whose name the priest
repeated such a great number of times, whom he praised with
all these curious expressions, had forbidden the very things
that were being done there; that he had not only prohibited
this meaningless much-speaking and the blasphemous incantation
over the bread and wine, but had also, in the clearest words,
forbidden men to call other men their master or to pray in
temples; had taught that every one should pray in solitude;
had forbidden to erect temples, saying that he had come to
destroy them, and that one should worship not in a temple, but
in spirit and in truth; and, above all, that not only had he
forbidden to judge, to imprison, to torment, to execute men, as
was done here, but had even prohibited any kind of violence,
saying that he had come to give freedom to the captives.
No one present seemed conscious that all that was going on here
was the greatest blasphemy, and a mockery of that same Christ
in whose name it was being done. No one seemed to realize that
the gilt cross with the enamel medallions at the ends, which
the priest held out to the people to be kissed, was nothing but
the emblem of that gallows on which Christ had been executed
for denouncing just what was going on here. That these priests,
who imagined they were eating and drinking the body and blood
of Christ in the form of bread and wine, did in reality eat
and drink his flesh and his blood, only not as wine and bits
of bread, but by ensnaring "these little ones" with whom he
identified himself, by depriving them of the greatest blessings
and submitting them to most cruel torments, and by hiding from
men the tidings of great joy which he had brought--that thought
did not enter the mind of any one present.
Before a Crucifix
BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
(English poet of nature and liberty, 1837-1909)
Here, down between the dusty trees,
At this lank edge of haggard wood,
Women with labor-loosened knees,
With gaunt backs bowed by servitude,
Stop, shift their loads, and pray, and fare
Forth with souls easier for the prayer.
The suns have branded black, the rains
Striped gray this piteous God of theirs;
The face is full of prayers and pains,
To which they bring their pains and prayers;
Lean limbs that shew the laboring bones,
And ghastly mouth that gapes and groans.
God of this grievous people, wrought
After the likeness of their race,
By faces like thine own besought,
Thine own blind helpless, eyeless face,
I too, that have nor tongue nor knee
For prayer, I have a word to thee.
It was for this then, that thy speech
Was blown about the world in flame
And men's souls shot up out of reach
Of fear or lust or thwarting shame--
That thy faith over souls should pass
As sea-winds burning the grey grass?
It was for this, that prayers like these
Should spend themselves about thy feet,
And with hard overlabored knees
Kneeling, these slaves of men should beat
Bosoms too lean to suckle sons
And fruitless as their orisons?
It was for this, that men should make
Thy name a fetter on men's necks,
Poor men made poorer for thy sake,
And women withered out of sex?
It was for this, that slaves should be,
Thy word was passed to set men free?
The nineteenth wave of the ages rolls
Now deathward since thy death and birth.
Hast thou fed full men's starved-out souls?
Hast thou brought freedom upon earth?
Or are there less oppressions done
In this wild world under the sun?
Nay, if indeed thou be not dead,
Before thy terrene shrine be shaken,
Look down, turn usward, bow thine head;
O thou that wast of God forsaken,
Look on thine household here, and see
These that have not forsaken thee.
Thy faith is fire upon their lips,
Thy kingdom golden in their hands;
They scourge us with thy words for whips,
They brand us with thy words for brands;
The thirst that made thy dry throat shrink
To their moist mouths commends the drink....
O sacred head, O desecrate,
O labor-wounded feet and hands,
O blood poured forth in pledge to fate
Of nameless lives in divers lands,
O slain and spent and sacrificed
People, the grey-grown speechless Christ!
Is there a gospel in the red
Old witness of thy wide-mouthed wounds?
From thy blind stricken tongueless head
What desolate evangel sounds
A hopeless note of hope deferred?
What word, if there be any word?
O son of man, beneath man's feet
Cast down, O common face of man
Whereon all blows and buffets meet,
O royal, O republican
Face of the people bruised and dumb
And longing till thy kingdom come!...
The tree of faith ingraft by priests
Puts its foul foliage out above thee,
And round it feed man-eating beasts
Because of whom we dare not love thee;
Though hearts reach back and memories ache,
We cannot praise thee for their sake....
Nay, if their God and thou be one,
If thou and this thing be the same,
Thou shouldst not look upon the sun;
The sun grows haggard at thy name.
Come down, be done with, cease, give o'er;
Hide thyself, strive not, be no more.
BOOK VIII
_The Church_
Contains passages, both of exhortation and denunciation,
dealing with the relation of the church toward modern problems,
and the effort to bring back a property-strangled institution
to the revolutionary gospel of its founder.
God and My Neighbor
BY ROBERT BLATCHFORD
(See pages 66, 121, 170)
"For all that, Robert, you're a notorious Infidel." I
paused--just opposite the Tivoli--and gazed moodily up and down
the Strand.
As I have remarked elsewhere, I like the Strand. It is a very
human place. But I own that the Strand lacks dignity and
beauty, and that amongst its varied odors the odor of sanctity
is scarcely perceptible.
There are no trees in the Strand. The thoroughfare should be
wider. The architecture is, for the most part, banal. For a
chief street in a Christian capital, the Strand is not eloquent
of high national ideals.
There are derelict churches in the Strand, and dingy, blatant
taverns, and strident signs and hoardings; and there are slums
hard by.
There are thieves in the Strand, and prowling vagrants, and
gaunt hawkers, and touts, and gamblers, and loitering failures,
with tragic eyes and wilted garments; and prostitutes plying
for hire.
And east and west, and north and south of the Strand, there
is London. Is there a man amongst all London's millions brave
enough to tell the naked truth about the vice and crime, the
misery and meanness, the hypocrisies and shames of the great,
rich, heathen city? Were such a man to arise amongst us and
voice the awful truth, what would his reception be? How would
he fare at the hands of the Press, and the Public--and the
Church?
As London is, so is England. This is a Christian country.
What would Christ think of Park Lane, and the slums, and the
hooligans? What would He think of the Stock Exchange, and the
music hall, and the race-course? What would He think of our
national ideals? What would He think of the House of Peers, and
the Bench of Bishops, and the Yellow Press?
Pausing again, over against Exeter Hall, I mentally
apostrophize the Christian British people. "Ladies and
Gentlemen," I say, "you are Christians in name, but I discern
little of Christ in your ideals, your institutions, or your
daily lives. You are a mercenary, self-indulgent, frivolous,
boastful, blood-guilty mob of heathen. I like you very much,
but that is what you are. And it is you--_you_ who call men
'Infidels.' You ridiculous creatures, what do you mean by it?"
If to praise Christ in words, and deny Him in deeds, be
Christianity, then London is a Christian city, and England is
a Christian nation. For it is very evident that our common
English ideals are anti-Christian, and that our commercial,
foreign, and social affairs are run on anti-Christian lines.
Renan says, in his _Life of Jesus_, that "were Jesus to return
amongst us He would recognize as His disciples, not those who
imagine they can compress Him into a few catechismal phrases,
but those who labour to carry on his work."
My Christian friends, I am a Socialist, and as such believe in,
and work for, universal freedom, and universal brotherhood, and
universal peace.
And you are Christians, and I am an "Infidel." Well, be it even
so.
FROM THE GOSPEL OF LUKE
When he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it,
saying, if thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy
day, the things which belong unto thy peace!
From the Bottom Up
BY ALEXANDER IRVINE
(The life-story of an Irish peasant lad, born 1863, who
became in turn stableman, man-of-war's-man, slum-missionary,
clergyman, and Socialist agitator)
After some years' experience in missions and mission churches,
I would find it very hard if I were a workingman living in a
tenement not to be antagonistic to them; for, in large measure,
such work is done on the assumption that people are poor and
degraded through laxity in morals. The scheme of salvation is
a salvation for the individual; social salvation is out of the
question. Social conditions cannot be touched, because in all
rotten social conditions, there is a thin red line which always
leads to the rich man or woman who is responsible for them.
Coming in contact with these ugly social facts continuously,
led me to this belief. It came very slowly; as did also the
opinion that the missionary himself or the pastor, be he as
wise as Solomon, as eloquent as Demosthenes, as virtuous as St.
Francis, has no social standing whatever among the people whose
alms support the institutions, religious and philanthropic, of
which he is the executive head. The fellowship of the saints is
a pure fiction, has absolutely no foundation in fact in a city
like New York except as the poor saints have it by themselves.
FROM THE GOSPEL OF JOHN
If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar:
for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can
he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we
from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.
The Inside of the Cup[A]
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
BY WINSTON CHURCHILL
(One of the most popular of American novelists, born 1871. This story
has for its theme the failure of the Church in the face of modern
social problems. In the following scene a rich man is rebuked by his
pastor)
The perceptions of the banker were keen, and his sense of
security was brief. Somehow, as he met the searching eye of
the rector, he was unable to see the man as a visionary, but
beheld and,--to do him justice--felt a twinge of respect for
an adversary worthy of his steel. He, who was accustomed
to prepare for clouds when they were mere specks on his
horizon, paused even now to marvel why he had not dealt
with this. Here was a man--a fanatic, if he liked--but
still a man who positively did not fear him, to whom his
wrath and power were as nothing! A new and startling and
complicated sensation--but Eldon Parr was no coward. If he
had, consciously or unconsciously, formerly looked upon the
clergyman as a dependent, Hodder appeared to be one no more.
The very ruggedness of the man had enhanced, expanded--as
it were--until it filled the room. And Hodder had, with an
audacity unparalleled in the banker's experience, arraigned by
implication his whole life, managed to put him on the defensive.
"But if that has become your philosophy," the rector
said--"that a man must look out for himself--what is it in you
that impels you to give these large sums for the public good?"
"I should suppose that you, as a clergyman, might understand
that my motive is a Christian one."
Hodder sat very still, but a higher light came into his eyes.
"Mr. Parr," he replied, "I have been a friend of yours, and I
am a friend still. And what I am going to tell you is not only
in the hope that others may benefit, but that your own soul
may be saved. I mean that literally--your own soul. You are
under the impression that you are a Christian, but you are not
and never have been one. And you will not be one until your
whole life is transformed, until you become a different man.
If you do not change, it is my duty to warn you that sorrow
and suffering, the uneasiness which you now know, and which
drive you on, in search of distraction, to adding useless sums
of money to your fortune--this suffering, I say, will become
intensified. You will die in the knowledge of it, and live on
after, in the knowledge of it."
In spite of himself, the financier drew back before this
unexpected blast, the very intensity of which had struck a
chill of terror in his inmost being. He had been taken off his
guard,--for he had supposed the day long past--if it had ever
existed--when a spiritual rebuke would upset him; the day long
past when a minister _could_ pronounce one with any force. That
the Church should ever again presume to take herself seriously
had never occurred to him. And yet--the man had denounced
him in a moment of depression, of nervous irritation and
exasperation against a government which had begun to interfere
with the sacred liberty of its citizens, against political
agitators who had spurred that government on. The world was
mad. No element, it seemed, was now content to remain in its
proper place. His voice, as he answered, shook with rage,--all
the greater because the undaunted sternness by which it was
confronted seemed to reduce it to futility.
"Take care!" he cried, "take care! You, nor any other man,
clergyman or no clergyman, have any right to be the judge of my
conduct."
"On the contrary," said Hodder, "if your conduct affects the
welfare, the progress, the reputation of the church of which I
am rector, I have the right. And I intend to exercise it. It
becomes my duty, however painful, to tell you, as a member of
the Church, wherein you have wronged the Church and wronged
yourself."
He didn't raise his tone, and there was in it more of sorrow
than of indignation. The banker turned an ashen gray.... A
moment elapsed before he spoke, a transforming moment. He
suddenly became ice.
"Very well," he said. "I can't pretend to account for these
astounding views you have acquired--and I am using a mild term.
Let me say this" (he leaned forward a little, across the desk):
"I demand that you be specific. I am a busy man, I have little
time to waste, I have certain matters before me which must be
attended to to-night. I warn you that I will not listen any
longer to vague accusations."
It was Hodder's turn to marvel. Did Eldon Parr, after all, have
no sense of guilt? Instantaneously, automatically, his own
anger rose.
"You may be sure, Mr. Parr, that I should not be here unless I
were prepared to be specific. And what I am going to say to you
I have reserved for your ear alone, in the hope that you will
take it to heart while it is not yet too late, and amend your
life accordingly...."
(The clergyman tells the banker of lives that have been ruined
by his financial dishonesties.)
"I am not talking about the imperfect code of human justice
under which we live, Mr. Parr," he cried. "This is not a case
in which a court of law may exonerate you, it is between
you and your God. But I have taken the trouble to find out,
from unquestioned sources, the truth about the Consolidated
Tractions Company--I shall not go into the details at
length--they are doubtless familiar to you. I know that the
legal genius of Mr. Langmaid, one of my vestry, made possible
the organization of the company, and thereby evaded the plain
spirit of the law of the state. I know that one branch line
was bought for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and
capitalized for three millions, and that most of the others
were scandalously over-capitalized. I know that while the
coming transaction was still a secret, you and other gentlemen
connected with the matter bought up large interests in other
lines, which you proceeded to lease _to yourselves_ at
guaranteed dividends which these lines do not earn. I know
that the first large dividend was paid out of capital. And the
stock which you sold to poor Garvin was so hopelessly watered
that it never could have been anything but worthless. If, in
spite of these facts, you do not deem yourself responsible for
the misery which has been caused, if your conscience is now
clear, it is my duty to tell you that there is a higher bar of
justice."
The intensity of the fire of the denunciation had, indeed,
a momentary yet visible effect in the banker's expression.
Whatever the emotions thus lashed to self-betrayal, anger,
hatred,--fear, perhaps, Hodder could not detect a trace of
penitence; and he was aware, on the part of the other, of
a supreme, almost spasmodic effort for self-control. The
constitutional reluctance of Eldon Parr to fight openly could
not have been more clearly demonstrated.
"Because you are a clergyman, Mr. Hodder," he began, "because
you are the rector of St. John's, I have allowed you to say
things to me which I would not have permitted from any other
man. I have tried to take into account your point of view,
which is naturally restricted, your pardonable ignorance of
what business men, who wish to do their duty by Church and
State, have to contend with. When you came to this parish you
seemed to have a sensible, a proportional view of things; you
were content to confine your activities to your own sphere,
content not to meddle with politics and business, which you
could, at first hand, know nothing about. The modern desire
of clergymen to interfere in these matters has ruined the
usefulness of many of them.
"I repeat, I have tried to be patient. I venture to hope,
still, that this extraordinary change in you may not be
permanent, but merely the result of a natural sympathy with the
weak and unwise and unfortunate who are always to be found in a
complex civilization. I can even conceive how such a discovery
must have shocked you, temporarily aroused your indignation,
as a clergyman, against the world as it is--and, I may add,
as it has always been. My personal friendship for you, and my
interest in your future welfare impel me to make a final appeal
to you not to ruin a career which is full of promise...."
"I hinted to you awhile ago of a project I have conceived and
almost perfected of gifts on a much larger scale than I have
ever attempted." The financier stared at him meaningly. "And I
had you in mind as one of the three men whom I should consult,
whom I should associate with myself in the matter. We cannot
change human nature, but we can better conditions by wise
giving. I do not refer now to the settlement house, which I am
ready to help make and maintain as the best in the country,
but I have in mind a system to be carried out with the consent
and aid of the municipal government, of playgrounds, baths,
parks, places of recreation, and hospitals, for the benefit of
the people, which will put our city in the very forefront of
progress. And I believe, as a practical man, I can convince you
that the betterment which you and I so earnestly desire can be
brought about in no other way. Agitation can only result in
anarchy and misery for all."
Hodder's wrath, as he rose from his chair, was of the sort
that appears incredibly to add to the physical stature,--the
bewildering spiritual wrath which is rare indeed, and carries
all before it.
"Don't tempt me, Mr. Parr!" he said. "Now that I know the
truth, I tell you frankly I would face poverty and persecution
rather than consent to your offer. And I warn you once more not
to flatter yourself that existence ends here, that you will
not be called to answer for every wrong act you have committed
in accumulating your fortune, that what you call business
is an affair of which God takes no account. What I say may
seem foolishness to you, but I tell you, in the words of that
Foolishness, that it will not profit you to gain the whole
world and lose your own soul. You remind me that the Church in
old time accepted gifts from the spoils of war, and I will add
of rapine and murder. And the Church today, to repeat your
own parallel, grows rich with money wrongfully got. Legally?
Ah, yes, legally, perhaps. But that will not avail you. And
the kind of church you speak of--to which I, to my shame, once
consented--Our Lord repudiates. It is none of his. I warn you,
Mr. Parr, in his Name, first to make your peace with your
brothers before you presume to lay another gift on the altar."
During this withering condemnation of himself Eldon Parr sat
motionless, his face grown livid, an expression on it that
continued to haunt Hodder long afterwards. An expression,
indeed, which made the banker almost unrecognizable.
"Go," he whispered, his hand trembling visibly as he pointed
towards the door. "Go--I have had enough of this."
Trinity Church
BY EDWIN DAVIES SCHOONMAKER
(Contemporary American poet)
In vain she points her finger to the sky
And sends her voice along the famous street,
Admonishing how the mortal hours fleet
And bidding men bethink that they must die.
Tearing the coat of Christ they jostle by
And ply their gambling at her very feet.
"Prepare, prepare, prepare thy God to meet!"
She loudly calls. They do not heed her. Why?
Thou, stuffed with tithes of them that traffic here,
Flesh of their flesh, and with thy spotted hand
Buying and selling, fattening year by year,
How darest thou rebuke this venal band?
Thou mocker of the man of Galilee,
Prepare to meet thy God, thou Pharisee.
[Illustration: TO SUSTAIN THE BODY OF THE CHURCH, IF YOU PLEASE
DENIS AUGUSTE MARIE RAFFET
(_French illustrator, 1804-1860_)]
[Illustration: CHRIST
JOHN MOWBRAY-CLARKE
(_Contemporary American sculptor_)]
The Church and the Workers
BY WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH
(See page 346)
The stratification of society is becoming more definite in
our country, and the people are becoming more conscious of
it. The industrial conflicts make them realize how their
interests diverge from those of the commercial class. As that
consciousness increases, it becomes harder for the two classes
to meet in the expression of Christian faith and love--in
prayer meetings, for instance. When the Christian business man
is presented as a model Christian, working people are coming
to look with suspicion on these samples of our Christianity.
I am not justifying that, but simply stating the fact. They
disapprove of the Christianity of the churches, not because it
is too good, but because it is not good enough. The working
people are now developing the principle and practice of
solidarity, which promises to be one of the most potent ethical
forces of the future, and which is essentially more Christian
than the covetousness and selfishness which we regard as the
indispensable basis of commerce. If this is a correct diagnosis
of our condition, is it strange that the Church is unable
to evangelize a class alienated from it by divergent class
interests and class morality?
Tainted Wealth
BY JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
(See page 298)
Capacious is the Church's belly;
Whole nations it has swallowed down,
Yet no dyspepsia 'neath its gown;
The Church alone, in jewels drest,
Your "tainted wealth" can quite digest.
The Collection
BY ERNEST HOWARD CROSBY
(American writer and social reformer, 1856-1907)
I passed the plate in church.
There was little silver, but the crisp bank-notes heaped themselves up
high before me;
And ever as the pile grew, the plate became warmer and warmer until it
burned my fingers, and a smell of scorching flesh rose from it, and I
perceived that some of the notes were beginning to smoulder and curl,
half-browned, at the edges.
And then I saw thru the smoke into the very substance of the money,
and I beheld what it really was;
I saw the stolen earnings of the poor, the wide margins of wages pared
down to starvation;
I saw the underpaid factory girl eking out her living on the street,
and the overworked child, and the suicide of the discharged miner;
I saw poisonous gases from great manufactories spreading disease and
death; ...
I saw hideousness extending itself from coal mine and foundry over
forest and river and field;
I saw money grabbed from fellow grabbers and swindlers, and underneath
them the workman forever spinning it out of his vitals....
I saw all this, and the plate burned my fingers so that I had to hold
it first in one hand and then in the other; and I was glad when the
parson in his white robes took the smoking pile from me on the chancel
steps and, turning about, lifted it up and laid it on the altar.
It was an old-time altar indeed, for it bore a burnt offering of flesh
and blood--a sweet savor unto the Moloch whom these people worship
with their daily round of human sacrifices.
The shambles are in the temple as of yore, and the tables of the
money-changers, waiting to be overturned.
BY ÉMILE DE LAVELAYE
(Belgian economist, 1822-1892)
If Christianity were taught and understood conformably to the
spirit of its Founder, the existing social organism could not
last a day.
The Voice of the Early Church
BY CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA
(Greek Church; 150-215)
I know that God has given us the use of goods, but only as far
as is necessary; and He has determined that the use be common.
It is absurd and disgraceful for one to live magnificently and
luxuriously when so many are hungry.
BY TERTULLIAN
(Earliest of the Latin fathers; 155-222)
All is common with us except women. Jesus was our man, God
and brother. He restored unto all men what cruel murderers
took from them by the sword. Christians have no master and no
Christian shall be bound for bread and raiment. The land is no
man's inheritance; none shall possess it as property.
BY ST. CYPRIAN
(Latin; 200-258)
No man shall be received into our commune who sayeth that the
land may be sold. God's footstool is not property.
BY ST. BASIL
(Greek Church; 329-379)
Which things, tell me, are yours? Whence have you brought
your goods into life? You are like one occupying a place in a
theatre, who should prohibit others from entering, treating
that as his own which was designed for the common use of all.
Such are the rich. Because they preoccupy common goods, they
take these goods as their own. If each one would take that
which is sufficient for his needs, leaving what is superfluous
to those in distress, no one would be rich, no one poor.... The
rich man is a thief.
BY ST. AMBROSE
(Latin; 340-397)
How far, O rich, do you extend your senseless avarice? Do
you intend to be the sole inhabitants of the earth? Why do
you drive out the fellow sharers of nature, and claim it all
for yourselves? The earth was made for all, rich and poor,
in common. Why do you rich claim it as your exclusive right?
The soil was given to the rich and poor in common--wherefore,
oh, ye rich, do you unjustly claim it for yourselves alone?
Nature gave all things in common for the use of all; usurpation
created private rights. Property hath no rights. The earth is
the Lord's, and we are his offspring. The pagans hold earth as
property. They do blaspheme God.
BY ST. JEROME
(Latin; 340-420)
All riches come from iniquity, and unless one has lost, another
cannot gain. Hence that common opinion seems to me to be very
true, "the rich man is unjust, or the heir an unjust one."
Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the
actual possessor, then by his predecessor.
BY ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM
(Greek Church; 347-407)
Tell me, whence are you rich? From whom have you received?
From your grandfather, you say; from your father. Are you
able to show, ascending in the order of generation, that that
possession is just throughout the whole series of preceding
generations? Its beginning and root grew necessarily out of
injustice. Why? Because God did not make this man rich and
that man poor from the beginning. Nor, when He created the
world, did He allot much treasure to one man, and forbid
another to seek any. He gave the same earth to be cultivated
by all. Since, therefore, His bounty is common, how comes
it that you have so many fields, and your neighbor not even
a clod of earth?... The idea we should have of the rich and
covetous--they are truly as robbers, who, standing in the
public highway, despoil the passers.
BY ST. AUGUSTINE
(Latin; 354-430)
The superfluities of the rich are the necessaries of the poor.
They who possess superfluities, possess the goods of others.
BY ST. GREGORY THE GREAT
(Latin; 540-604)
They must be admonished who do not seek another's goods, yet do
not give of their own, that they may know that the earth from
which they have received is common to all men, and therefore
its products are given in common to all. They, therefore,
wrongly think they are innocent who claim for themselves
the common gift of God. When they do not give what they have
received, they assist in the death of neighbors, because daily
almost as many of the poor perish as have been deprived of
means which the rich have kept to themselves. When we give
necessaries to the needy we do not bestow upon them our goods;
we return to them their own; we pay a debt of justice rather
than fulfil a work of mercy.
The Annexing of Christianity[A]
[A] By permission of Doubleday, Page & Co.
(_From "The Call of the Carpenter"_)
BY BOUCK WHITE
(See page 353)
The annexing process was started by a Roman citizen named
Saul. Formerly a Jew, he deserted his nationality and with it
his former name, and called himself thereafter Paul. Paul was
undeniably sincere. He believed that in reinterpreting the
Christian faith so as to make it acceptable to the Romans he
was doing that faith a service. His make-up was imperial rather
than democratic. Both by birth and training he was unfitted to
enter into the working-class consciousness of Galileans. He was
in culture a Hellenist, in religion a Pharisee, in citizenship
a Roman. From the first strain, Hellenism, he received a bias
in the direction of philosophy rather than economics; from the
second, his Pharisaism, he received a bias toward aloofness,
otherworldliness; and from the third, his Romanism, he received
a bias toward political acquiescence and the preservation of
the status quo....
Paul planned to make Christianity the religion of the Roman
Empire. It needed a religion badly. The catalogue of its
vices, in the forepart of the Epistle to the Romans, is proof.
Paul the Roman citizen saw nothing but excellence in Rome's
world-wide empire. Only, it must be redeemed from its laxity
of morals. Therefore he would bring to it the Christ as its
cleanser and thereby its perpetuator. It was the test of loyal
citizenship among the Romans to seek out in every part of the
world that which was most rare and valued, and bring it back
to Rome as a gift. Thus her sons went forth and returned laden
with richest trophies to lay at her feet. They brought to her
pearls from India, gold chariots from Babylon, elephants from
interior Africa, high-breasted virgins from the Greek isles,
Phidian marbles from Athens. Paul also would be a bringer of
gifts to the Rome that had honored him and his fathers with the
high honor of citizenship. And the gift he would bring and lay
at her feet would be the richest of them all--a religion....
Paul was a stockholder in Rome's world corporation. And that
stock by slow degrees had blinded him to the injustice of
a social system in whose dividends he himself shared. This
explains in large part why he accepted the political status
quo, and preached its acceptance by others. Students of ethics
have difficulty in reconciling Aristotle's defence of human
servitude, "slavery is a law of nature which is advantageous
and just," with his insight and logic in other matters. The
difficulty resolves itself when it is recalled that Aristotle
possessed thirteen slaves, and therefore had exactly thirteen
arguments for the righteousness of slavery. Seneca, gifted
in other things with fine powers of moral philosophy, saw no
monstrousness in Nero that he should rebuke--Seneca was a
favorite with Nero, and was using that favoritism to amass
an enormous fortune. Paul was too highly educated--using the
term in its academic sense--to be at one with the unbookish
Galileans, and he was personally too much the gainer from
Rome's empire of privilege to share the insurrectionary spirit
of the Son of Mary....
Paul was under the spell of Rome's material greatness. His
heart was secretly enticed by her triumphal arches, her
literature, her palaces on the Palatine, her baths, porticos of
philosophy, gymnasia, schools of rhetoric, her athletic games
in the arena. He thought of her history, her jurisprudence,
her military might, the starry names in her roll of glory, her
sweep of empire from the Thames to the Tigris, and from the
Rhine to the deserts of Africa; and when, to this summary,
came the pleasant reflection that he was a part of this
world corporation, one of the privileged few to share in its
profits, it was not hard for him to find reasons to justify his
desertion of that poverty-stricken and fanatically democratic
race of Israel off there in unimportant Palestine.
A true Roman, Paul preaches to the proletariat the duty of
political passivity. To the Carpenter, with his splendid
worldliness, the premier qualification for character was
self-respect, and the alertness and mastery of environment
which go with self-respect. But to Paul the primate virtue is
submissiveness--"the powers that be!" He sought to cure the
seditiousness of the working class by drawing off their gaze
to a crown of righteousness reserved in heaven for them--a
gaseous felicity beyond the stars. Israel, holding fast to
the enrichment of the present life, had kept its religion
from getting off into fog lands, by seeking "a city that hath
foundations." But Paul sought to hush all these "worldly" aims;
he wooed the toiling masses to desire "a building of God, a
house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." He was a
true yoke-fellow of Pylades, the Roman play-actor, who, wishing
to justify his usefulness to the master class, said to Augustus
that "it was for the emperor's advantage that the people should
have their attention fixed on the playhouse rather than on
politics."
Preface to "Major Barbara"
BY G. BERNARD SHAW
(See pages 193, 212, 263)
Churches are suffered to exist only on condition that they
preach submission to the State as at present capitalistically
organized. The Church of England itself is compelled to add to
the thirty-six articles in which it formulates its religious
tenets, three more in which it apologetically protests that the
moment any of these articles comes in conflict with the State
it is to be entirely renounced, abjured, violated, abrogated
and abhorred, the policeman being a much more important person
than any of the Persons of the Trinity. And this is why no
tolerated Church nor Salvation Army can ever win the entire
confidence of the poor. It must be on the side of the police
and the military, no matter what it believes or disbelieves;
and as the police and the military are the instruments by
which the rich rob and oppress the poor (on legal and moral
principles made for the purpose), it is not possible to be on
the side of the poor and of the police at the same time. Indeed
the religious bodies, as the almoners of the rich, become a
sort of auxiliary police, taking off the insurrectionary edge
of poverty with coals and blankets, bread and treacle, and
soothing and cheering the victims with hopes of immense and
inexpensive happiness in another world, when the process of
working them to premature death in the service of the rich is
complete in this.
Prince Hagen
BY UPTON SINCLAIR
(Prince Hagen, ruler of the Nibelungs, a race of gold-hoarding gnomes,
comes up to visit the land of the earth-men, and study Christian
civilization. He finds a number of ideas worth taking back to his
underground home)
Prince Hagen paused for a moment and puffed in silence; then
suddenly he remarked: "Do you know that it is a very wonderful
idea--that immortality? Did you ever think about it?"
"Yes," I said, "a little."
"I tell you, the man who got that up was a world-genius. When
I saw how it worked, it was something almost too much for
me to believe; and still I find myself wondering if it can
last. For you know if you can once get a man believing in
immortality, there is no more left for you to desire; you can
take everything in the world he owns--you can skin him alive
if it pleases you--and he will bear it all with perfect good
humor. I tell you what, I lie awake at night and dream about
the chances of getting the Nibelungs to believe in immortality;
I don't think I can manage it, but it is a stake worth playing
for. I say the phrases over to myself--you know them all--'It
is better to give than to receive'--'Lay not up for yourself
treasures on earth'--'Take no heed, saying what shall ye eat!'
As a matter of fact, I fancy the Nibelungs will prove pretty
tough at reforming, but it is worth any amount of labor.
Suppose I could ever get them to the self-renouncing point!
Just fancy the self-renunciation of a man with a seventy-mile
tunnel full of gold!"
Prince Hagen's eyes danced; his face was a study. I watched him
wonderingly. "Why do you go to all that bother?" I demanded,
suddenly. "If you want the gold, why don't you simply kill the
Nibelungs and take it?"
"I have thought of that," he replied; "I might easily manage
it all with a single revolver. But why should I kill the geese
that lay me golden eggs? I want not only the gold they have,
but the gold that they will dig through the centuries that are
to come; for I know that the resources of Nibelheim, if they
could only be properly developed, would be simply infinite. So
I have made up my mind to civilize the people and develop their
souls."
"Explain to me just how you expect to get their gold," I said.
"Just as the capitalist is getting it in New York," was the
response. "At present the Nibelungs hide their wealth; I mean
to broaden their minds, and establish a system of credit.
I mean to teach them ideals of usefulness and service, to
establish the arts and sciences, to introduce machinery
and all the modern improvements that tend to increase the
centralization of power; I shall be master--just as I am
here--because I am the strongest, and because I am not a dupe."
"I see," I said; "but all this will take a long time."
"Yes," said he, "I know; it is the whole course of history
to be lived over again. But there will be no mistakes and no
groping in this case, for I know the way, and I am king. It
will be a sort of benevolent despotism--the ideal form of
government, as I believe."
"And you are sure there is no chance of your plans failing?"
"Failing!" he laughed. "You should have seen how they have
worked so far."
"You have begun applying them?"
"I have been down to Nibelheim twice since the death of dear
grandpa," said the prince. "The first time, as you imagine,
there was tremendous excitement, for all Nibelheim knew what
a bad person I had been, and stood in terror of my return.
I got them all together and told them the truth--that I had
become wise and virtuous, that I meant to respect every man's
property, and that I meant to consecrate my whole endeavor to
the developing of the resources of my native land. And then
you should have witnessed the scene! They went half wild with
rejoicing; they fell down on their knees and thanked me with
tears in their eyes: I played the _pater patriae_ in a fashion
to take away your breath. And afterwards I went on to explain
to them that I had discovered very many wonderful things
up on the earth; that I was going to make a law forbidding
any of them to go there, because it was so dangerous, but
that I myself was going to brave all the perils for their
sakes. I told them about a wonderful animal that was called a
steam-drill, and that ate fire, and dug out gold with swiftness
beyond anything they could imagine. I said that I was going
to empty all my royal treasure caves, and take my fortune and
some of theirs to the earth to buy a few thousand of these
wonderful creatures; and I promised them that I would give them
to the Nibelungs to use, and they might have twice as much gold
as they would have dug with their hands, provided they would
give me the balance. Of course they agreed to it with shouts
of delight, and the contracts were signed then and there.
They helped me get out all my gold, and I took them down the
steam-drills, and showed them how to manage them; so before
very long I expect to have quite a snug little income."
The Prince
BY NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI
(Italian courtier, author of a famous treatise on statecraft:
1469-1527)
A prince has to have particular care that, to see and to hear
him, he appears all goodness, integrity, humanity and religion,
which last he ought to pretend to more than ordinarily. For
everybody sees, but few understand; everybody sees how you
appear, but few know what in reality you are, and those few
dare not oppose the opinion of the multitude, who have the
majesty of their prince to defend them.
Children of the Dead End[A]
[A] By permission of E. P. Dutton & Co.
BY PATRICK MACGILL
(See pages 32, 47, 122)
Nearly every second year the potatoes went bad; then we were
always hungry, although Farley McKeown, a rich merchant in the
neighboring village, let my father have a great many bags of
Indian meal on credit. A bag contained sixteen stone of meal
and cost a shilling a stone. On the bag of meal Farley McKeown
charged sixpence a month interest; and fourpence a month on a
sack of flour which cost twelve shillings. All the people round
about were very honest, and paid up their debts when they were
able. Usually when the young went off to Scotland or England
they sent home money to their fathers and mothers, and with
this money the parents paid for the meal to Farley McKeown.
"What doesn't go to the landlord goes to Farley McKeown," was a
Glenmornan saying.
The merchant was a great friend of the parish priest, who
always told the people if they did not pay their debts they
would burn for ever and ever in hell. "The fires of eternity
will make you sorry for the debts that you did not pay," said
the priest. "What is eternity?" he would ask in a solemn voice
from the altar steps. "If a man tried to count the sands on
the sea-shore and took a million years to count every single
grain, how long would it take him to count them all? A long
time, you'll say. But that time is nothing to eternity. Just
think of it! Burning in hell while a man, taking a million
years to count a grain of sand, counts all the sand on the
sea-shore. And this because you did not pay Farley McKeown his
lawful debts, his lawful debts within the letter of the law."
That concluding phrase, "within the letter of the law," struck
terror into all who listened, and no one, maybe not even the
priest himself, knew what it meant.
Incantations
BY MAX EASTMAN
(Editor of "The Masses," born 1883)
I remember a vesper service at Ravello in Italy. I remember
that the exquisite and pathetically resplendent little chapel
was filled with ragged and dirty-smelling and sweet, sad-eyed
mothers. Some carried in their arms their babies, some carried
only a memory in their haggard eyes. They were all poor.
They were all sad in that place. They were mothers. Mothers
wrinkle-eyed, stooped, worn old, but yet gentle--O, so gentle
and eager to believe that it would all be made up to them and
their beloved in Heaven! I see their bodies swaying to the
chant of meaningless long syllables of Latin magic, I see them
worked upon by those dark agencies of candle, and minor chord,
and incense, and the unknown tongue, and I see that this little
dirt-colored coin clutched so tight in their five fingers is
going to be given up, with a kind of desperate haste, ere the
climax of these incantations is past. Poor, anguished dupes of
the hope of Heaven, poor mothers, pinching your own children's
bellies to fatten the wallets of those fat priests!
Exit Salvatore
BY CLEMENT WOOD
(American poet, born 1888)
Salvatore's dead--a gap
Where he worked in the ditch-edge, shovelling mud;
Slanting brow; a head mayhap
Rather small, like a bullet; hot southern blood;
Surly now, now riotous
With the flow of his joy; and his hovel bare,
As his whole life is to us--
A stone in his belly the whole of his share.
Body starved, but the soul secure,
Masses to save it from Purgatory,
And to dwell with the Son and the Virgin pure--
Lucky Salvatore!
Salvatore's glad, for see
On the hearse and the coffin, purple and black,
Tassels, ribbons, broidery
Fit for the Priest's or the Pope's own back;
Flowers costly, waxen, gay,
And the mates from the ditch-edge, pair after pair;
Dirging band, and the Priest to pray,
And the soul of the dead one pleasuring there.
Body starved, and the mind as well.
Peace--let him rot in his costly glory,
Cheated no more with a Heaven or Hell--
Exit Salvatore.
FROM MICAH
Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob, and
rulers of the house of Israel, that abhor judgment, and pervert
all equity. They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with
iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests
thereof teach for hire, and the prophets divine for money....
Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and
Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as
the high places of a forest.
The Saint
BY ANTONIO FOGAZZARO
(Italian poet and novelist, 1842-1911. A devout Catholic, he
endeavored to reform the Church from within. The present novel created
a tremendous sensation in Italy, and was placed upon the "Index." In
this scene "the Saint" pleads with the Pope)
"May I continue, Your Holiness?"
The Pope, who while Benedetto had been speaking had kept his
eyes fixed on his face, now bowed his head slightly, in answer.
"The third evil spirit which is corrupting the Church does
not disguise itself as an angel of light, for it well knows
it cannot deceive; it is satisfied with the garb of common,
human honesty. This is the spirit of avarice. The Vicar of
Christ dwells in this royal palace as he dwelt in his episcopal
palace, with the pure heart of poverty. Many venerable pastors
dwell in the Church with the same heart, but the spirit of
poverty is not preached sufficiently, not preached as Christ
preached it. The lips of Christ's ministers are too often
over-complaisant to those who seek riches. There are those
among them who bow the head respectfully before the man who has
much, simply because he has much; there are those who let their
tongues flatter the greedy, and too many preachers of the word
and of the example of Christ deem it just for them to revel in
the pomp and honors attending on riches, to cleave with their
souls to the luxury riches bring. Father, exhort the clergy to
show those greedy for gain, be they rich or poor, more of that
charity which admonishes, which threatens, which rebukes. Holy
Father!----"
Benedetto ceased speaking. There was an expression of fervent
appeal in the gaze fixed upon the Pope.
"Well?" the Pontiff murmured.
Benedetto spread wide his arms, and continued:
"The Spirit urges me to say more. It is not the work of a day,
but let us prepare for the day--not leaving this task to the
enemies of God and of the Church--let us prepare for the day
on which the priests of Christ shall set the example of true
poverty; when it shall be their duty to live in poverty, as it
is their duty to live in chastity; and let the words of Christ
to the Seventy-two serve them as a guide in this. Then the Lord
will surround the least of them with such honors, with such
reverence as does not to-day exist in the hearts of the people
for the princes of the Church. They will be few in number, but
they will be the light of the world. Holy Father, are they that
to-day? Some among them are, but the majority shed neither
light nor darkness."
At this point the Pontiff for the first time bowed his head in
sorrowful acquiescence.
The New Rome
BY ROBERT BUCHANAN
(See page 367)
A thousand starve, a few are fed,
Legions of robbers rack the poor,
The rich man steals the widow's bread,
And Lazarus dies at Dives' door;
The Lawyer and the Priest adjust
The claims of Luxury and Lust
To seize the earth and hold the soil,
To store the grain they never reap;
Under their heels the white slaves toil,
While children wail and women weep!--
The gods are dead, but in their name
Humanity is sold to shame,
While (then as now!) the tinsel'd Priest
Sitteth with robbers at the feast,
Blesses the laden blood-stain'd board,
Weaves garlands round the butcher's sword,
And poureth freely (now as then)
The sacramental blood of Men!
The Priest and the Devil
BY FÉODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
(The Russian realist, 1821-1881, wrote this little story upon
the wall of his Siberian prison)
"Hello, you little fat father!" the devil said to the priest.
"What made you lie so to those poor, misled people? What
tortures of hell did you depict? Don't you know they are
already suffering the tortures of hell in their earthly lives?
Don't you know that you and the authorities of the State are
my representatives on earth? It is you that make them suffer
the pains of hell with which you threaten them. Don't you know
this? Well, then, come with me!"
The devil grabbed the priest by the collar, lifted him high
in the air, and carried him to a factory, to an iron foundry.
He saw the workmen there running and hurrying to and fro, and
toiling in the scorching heat. Very soon the thick, heavy air
and the heat are too much for the priest. With tears in his
eyes, he pleads with the devil: "Let me go! Let me leave this
hell!"
"Oh, my dear friend, I must show you many more places." The
devil gets hold of him again and drags him off to a farm. There
he sees workmen threshing the grain. The dust and heat are
insufferable. The overseer carries a knout, and unmercifully
beats anyone who falls to the ground overcome by hard toil or
hunger.
Next the priest is taken to the huts where these same workers
live with their families--dirty, cold, smoky, ill-smelling
holes. The devil grins. He points out the poverty and hardships
which are at home here.
"Well, isn't this enough?" he asks. And it seems as if even
he, the devil, pities the people. The pious servant of God can
hardly bear it. With uplifted hands he begs: "Let me go away
from here. Yes, yes! This is hell on earth!"
"Well, then, you see. And you still promise them another hell.
You torment them, torture them to death mentally when they are
already all but dead physically. Come on! I will show you one
more hell--one more, the very worst."
He took him to a prison and showed him a dungeon, with its
foul air and the many human forms, robbed of all health and
energy, lying on the floor, covered with vermin that were
devouring their poor, naked, emaciated bodies.
"Take off your silken clothes," said the devil to the
priest, "put on your ankles heavy chains such as these poor
unfortunates wear; lie down on the cold and filthy floor--and
then talk to them about a hell that still awaits them!"
"No, no!" answered the priest, "I cannot think of anything more
dreadful than this. I entreat you, let me go away from here!"
"Yes, this is hell. There can be no worse hell than this. Did
you not know it? Did you not know that these men and women whom
you are frightening with the picture of a hell hereafter--did
you not know that they are in hell right here, before they die?"
Work According to the Bible
(A pamphlet written by T. M. Bondareff, a Siberian peasant and
ex-serf, at the age of sixty-seven)
They often arrest thieves in the world; but these culprits
are rather rogues than thieves. I have laid hands on the real
thief, who has robbed God and the church. He has stolen the
primal commandment which belongs to us who till the fields. I
will point him out. It is he who does not produce his bread
with his own hands, but eats the fruit of others' toil.
Seize him and lead him away to judgment. All crimes such as
robberies, murders, frauds and the like arise from the fact
that this commandment is hidden from man. The rich do all they
can to avoid working with their hands, and the poor to rid
themselves of the necessity. The poor man says, "There are
people who can live on others' labor; why should not I?" and
he kills, steals and cheats in consequence. Behold now what
harm can be done by white hands, more than all that good grimy
hands can repair upon the earth! You spread out before the
laborer the idleness of your life, and thus take away the force
from his hands. Your way of living is for us the most cruel
of offences, and a shame withal. You are a hundred-fold more
wise and learned than I am, and for that reason you take my
bread. But because you are wise you ought rather to have pity
on me who am weak. It is said, "Love thy neighbor as thyself."
I am your neighbor, and you are mine. Why are we coarse and
untaught? Because we produce our own bread, and yours too! Have
we any time to study and educate ourselves? You have stolen our
brains as well as our bread by trickery and violence.
How blind thou art, O wise man; thou that readest the
scriptures, and seest not the way in which thou mightest free
thyself, and the flock committed to thee, from the burden of
sin! Thy blindness is like unto that of Balaam, who, astride
his ass, saw not the angel of God armed with a sword of fire
standing in the way before him. Thou art Balaam, I am the ass,
and thou hast ridden upon my back from childhood!
Resurrection
BY LEO TOLSTOY
(In this novel the greatest of modern religious teachers has presented
his indictment of the government and church of his country. The hero
is a Russian prince who in early youth seduces a peasant girl, and in
after life meets her, a prostitute on trial for murder. He follows
her to Siberia, in an effort to reclaim her. Near the end of his
story Tolstoi introduces this scene. The Englishman may be said to
represent modern science, which asks questions and accumulates futile
statistics; while the old man voices the peculiar Christian Anarchism
of the author, who at the age of eighty-two left his home and wandered
out into the steppes to die)
In one of the exiles' wards, Nehlúdof [the prince] recognized
the strange old man he had seen crossing the ferry that
morning. This tattered and wrinkled old man was sitting on
the floor by the beds, barefooted, wearing only a dirty
cinder-colored shirt, torn on one shoulder, and similar
trousers. He looked severely and inquiringly at the new-comers.
His emaciated body, visible through the holes in his dirty
shirt, looked miserably weak, but in his face was more
concentrated seriousness and animation than even when Nehlúdof
saw him crossing the ferry. As in all the other wards, so here
also the prisoners jumped up and stood erect when the official
entered; but the old man remained sitting. His eyes glittered
and his brow frowned wrathfully.
"Get up!" the inspector called out to him.
The old man did not rise, but only smiled contemptuously.
"Thy servants are standing before thee, I am not thy servant.
Thou bearest the seal...." said the old man, pointing to the
inspector's forehead.
"Wha--a--t?" said the inspector threateningly, and made a step
towards him.
"I know this man," said Nehlúdof. "What is he imprisoned for?"
"The police have sent him here because he has no passport.
We ask them not to send such, but they will do it," said the
inspector, casting an angry side glance at the old man.
"And so it seems thou, too, art one of Antichrist's army?" said
the old man to Nehlúdof.
"No, I am a visitor," said Nehlúdof.
"What, hast thou come to see how Antichrist tortures men? Here,
see. He has locked them up in a cage, a whole army of them. Men
should eat bread in the sweat of their brow. But He has locked
them up with no work to do, and feeds them like swine, so that
they should turn into beasts."
"What is he saying?" asked the Englishman.
Nehlúdof told him the old man was blaming the inspector for
keeping men imprisoned.
"Ask him how he thinks one should treat those who do not keep
the laws," said the Englishman.
Nehlúdof translated the question.
The old man laughed strangely, showing his regular teeth.
"The laws?" he repeated with contempt. "First Antichrist
robbed everybody, took all the earth, and all rights away from
them--took them all for himself--killed all those who were
against him--and then He wrote laws forbidding to rob and to
kill. He should have written those laws sooner."
Nehlúdof translated. The Englishman smiled.
"Well, anyhow, ask him how one should treat thieves and
murderers now?"
Nehlúdof again translated the question.
"Tell him he should take the seal of Antichrist off from
himself," the old man said, frowning severely; "then he will
know neither thieves nor murderers. Tell him so."
"He is crazy," said the Englishman, when Nehlúdof had
translated the old man's words; and shrugging his shoulders he
left the cell.
"Do thine own task and leave others alone. Every one for
himself. God knows whom to execute, whom to pardon, but we do
not know," said the old man. "Be your own chief, then chiefs
will not be wanted. Go, go," he added, frowning angrily, and
looking with glittering eyes at Nehlúdof, who lingered in
the ward. "Hast thou not gazed enough on how the servants of
Antichrist feed lice on men? Go! Go!"
Sunday
(_From "Challenge"_)
BY LOUIS UNTERMEYER
(See pages 42, 418)
It was Sunday--
Eleven in the morning; people were at church--
Prayers were in the making; God was near at hand--
Down the cramped and narrow streets of quiet Lawrence
Came the tramp of workers marching in their hundreds;
Marching in the morning, marching to the grave-yard,
Where, no longer fiery, underneath the grasses,
Callous and uncaring, lay their friend and sister.
In their hands they carried wreaths and drooping flowers,
Overhead their banners dipped and soared like eagles--
Aye, but eagles bleeding, stained with their own heart's blood--
Red, but not for glory--red, with wounds and travail,
Red, the buoyant symbol of the blood of all the world.
So they bore their banners, singing toward the grave-yard,
So they marched and chanted, mingling tears and tributes,
So, with flowers, the dying went to deck the dead.
Within the churches people heard
The sound, and much concern was theirs--
God might not hear the Sacred Word--
God might not hear their prayers!
_Should such things be allowed these slaves--
To vex the Sabbath peace with Song,
To come with chants, like marching waves,
That proudly swept along._
_Suppose God turned to these--and heard!
Suppose He listened unawares--
God might forget the Sacred Word,
God might forget their prayers!_
And so (the tragic irony)
The blue-clad Guardians of the Peace
Were sent to sweep them back--to see
The ribald Song should cease;
To scatter those who came and vexed
God with their troubled cries and cares.
Quiet--so God might hear the text;
The sleek and unctuous prayers!
Up the rapt and singing streets of little Lawrence
Came the stolid soldiers; and, behind the bluecoats,
Grinning and invisible, bearing unseen torches,
Rode red hordes of anger, sweeping all before them.
Lust and Evil joined them--Terror rode among them;
Fury fired its pistols; Madness stabbed and yelled.
Through the wild and bleeding streets of shuddering Lawrence,
Raged the heedless panic, hour-long and bitter.
Passion tore and trampled; men once mild and peaceful,
Fought with savage hatred in the name of Law and Order.
And, below the outcry, like the sea beneath the breakers,
Mingling with the anguish, rolled the solemn organ....
Eleven in the morning--people were at church--
Prayers were in the making--God was near at hand--
It was Sunday!
BY ISAIAH
Hear the word of the Lord, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto
the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah. To what purpose is
the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord....
Bring no more vain oblations.... When ye spread forth your
hands, I will hide mine eyes from you; yea when ye make many
prayers I will not hear; your hands are full of blood.
To the Preacher
(_From "In This Our World"_)
BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
(See pages 200, 209)
Preach about yesterday, Preacher!
The time so far away:
When the hand of Deity smote and slew,
And the heathen plagued the stiff-necked Jew;
Or when the Man of Sorrow came,
And blessed the people who cursed his name--
Preach about yesterday, Preacher,
Not about today!
Preach about tomorrow, Preacher!
Beyond this world's decay:
Of the sheepfold Paradise we priced
When we pinned our faith to Jesus Christ;
Of those hot depths that shall receive
The goats who would not so believe--
Preach about tomorrow, Preacher,
Not about today!
Preach about the old sins, Preacher!
And the old virtues, too:
You must not steal nor take man's life,
You must not covet your neighbor's wife,
And woman must cling at every cost
To her one virtue, or she is lost--
Preach about the old sins, Preacher!
Not about the new!
Preach about the other man, Preacher!
The man we all can see!
The man of oaths, the man of strife,
The man who drinks and beats his wife,
Who helps his mates to fret and shirk
When all they need is to keep at work--
Preach about the other man, Preacher!
Not about me!
The Reluctant Briber
BY LINCOLN STEFFENS
(The president of a powerful public service corporation has
become disturbed in conscience, and calls in a student of
social conditions)
"You're unhappy because you are bribing and corrupting, and you
ask my advice. Why? I'm no ethical teacher. You're a churchman.
Why don't you go to your pastor?"
"Pastor!" he exclaimed, and he laughed. The scorn of that
laugh! "Pastor!"
He turned and walked away, to get control, no doubt. I kept
after him.
"Yes," I insisted, "you should go to the head of your church
for moral counsel, and--for economic advice you should go to
the professor of economics in----"
He stopped me, facing about. "Professor!" he echoed, and he
didn't reflect my tone.
I was serious. I wanted to get something from him. I wanted to
know why our practical men do not go to these professions for
help, as they go to lawyers and engineers. And this man had
given time and money to the university in his town and to his
church, as I reminded him.
"You support colleges and churches, you and your kind do," I
said. "What for?"
"For women and children," he snapped from his distance.
BY SAVONAROLA
(Italian religious reformer, 1452-1498; hanged and burned by
his enemies)
But dost thou know what I would tell thee? In the primitive
church, the chalices were of wood, the prelates of gold. In
these days the church hath chalices of gold and prelates of
wood.
The Preacher
(_From "The Canterbury Tales"_)
BY GEOFFREY CHAUCER
(Early English poet, 1340-1400)
Than peyne I me to strecche forth my necke,
And est and west upon the people I bekke,
As doth a pigeon, syttyng on a loft;
Myn hondes and my tonge move so oft,
That it is joye to see my busynesse.
Of avarice and of suche cursedness
Is al my preching, for to make hem free
To give their pence, and namely unto me....
Therfor my theem is yit, and ever was,
The root of evils is cupidity.
Thus can I preche agayn the same vice
Which that I use, and that is avarice.
But though myself be gilty in the same,
Yit can I maken other folks to blame.
Twentieth Century Socialism
BY EDMOND KELLY
(American lawyer and Socialist, 1851-1909)
It seems inconceivable that the same civilization should
include two bodies of men living in apparent harmony and
yet holding such opposite and inconsistent views of man as
economists on the one hand and theologians on the other. To
these last, man has no economic needs; this world does not
count; it is merely a place of probation, mitigated sometimes,
it is true, by ecclesiastical pomp and episcopal palaces;
but serving for the most part as a mere preparation for a
future existence which will satisfy the aspirations of the
human soul--the only thing that does count, in this world
or the next. So while to the economist man is all hog, to
the theologian he is all soul; and between the two the devil
secures the vast majority.
The True Faith
(_From "A Lay Sermon to Preachers"_)
BY HENRY ARTHUR JONES
(English dramatist, born 1851)
I believe--I stand accountant for the words to That which gave
me the power of thinking and writing them--I believe that if
the time and money and thought now given in England to the
propagation of wholly incredible doctrines, which are no sooner
uttered in one pulpit than they are repudiated in another--if
this time and money and thought were given to the understanding
and scattering abroad of the simplest laws of national economy,
of physiology, of health and beauty, in another generation our
England would be greater and mightier than she has ever been.
I believe a knowledge of the necessity of fresh air, of the
value of beauty, of the certain disease and national corruption
and deathfulness hidden in our present commercial system, to
be worth far more than all the books on theology ever written.
I believe faith in constant ventilation and constant outdoor
exercise to be a greater religious necessity than faith in any
doctrine of any sect in England today.
God in the World
(_From "Gitanjali"_)
BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE
(Most popular of Hindoo poets, who recently achieved
international fame, and received the Nobel prize)
Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost
thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors
all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!
He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and
where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun
and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put off
thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!
Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? Our master
himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation; he
is bound with us all for ever.
Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and
incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and
stained? Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy
brow.
Priests
(_From "Songs for the New Age"_)
BY JAMES OPPENHEIM
(See pages 45, 129, 147)
Priests are in bad odor,
And yet there shall be no lack of them.
The skies shall not lack a spokesman,
Nor the spirit of man a voice and a gesture.
Not garbed nor churched,
Yet, as of old, in loneliness and anguish,
They shall come eating and drinking among us,
With scourge, pity, and prayer.
Brotherhood
(_From "The Book of The People"_)
BY ROBERT DE LAMENNAIS
(French philosopher and religious reformer, 1782-1854)
Your task is to form the universal family, to build the City of
God, and by a continuous labor gradually to translate His work
in Humanity into fact.
When you love one another as brothers, and treat each other
reciprocally as such; when each one, seeking his own good in
the good of all, shall identify his own life with the life of
all, his own interests with the interests of all, and shall be
always ready to sacrifice himself for all the members of the
common family--then most of the ills which weigh upon the human
race will vanish, as thick mists gathered upon the horizon
vanish at the rising of the sun.
BOOK IX
_The Voice of the Ages_
Records from all the past history of mankind from twenty-five
different races; the earliest being about 3500 B. C.
The Suppressions of History
(_From "The Ancient Lowly"_)
BY C. OSBORNE WARD
(American historian, who was forced to publish at his own
expense the results of his life-time researches into the early
history of the working class)
The great strikes and uprisings of the working people of the
ancient world are almost unknown to the living age. It matters
little how accounts of five immense strike-wars, involving
destruction of property and mutual slaughter of millions of
people, have been suppressed, or have otherwise failed to reach
us; the fact remains that people are absolutely ignorant of
these great events. A meagre sketch of Spartacus may be seen
in the encyclopedias, but it is always ruined and its interest
pinched and blighted by being classed with crime, its heroes
with criminals, its theme with desecration. Yet Spartacus was
one of the great generals of history; fully equal to Hannibal
and Napoleon, while his cause was much more just and infinitely
nobler, his life a model of the beautiful and virtuous, his
death an episode of surpassing grandeur.
Still more strange is it, that the great ten-years' war of
Eunus should be unknown. He marshalled at one time an army of
two hundred thousand soldiers. He manœuvered them and fought
for ten full years for liberty, defeating army after army
of Rome. Why is the world ignorant of this fierce, epochal
rebellion? Almost the whole matter is passed over in silence by
our histories of Rome. In these pages it will be read as news,
yet should a similar war rage in our day, against a similar
condition of slavery, its cause would not only be considered
just, but the combatants would have the sympathy and support of
the civilized world.
The great system of labor organization explained in these
pages must likewise be regarded as a chapter of news. The
portentous fact has lain in abeyance century after century,
with the human family in profound ignorance of an organization
of trades and other labor unions so powerful that for hundreds
of years they undertook and successfully conducted the business
of manufacture, of distribution, of purveying provisions to
armies, of feeding the inhabitants of the largest cities in the
world, of inventing, supplying and working the huge engines of
war, and of collecting customs and taxes--tasks confided to
their care by the state.
Our civilization has a blushingly poor excuse for its profound
ignorance of these facts; for the evidences have existed from
much before the beginning of our era.... They are growing fewer
and dimmer as their value rises higher in the estimation of a
thinking, appreciative, gradually awakening world.
Agis
BY PLUTARCH
(Greek historian, A. D. 50-120; author of numerous biographical
sketches. It has been said: He stands before us as the legate, the
ambassador, and the orator on behalf of those institutions whereby the
old-time men were rendered wise and virtuous)
When the love of gold and silver had once gained admittance
into the Lacedæmonian commonwealth, it was quickly followed by
avarice and baseness of spirit in the pursuit of it, and by
luxury, effeminacy and prodigality in the use. Then Sparta fell
from almost all her former virtue and repute....
For the rich men without scruple drew the estate into their own
hands, excluding the rightful heirs from their succession; and
all the wealth being centered upon the few, the generality were
poor and miserable. Honorable pursuits, for which there was
no longer leisure, were neglected; the state was filled with
sordid business, and with hatred and envy of the rich....
Agis, therefore, believing it a glorious action, as in truth
it was, to equalize and repeople the state, began to sound the
inclinations of the citizens. He found the young men disposed
beyond his expectation; they were eager to enter with him upon
the contest in the cause of virtue, and to fling aside, for
freedom's sake, their old manner of life, as readily as the
wrestler does his garment. But the old men, habituated and
confirmed in their vices, were most of them alarmed. These men
could not endure to hear Agis continually deploring the present
state of Sparta, and wishing she might be restored to her
ancient glory....
Agis, nevertheless, little regarding these rumours, took the
first occasion of proposing his measure to the council, the
chief articles of which were these: That every one should be
free from their debts; all the lands to be divided into equal
portions....
The people were transported with admiration of the young man's
generosity, and with joy that, after three hundred years'
interval, at last there had appeared a king worthy of Sparta.
But, on the other side, Leonidas was now more than ever averse,
being sensible that he and his friends would be obliged to
contribute with their riches, and yet all the honour and
obligation would redound to Agis. [Sparta had two kings,
Leonidas and Agis.]
From this time forward, as the common people followed Agis,
so the rich men adhered to Leonidas. They besought him not to
forsake their cause; and with persuasions and entreaties so far
prevailed with the council of Elders, whose power consisted in
preparing all laws before they were proposed to the people,
that the designed measure was rejected, though but by one vote.
[Attacked by his enemies, Agis sought refuge in a temple.]
Leonidas proceeded also to displace the ephors, and to choose
others in their stead; then he began to consider how he
might entrap Agis. At first, he endeavored by fair means to
persuade him to leave the sanctuary, and partake with him in
the kingdom. The people, he said, would easily pardon the
errors of a young man, ambitious of glory. But finding Agis was
suspicious, and not to be prevailed with to quit his sanctuary,
he gave up that design; yet what could not then be effected by
the dissimulation of an enemy, was soon after brought to pass
by the treachery of friends.
Amphares, Damochares, and Arcesilaus often visited Agis, and he
was so confident of their fidelity that after a while he was
prevailed on to accompany them to the baths, which were not
far distant, they constantly returning to see him safe again
in the temple. They were all three his familiars; and Amphares
had borrowed a great deal of plate and rich household stuff
from the mother of Agis, and hoped if he could destroy her and
the whole family, he might peaceably enjoy those goods. And
he, it is said, was the readiest of all to serve the purposes
of Leonidas, and being one of the ephors, did all he could to
incense the rest of his colleagues against Agis. These men,
therefore, finding that Agis would not quit his sanctuary, but
on occasion would venture from it to go to the bath, resolved
to seize him on the opportunity thus given them. And one day
as he was returning, they met and saluted him as formerly,
conversing pleasantly by the way, and jesting, as youthful
friends might, till coming to the turning of the street which
led to the prison, Amphares, by virtue of his office, laid his
hand on Agis, and told him, "You must go with me, Agis, before
the other ephors, to answer for your misdemeanors." At the same
time Damochares, who was a tall, strong man, drew his cloak
tight around his neck, and dragged him after by it, whilst the
others went behind to thrust him on. So that none of Agis'
friends being near to assist him, nor any one by, they easily
got him into the prison, where Leonidas was already arrived,
with a company of soldiers, who strongly guarded all the
avenues; the ephors also came in, with as many of the Elders as
they knew to be true to their party, being desirous to proceed
with some semblance of justice. And thus they bade him give
an account of his actions. To which Agis, smiling at their
dissimulation, answered not a word. Amphares told him it was
more seasonable for him to weep, for now the time was come in
which he should be punished for his presumption. Another of the
ephors, as though he would be more favorable, and offering as
it were an excuse, asked him whether he was not forced to what
he did by Agesilaus and Lysander. But Agis answered, he had not
been constrained by any man, nor had any other intent in what
he did but to follow the example of Lycurgus, and to govern
conformably to his laws. The same ephor asked him whether now
at least he did not repent his rashness. To which the young man
answered that though he were to suffer the extremest penalty
for it, yet he could never repent of so just and glorious a
design. Upon this they passed sentence of death on him, and
bade the officers carry him to the Dechas, as it is called, a
place in the prison where they strangle malefactors. And when
the officers would not venture to lay hands on him, and the
very mercenary soldiers declined it, believing it an illegal
and a wicked act to lay violent hands on a king, Damochares,
threatening and reviling them for it, himself thrust him into
the room.
For by this time the news of his being seized had reached many
parts of the city, and there was a concourse of people with
lights and torches about the prison gates, and in the midst of
them the mother and the grandmother of Agis, crying out with a
loud voice that their king ought to appear, and to be heard and
judged by the people. But this clamour, instead of preventing,
hastened his death; his enemies fearing, if the tumult should
increase, he might be rescued during the night out of their
hands.
Agis, being now at the point to die, perceived one of the
officers bitterly bewailing his misfortune. "Weep not, friend,"
said he, "for me, who die innocent, by the lawless act of
wicked men. My condition is much better than theirs." As soon
as he had spoken these words, not showing the least sign of
fear, he offered his neck to the noose.
The Labor Problem in Egypt
(_From the Book of Exodus_)
(Hebrew, B. C. Fourteenth Century; a record of one of the
earliest of labor disputes)
Pharaoh said, "Who is the Lord, that I should hearken unto his
voice to let Israel go? I know not the Lord, and moreover I
will not let Israel go.... Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron,
loose the people from their work? get you unto your burdens....
Let heavier work be laid upon the men, that they may labour
therein; and let them not regard lying words.... Ye are idle,
ye are idle; therefore ye say, Let us go and sacrifice to the
Lord. Go therefore now, and work; for there shall no straw be
given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks."
And the officers of the children of Israel did see that they
were in evil case, when it was said, "Ye shall not minish aught
from your bricks, your daily task."
And they met Moses and Aaron, who stood in the way, as they
came forth from Pharaoh: and they said unto them, "The Lord
look upon you and judge; because you have made our savour to
be abhorred in the eyes of Pharaoh, and in the eyes of his
servants, to put a sword in their hand to slay us."
And Moses returned unto the Lord, and said, "Lord, wherefore
hast thou evil entreated this people? Why is it that thou hast
sent me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in thy name, he
hath evil entreated this people; neither hast thou delivered
thy people at all."
Then the Lord said unto Moses, "Now shalt thou see what I will
do to Pharaoh: for with a strong hand shall he let them go, and
with a strong hand shall he drive them out of his land."
The People
BY TOMMASO CAMPANELLA
(Italian philosopher, 1568-1639. Translation by John Addington
Symonds)
The people is a beast of muddy brain
That knows not its own strength, and therefore stands
Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands
Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein;
One kick would be enough to break the chain,
But the beast fears, and what the child demands
It does; nor its own terror understands,
Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.
Most wonderful! With its own hand it ties
And gags itself--gives itself death and war
For pence doled out by kings from its own store.
Its own are all things between earth and heaven;
But this it knows not; and if one arise
To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.
FROM ECCLESIASTES
(Hebrew, B.C. 200)
Then I returned and saw all oppressions that are done under the
sun: and behold, the tears of such as were oppressed, and they
had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there
was power, but they had no comforter. Wherefore I praised the
dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet
alive; yea, better than them both did I esteem him which hath
not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done
under the sun.
Tiberius Gracchus
(_Tribune of the Roman People_)
BY PLUTARCH
(Greek, A.D. 50-120)
Tiberius, maintaining an honorable and just cause, and
possessed of eloquence sufficient to have made a less
creditable action appear plausible, was no safe or easy
antagonist, when, with the people crowding around the hustings,
he took his place and spoke in behalf of the poor. "The savage
beasts," said he, "in Italy, have their particular dens, they
have their places of repose and refuge; but the men who bear
arms, and expose their lives for the safety of their country,
enjoy in the meantime nothing in it but the air and light; and,
having no houses or settlements of their own, are constrained
to wander from place to place with their wives and children."
He told them that the commanders were guilty of a ridiculous
error, when, at the head of their armies, they exhorted the
common soldiers to fight for their sepulchers and altars; when
not any amongst so many Romans is possessed of either altar
or monument, neither have they any houses of their own, or
hearths of their ancestors to defend. They fought indeed and
were slain, but it was to maintain the luxury and the wealth of
other men. They were styled the masters of the world, but had
not one foot of ground they could call their own.
Captive Good Attending Captain Ill
BY EURIPIDES
(Athenian tragic poet, B.C. 480-406; the most modern of ancient
writers. Translation by John Addington Symonds)
Doth some one say that there be gods above?
There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool,
Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.
Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words
No undue credence; for I say that kings
Kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud,
And doing thus are happier than those
Who live calm pious lives day after day.
How many little states that serve the gods
Are subject to the godless but more strong,
Made slaves by might of a superior army!
Poverty
BY ALCAEUS
(Greek lyric poet, B.C. 611-580; banished for his resistance to
tyrants. Translation by Sir William Jones)
The worst of ills, and hardest to endure,
Past hope, past cure,
Is Penury, who, with her sister-mate
Disorder, soon brings down the loftiest state,
And makes it desolate.
This truth the sage of Sparta told,
Aristodemus old,--
"Wealth makes the man." On him that's poor
Proud Worth looks down, and Honor shuts the door.
The Beggar's Complaint
(Ancient Japanese classic)
The heaven and earth they call so great,
For me are very small;
The sun and moon they call so bright,
For me ne'er shine at all.
Are all men sad, or only I?
And what have I obtained--
What good the gift of mortal life,
That prize so rarely gained--
If nought my chilly back protects
But one thin grass-cloth coat,
In tatters hanging like the weeds
That on the billows float?
If here in smoke-stained, darksome hut,
Upon the bare cold ground,
I make my wretched bed of straw,
And hear the mournful sound--
Hear how mine aged parents groan,
And wife and children cry,
Father and mother, children, wife,
Huddling in misery--
If in the rice-pan, nigh forgot,
The spider hangs its nest,
And from the hearth no smoke goes up
Where all is so unblest?
Shame and despair are mine from day to day,
But, being no bird, I cannot fly away.
Free Labor
BY HAGGAI
(Hebrew prophet, B.C. 515)
He that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with
holes.
Plutus
BY ARISTOPHANES
(Greek comedy writer and satirist; B.C. 450-380. There is probably not
a Socialist in the world who has not been asked the question: "Who
will do the dirty work?" It is interesting to see this difficulty set
forth in a comedy which was staged in Athens in the year 408 B.C.
Chremylus and Blepsidemus, two citizens, have taken in charge Plutus,
the god of wealth, who is blind. They have undertaken to cure him of
his blindness; but an old hag by the name of Poverty appears, and
offers to convince them that their success would mean a calamity to
the human race)
CHREMYLUS:--As matters now stand (who will dare contradict it?)
the life of us men is compos'd
Of a system where folly, absurdity, madness, ay, raving
downright is disclosed;
Since, how many a knave we see revel in wealth--the rich heap
of his ill-gotten store--
And how many a good man, by fortune unblest, with thee begging
bread at the door! (_Turns to Poverty._)
I say, then, there is but one thing to be done, and if we
succeed, what a prize
Will we bring to mankind! That thing it will be--to give Plutus
the use of his eyes.
POVERTY:--A pest on your prate, and palavering stuff! back!
begone with ye, blockheads, to school!
You pair of old dotards, you drivelling comrades in trifling
and playing the fool!
If the plan ye propose be accomplish'd at last nothing worse
could mankind e'er befall,
Than that Plutus should have the full use of his eyes, and
bestow himself equal on all!
See you not, that at once, to all arts there would be, to each
craft that you reckon, an end?
If these were exploded (so much to your joy), say who _then_
should there be, who would lend
To the forge, to the hammer, the adze or the loom--to the rule
or the mallet--his hand?
Not a soul! The mechanic, the carpenter, shipwright--would all
be expelled from the land.
Where would tailor, or cobbler, or dyer of leather, or
bricklay'r, or tanner be found?
Who would e'er condescend in this golden vacation, to till, for
his bread's sake, the ground?
BLEPSIDEMUS:--Hold, hold, jade! Whatever essentials of life in
your catalogue's column you string,
Our servants, of course, shall provide us.
POVERTY:--Your servants? and whence do you think _they_ shall spring?
BLEPSIDEMUS:--We shall buy them with cash--
POVERTY:--But with cash all the world as well as yourself is supplied!
Who will care about selling?
BLEPSIDEMUS:--Some dealer, no doubt, coming down from the Thessaly
side,
(A rare kidnapping nest) who may wish to secure a good bargain to
profit the trade.
POVERTY (_impatiently_):--You will not understand! In the lots of
mankind when this grand revolution is made
'Twill at once put an end to all wants--and of course then, the
kidnapper's business will cease:
For who will court danger, and hazard his life, when, grown rich,
he may live at his ease?
Thus each for himself will be forced to turn plowman, to dig and
to delve and to sweat;
Wearing out an existence more grievous by far than he ever
experienced yet.
CHREMYLUS:--Curses on you!
POVERTY:--You'll not have a bed to lie down on--no goods of the
sort will be seen!
Not a carpet to tread on--for who, pray, will weave one, when
well stock'd his coffers have been?
Farewell to your essences, perfumes, pastilles! When you lead
to the altar your bride
Farewell to your roseate veil's drooping folds, the bright hues
of its glittering pride!
Yet forsooth "to be rich"--say what is it, without all these
gew-gaws to swell the detail?
Now with me, every item that wish can suggest springs abundant
and never can fail;
For who, but myself, urges on to his toil, like a mistress, and
drives the mechanic?
If he flags, I but show him my face at the door, and he hies to
his work in a panic!
CHREMYLUS:--Pshaw! What good can _you_ bring but sores,
blisters and blains, on the wretch as he shivering goes
From the baths' genial clime driv'n forth to the cold, at the
certain expense of his toes?
What, but poor little urchins, whose stomachs are craving, and
little old beldames in shoals;
And lice by the thousand, mosquitoes and flies? (I can't count
you the cloud as it rolls!)
Which keep humming and buzzing about one, a language denying
the respite of sleep,
In a strain thus consoling--"Poor starveling, awake, tho to
hunger!"--yet up you must leap!
Add to this, that you treat us with rags to our backs and a
bundle of straw for a bed
(Woe betide the poor wretch on whose carcass the bugs of that
ravenous pallet have fed!)
For a carpet, a rotten old mat--for a pillow, a great stone
picked out of the street--
And for porridge, or bread, a mere leaf of radish, or stem of a
mallow, to eat.
The head that remains of some wreck of a pitcher, by way of a
seat you provide;
For the trough we make use of in kneading, we're driven to
shift with a wine barrel's side,--
And this, too, all broken and split:--in a word, your
magnificent gifts to conclude,
(_Ironically_) To mankind you indeed are a blessed dispenser of
mighty and manifold good!...
On my word, dame, your fav'rites are happily off, after
striving and toiling to save,
If at last they are able to levy enough to procure them a
cheque to the grave!
The Lawyer and the Farmer
(Egyptian; B.C. 1400, or earlier. A letter from a father to his
son, exhorting him to stick to the study of his profession)
It is told to me that thou hast cast aside learning, and givest
thyself to dancing; thou turnest thy face to the work in the
fields, and castest the divine words behind thee.
Behold, thou rememberest not the condition of the fellah
(farmer) when the harvest is taken over. The worms carry off
half the corn, and the hippopotamus devours the rest; mice
abound in the fields, and locusts arrive; the cattle devour,
the sparrows steal. How miserable is the lot of the fellah!
What remains on the threshing-floor, robbers finish it up. The
bronze ... are worn out, the horses die with threshing and
plowing. Then the scribe (lawyer) moors at the bank, who is
to take over the harvest for the government; the attendants
bear staves, the negroes carry palm sticks. They say, "Give
corn!" But there is none. They beat the fellah prostrate; they
bind him and cast him into the canal, throwing him headlong.
His wife is bound before him, his children are swung off; his
neighbors let them go, and flee to look after their corn.
But the scribe is the leader of labor for all; he reckons to
himself the produce in winter, and there is none that appoints
him his tale of produce. Behold, now thou knowest!
Farmer and Lawyer Again
(_From "The Vision of Piers Plowman"_)
BY WILLIAM LANGLAND
(One of the earliest of English social protests, a picture of
the misery of the workers of the fourteenth century)
Some were for ploughing, and played full seldom,
Set their seed and sowed their seed and sweated hard,
To win what wastrels with gluttony destroy....
There wandered a hundred in hoods of silk,
Serjeants they seemed, and served at the Bar,
Pleading the Law for pennies and for pounds,
Unlocking their lips never for love of our Lord.
Thou mightest better mete the mist on Malvern hills
Than get a mutter from their mouths--save thou show thy money!
The Agitator
BY ISAIAH
(Hebrew prophet, B.C. 740)
For Zion's sake will I not hold my peace,
And for Jerusalem's sake will I not rest,
Until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness,
And the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth.
Upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, have I set watchmen,
Who shall never hold their peace, day and night.
Go through, go through the gates;
Prepare ye the way of the people!
Lift up a standard to the peoples!
The Muckraker in Persia
BY NIZAMI
(Persian poet, A.D. 1200)
There was a king who oppressed his subjects. An informer came
to him, and said, "A certain old man has in private called thee
a tyrant, a disturber, and bloodthirsty." The king, enraged,
said, "Even now I put him to death." While the king made
preparations for the execution, a youth ran to the old man, and
said, "The king is ill-disposed to thee; hasten to assuage his
wrath." The sage performed his ablutions, took his shroud, and
went to the king. The tyrant, seeing him, clapped his hands
together, and with eye hungry for revenge, cried, "I hear thou
hast given loose to thy speech; thou hast called me revengeful,
an oppressive demon." The sage replied, "I have said worse of
thee than what thou repeatest. Old and young are in peril from
thy action; town and village are injured by thy ministry. Apply
thy understanding, and see if it be true; if it be not, slay me
on a gibbet. I am holding a mirror before thee; when it shows
thy blemishes truly, it is a folly to break the mirror. Break
thyself!"
The king saw the rectitude of the sage, and his own
crookedness. He said, "Remove his burial spices, and his
shroud; bring to him sweet perfumes, and the robe of honor." He
became a just prince, cherishing his subjects. Bring forward
thy rough truth; truth from thee is victory; it shall shine as
a pearl.
The System
BY JEREMIAH
(Hebrew prophet, B.C. 630)
For among my people are found wicked men; they lay wait, as he
that setteth snares; they set a trap, they catch men. As a cage
is full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit; therefore
they are become great, and waxen rich. They are waxen fat, they
shine; yea, they overpass the deeds of the wicked; they judge
not the cause, the cause of the fatherless, yet they prosper;
and the right of the needy do they not judge. Shall I not visit
them for these things? saith the Lord; shall not my soul be
avenged on such a nation as this? A wonderful and horrible
thing is committed in the land; the prophets prophesy falsely,
and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to
have it so; and what will ye do in the end thereof?
Grafters in Athens
(_From "The Frogs"_)
BY ARISTOPHANES
(Greek comedy, produced B.C. 405)
Keep silence--keep peace--and let all the profane
From our holy solemnity duly refrain;
Whose souls unenlightened by taste, are obscure;
Whose poetical notions are dark and impure;
Whose theatrical conscience
Is sullied by nonsense;
Who never were train'd by the mighty Cratinus
In mystical orgies poetic and vinous;
Who delight in buffooning and jests out of season;
Who promote the designs of oppression and treason;
Who foster sedition, and strife, and debate;
All traitors, in short, to the stage and the state;
Who surrender a fort, or in private, export
To places and harbors of hostile resort,
Clandestine consignments of cables and pitch;
In the way the Thorycion grew to be rich
From a scoundrelly dirty collector of tribute!
All such we reject and severely prohibit:
All statesmen retrenching the fees and the salaries
Of theatrical bards, in revenge for the railleries,
And jests, and lampoons, of this holy solemnity,
Profanely pursuing their personal enmity,
For having been flouted, and scoff'd, and scorn'd,
All such are admonish'd and heartily warn'd!
We warn them once,
We warn them twice,
We warn and admonish--we warn them thrice,
To conform to the law,
To retire and withdraw--
While the Chorus again with the formal saw
(Fixt and assign'd to the festive day)
Move to the measure and march away!
Pure Food Agitation
BY MARTIN LUTHER
(German religious reformer, 1483-1564)
They have learned the trick of placing such commodities as
pepper, ginger, saffron, in damp vaults or cellars in order
to increase the weight.... Nor is there a single article of
trade whatever out of which they cannot make unfair profit by
false measuring, counting or weighing. They produce artificial
colors, or they put the pretty things at the top and bottom
and the ugly ones in the middle; and indeed there is no end to
their trickery, and no one tradesman will trust another, for
they know each other's ways.
Wall Street
BY HABAKKUK
(Hebrew prophet. B.C. 600)
They take up all of them with the angle, they catch them in
their net, and gather them in their drag; therefore they
sacrifice unto their nets, and burn incense unto their drags;
because by them their portion is fat, and their meat plenteous.
BY MARTIAL
(Latin poet, A.D. 43-104)
If you are a poor man now, Aemilianus, a poor man you will
always be. Nowadays, riches are bestowed on no one but the
rich.
BY CATO, THE CENSOR
(Latin, B.C. 234-149)
Small thieves lie in towers fastened to wooden blocks; big ones
strut about in gold and silver.
Prosperity
(_From the Book of Job_)
(Hebrew, B.C. Fourth Century)
Thou hast taken pledges of thy brother for nought, and stripped
the naked of their clothing. Thou hast not given water to the
weary to drink, and thou hast withholden bread from the hungry.
But as for the mighty man, he had the earth; and the honourable
man, he dwelt in it. Thou hast sent widows away empty, and the
arms of the fatherless have been broken.
The Leading Citizen
BY HORACE
(Latin poet, B.C. 65-8. Translation by John Milton)
Whom do we count a good man? Whom but he
Who keeps the laws and statutes of the senate,
Who judges in great suits and controversies,
Whose witness and opinion wins the cause?
But his own house, and the whole neighborhood,
Sees his foul inside through his whited skin.
Hong's Experiences in Hades
BY IM BANG
(Korean poet, 1640-1722)
The next hell had inscribed on it, "Deceivers." I saw in it
many scores of people, with ogres that cut the flesh from their
bodies, and fed it to starving demons. These ate and ate, and
the flesh was cut and cut till only the bones remained. When
the winds of hell blew, then flesh returned to them; then
metal snakes and copper dogs crowded in to bite them and suck
their blood. Their screams of pain made the earth to tremble.
The guides said to me, "When these offenders were on earth
they held high office, and while they pretended to be true
and good they received bribes in secret and were doers of all
evil. As Ministers of State they ate the fat of the land and
sucked the blood of the people, and yet advertised themselves
as benefactors and were highly applauded. While in reality
they lived as thieves, they pretended to be holy, as Confucius
and Mencius were holy. They were deceivers of the world, and
robbers, and so are punished thus."
Monopolies
BY MARTIN LUTHER
(A picture of the conditions which brought on the Peasants' War
in Germany, 1525)
Before all, if the princes and lords wish to fulfill the duties
of their office they must prohibit and banish the vicious
system of monopolies, which is altogether unendurable in town
or country. As for the trading companies, they are thoroughly
corrupt and made up of great injustices. They have every sort
of commodity in their own power and they do with them just as
they please, raise or lower the prices at their own convenience
and crush and ruin all the small shop people--just as the pike
does with the small fish in the water--as if they were lords
over God's creatures and exempt from all laws of authority and
religion.... How can it be godly and just that in so short a
time a man should grow so rich that he can outbid kings and
emperors? They have brought things to such a pass that all
the rest of the world must carry on business with risk and
damage, gaining today, losing tomorrow, while they continually
grow richer and richer, and make up for their losses by higher
profits; so it is no wonder that they are appropriating to
themselves the riches of the whole world.
Intemperate Speech
(_From the Epistle of James_)
(A.D. 100 to 120)
Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that
shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your
garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver are cankered;
and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall
eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasures
together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the laborers
who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back
by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are
entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. Ye have lived in
pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your
hearts, as in a day of slaughter. Ye have condemned and killed
the just: and he doth not resist you. Be patient, therefore,
brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman
waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long
patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. Be
ye also patient; stablish your hearts; for the coming of the
Lord draweth nigh.
Government
BY MARCUS AURELIUS
(Roman emperor and philosopher, A.D. 121-180)
And these your professed politicians, the only true practical
philosophers of the world (as they think themselves) so full
of affected gravity, or such professed lovers of virtue and
honesty, what wretches be they in very deed; how vile and
contemptible in themselves! O man, what ado dost thou make!
Murder by Statute
(_From "The Sayings of Mencius"_)
(Chinese classic, B.C. 300)
King Hwuy of Leang said, "I wish quietly to receive your
instructions." Mencius replied, "Is there any difference between
killing a man with a stick, and with a sword?" "There is not,"
was the answer.
Mencius continued, "Is there any difference between doing it
with a sword and with government measures?" "There is not," was
the answer again.
Mencius then said, "In your stalls there are fat beasts; in
your stables there are fat horses. But your people have the
look of hunger, and in the fields are those who have died of
famine. This is leading on beasts to devour men. Beasts devour
one another, and men hate them for doing so. When he who is
called the parent of the people conducts his government so as
to be chargeable with leading on beasts to devour men, where is
that parental relation to the people?"
Rebuking a Tyrant
BY SADI
(Persian poet, A.D. 1200)
In a certain year I was sitting retired in the great mosque at
Damascus, at the head of the tomb of Yahiya the prophet (on
whom be peace!). One of the kings of Arabia, who was notorious
for his injustice, happened to come on a pilgrimage, and having
performed his devotions, he uttered the following words: "The
poor and the rich are servants of this earth, and those who are
richest have the greatest wants." He then looked towards me,
and said, "Because dervishes are strenuous and sincere in their
commerce with heaven, unite your prayers with mine, for I am in
dread of a powerful enemy."
I replied, "Show mercy to the weak peasant, that you may not
experience difficulty from a strong enemy. It is criminal to
crush the poor and defenceless subjects with the arm of
power. He liveth in dread who befriendeth not the poor; for
should his foot slip, no one layeth hold of his hand. Whosoever
soweth bad seed, and looketh for good fruit, tortureth his
imagination in vain, making a false judgment of things.
Take the cotton out of thine ear, and distribute justice to
mankind; for if thou refusest justice, there will be a day of
retribution.
"The children of Adam are limbs of one another, and are all
produced from the same substance; when the world gives pain to
one member, the others also suffer uneasiness. Thou who art
indifferent to the sufferings of others deservest not to be
called a man."
[Illustration: THE DESPOTIC AGE
ISIDORE KONTI (_American sculptor, born 1862; group from the
Buffalo Exposition_)]
[Illustration: THE SEA OF BLOOD
"COURAGE, YOUR MAJESTY, ONLY ONE STEP MORE"
(_Example of Russian cartooning, published at the height of the
Revolution of 1905_)]
The Eloquent Peasant
(Egyptian, B.C. 2000 or earlier)
An interesting primitive protest against injustice is the story
of the Eloquent Peasant, which was one of the most popular of
ancient Egyptian tales, and is found in scores of different
papyri. The story narrates how a peasant named Rensi was robbed
of his asses by the henchmen of a certain grand steward. In
spite of all threats the peasant persisted in appealing against
the robber to the grand steward himself. The scene is described
in "Social Forces and Religion in Ancient Egypt," by James
Henry Breasted, as follows:
"It is a tableau which epitomizes ages of social history in the
East: on the one hand, the brilliant group of the great man's
sleek and subservient suite, the universal type of the official
class; and, on the other, the friendless and forlorn figure
of the despoiled peasant, the pathetic personification of the
cry for social justice. This scene is one of the earliest
examples of that Oriental skill in setting forth abstract
principles, so wonderfully illustrated later in the parables
of Jesus. Seeing that the grand steward makes no reply, the
peasant makes another effort to save his family and himself
from the starvation which threatens them. He steps forward and
with amazing eloquence addresses the great man in whose hands
his case now rests, promising him a fair voyage as he embarks
on the canal, and voicing the fame of the grand steward's
benevolence, on which he had reckoned. 'For thou art the father
of the orphan, the husband of the widow, the brother of the
forsaken, the kilt of the motherless. Let me put thy name in
this land above every good law, O leader free from avarice,
great man free from littleness, who destroys falsehood and
brings about truth. Respond to the cry which my mouth utters;
when I speak, hear thou. Do justice, thou who art praised, whom
the praised praise. Relieve my misery. Behold me, I am heavy
laden; prove me, lo I am in sorrow.'"
To follow the account of the incident in other records, the
grand steward is so much pleased with the peasant's eloquence
that he goes to the king and tells him about it. "My Lord, I
have found one of these peasants, excellent of speech, in very
truth; stolen are his goods, and he has come to complain to me
of the matter."
His majesty says, "As thou wishest that I may see health,
lengthen out his complaint, without reply to any of his
speeches! He who desireth him to continue speaking should be
silent; behold, bring us his words in writing that we may
listen to them."
So he keeps the peasant pleading for many days. The story
quotes nine separate speeches, of constantly increasing
bitterness and pathos. The peasant is beaten by the servants of
the grand steward, but still he comes. "Thou art appointed to
hear causes, to judge two litigants, to ward off the robber.
But thou makest common cause with the thief.... Thou art
instructed, thou art educated, thou art taught--but not for
robbery. Thou art accustomed to do like all men, and thy kin
are likewise ensnared. Thou the rectitude of all men, art the
chief transgressor of the whole land. The gardener of evil
waters his domain with iniquity that his domain may bring forth
falsehood, in order to flood the estate with wickedness."
In spite of his eloquence, the grand steward remains unmoved.
The peasant appeals to the gods of Justice; and in the ninth
address he threatens to make his plea to the god Anubis, who
is the god of the dead--meaning thereby that he will commit
suicide. None of the extant papyri informs us as to the outcome
of the whole proceedings.
Prayers Without Answer
(_From The Iliad_)
BY HOMER
(Greek epic poet, B.C. 700?)
Prayers are Jove's daughters of celestial race,
Lame are their feet, and wrinkled is their face;
With homely mien and with dejected eyes,
Constant they follow where injustice flies.
Injustice, suave, erect, and unconfined,
Sweeps the wide earth, and tramples o'er mankind--
While prayers to heal her wrongs move slow behind.
The Suffering of Women
BY HERBERT SPENCER
(English philosopher, 1820-1903)
In the history of humanity as written, the saddest part
concerns the treatment of women; and had we before us its
unwritten history we should find this part still sadder. I
say the saddest part because there have been many things
more conspicuously dreadful--cannibalism, the torturing of
prisoners, the sacrifice of victims to ghosts and gods--these
have been but occasionally; whereas the brutal treatment of
woman has been universal and constant. If looking first at
their state of subjection among the semi-civilized we pass to
the uncivilized, and observe the lives of hardship borne by
nearly all of them; if we then think what must have gone on
among those still ruder peoples who, for so many thousands of
years roamed over the uncultivated earth; we shall infer that
the amount of suffering which has been and is borne by women is
utterly beyond imagination.
Divorce in Ancient Babylon
(_From the Code of Hammurabi_)
(B.C. 2250)
Anu and Baal called me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, the
worshipper of the gods, to cause justice to prevail in the
land, to destroy the wicked and evil, to prevent the strong
from oppressing the weak, to enlighten the land and to further
the welfare of the people. Hammurabi, the governor named by
Baal am I, who brought about plenty and abundance.
§ 142: If a woman shall hate her husband and say: "Thou shalt
not have me," they shall inquire into her antecedents for her
defects.... If she have not been a careful mistress, have
gadded about, have neglected her house and have belittled her
husband, they shall throw that woman into the water.
The Parable of the Hungry Dog
(_From the Gospel of Buddha_)
(Hindu Bible, B.C. 600)
There was a wicked tyrant; and the god Indra, assuming the
shape of a hunter, came down upon earth with the demon Matali,
the latter appearing as a dog of enormous size. Hunter and dog
entered the palace, and the dog howled so woefully that the
royal buildings shook with the sound to their very foundations.
The tyrant had the awe-inspiring hunter brought before his
throne and inquired after the cause of the terrible bark. The
hunter said, "The dog is hungry," whereupon the frightened
king ordered food for him. All the food prepared at the royal
banquet disappeared rapidly in the dog's jaws, and still he
howled with portentous significance. More food was sent for,
and all the royal store-houses were emptied, but in vain. Then
the tyrant grew desperate and asked: "Will nothing satisfy the
cravings of that woeful beast?" "Nothing," replied the hunter,
"nothing except perhaps the flesh of all his enemies." "And
who are his enemies?" anxiously asked the tyrant. The hunter
replied: "The dog will howl as long as there are people
hungry in the kingdom, and his enemies are those that practice
injustice and oppress the poor." The oppressor of the people,
remembering his evil deeds, was seized with remorse, and for
the first time in his life he began to listen to the teachings
of righteousness.
The Nature of Kings
(_From the First Book of Samuel_)
(Hebrew, B.C. Eleventh Century)
And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that
asked of him a king. And he said: "This will be the manner of
the king that shall reign over you; he will take your sons,
and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be
his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he
will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over
fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his
harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments
of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be
confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will
take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even
the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will
take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give
to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your
menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young
men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the
tenth of your sheep; and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall
cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have
chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day."
King Yu's Misgovernment
(_From the She-ching_)
(Chinese classic, B.C. 1000)
A fish in some translucent lake
Must ever live to fear a prey
He cannot hide himself away
From those who come the fish to take.
I, too, may not escape the eyes
Of those who cause these miseries;
My sorrowing heart must grieve to know
My country's deep distress and woe.
Slavery
(_From the Edda_)
(Scandinavian legends of great antiquity, collected, A.D. 1100,
by Saemund)
King Frothi called his slaves renowned for strength, Fenia and
Menia, and bade them grind for gold. The maidens ground through
many years, they ground endless treasures; but at last they
grew weary. Then Frothi said, "Grind on! Rest ye not, sleep ye
not, longer than the cuckoo is silent, or a verse can be sung."
The weary slaves ground on, till lo! from the mighty mill is
poured forth an army of men. Now lies Frothi slain amid his
gold. Now is Frothi's peace forever ended.
The Power of Justice
BY MANU
(Hindu poet, B.C. 1200)
Iniquity, committed in this world, produces not fruit
immediately, but, like the earth, in due season, and advancing
by little and little, it eradicates the man who committed it.
He grows rich for a while through unrighteousness; then he
beholds good things; then it is that he vanquishes his foes;
but he perishes at length from his whole root upwards.
Justice, being destroyed, will destroy; being preserved, will
preserve; it must never therefore be violated. Beware, O judge!
lest justice, being overturned, overturn both us and thyself.
Legislators
BY ISAIAH
(Hebrew prophet, B.C. 740)
Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write
grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the
needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor
of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they
may rob the fatherless! And what will ye do in the day of
visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from far?
to whom will ye flee for help? and where will ye leave your
glory? Without me they shall bow down under the prisoners, and
they shall fall under the slain. For all this his anger is not
turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.
Concerning Wealth
HESIOD
(Greek poet, B.C. 650)
Who, or by open force, or secret stealth,
Or perjured wiles, amasses wealth,
(Such many are, whom thirst of gain betrays)
The gods, all seeing, shall o'ercloud his days;
His wife, his children, and his friends shall die,
And, like a dream, his ill-got riches fly.
(_From the Instructions of Ptah-Hotep_)
(Egyptian, B.C. 3550; the oldest book in the world)
If thou be great, after being of no account, and hast gotten
riches after squalor, being foremost in these in the city, and
hast knowledge concerning useful matters, so that promotion is
come unto thee; then swathe not thine heart in thine hoard, for
thou art become a steward of the endowment of the God. Thou art
not the last, others shall be thine equal, and to them shall
come what has come to thee.
(_From the Icelandic, Eleventh Century_)
I saw the well-filled barns
Of the child of wealth;
Now leans he on the staff of the beggar.
Thus are riches,
As the glance of an eye,
They are an inconstant friend.
BY VIRGIL
(Latin epic poet, B.C. 70-19)
Curst greed of gold, what crimes thy tyrant power has caused!
(_From the "Antigone" of Sophocles_)
(Greek tragic poet, B.C. 440)
No such ill device
Ever appeared, as money to mankind:
This is it that sacks cities, this routs out
Men from their homes, and trains and turns astray
The minds of honest mortals, setting them
Upon base actions; this revealed to men
Habits of all misdoing, and cognizance
Of every work of wickedness.
(_From the Book of Good Counsels_)
(Sanscrit, B.C. 300)
Wealth is friends, home, father, brother, title to respect, and fame;
Yea, and wealth is held for wisdom--that it should be so is shame.
(_From the "Medea" of Euripides_)
(Greek tragic poet, B.C. 431)
Speak not so hastily: the gods themselves
By gifts are swayed, as fame relates; and gold
Hath a far greater influence o'er the souls
Of mortals than the most persuasive words.
(_From "The Convivio" of Dante Alighieri_)
(Italian epic poet, 1265-1321)
I affirm that gain is precisely that which comes oftener to the
bad than to the good; for illegitimate gains never come to the
good at all, because they reject them. And lawful gains rarely
come to the good, because, since much anxious care is needful
thereto, and the anxious care of the good man is directed to
weightier matters, rarely does the good man give sufficient
attention thereto. Wherefore it is clear that in every way the
advent of these riches is iniquitous....
Let us give heed to the life of them who chase riches, and see
in what security they live when they have gathered of them, how
content they are, how reposeful! And what else, day by day,
imperils and slays cities, countries and single persons so much
as the new amassing of wealth by anyone? Which amassing reveals
new longings, the goal of which may not be reached without
wrong to someone....
Wherefore the baseness of riches is manifest enough by reason
of all their characteristics, and so a man of right appetite
and of true knowledge never loves them; and not loving them
does not unite himself to them, but ever wishes them to be far
removed from him, save as they be ordained to some necessary
service....
The Perfect City
(_From "The Republic" of Plato_)
(Greek philosopher, B.C. 429-347)
We have, it seems, discovered other things, which our guardians
must by all means watch against, that they may nowise escape
their notice and steal into the city.
What kinds of things are these?
Riches, said I, and poverty.
Concerning Independence
BY LUCRETIUS
(Latin poet, B.C. 95-52)
But if men would live up to reason's rules,
They would not bow and scrape to wealthy fools.
(_From The Hitopadesa_)
(Hindu religious work, B.C. 250)
It is better to abandon life than flatter the base.
Impoverishment is better than luxury through another's wealth.
Not to attend at the door of the wealthy, and not to use the
voice of petition, these imply the best life of a man.
BY XENOPHON
(Greek historian, B.C. Fourth Century)
If you perfume a slave and a freeman, the difference of their
birth produces none in the smell; and the scent is perceived as
soon in the one as the other; but the odor of honorable toil,
as it is acquired with great pains and application, is ever
sweet and worthy of a brave man.
BY DANTE ALIGHIERI
(Italian epic poet, 1265-1321)
What! You say a horse is noble because it is good in itself,
and the same you say of a falcon or a pearl; but a man shall be
called noble because his ancestors were so? Not with words, but
with knives must one answer such a beastly notion.
BY OMAR KHAYYAM
(Persian poet, Eleventh Century)
In this world he who possesses a morsel of bread, and some
nest in which to shelter himself, who is master or slave of no
man, tell that man to live content; he possesses a very sweet
existence.
Oh! Freedom
(_Negro Slave Song_)
Oh! Freedom, oh! Freedom,
Oh! Freedom, over me;
And before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my God
And be free.
Fredome
BY JOHN BARBOUR
(English poet, Fourteenth Century)
A! fredome is a nobill thing!
Fredome mayse man to haiff liking!
Fredome all solace to man giffis:
He levys at ese that frely levys;
A noble hart may haiff nane ease,
Na ellys nocht that may him plese,
Gyff fredome failythe: for fre liking
Is yearnyt ow'r all othir thing
Na he, that ay hase levyt fre,
May nocht knaw weill the propyrte,
The angry, na the wretchyt dome,
That is cowplyt to foule thyrldome.
Bot gyff he had assayit it,
Than all perquer he suld it wyt;
And suld think fredome mar to pryse
Than all the gold in warld that is.
A Home of Righteousness
(_Ancient Greek Inscription_)
Piety has raised this house from the first foundation even
to the lofty roof; for Macedonius fashioned not his wealth
by heaping up from the possessions of others with plundering
sword, nor has any poor man here wept over his vain and
profitless toil, being robbed of just hire; and as rest from
labor is kept inviolate by the just man, so let the works of
pious mortals endure.
Palaces
(_From the Book of Enoch_)
(Hebrew work of the Second Century, B.C., preserved only in the
Ethiopic tongue)
Woe unto you who despise the humble dwelling and inheritance
of your fathers! Woe unto you who build your palaces with the
sweat of others! Each stone, each brick of which it is built,
is a sin!
Pride in Poverty
BY CONFUCIUS
(Chinese philosopher, B. C. 500)
Riches and honor are what men desire; but if they attain to
them by improper ways, they should not continue to hold them.
Poverty and low estate are what men dislike; but if they are
brought to such condition by improper ways, they should not
feel shame for it.
Millionaires in Rome
BY CICERO
(Latin statesman and orator, B. C. 106-43)
As to their money, and their splendid mansions, and their
wealth, and their lordship, and the delights by which they are
chiefly attracted, never in truth have I ranked them amongst
things good or desirable; inasmuch as I saw for a certainty
that in the abundance of these things men longed most for the
very things wherein they abounded. For never is the thirst of
cupidity filled nor sated. And not only are they tortured by
the longing to increase their possessions, but they are also
tortured by fear of losing them.
The Ruling Classes
BY EZEKIEL
(Hebrew prophet, B. C. 600)
The word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, prophesy
against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy and say unto them,
Thus saith the Lord God unto the shepherds: Woe be to the
shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! Should not the
shepherds feed the flocks? Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you
with the wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the
flock. The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have
ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that
which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was
driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but
with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them. And they were
scattered, because there is no shepherd.... My sheep wandered
through all the mountains, and upon every high hill; yea, my
flock was scattered upon all the face of the earth, and none
did search or seek after them. Therefore ye shepherds, hear the
word of the Lord; as I live, saith the Lord God, ... Behold,
I am against the shepherds; and I will require my flock at
their hand.... I will feed my flock, and I will cause them to
lie down.... And they shall no more be a prey to the heathen,
neither shall the beast of the land devour them; but they shall
dwell safely, and none shall make them afraid. And ye my flock,
the flock of my pasture, are men, and I am your God, saith the
Lord God.
Ladies of Fashion
BY ISAIAH
(Hebrew prophet, B.C. 740)
The Lord standeth up to plead, and standeth to judge the
people. The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients
of his people, and the princes thereof; for ye have eaten up
the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What
mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces
of the poor? saith the Lord God of Hosts. Moreover the Lord
saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with
stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing
as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet; therefore
the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the
daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret
parts. In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of
their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls,
and their round tires like the moon, the chains, and the
bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets, and the ornaments of
the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings,
the rings, and nose jewels, the changeable suits of apparel,
and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins, the
glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the veils. And
it shall come to pass that instead of sweet smell there shall
be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well
set hair, baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of
sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty. Thy men shall fall
by the sword, and thy mighty in the war. And her gates shall
lament and mourn; and she being desolate shall sit upon the
ground.
Concerning Justice
(Ancient Hindu Proverb)
Justice is so dear to the heart of Nature, that if in the
last day one atom of injustice were found, the universe would
shrivel like a snake-skin to cast it off forever.
BY MARCUS AURELIUS
(Roman emperor, A.D. 121-180)
In the whole constitution of man, I see not any virtue contrary
to justice, whereby it may be resisted and opposed.
BY SADI
(Persian poet, A.D. 1200)
Take heed that he weep not; for the throne of the Almighty is
shaken to and fro when the orphan sets a-crying. Beware of the
groans of the wounded souls, since the hidden sore will at
length break out; oppress not to the utmost a single heart, for
a single sigh has power to overset a whole world.
(_From "The Koran"_)
(Bible of Mohammedanism; Arabic, A.D. 600)
Justice is an unassailable fortress, built on the brow of
a mountain which cannot be overthrown by the violence of
torrents, nor demolished by the force of armies.
"Do you desire," said Abdallah, "to bring the praise of mankind
upon your action? Then desire not unjustly, or even by your
right, to grasp that which belongs to another."
(Arabian proverb, Sixteenth Century)
The exercise of equity for one day is equal to sixty years
spent in prayer.
BY NINTOKU
(Japanese emperor, Fourth Century)
If the people are poor, I am the poorest.
Solon
BY PLUTARCH
(Greek historian, A.D. 50-120)
The Athenians fell into their old quarrels about the
government, there being as many different parties as there
were diversities in the country. The Hill quarter favoured
democracy, the Plain, oligarchy, and those that lived by the
Seaside stood for a mixed sort of government, and so hindered
either of the other parties from prevailing. And the disparity
of fortune between the rich and the poor at that time also
reached its height; so that the city seemed to be in a truly
dangerous condition, and there appeared no other means for
freeing it from disturbances and settling it but a despotic
power. All the people were indebted to the rich; and either
they tilled their land for their creditors, paying them a sixth
part of the increase, or else they engaged their body for
the debt, and might be seized, and either sent into slavery
at home, or sold to strangers; some (for no law forbade it)
were forced to sell their children, or fly their country to
avoid the cruelty of their creditors; but the most part and
the bravest of them began to combine together and encourage
one another to stand it, to choose a leader, to liberate the
condemned debtors, divide the land, and change the government.
Then the wisest of the Athenians, perceiving Solon was of all
men the only one not implicated in the troubles, that he had
not joined in the exactions of the rich, and was not involved
in the necessities of the poor, pressed him to succour the
commonwealth and compose the differences....
The first thing which he settled was, that what debts remained
should be forgiven, and no man, for the future, should engage
the body of his debtor for security.
Concerning Land
BY SOLON
(Greek lawgiver, B.C. 639-559)
The mortgage stones that covered her, by me
Removed, the land that was a slave is free.
DEUTERONOMY
(Hebrew, B.C. 700?)
These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to
do in the land, which the Lord God of thy fathers giveth thee
to possess it, all the days that ye live upon the earth.... At
the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release. And
this is the manner of the release: Every creditor that lendeth
ought unto his neighbor shall release it, he shall not exact it
of his neighbor, or of his brother; because it is called the
Lord's release.
LEVITICUS
(Hebrew law-book, B.C. 700?)
And the Lord spake unto Moses in Mount Sinai, saying: ... "The
land shall not be sold for ever; for the land is mine; for ye
are strangers and sojourners with me."
(_From, "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality"_)
BY JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
(French novelist and philosopher, 1712-1778; father of the
French Revolution)
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought
himself of saying, _This is mine_, and found people simple
enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors
and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by
pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to
his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are
undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong
to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
Radicalism
BY CONFUCIUS
(Chinese philosopher, B.C. 500)
Things have their root and their completion. It cannot be that
when the root is neglected, what springs from it will be well
ordered.
Seeking Causes
BY PLATO
(Greek philosopher and poet, B.C. 428-347)
Neither drugs nor charms nor burnings will touch a deep-lying
political sore any more than a deep bodily one; but only right
and utter change of constitution; and they do but lose their
labor who think that by any tricks of law they can get the
better of those mischiefs of commerce, and see not that they
hew at a hydra.
Concerning Usury[A]
[A] As used in the Bible, and other ancient writings, the
word usury means, not excessive interest-taking, but all
interest-taking whatever.
(_From "The Koran"_)
(Arabic, A.D. 600)
To him who is of kin to thee give his due, and to the poor and
to the wayfarer: this will be best for those who seek the face
of God; and with them it shall be well.
Whatever ye put out at usury to increase it with the substance
of others shall have no increase from God: but whatever ye
shall give in alms, as seeking the face of God, shall be
doubled to you.
(_From the Psalms_)
(Hebrew, B.C. 200)
Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell in thy
holy hill?
He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and
speaketh the truth in his heart....
He that putteth his money not out to usury, nor taketh reward
against the innocent. He that doeth these things shall never be
moved.
BY ARISTOTLE
(Greek philosopher, B.C. Fourth Century)
Usury is the most reasonably detested of all forms of
money-making; it is most against nature.
(_From "Essay on Riches"_)
BY FRANCIS BACON, LORD VERULAM
(English philosopher and statesman, 1561-1626)
The ways to enrich are many, and most of them foul....
Usury is the certainest means of gain, though one of the
worst; as that whereby a man doth eat his bread with sweat of
another's face, and besides, doth plough upon Sundays.
Solidarity
BY MARCUS AURELIUS
(Roman emperor, A.D. 121-180)
As thou thyself, whoever thou art, wert made for the perfection
and consummation of a common society; so must every action of
thine tend to the perfection and consummation of a life that
is truly sociable. Whatever action of thine that, either
immediately or afar off, hath not reference to the common
good, that is an exorbitant and disorderly action; yea, it is
seditious; as one among the people who from a general consent
and unity should factiously divide and separate himself.
Socialism
BY WANG-AN-SHIH
(Chinese statesman, Eleventh Century)
The State should take the entire management of commerce,
industry, and agriculture into its own hands, with a view to
succoring the working classes and preventing their being ground
to the dust by the rich.
The Promise
(_From the Psalms_)
(Hebrew, B.C. 200)
The Lord shall deliver the needy when he crieth; the poor also,
and him that hath no helper. He shall spare the poor and needy,
and shall save the souls of the needy. He shall redeem their
soul from deceit and violence; and precious shall their blood
be in his sight.
The Co-operative Commonwealth
BY ISAIAH II, THE PROPHET OF THE EXILE
(B.C. 550)
And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall
plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not
build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another
eat; for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and
mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
BOOK X
_Mammon_
Wealth, and the crimes that are committed in its name, and the
protests of the spirit of humanity against its power in society.
Paradise Lost
BY JOHN MILTON
(English lyric and epic poet, 1608-1674)
Mammon led them on--
Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific. By him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of their mother earth
For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Opened into the hill a spacious wound,
And digged out ribs of gold. Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.
Miss Kilmansegg: Her Moral
BY THOMAS HOOD
(See pages 59, 171)
Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold,
Molten, graven, hammer'd, and roll'd;
Heavy to get, and light to hold;
Hoarded, barter'd, bought, and sold,
Stolen, borrow'd, squander'd, doled:
Spurn'd by the young, but hugg'd by the old
To the very verge of the churchyard mould;
Price of many a crime untold:
Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Good or bad a thousand-fold!
How widely its agencies vary--
To save--to ruin--to curse--to bless--
As even its minted coins express,
Now stamp'd with the image of Good Queen Bess,
And now of a bloody Mary.
Northern Farmer: New Style
BY ALFRED TENNYSON
(See page 77)
Dosn't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaäy,
Proputty, proputty, proputty--that's what I 'ears 'em saäy.
Proputty, proputty, proputty--Sam, thou's an ass for thy paäins,
Theer's moor sense i' one o' 'is legs nor in all thy braäins.
Me an' thy muther, Sammy, 'as beän a-talkin' o' thee;
Thou's beän talkin' to muther, an' she beän a tellin' it me.
Thou'll not marry for munny--thou's sweet upo' parson's lass--
Noä--thou'll marry for luvv--an' we boäth on us thinks tha an ass.
Seeä'd her todaäy goä by--Saäint's daäy--they was ringing the bells.
She's a beauty thou thinks--an' soä is scoors o' gells,
Them as 'as munny an' all--wot's a beauty?--the flower as blaws.
But proputty, proputty sticks, an' proputty, proputty graws.
Doänt't be stunt: taäke time: I knaws what maäkes tha sa mad.
Warn't I craäzed fur the lasses mysén when I wur a lad?
But I knaw'd a Quaäker feller as often 'as towd ma this:
"Doän't thou marry for munny, but goä wheer munny is!"
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep
BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER
(American capitalist, born 1839)
Then, and indeed for many years after, it seemed as though
there was no end to the money needed to carry on and develop
the business. As our successes began to come, I seldom put my
head upon the pillow at night without speaking a few words to
myself in this wise:
"Now a little success, soon you will fall down, soon you will
be overthrown. Because you have got a start, you think you are
quite a merchant; look out, or you will lose your head--go
steady." These intimate conversations with myself, I am sure,
had a great influence on my life.
From Ecclesiasticus
A merchant shall hardly keep himself from wrong-doing; and a
huckster shall not be acquitted of sin.
Past and Present
BY THOMAS CARLYLE
(See pages 31, 74, 133)
What is it, if you pierce through his Cants, his oft-repeated
Hearsays, what he calls his Worships and so forth,--what is
it that the modern English soul does, in very truth, dread
infinitely, and contemplate with entire despair? What _is_ his
Hell, after all these reputable, oft-repeated Hearsays, what is
it? With hesitation, with astonishment, I pronounce it to be:
The terror of "Not succeeding"; of not making money, fame, or
some other figure in the world,--chiefly of not making money!
Is not that a somewhat singular Hell?
[Illustration: MAMMON
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
(_English painter, member of the Royal Academy, 1817-1904_)]
[Illustration: MARRIAGE À LA MODE
WILLIAM HOGARTH
(_Old English artist, 1697-1764._
_Famous painting, representing an alliance between the son of
a broken-down old nobleman and the daughter of a rich city
merchant_)]
Dipsychus
BY ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
(English poet and scholar, friend of Tennyson and Matthew
Arnold, 1819-1861)
As I sat at the café, I said to myself,
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,
But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking,
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.
I sit at my table _en grand seigneur_,
And when I have done, throw a crust to the poor;
Not only the pleasure, one's self, of good living,
But also the pleasure of now and then giving.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money....
I drive through the streets, and I care not a d--n;
The people they stare, and they ask who I am;
And if I should chance to run over a cad,
I can pay for the damage if ever so bad.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.
We stroll to our box and look down on the pit,
And if it weren't low should be tempted to spit;
We loll and we talk until people look up,
And when it's half over we go out to sup.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.
The best of the tables and best of the fare--
And as for the others, the devil may care;
It isn't our fault if they dare not afford
To sup like a prince and be drunk as a lord.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.
Utopia
BY SIR THOMAS MORE
(See page 160)
They marveile also that golde, whych of the owne nature is a
thinge so unprofytable, is nowe amonge all people in so hyghe
estimation, that man him selfe, by whome, yea and for the use
of whome it is so much set by, is in muche lesse estimation,
then the golde it selfe. In so muche that a lumpyshe
blockehedded churle, and whyche hathe no more wytte then an
asse, yea and as ful of noughtynes as of follye, shall have
nevertheless manye wyse and good men in subjectyon and bondage,
only for this, bycause he hath a greate heape of golde. Whyche
yf it shoulde be taken from hym by anye fortune, or by some
subtyll wyle and cautele of the lawe, (whyche no lesse then
fortune dothe bothe raise up the lowe, and plucke downe the
highe) and be geven to the moste vile slave and abject dryvell
of all his housholde, then shortely after he shal goo into the
service of his servaunt, as an augmentation or overplus beside
his money. But they muche more marvell at and detest the madnes
of them, whyche to those riche men, in whose debte and daunger
they be not, do give almost divine honoures, for none other
consideration, but bicause they be riche: and yet knowing them
to bee suche nigeshe penny fathers, that they be sure as longe
as they live, not the worthe of one farthinge of that heape
of gold shall come to them. These and such like opinions have
they conceaved, partely by education, beinge brought up in that
common wealthe, whose lawes and customes be farre different
from these kindes of folly, and partely by good litterature and
learning.
The Crown of Wild Olive
BY JOHN RUSKIN
(See page 106)
It is physically impossible for a well-educated, intellectual,
or brave man to make money the chief object of his thoughts;
as physically impossible as it is for him to make his dinner
the principal object of them. All healthy people like their
dinners, but their dinner is not the main object of their
lives. So all healthily minded people like making money--ought
to like it, and to enjoy the sensation of winning it: but the
main object of their life is not money; it is something better
than money.
Don Juan
BY LORD BYRON
(See pages 233, 340)
Oh, Gold! Why call we misers miserable?
Theirs is the pleasure that can never pall;
Theirs is the best bower-anchor, the chain-cable
Which holds fast other pleasures great and small.
Ye who but see the saving man at table
And scorn his temperate board, as none at all,
And wonder how the wealthy can be sparing,
Know not what visions spring from each cheese-paring....
Perhaps he hath great projects in his mind
To build a college, or to found a race,
An hospital, a church--and leave behind
Some dome surmounted by his meagre face;
Perhaps he fain would liberate mankind,
Even with the very ore that makes them base;
Perhaps he would be wealthiest of his nation,
Or revel in the joys of calculation....
"Love rules the camp, the court, the grove--for love
Is heaven, and heaven is love:" so sings the bard;
Which it were rather difficult to prove
(A thing with poetry in general hard).
Perhaps there may be something in "the grove,"
At least it rhymes to "love"; but I'm prepared
To doubt (no less than landlords of their rental)
If "courts" and "camps" be quite so sentimental.
But if Love don't, _Cash_ does, and Cash alone:
Cash rules the grove, and fells it too besides;
Without cash, camps were thin, and courts were none;
Without cash, Malthus tells you, "take no brides."
So Cash rules Love the ruler, on his own
High ground, as virgin Cynthia sways the tides:
And as for "Heaven being Love," why not say honey
Is wax? Heaven is not Love, 'tis Matrimony.
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(See page 181)
Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold?...
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions; bless the accursed;
Make the hoar leprosy adored; place thieves,
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench.
The Cave of Mammon
(_From "The Faerie Queene"_)
BY EDMUND SPENSER
(Old English poet, 1552-1599)
At last he came unto a gloomy glade
Cover'd with boughs and shrubs from heavens light,
Whereas he sitting found in secret shade
An uncouth, salvage, and uncivile wight,
Of griesly hew and fowle ill-favour'd sight;
His face with smoke was tand, and eies were bleard,
His head and beard with sout were ill bedight,
His cole-blacke hands did seem to have ben seard
In smythes fire-spitting forge, and nayles like clawes appeard....
And round about him lay on every side
Great heapes of gold that never could be spent;
Of which some were rude owre, not purifide,
Of Mulcibers devouring element;
Some others were new driven, and distent
Into great ingowes and to wedges square;
Some in round plates withouten moniment;
But most were stampt, and in their metal bare
The antique shapes of kings and kesars straung and rare....
"What secret place," quoth he, "can safely hold
So huge a mass, and hide from heavens eie?
Or where hast thou thy wonne, that so much gold
Thou canst preserve from wrong and robbery?"
"Come thou," quoth he, "and see." So by and by
Through that black covert he him led, and fownd
A darksome way, which no man could descry,
That deep descended through the hollow grownd,
And was with dread and horror compassèd arownd....
So soon as Mammon there arrived, the dore
To him did open and affoorded way:
Him followed eke Sir Guyon evermore,
Ne darknesse him ne daunger might dismay.
Soone as he entred was, the dore streightway
Did shutt, and from behind it forth there lept
An ugly feend, more fowle then dismall day:
The which with monstrous stalke behind him stept,
And ever as he went dew watch upon him kept.
Well hopèd hee, ere long that hardy guest,
If ever covetous hand, or lustfull eye,
Or lips he layd on thing that likte him best,
Or ever sleepe his eie-strings did untye,
Should be his pray: and therefore still on hye
He over him did hold his cruell clawes,
Threatning with greedy gripe to doe him dye,
And rend in peeces with his ravenous pawes,
If ever he transgrest the fatall Stygian lawes.
In all that rowme was nothing to be seene
But huge great yron chests, and coffers strong,
All bard with double bends, that none could weene
Them to efforce by violence or wrong;
On every side they placèd were along.
But all the grownd with sculs was scattered
And dead mens bones, which round about were flong;
Whose lives, it seemed, whilome there was shed,
And their vile carcases now left unburièd.
Mammon Marriage
BY GEORGE MACDONALD
(Scotch novelist and clergyman, 1824-1905)
The croak of a raven hoar!
A dog's howl, kennel-tied!
Loud shuts the carriage-door:
The two are away on their ghastly ride
To Death's salt shore!
Where are the love and the grace?
The bridegroom is thirsty and cold!
The bride's skull sharpens her face!
But the coachman is driving, jubilant, bold,
The devil's pace.
The horses shiver'd and shook
Waiting gaunt and haggard
With sorry and evil look;
But swift as a drunken wind they stagger'd
'Longst Lethe brook.
Long since, they ran no more;
Heavily pulling they died
On the sand of the hopeless shore
Where never swell'd or sank a tide,
And the salt burns sore.
Flat their skeletons lie,
White shadows on shining sand;
The crusted reins go high
To the crumbling coachman's bony hand
On his knees awry.
Side by side, jarring no more,
Day and night side by side,
Each by a doorless door,
Motionless sit the bridegroom and bride
On the Dead-Sea-shore.
Snobs and Marriage
(_From "The Book of Snobs"_)
BY WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
(English novelist and satirist of manners, 1811-1863)
People dare not be happy for fear of Snobs. People dare not
love for fear of Snobs. People pine away lonely under the
tyranny of Snobs. Honest kindly hearts dry up and die. Gallant
generous lads, blooming with hearty youth, swell into bloated
old bachelorhood, and burst and tumble over. Tender girls
wither into shrunken decay, and perish solitary, from whom
Snobbishness has cut off the common claim to happiness and
affection with which Nature endowed us all. My heart grows sad
as I see the blundering tyrant's handiwork. As I behold it I
swell with cheap rage, and glow with fury against the Snob.
Come down, I say, thou skulking dullness. Come down, thou
stupid bully, and give up thy brutal ghost! And I arm myself
with the sword and spear, and taking leave of my family, go
forth to do battle with that hideous ogre and giant, that
brutal despot in Snob Castle, who holds so many gentle hearts
in torture and thrall.
In Bohemia
BY JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY
(Irish-born American journalist, 1844-1890)
The thirsty of soul soon learn to know
The moistureless froth of the social show,
The vulgar sham of the pompous feast
Where the heaviest purse is the highest priest;
The organized charity, scrimped and iced,
In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.
Vanity Fair
(_From "The Pilgrim's Progress"_)
BY JOHN BUNYAN
(English thinker and religious rebel, who was put in prison and
there wrote one of the world's great allegories; 1628-1688)
Then I saw in my dream, that when they were got out of the
wilderness, they presently saw a town before them, and the name
of that town is Vanity; and at the town there is a fair kept,
called Vanity Fair. It is kept all the year long.... At this
fair are all such merchandise sold as houses, lands, trades,
places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms,
lusts, pleasures; and delights of all sorts, such as harlots,
wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood,
bodies, souls, silver, gold, precious stones, and what not.
And moreover, at this fair there are at all times to be seen
jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and
rogues, and that of every kind.
Here are to be seen, too, and that for nothing, thefts,
murders, adulteries, false-swearers, and that of a blood-red
color.
The Sins of Society
BY BERNARD VAUGHAN
(The sermons of a Jesuit priest, in Mayfair, London, which
caused great excitement among the "Smart Set")
Society nowadays, as we all know, is every bit as material
as it was when Dives was alive. It still cares very little,
indeed, for what it cannot either put on or into itself. It
is self-centred. Its fair votaries must be set up by the best
man-milliner, and fed up by the best man-cook; and then,
provided they are known at the opera by their diamonds, in
Mayfair by their motors, and at Cowes by their yacht, nothing
else matters, especially if they happen to have a house at
Ascot and a launch at Henley for the racing weeks.
It is not so much persons as things that count in this age of
materialism. Hence there is but one sin less pardonable than
that of being dull, and that is being poor. After all, there
may be some excuse for dulness if you have money, but there
is simply none at all for poverty, which like dirt on one's
shoes, or dust on one's gown, must be brushed away from sight
as soon as possible. Not even poor relatives are tolerated or
recognized, except occasionally on an "off-day," when, like
some unfortunate governesses in such households, they may be
asked to look in at tea-time, when nobody is there. Surely
all this is very contemptible, and altogether unworthy of old
English traditions. Yes, but old English traditions, with
rare exceptions, are being swept away by the incoming tide
of millionaire wealth, so that, nowadays, it matters little
what you are, but much, nay, everything, what you have. If you
command money, you command the world. If you have none, you are
nobody, though you be a prince.
(_From a leading London newspaper_)
Father Vaughan's knotted lash is sharp, and he wields it
sternly, but it does not raise one weal on the delicate flesh
of these massaged and manicured Salomes and Phrynes. His scorn
is savage, but it does not produce more than a polite smile
on these soft, faultless faces. His contempt is bitter, but
it does not make a single modish harlot blush. They are dimly
amused by the excitement of the good man. They are not in the
least annoyed. They are, on the contrary, eager to ask him to
dinner. What a piquant sensation to serve adultery with the
sauce of asceticism!
Father Vaughan says that if King Herod and Herodias and Salome
were to arrive in Mayfair they would be petted by the Smart
Set. The good father, in the innocence of his heart, underacts
the role of Sa-vaughan-rola. Herod and Herodias and Salome
have arrived. They are here. We know them. We see them daily.
Their names are in the newspapers. They were at Ascot. They
are present at the smartest weddings at St. George's, Hanover
Square. Do we despise them? Do we boycott them? Do we cut
them. By no means. We honor and reverence them. We may talk
about their bestialities in the privacy of the boudoir and the
smoking-room, but in public the theme is discreetly evaded.
Fifth Avenue, 1915
BY HERMANN HAGEDORN
(American poet, born 1882. The following poem is a _rondel_,
an interesting case of the use of an artificial old French
verse-form in a vital way)
The motor cars go up and down,
The painted ladies sit and smile.
Along the sidewalks, mile on mile,
Parade the dandies of the town.
The latest hat, the latest gown,
The tedium of their souls beguile.
The motor cars go up and down,
The painted ladies sit and smile.
In wild and icy waters drown
A thousand for a rock-bound isle.
Ten thousand in a black defile
Perish for justice or a crown.
The motor cars go up and down....
Hotel Life[A]
[A] Copyright, 1905. By permission of Charles Scribner's Sons.
(_From "The House of Mirth"_)
BY EDITH WHARTON
(Contemporary American novelist)
The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange
to her as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the
world of the fashionable New York hotel--a world over-heated,
over-upholstered, and overfitted with mechanical appliances
for the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the
comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a
desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan
beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without
definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a
languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to concert-hall, from
palm-garden to music-room, from "art-exhibit" to dressmaker's
opening. High-stepping horses or elaborately equipped motors
waited to carry these ladies into vague metropolitan distances,
whence they returned, still more wan from the weight of their
sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of the
hotel routine. Somewhere behind them in the background of
their lives, there was doubtless a real past, peopled by real
human activities: they themselves were probably the product of
strong ambitions, persistent energies, diversified contacts
with the wholesome roughness of life; yet they had no more real
existence than the poet's shades in limbo.
Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering
that Mrs. Hatch was its most substantial figure.... The daily
details of her existence were as strange to Lily as its general
tenor. The lady's habits were marked by an Oriental indolence
and disorder peculiarly trying to her companion. Mrs. Hatch
and her friends seemed to float together outside the bounds
of time and space. No definite hours were kept; no fixed
obligations existed: night and day floated into one another
in a blur of confused and retarded engagements, so that one
had the impression of lunching at the tea-hour, while dinner
was often merged in the noisy after-theatre supper which
prolonged Mrs. Hatch's vigil until daylight. Through this
jumble of futile activities came and went a strange throng of
hangers-on--manicures, beauty-doctors, hair-dressers, teachers
of bridge, of French, of "physical development." ... Mrs. Hatch
swam in a haze of indeterminate enthusiasms, of aspirations
culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion-journals,
and a gaudy world of sport still more completely beyond her
companion's ken.
The Parasitic Female
(_From "Woman and Labor"_)
BY OLIVE SCHREINER
(In the preface to this book, it is explained that it is
only a faint sketch from memory of part of a great work, the
manuscript of which was destroyed during the Boer war)
In place of the active laboring woman, upholding society by her
toil, had come the effete wife, concubine or prostitute, clad
in fine raiment, the work of others' fingers; fed on luxurious
viands, the result of others' toil, waited on and tended by the
labor of others. The need for her physical labor having gone,
and mental industry not having taken its place, she bedecked
and scented her person, or had it bedecked and scented for
her, she lay upon her sofa, or drove or was carried out in her
vehicle, and, loaded with jewels, she sought by dissipations
and amusements to fill up the inordinate blank left by the
lack of productive activity. And the hand whitened and the
frame softened, till at last, the very duties of motherhood,
which were all the constitution of her life left her, became
distasteful, and, from the instant when her infant came damp
from her womb, it passed into the hands of others, to be
tended and reared by them; and from youth to age her offspring
often owed nothing to her personal toil. In many cases so
complete was her enervation, that at last the very joy of
giving life, the glory and beatitude of a virile womanhood,
became distasteful; and she sought to evade it, not because of
its interference with more imperious duties to those already
born of her, or to her society, but because her existence of
inactivity had robbed her of all joy in strenuous exertion
and endurance in any form. Finely clad, tenderly housed, life
became for her merely the gratification of her own physical and
sexual appetites, and the appetites of the male, through the
stimulation of which she could maintain herself. And, whether
as kept wife, kept mistress, or prostitute, she contributed
nothing to the active and sustaining labors of her society.
She had attained to the full development of that type which,
whether in modern Paris or New York or London, or in ancient
Greece, Assyria, or Rome, is essentially one in its features,
its nature, and its results. She was the "fine lady," the human
female parasite--the most deadly microbe which can make its
appearance on the surface of any social organism.
Wherever in the history of the past this type has reached its
full development and has comprised the bulk of the females
belonging to any dominant class or race, it has heralded its
decay. In Assyria, Greece, Rome, Persia, as in Turkey today,
the same material conditions have produced the same social
disease among the wealthy and dominant races; and again and
again, when the nation so affected has come into contact with
nations more healthily constituted, this diseased condition has
contributed to its destruction.
In the Market-Place
(_From "Beyond the Breakers"_)
BY GEORGE STERLING
(California poet, born 1869)
In Babylon, high Babylon,
What gear is bought and sold?
All merchandise beneath the sun
That bartered is for gold;
Amber and oils from far beyond
The desert and the fen,
And wines whereof our throats are fond--
Yea! and the souls of men!
In Babylon, grey Babylon,
What goods are sold and bought?
Vesture of linen subtly spun,
And cups from agate wrought;
Raiment of many-colored silk
For some fair denizen,
And ivory more white than milk--
Yea! and the souls of men!...
In Babylon, sad Babylon,
What chattels shall invite?
A wife whenas your youth is done,
Or leman for a night.
Before Astarte's portico
The torches flare again;
The shadows come, the shadows go--
Yea! and the souls of men!
In Babylon, dark Babylon,
Who take the wage of shame?
The scribe and singer, one by one,
That toil for gold and fame.
They grovel to their masters' mood
The blood upon the pen
Assigns their souls to servitude--
Yea! and the souls of men!
Dinner à la Tango
BY EDWIN BJÖRKMAN
(American critic, born in Sweden 1866)
It is after eight o'clock in one of the smaller dining-rooms of
a fashionable New York hotel. The middle of the room is cleared
for dancing. At one end a small orchestra is working furiously
at a melody that affects the mind like the triple-distilled
essence of nervous unrest. Every table is occupied by merry
groups of men and women in evening dress. Above our heads are
strung almost invisible wires, to which are attached colored
lanterns, gaudy mechanical butterflies, and huge red and green
toy balloons. Just as we enter, a stoutish, heavy-faced chap
with a monocle slaps the next man on the back and cries out:
"We must be gay, old boy!"
The open square in the middle is filled with dancers. They trip
and slide and dip. They side-step and back-step and gyrate.
They wave their arms like pump-handles, or raise them skyward,
palm to palm, as if in prayer. There are among them young girls
with shining faces full of inarticulate desire; simpering
young men with a leer lurking at the bottom of their vacant
stares; stiff-legged and white-haired old men with drooping
eyelids; and stern-jawed matrons with hand-made faces of a
startling purple hue. But on every face, young or old, bright
or dull, there beams a smile or clings a smirk, for the spirit
of the place demands gaiety at any price.
On the tables are strewn gaily trimmed packages that open with
a report, and yield up gaily colored paper caps. Rubicund
gentlemen place the caps over their bald spots, while women
pick the big butterflies to pieces, and put the fragments into
their hair until they look like barbarous princesses. Men and
women drink and dance, feast and flirt, sing and laugh and
shout....
Gay is the scene indeed: gay the music and the laughter; gay
the wine that sparkles in the glasses; gay the swirling,
swaying maze of dancing couples; gay the bright balloons and
brilliant dresses of the women. And it is as if my mind's eye
saw these words written in burning letters on the wall:
_Leave care behind, all ye that enter here!_
But out there on Fifth Avenue a lot of unkempt, unreasonable
men and women are marching savagely behind a black flag.
Evils of Gold
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(See pages 181, 492)
O thou sweet king killer, and dear divorce
'Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler
Of Hymen's purest bed! thou valiant Mars;
Thou ever young, fresh, loved, and delicate wooer,
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian's lap! thou visible god,
That solder'st close impossibilities,
And mak'st them kiss; that speak'st with every tongue,
To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!
Think, thy slave, man, rebels; and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
May have the world in empire.
The Theory of the Leisure Class[A]
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
BY THORSTEIN VEBLEN
(American university professor)
The function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does
not end with simply showing that the wearer consumes valuable
goods in excess of what is required for physical comfort.
Simple conspicuous waste of goods is effective and gratifying
as far as it goes; it is good _prima facie_ evidence of
pecuniary success, and consequently _prima facie_ evidence
of social worth. But dress has subtler and more far-reaching
possibilities than this crude, first-hand evidence of
wasteful consumption only. If, in addition to showing that
the wearer can afford to consume freely and uneconomically,
it can also be shown in the same stroke that he or she is not
under the necessity of earning a livelihood, the evidence of
social worth is enhanced in a very considerable degree. Our
dress, therefore, in order to serve its purpose effectually,
should not only be expensive, but it should also make plain
to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind
of productive labor. In the evolutionary process by which our
system of dress has been elaborated into its present admirably
perfect adaptation to its purpose, this subsidiary line of
evidence has received due attention. A detailed examination
of what passes in popular apprehension for elegant apparel
will show that it is contrived at every point to convey the
impression that the wearer does not habitually put forth
any useful effort. It goes without saying that no apparel
can be considered elegant, or even decent, if it shows the
effect of manual labor on the part of the wearer, in the way
of soil or wear. The pleasing effect of neat and spotless
garments is chiefly, if not altogether, due to their carrying
the suggestion of leisure--exemption from personal contact
with industrial processes of any kind. Much of the charm
that invests the patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen,
the lustrous cylindrical hat, and the walking-stick, which
so greatly enhance the native dignity of a gentleman, comes
of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer cannot when so
attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and
immediately of any human use....
The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the
way of demonstrating the wearer's abstinence from productive
employment. It needs no argument to enforce the generalization
that the more elegant styles of feminine bonnets go even
farther towards making work impossible than does the man's
high hat. The woman's shoe adds the so-called French heel
to the evidence of enforced leisure afforded by its polish;
because this high heel obviously makes any, even the simplest
and most necessary manual work extremely difficult. The like
is true even in a higher degree of the skirt and the rest of
the drapery which characterizes woman's dress. The substantial
reason for our tenacious attachment to the skirt is just this:
it is expensive and it hampers the wearer at every turn and
incapacitates her for all useful exertion. The like is true of
the feminine custom of wearing the hair excessively long.
But the woman's apparel not only goes beyond that of the modern
man in the degree in which it argues exemption from labor; it
also adds a peculiar and highly characteristic feature which
differs in kind from anything habitually practiced by the men.
This feature is the class of contrivances of which the corset
is the typical example. The corset is, in economic theory,
substantially a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of
lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently
and obviously unfit for work. It is true, the corset impairs
the personal attractions of the wearer, but the loss suffered
on that score is offset by the gain in reputability which comes
of her visibly increased expensiveness and infirmity. It may
broadly be set down that the womanliness of woman's apparel
resolves itself, in point of substantial fact, into the more
effective hindrance to useful exertion offered by the garments
peculiar to women.
The Vanity of Human Wishes
BY SAMUEL JOHNSON
(English essayist and poet, 1709-1784. The poem from which
these lines are taken is a paraphrase of the Roman poet Juvenal)
But, scarce observed, the knowing and the bold
Fall in the general massacre of gold;
Wide wasting pest! that rages unconfined,
And crowds with crimes the records of mankind;
For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws,
For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws;
Wealth heaped on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys,
The dangers gather as the treasures rise.
Letters from a Chinese Official
BY G. LOWES DICKINSON
(This little book, published anonymously, was taken for a genuine
document by many critics, among others, Mr. William Jennings Bryan,
who wrote an elaborate answer to it. The writer is an English
university lecturer)
When I review my impressions of the average English citizen,
impressions based on many years' study, what kind of man do I
see? I see one divorced from Nature, but unreclaimed by Art;
instructed, but not educated; assimilative, but incapable
of thought. Trained in the tenets of a religion in which he
does not believe--for he sees it flatly contradicted in every
relation of life--he dimly feels that it is prudent to conceal
under a mask of piety the atheism he is hardly intelligent
enough to avow. His religion is conventional; and, what is
more important, his morals are as conventional as his creed.
Charity, chastity, self-abnegation, contempt of the world and
its prizes--these are the words on which he has been fed from
his childhood upward. And words they have remained, for neither
has he anywhere seen them practiced by others, nor has it ever
occurred to him to practice them himself. Their influence,
while it is strong enough to make him a chronic hypocrite, is
not so strong as to show him the hypocrite he is. Deprived
on the one hand of the support of a true ethical standard,
embodied in the life of the society of which he is a member,
he is duped, on the other, by lip-worship of an impotent
ideal. Abandoned thus to his instinct, he is content to do as
others do, and, ignoring the things of the spirit, to devote
himself to material ends. He becomes a mere tool; and of such
your society is composed. By your works you may be known. Your
triumphs in the mechanical arts are the obverse of your failure
in all that calls for spiritual insight.
Stupidity Street
BY RALPH HODGSON
(Contemporary English poet, who publishes his work in tiny
pamphlets with quaint illustrations)
I saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For the people to eat,
Sold in the shops of
Stupidity Street.
I saw in vision
The worm in the wheat;
And in the shops nothing
For people to eat;
Nothing for sale in
Stupidity Street.
The Souls of Black Folk
BY W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS
(Professor in the University of Atlanta, born 1868; a prominent
advocate of the rights of his race)
In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once
the ideals of this people,--the strife for another and a
juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of
knowing; but today the danger is that these ideals, with their
simple beauty and weird inspiration, will suddenly sink to a
question of cash and a lust for gold. Here stands this black
young Atalanta, girding herself for the race that must be run;
and if her eyes be still toward the hills and sky as in the
days of old, then we may look for noble running; but what if
some ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden
apples before her? What if the negro people be wooed from a
strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard
dollars as the be-all and the end-all of life? What if to the
Mammonism of America be added the rising Mammonism of the
re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South be reinforced
by the budding Mammonism of its half-awakened black millions?
Whither, then, is the new-world quest of Goodness and Beauty
and Truth gone glimmering?
Co-operation and Nationality
BY "A.E." (GEORGE W. RUSSELL)
(See page 252)
When steam first began to puff and wheels go round at so
many revolutions per minute, the wild child humanity, who
had hitherto developed his civilization in picturesque
unconsciousness of where he was going, and without any set
plan, was caught and put in harness. What are called business
habits were invented to make the life of man run in harmony
with the steam engine, and his movements rival the train in
punctuality. The factory system was invented, and it was an
instantaneous success. Men were clothed with cheapness and
uniformity. Their minds grew numerously alike, cheap and
uniform also. They were at their desks at nine o'clock, or at
their looms at six. They adjusted themselves to the punctual
wheels. The rapid piston acted as pacemaker, and in England,
which started first in the modern race for wealth, it was an
enormous advantage to have tireless machines of superhuman
activity to make the pace, and nerve men, women and children
to the fullest activity possible. Business methods had a long
start in England, and irregularity and want of uniformity
became after a while such exceptions that they were regarded as
deadly sins. The grocer whose supplies of butter did not arrive
week after week by the same train, at the same hour, and of the
same quality, of the same color, the same saltness, and in the
same kind of box, quarrelled with the wholesaler, who in his
turn quarrelled with the producer. Only the most machine-like
race could win custom. After a while every country felt it had
to be drilled or become extinct. Some made themselves into
machines to enter the English market, some to preserve their
own markets. Even the indolent Oriental is getting keyed up,
and in another fifty years the Bedouin of the desert will be at
his desk and the wild horseman of Tartary will be oiling his
engines.
The Communist Manifesto
BY KARL MARX AND FREDERICK ENGELS
(Published in 1848, the charter of the modern Socialist
movement)
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put
an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has
pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound
man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no
other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest,
than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly
ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of
philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical
calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange
value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered
freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom--Free
Trade.
Portrait of an American
BY LOUIS UNTERMEYER
(See pages 42, 418)
He slobbers over sentimental plays
And sniffles over sentimental songs.
He tells you often how he sadly longs
For the ideals of the dear old days.
In gatherings he is the first to raise
His voice against "our country's shameful wrongs."
He storms at greed. His hard, flat tone prolongs
The hymns and mumbled platitudes of praise.
I heard him in his office Friday past.
"Look here," he said, "their talk is all a bluff;
You mark my words, this thing will never last.
Let them walk out--they'll come back quick enough.
We'll have all hands at work--and working fast!
How do they think we're running this--for _love_?"
A Living Wage
BY J. PIERPONT MORGAN
(American banker; testimony before the United States Commission
on Industrial Relations)
QUESTION: Do you consider ten dollars a week enough for a
'longshoreman with a family to support?
ANSWER: If that's all he can get, and he takes it, I should say
it's enough.
Impressions
BY HAROLD MONRO
(Contemporary English poet)
He's something in the city. Who shall say
His fortune was not honorably won?
Few people can afford to give away
As he, or help the poor as he has done.
Neat in his habits, temperate in his life:
Oh, who shall dare his character besmirch?
He scarcely ever quarrels with his wife,
And every Sabbath strictly goes to church.
He helps the village club, and in the town
Attends parochial meetings once a week,
Pays for each purchase ready-money down:
Is anyone against him?--Who will speak?
There is a widow somewhere in the north,
On whom slow ruin gradually fell,
While she, believing that her God was wroth,
Suffered without a word--or she might tell.
And there's a beggar somewhere in the west,
Whose fortune vanished gradually away:
Now he but drags his limbs in horror lest
Starvation feed on them--or he might say.
And there are children stricken with disease,
Too ignorant to curse him, or too weak.
In a true portrait of him all of these
Must figure in the background--they shall speak.
New Varieties of Sin
(_From "Sin and Society"_)
BY EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS
(American college professor, born 1866, a prominent advocate of
academic freedom)
Today the sacrifice of life incidental to quick success rarely
calls for the actual spilling of blood. How decent are the
pale slayings of the quack, the adulterator, and the purveyor
of polluted water, compared with the red slayings of the
vulgar bandit or assassin! Even if there is blood-letting, the
long-range, tentacular nature of modern homicide eliminates
all personal collision. What an abyss between the knife-play
of brawlers and the law-defying neglect to fence dangerous
machinery in a mill, or to furnish cars with safety couplers!
The providing of unsuspecting passengers with "cork"
life-preservers secretly loaded with bars of iron to make up
for their deficiency in weight of cork, is spiritually akin
to the treachery of Joab, who, taking Amasa by the beard "to
kiss him," smote Amasa "in the fifth rib"; but it wears a very
different aspect. The current methods of annexing the property
of others are characterized by a pleasing indirectness and
refinement. The furtive, apprehensive manner of the till-tapper
or the porch-climber would jar disagreeably upon the tax-dodger
"swearing off" his property, or the city official concealing
a "rake-off" in his specifications for a public building. The
work of the card-sharp and the thimblerigger shocks a type of
man that will not stick at the massive "artistic swindling" of
the contemporary promoter....
One might suppose that an exasperated public would sternly
castigate these modern sins. But the fact is, the very
qualities that lull the conscience of the sinner blind the
eyes of the on-lookers. People are sentimental, and bastinado
wrong-doing not according to its harmfulness, but according to
the infamy that has come to attach to it. Undiscerning, they
chastise with scorpions the old authentic sins, but spare the
new. They do not see that boodling is treason, that blackmail
is piracy, that embezzlement is theft, that speculation
is gambling, that tax dodging is larceny, that railroad
discrimination is treachery, that the factory labor of children
is slavery, that deleterious adulteration is murder. It has not
come home to them that the fraudulent promoter "devours widows'
houses," that the monopolist "grinds the faces of the poor,"
that mercenary editors and spellbinders "put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter." The cloven hoof hides in patent leather;
and to-day, as in Hosea's time, the people "are destroyed for
lack of knowledge." The mob lynches the red-handed slayer,
when it ought to keep a gallows Haman-high for the venal mine
inspector, the seller of infected milk, the maintainer of a
fire-trap theatre. The child-beater is forever blasted in
reputation, but the exploiter of infant toil, or the concocter
of a soothing syrup for the drugging of babies, stands a pillar
of society. The petty shoplifter is more abhorred than the
stealer of a franchise, and the wife-whipper is outcast long
before the man who sends his over-insured ship to founder with
its crew.
BY JACK LONDON
Far better to have the front of one's face pushed in by the
fist of an honest prize-fighter than to have the lining of
one's stomach corroded by the embalmed beef of a dishonest
manufacturer.
Tono-Bungay
BY H. G. WELLS
(English novelist, born 1866; author of many strange romances of
modern science, and later, of penetrating studies of social injustice
and hypocrisy. The present novel tells of the career of a financial
potentate who begins life with a patent-medicine business)
It was my uncle's genius that did it. No doubt he
needed me--I was, I will admit, his indispensable right
hand; but his was the brain to conceive. He wrote every
advertisement; some of them even he sketched. You must
remember that his were the days before the _Times_
took to enterprise and the vociferous hawking of that
antiquated _Encyclopædia_. That alluring, button-holing,
let-me-just-tell-you-quite-soberly-something-you-ought-to-know
style of newspaper advertisement, with every now and then a
convulsive jump of some attractive phrase into capitals, was
then almost a novelty. "Many people who are MODERATELY well
think they are QUITE well," was one of his early efforts. The
jerks in capitals were, "DO NOT NEED DRUGS OR MEDICINE," and
"SIMPLY A PROPER REGIMEN TO GET YOU IN TONE." One was warned
against the chemist or druggist who pushed "much-advertised
nostrums" on one's attention. That trash did more harm than
good. The thing needed was regimen--and Tono-Bungay!
Very early, too, was that bright little quarter column, at
least it was usually a quarter column in the evening papers:
"HILARITY--TONO-BUNGAY. Like Mountain Air in the Veins."
The penetrating trio of questions: "Are you bored with your
Business? Are you bored with your Dinner? Are you bored with
your Wife?"--that, too, was in our Gower Street days. Both
these we had in our first campaign when we worked London south,
central, and west; and then, too, we had our first poster,--the
HEALTH, BEAUTY AND STRENGTH one. That was his design; I happen
still to have got by me the first sketch he made for it....
By all modern standards the business was, as my uncle would
say, "absolutely _bona fide_." We sold our stuff and got the
money, and spent the money honestly in lies and clamor to sell
more stuff. Section by section we spread it over the whole
of the British Isles; first working the middle-class London
suburbs, then the outer suburbs, then the home counties,
then going (with new bills and a more pious style of "ad")
into Wales, a great field always for a new patent-medicine,
and then into Lancashire. My uncle had in his inner office a
big map of England, and as we took up fresh sections of the
local press and our consignments invaded new areas, flags
for advertisements and pink underlines for orders showed our
progress.
"The romance of modern commerce, George!" my uncle would say,
rubbing his hands together and drawing in air through his
teeth. "The romance of modern commerce, eh? Conquest. Province
by Province. Like sogers."
We subjugated England and Wales; we rolled over the Cheviots
with a special adaptation containing eleven per cent. of
absolute alcohol; "Tono-Bungay: Thistle Brand." We also had
the Fog poster adapted to a kilted Briton in a misty Highland
scene....
As I look back at them now, those energetic years seem all
compacted to a year or so; from the days of our first hazardous
beginning in Farrington Street with barely a thousand pounds'
worth of stuff or credit all told--and that got by something
perilously like snatching--to the days when my uncle went to
the public on behalf of himself and me (one-tenth share) and
our silent partners, the drug wholesalers and the printing
people and the owner of that group of magazines and newspapers,
to ask with honest confidence for £150,000. Those silent
partners were remarkably sorry, I know, that they had not taken
larger shares and given us longer credit when the subscriptions
came pouring in. My uncle had a clear half to play with
(including the one-tenth understood to be mine).
£150,000--think of it!--for the goodwill in a string of lies
and a trade in bottles of mitigated water! Do you realize the
madness of the world that sanctions such a thing? Perhaps you
don't. At times use and wont certainly blinded me. If it had
not been for Ewart, I don't think I should have had an inkling
of the wonderfulness of this development of my fortunes; I
should have grown accustomed to it, fallen in with all its
delusions as completely as my uncle presently did. He was
immensely proud of the flotation. "They've never been given
such value," he said, "for a dozen years." But Ewart, with his
gesticulating hairy hands and bony wrists, is single-handed
chorus to all this as it plays itself over again in my memory,
and he kept my fundamental absurdity illuminated for me during
all this astonishing time.
"It's just on all fours with the rest of things," he remarked;
"only more so. You needn't think you're anything out of the
way."
Man the Reformer
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON
(See page 235)
It is only necessary to ask a few questions as to the progress
of the articles of commerce from the fields where they grew,
to our houses, to become aware that we eat and drink and
wear perjury and fraud in a hundred commodities. We are all
implicated in this charge. The sins of our trade belong to
no class, to no individual. Everybody partakes, everybody
confesses, yet none feels himself accountable. The trail of
the serpent reaches into all the lucrative professions and
practices of man. Nay, the evil custom reaches into the whole
institution of property, until our laws which establish and
protect it seem not to be the issue of love and reason, but of
selfishness.
To a Certain Rich Young Ruler
BY CLEMENT WOOD
(A sonnet which was widely circulated at the time of the
Colorado coal-strike of 1913-14)
White-fingered lord of murderous events,
Well are you guarding what your father gained;
With torch and rifle you have well maintained
The lot to which a heavenly providence
Has called you; laborers, risen in defense
Of liberty and life, lie charred and brained
About your mines, whose gutted hills are stained
With slaughter of these newer innocents.
Ah, but your bloody fingers clenched in prayer!
Your piety, which all the world has seen!
The godly odor spreading through the air
From your efficient charity machine!
Thus you rehearse for your high rôle up there,
Ruling beside the lowly Nazarene!
FROM THE POLITICS OF ARISTOTLE
(See page 480)
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to
religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment
from a ruler whom they consider godfearing and pious. On the
other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing
that he has the gods on his side.
BY AMOS
(Hebrew prophet, B. C. 760)
I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will take no delight in
your solemn assemblies. Yea, though you offer me your burnt
offerings and meal offerings, I will not accept them; neither
will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou
away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the
melody of thy viols. But let judgment roll down as waters, and
righteousness as a mighty stream.
Concerning Charity
BY JOHN R. LAWSON
(Part of a statement before the United States Commission on Industrial
Relations, 1915. The writer was the representative of the miners in
charge of the Colorado strike, and went to work as a pit-boy at the
age of eight)
There is another cause of industrial discontent. This is the
skillful attempt that is being made to substitute Philanthropy
for Justice. There is not one of these foundations, now
spreading their millions over the world in showy generosity,
that does not draw those millions from some form of industrial
injustice. It is not _their_ money that these lords of
commercialized virtue are spending, but the withheld wages of
the American working-class.
I sat in this room and heard a great philanthropist read the
list of activities of his Foundation "to promote the well-being
of mankind." An international health commission to extend to
foreign countries and peoples the work of eradicating the
hookworm; the promotion of medical education and health in
China; the investigations of vice conditions in Europe; one
hundred thousand dollars for the American Academy in Rome,
twenty thousand a year for widows' pensions in New York, one
million for the relief of Belgians, thirty-four millions for
the University of Chicago, thirty-four millions for a General
Education Board. A wave of horror swept over me during that
reading, and I say to you that that same wave is now rushing
over the entire working-class of the United States. Health for
China, a refuge for birds in Louisiana, food for the Belgians,
pensions for New York widows, university training for the
elect--and never a thought or a dollar for the many thousands
of men, women and children who starved in Colorado, for the
widows robbed of husbands and children of their fathers, by
law-violating conditions in the mines. There are thousands of
this great philanthropist's former employees in Colorado today
who wish to God that they were in Belgium to be fed, or birds
to be cared for tenderly.
Crowds
BY GERALD STANLEY LEE
(Contemporary American author and lecturer, formerly a
clergyman)
As I have watched my fellow human beings, what I have come to
want most of all in this world is the inspired employer--or
what I have called the inspired millionaire or organizer; the
man who can take the machines off the backs of the people, and
take the machines out of their wits, and make the machines free
their bodies and serve their souls.
If we ever have the inspired employer, he will have to be made
by the social imagination of the people, by creating the spirit
of expectation and challenge toward the rich among the masses
of the people....
Nothing is more visionary than trying to run a world without
dreams, especially an economic world. It is because even bad
dreams are better in this world than having no dreams at all
that bad people so-called are so largely allowed to run it.
In the final and practical sense, the one factor in economics
to be reckoned with is Desire.
The Dying Boss
BY LINCOLN STEFFENS
(American writer upon social problems, born 1866. A story of the
political leader of a corrupt city, who lies upon his death-bed, and
has asked to have the meaning of his own career made plain to him)
"What kind of a kid were you, Boss?" I began.
"Pretty tough, I guess," he answered.
"Born here?"
"Yes; in the Third Ward."
"Tough then as it is now?"
"Tougher," he said.
"Produces toughness the way Kansas produces corn," I remarked.
"Father?" I asked.
"Kept a saloon; a driver before that."
"Mother a girl of the ward?"
"Yes," he said. "She was brought up there; but she came to this
country with her father from England, as a baby."
"What sort of woman was she?"
"Quiet," he said; "always still; silent-like; a worker. Kept
the old man straight--some; and me too--'s well as she could.
She's th' one that got him off th' wagon and started in th'
liquor business."
"You were poor people?"
"Yes."
"And common?"
"Y-yes-s."
"A child of the people," I commented: "the common people."
He nodded, wondering.
"One of the great, friendless mass of helpless humanity?"
He nodded.
"That wasn't your fault, was it?" I said. "Not to blame for
that? That's not your sin, is it?"
He shook his head, staring, and he was so mystified that I
said that most people were "pretty terribly punished for being
born poor and common." He nodded, but he wasn't interested or
enlightened, apparently. "And you learned, somehow, that the
thing to do was to get yourself on, get up out of it, make a
success of your life?"
"Yes," he said slowly. "I don't know how, but I did get that,
somehow."
"That was the ideal they taught you," I said. "Never heard of
getting everybody on and making a success of society; of the
city and State?"
But this line of questioning was beyond him. I changed my
tack....
"In that first interview we had," I said, "you insisted that,
while the business boss was the real boss, the sovereign, you
had some power of your own. And you described it today as the
backing of your own ward, which, you said, you had in your
pocket. When you became boss, you got the backing, the personal
support, of other wards, didn't you?"
"Seven of 'em," he counted. "Made th' leaders myself."
"And you developed a big personal following in other wards,
too?"
"Sure," he said; "in every one of them. I was a popular leader;
not only a boss, but a friend with friends, lots of 'em. The
people liked me."
"That's the point," I said. "The people liked you."
He nodded warmly.
"The common people," I went on, and he was about to nod, but
he didn't. And his fingers became still. "Your own people--the
great helpless mass of the friendless mob--liked you." His eyes
were fixed on mine. "They followed you; they trusted you."
I paused a moment, then I asked: "Didn't they, Boss?"
"Yes," he said with his lips alone.
"They didn't set a watch on you, did they?" I continued. "They
voted as you bade them vote, elected the fellows you put on the
tickets of their party for them. And, after they elected them,
they left it to them, and to you, to be true to them; to stick
to them; to be loyal."
His eyes fell to his fingers, and his fingers began again to
pick.
"And when your enemies got after you and accused you," I said,
"the people stuck by you?"
No answer; only the fingers picked.
"The great, friendless mass--the hopeful, hopeless
majority--they were true to you and the party, and they
re-elected you."
His eyes were on mine again, and there was light in them; but
it was the reflected light of fire, and it burned.
"And you--you betrayed them," I said; and I hurried on, piling
on the fuel, all I had. "They have power, the people have,
and they have needs, great common needs; and they have great
common wealth. All your fat, rich franchises, all your great
social values, the values added to land and franchise by the
presence of the great, common, numerous mass, all the city's
public property--all are theirs, their common property. They
own enough in common to meet all their great common needs, and
they have an organization to keep for them and to develop for
their use and profit all these great needed social values. It
is the city; the city government; city, State, and national.
And they have, they breed in their own ranks, men like you,
natural political leaders, to go into public life and lead
them, teach them, represent them. And they leave it all to
you, trusting you. And you, all of you--not you alone, Boss,
but all of you: ward leaders; State leaders; all the national
political bosses--you all betray them. You receive from them
their votes, so faithfully given, and you transform them into
office-holders whom you teach or corrupt and compel to obey
you. So you reorganize the city government. You, not the Mayor,
are the head of it; you, not the council, are its legislature;
you, not the heads of departments, are the administrators of
the property and the powers of the people of your city; the
common, helpless, friendless people. And, having thus organized
and taken over all this power and property and--this beautiful
faith, you do not protect their rights and their property.
What do you do with it, Boss?"
He started. He could not answer. I answered for him:
"You sell 'em out; you turn over the whole thing--the city,
its property, and its people--to Business, to the big fellows;
to the business leaders of the people. You deliver, not only
franchises, privileges, private rights and public properties,
and values, Boss: you--all of you together--have delivered the
government itself to these men, so that today this city, this
State, and the national government represent, normally, not the
people, not the great mass of common folk, who need protection,
but--Business; preferably bad business; privileged business; a
class; a privileged class."
He had sunk back among the pillows, his eyes closed, his
fingers still. I sounded him.
"That's the system," I repeated. "It's an organization of
social treason, and the political boss is the chief traitor. It
couldn't stand without the submission of the people; the real
bosses have to get that. They can't buy the people--too many of
them; so they buy the people's leaders, and the disloyalty of
the political boss is the key to the whole thing."
These was no response. I plumbed him again.
"And you--you believe in loyalty, Boss," I said--"in being true
to your own." His eyes opened. "That's your virtue, you say,
and you said, too, that you have practiced it."
"Don't," he murmured.
A Ballad of Dead Girls
BY DANA BURNET
(American poet, born 1888)
Scarce had they brought the bodies down
Across the withered floor,
Than Max Rogosky thundered at
The District Leader's door.
Scarce had the white-lipped mothers come
To search the fearful noon,
Than little Max stood shivering
In Tom McTodd's saloon!
In Tom McTodd's saloon he stood,
Beside the silver bar,
Where any honest lad may stand,
And sell his vote at par.
"Ten years I've paid the System's tax,"
The words fell, quivering, raw;
"And now I want the thing I bought--
Protection from the law!"
The Leader smiled a twisted smile:
"Your doors were locked," he said.
"You've overstepped the limit, Max--
A hundred women ... dead!"
Then Max Rogosky gripped the bar
And shivered where he stood.
"You listen now to me," he cried,
"Like business fellers should!
"I've paid for all my hundred dead,
I've paid, I've paid, I've paid."
His ragged laughter rang, and died--
For he was sore afraid.
"I've paid for wooden hall and stair,
I've paid to strain my floors,
I've paid for rotten fire-escapes,
For all my bolted doors.
"Your fat inspectors came and came--
I crossed their hands with gold.
And now I want the thing I bought,
The thing the System sold."
The District Leader filled a glass
With whiskey from the bar,
(The little silver counter where
He bought men's souls at par.)
And well he knew that he must give
The thing that he had sold,
Else men should doubt the System's word,
Keep back the System's gold.
The whiskey burned beneath his tongue:
"A hundred women dead!
I guess the Boss can fix it up,
Go home--and hide," he said.
* * * * *
All day they brought the bodies down
From Max Rogosky's place--
And oh, the fearful touch of flame
On hand and breast and face!
All day the white-lipped mothers came
To search the sheeted dead;
And Horror strode the blackened walls.
Where Death had walked in red.
But Max Rogosky did not weep.
(He knew that tears were vain.)
He paid the System's price, and lived
To lock his doors again.
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(See pages 181, 492, 507)
The strongest castle, tower and town,
The golden bullet beats it down.
The Miner's Tale
BY MAY BEALS
(A tragedy at Coal Creek, Tennessee, May 19, 1902)
The lord of us he lay in his bed--
Good right had he, good right!
But we were up before night had fled,
Out to the mine in the dawning red;
Slaves were we all, by hunger led
Into the land of night.
The master knew of our danger well,
We also knew--we knew.
His greed for profits had served him well,
But he over-reached him, as fate befell,
And I alone am left to tell,
Death's horrors I lived through
The master dreamed, mayhap, of his gold,
But we were awake--awake,
Buried alive in the black earth's mold;
And some who yet could a pencil hold,
Wrote till their hands in death grew cold,
For wife or sweetheart's sake.
Letters they wrote of farewell--farewell,
To mother, sweetheart, wife:
What words of comfort could they tell--
Comfort for those who loved them well,
Up from the jaws of the earth's black hell
That was crushing out their life.
The master cursed, as masters do--
Good right had he, good right!
But the fear of our vengeance stirred him, too;
He sailed, with some of his pirate crew,
To Europe, and reveled a year or two;
Great might has he--great might!
Romance
BY SEYMOUR DEMING
(Contemporary American writer)
The old idea of romance: The country boy goes to the city,
marries his employer's daughter, enslaves some hundreds of his
fellow humans, gets rich, and leaves a public library to his
home town.
The new idea of romance: To undo some of the mischief done by
the old idea of romance.
The Soul's Errand
BY SIR WALTER RALEIGH
(Written by the English soldier and statesman, 1552-1618, just
before his execution)
Go, Soul, the body's guest,
Upon a thankless errand;
Fear not to touch the best;
The truth shall be thy warrant:
Go, since I needs must die,
And give them all the lie.
Go tell the Court it glows
And shines like rotten wood;
Go tell the Church it shows
What's good, but does no good:
If Court and Church reply
Give Court and Church the lie.
Tell Potentates they live
Acting, but oh! their actions;
Not loved, unless they give,
Nor strong but by their factions:
If Potentates reply,
Give Potentates the lie.
Tell men of high condition,
That rule affairs of state,
Their purpose is ambition;
Their practice only hate:
And if they do reply,
Then give them all the lie....
Tell Physic of her boldness;
Tell Skill it is pretension;
Tell Charity of coldness;
Tell Law it is contention:
And if they yield reply,
Then give them all the lie....
So when thou hast, as I
Commanded thee, done blabbing;
Although to give the lie
Deserves no less than stabbing:
Yet stab at thee who will,
No stab the Soul can kill.
December 31st
BY LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE
(Contemporary English poet)
What is he hammering there,
That devil swinking in Hell?
Oh, he forges a cunning New Year,
God knows he does it well.
Mill and harrow and rake,
A restless enginery
Of men and women to make
Cruelty, Harlotry.
Sisters of the Cross of Shame
BY DANA BURNET
(See page 531)
The Sisters of the Cross of Shame,
They smile along the night;
Their houses stand with shuttered souls
And painted eyes of light.
Their houses look with scarlet eyes
Upon a world of sin;
And every man cries, "Woe, alas!"
And every man goes in.
The sober Senate meets at noon,
To pass the Woman's Law,
The portly Churchmen vote to stem
The torrent with a straw.
The Sister of the Cross of Shame,
She smiles beneath her cloud--
(She does not laugh till ten o'clock,
And then she laughs too loud.)
And still she hears the throb of feet
Upon the scarlet stair,
And still she dons the cloak of shame
That is not hers to wear.
The sons of saintly women come
To kiss the Cross of Shame;
Before them, in another time,
Their worthy fathers came....
And no man tells his son the truth,
Lest he should speak of sin;
And every man cries, "Woe, alas!"
And every man goes in.
Bringing the Light
(_From "A Bed of Roses"_)
BY W. L. GEORGE
(Contemporary English novelist. The life-story of a woman wage-earner
who is driven by the pressure of want to a career of shame. In the
following scene she argues with a suffrage-worker, who has called upon
her, in ignorance of her true character)
The woman's eyes were rapt, her hands tightly clenched, her
lips parted, her cheeks a little flushed. But Victoria's face
had hardened suddenly.
"Miss Welkin," she said quietly, "has anything struck you about
this house, about me?"
The suffragist looked at her uneasily.
"You ought to know whom you are talking to," Victoria went on,
"I am a.... I am a what you would probably call ... well, not
respectable."
A dull red flush spread over Miss Welkin's face, from the line
of her tightly pulled hair to her stiff white collar; even her
ears went red. She looked away into a corner.
"You see," said Victoria, "it's a shock, isn't it? I ought not
to have let you in. It wasn't quite fair, was it?"
"Oh, it isn't that, Mrs. Ferris," burst out the suffragist,
"I'm not thinking of myself.... Our cause is not the cause of
rich women or poor women, of good women or bad; it's the cause
of woman. Thus, it doesn't matter who she is, so long as there
is a woman who stands aloof from us there is still work to do.
I know that yours is not a happy life; and we are bringing the
light."
"The light!" echoed Victoria bitterly. "You have no idea, I
see, of how many people there are who are bringing the light
to women like me. There are various religious organizations
who wish to rescue us and house us comfortably under the
patronage of the police, to keep us nicely and feed us on what
is suitable for the fallen; they expect us to sew ten hours a
day for these privileges, but that is by the way. There are
also many kindly souls who offer little jobs as charwomen to
those of us who are too worn out to pursue our calling; we
are offered emigration as servants in exchange for the power
of commanding a household; we are offered poverty for luxury,
service for domination, slavery to women instead of slavery to
men. How tempting it is!" ...
The suffragist said nothing for a second. She felt shaken by
Victoria's bitterness.... "The vote does not mean everything,"
she said reluctantly. "It will merely ensure that we rise like
the men when we are fit."
"Well, Miss Welkin, I won't press that. But now, tell me, if
women got the vote to-morrow, what would it do for my class?"
"It would be raised...."
"No, no, we can't wait to be raised. We've got to live, and
if you 'raise' us we lose our means of livelihood. How are
you going to get to the root cause and lift us, not the next
generation, at once out of the lower depths?"
The suffragist's face contracted.
"Everything takes time," she faltered. "Just as I couldn't
promise a charwoman that her hours would go down and her wages
go up the next day, I can't say that ... of course your case is
more difficult than any other, because ... because...."
"Because," said Victoria coldly, "I represent a social
necessity. So long as your economic system is such that there
is not work for the asking for every human being--work, mark
you, fitted to strength and ability--so long on the other hand
as there is such uncertainty as prevents men from marrying, so
long as there is a leisure class who draw luxury from the labor
of other men; so long will my class endure as it endured in
Athens, in Rome, in Alexandria, as it does now from St. John's
Wood to Pekin."
The Selling of Love
(_From "Love's Coming of Age"_)
BY EDWARD CARPENTER
(See page 186)
The commercial prostitution of love is the last outcome of
our whole social system, and its most clear condemnation.
It flaunts in our streets, it hides itself in the garment
of respectability under the name of matrimony, it eats in
actual physical disease and death right through our midst;
it is fed by the oppression and the ignorance of women, by
their poverty and denied means of livelihood, and by the
hypocritical puritanism which forbids them by millions not only
to gratify but even to speak of their natural desires; and it
is encouraged by the callousness of an age which has accustomed
men to buy and sell for money every most precious thing--even
the life-long labor of their brothers, therefore why not also
the very bodies of their sisters?
The Butcher's Stall
(_From "Les Villes Tentaculaires:" The Octopus Cities_)
BY ÉMILE VERHAEREN
(Belgian poet, born 1855. When Maurice Maeterlinck was suggested as a
member of the French Academy, he recommended that the honor should be
conferred upon Verhaeren instead. Beginning his career as a decadent
and victim of disease, Verhaeren evolved into a rhapsodist of modern
civilization. No poet has ever approached him in the portrayal and
interpretation of factories, forges, railroads, and all the phenomena
of industrialism. Of late he has become an ardent Socialist. The poem
here quoted is from a book portraying the sins and agonies of great
cities. Only portions of the poem could be printed in a work intended
for general circulation in English; but even of these passages the
editor will venture the assertion that never before has the horror of
prostitution been so packed into human speech)
Hard by the docks, soon as the shadows fold
The dizzy mansion-fronts that soar aloft,
When eyes of lamps are burning soft,
The shy, dark quarter lights again its old
Allurement of red vice and gold.
Women, blocks of heaped, blown meat,
Stand on low thresholds down the narrow street,
Calling to every man that passes;
Behind them, at the end of corridors,
Shine fires, a curtain stirs
And gives a glimpse of masses
Of mad and naked flesh in looking-glasses.
Hard by the docks
The street upon the left is ended by
A tangle of high masts and shrouds that blocks
A sheet of sky;
Upon the right a net of grovelling alleys
Falls from the town--and here the black crowd rallies
And reels to rotten revelry.
It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury,
Time out of mind erected on the frontiers
Of the city and the sea.
Far-sailing melancholy mariners
Who, wet with spray, thru grey mists peer,
Cabin-boys cradled among the rigging, and they who steer
Hallucinated by the blue eyes of the vast sea-spaces,
All dream of it, evoke it when the evening falls;
Their raw desire to madness galls;
The wind's soft kisses hover on their faces;
The wave awakens rolling images of soft embraces;
And their two arms implore
Stretched in a frantic cry towards the shore.
And they of offices and shops, the city tribes,
Merchants precise, keen reckoners, haggard scribes,
Who sell their brains for hire, and tame their brows,
When the keys of desks are hanging on the wall,
Feel the same galling rut at even-fall,
And run like hunted dogs to the carouse.
Out of the depths of dusk come their dark flocks,
And in their hearts debauch so rudely shocks
Their ingrained greed and old accustomed care,
That they are racked and ruined by despair.
It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury,
Time out of mind erected on the frontiers
Of the city and the sea.
Come from what far sea-isles or pestilent parts?
Come from what feverish or methodic marts?
Their eyes are filled with bitter, cunning hate,
They fight their instincts that they cannot sate;
Around red females who befool them, they
Herd frenzied till the dawn of sober day.
The panelling is fiery with lewd art;
Out of the wall nitescent knick-knacks dart;
Fat Bacchuses and leaping satyrs in
Wan mirrors freeze an unremitting grin....
And women with spent loins and sleeping croups
Are piled on sofas and arm-chairs in groups,
With sodden flesh grown vague, and black and blue
With the first trampling of the evening's crew.
One of them slides a gold coin in her stocking;
Another yawns, and some their knees are rocking;
Others by bacchanalia worn out,
Feeling old age, and, sniffing them, Death's snout,
Stare with wide-open eyes, torches extinct,
And smooth their legs with hands together linked....
It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury,
Wherein Crime plants his knives that bleed,
Where lightning madness stains
Foreheads with rotting pains,
Time out of mind erected on frontiers that feed
The city and the sea.
Fomá Gordyéeff
BY MAXIM GORKY
(Perhaps the most famous novel of the Russian writer, the life-story
of the son of a prosperous merchant, a youth who wrecks himself in a
vain search for some outlet for his energies, and at the end commits
suicide)
"Where is the merchant to spend his energy? He cannot spend
much of it on the Exchange, so he squanders the excess of his
muscular capital in drinking-bouts in _kabaky_; for he has
no conception of other applications of his strength, which
are more productive, more valuable to life. He is still a
beast, and life has already become to him a cage, and it is
too narrow for him with his splendid health and predilection
for licentiousness. Hampered by culture, he at once starts to
lead a dissolute life. The debauch of a merchant is always the
revolt of a captive beast. Of course this is bad. But, ah! it
will be worse yet, when this beast shall have gathered some
sense and shall have disciplined it. Believe me, even then he
will not cease to create scandals, but they will be historical
events. For they will emanate from the merchant's thirst for
power; their aim will be the omnipotence of one class, and the
merchant will not be particular about the means toward the
attainment of this aim.
"Where am I to make use of my strength, since there is no
demand for it? I ought to fight with robbers, or turn a robber
myself. In general I ought to do something big. And that would
be done, not with the head, but with the arms and breast. While
here we have to go to the Exchange and try to aim well to make
a rouble. What do we need it for? And what is it, anyway? Has
life been arranged in this form forever? What sort of life is
it, if everyone finds it too narrow for him? Life ought to be
according to the taste of man. If it is narrow for me; I must
move it asunder that I may have more room. I must break it
and reconstruct it. But how? That's where the trouble lies!
What ought to be done that life may be freer? That I don't
understand, and that's all there is to it!"
Venus Pandemos
BY RICHARD DEHMEL
(Contemporary German poet, born 1863)
This was the last time. I was lounging in
The night-café that lights the suburb gloom,
Tired with the reek of sultry sofa plush,
And with my glowing toddy, and the steam
Of women sweating in their gowns: tired, lustful.
Clouds of tobacco smoke were wavering through
The laughter and the haggling cries and shrieks
Of painted women and the men they drew.
The rattling at the sideboard of the spoons
Cheered on the hubbub of the mart of love
Uninterrupted like a tambourine....
I was about to choose, when, where I sate,
The crimson curtain of the door was split,
And a fresh couple entered. A cold draught
Cut through the heated room, and some one swore;
But through the crowd the pair stepped noiselessly.
Over against me at the transverse end
Of the corridor, whence they could sweep the room,
They took their seats. The chandelier of bronze
Hung o'er them like an awning heavy, old.
And no one seemed to know the couple, but
At my right hand I heard a hoarse voice pipe:
"I must have come across that pair before."
He sat quite still. The loud gray of the air
Almost recoiled before his callous brow,
Which wan as wax rose into his sparse hair.
His great pale eye-lids hung down deep and shut,
On both sides lay around his sunken nose
Their shadows, and through his thin beard shone the skin.
And only when the woman at his side,
Less tall than he, and of a lissom shape,
Hissed, giggling, in his ear some obscene word,
Half rose of one black eye the heavy lid,
And slowly round he turned his long, thin neck,
As when a vulture lunges at a corpse.
And silent and more silent grew the room;
All eyes were fixed upon the silent guest,
And on the woman squatted, strange to see.
"She is quite young"--a whispering round me went;
And with a child's greed she was drinking milk.
Yet almost old she seemed to me, whenever
Her tongue shot through a gap in her black teeth,
Her pointed tongue out of her hissing mouth,
While her gray, eager glance took in the room;
The gaslight in it shone like poisonous green.
And now she rose. He had not touched his glass;
A great coin lit the table. She went out;
He automatically followed her.
The crimson curtain round the door fell to,
Once more the cold draught shivered through the heat,
But no one cursed. Through me a shiver ran.
I did not choose a partner--suddenly
I knew them: it was Syphilis and Death.
BOOK XI
_War_
Pictures of a terrible evil, and denunciations of it, which
will be found especially timely at the present hour.
I Sing the Battle
(_From "The Cry of Youth"_)
BY HARRY KEMP
(See pages 37, 351)
I sing the song of the great clean guns that belch forth death at will.
Ah, but the wailing mothers, the lifeless forms and still!
I sing the songs of the billowing flags, the bugles that cry before.
Ah, but the skeletons flapping rags, the lips that speak no more!
I sing the clash of bayonets and sabres that flash and cleave.
And wilt thou sing the maimed ones, too, that go with pinned-up sleeve?
I sing acclaimèd generals that bring the victory home.
Ah, but the broken bodies that drip like honey-comb!
I sing of hearts triumphant, long ranks of marching men.
And wilt thou sing the shadowy hosts that never march again?
War
(_From "Beyond the Breakers"_)
BY GEORGE STERLING
(See page 504)
The night was on the world, and in my sleep
I heard a voice that cried across the dark:
"Give steel!" And gazing I beheld a red,
Infernal stithy. There were Titans five
Assembled, thewed and naked and malign
Against the glare. One to the furnace throat,
Whence issued screams, fed shapes of human use--
The hammer, axe and plow. Those molten soon,
Another haled the dazzling ingot forth
With tongs, and gave it to the anvil. Two,
With massy sledges throbbing at the task,
Harried the gloom with unenduring stars
And poured a clangorous music on the dark,
With loud, astounding shock and counter-shock
Incessant. And the fifth colossus stood
The captain of that labor. From his form
Spread wings more black than Hell's high-altar--ribbed
As are the vampire-bat's. The night grew old,
And I was then aware they shaped a sword....
In that domain and interval of dream
'Twas dawn upon the headlands of the world,
And I, appalled, beheld how men had reared
A mountain, dark below the morning star--
A peak made up of houses and of herds,
Of cradles, yokes and all the handiwork
Of man. Upon its crest were gems and gold,
Rare fabrics, and the woof of humble looms.
Harvests and groves and battlements were made
Part of its ramparts, and the whole was drenched
With oil and wine and honey. Then thereon
Men bound their sons, the fair, alert and strong,
Sparing no household. And when all were bound,
Brands were brought forth: the mount became a pyre.
Black from that red immensity of flame,
A tower of smoke, upcoiling to the sky,
Was shapen by the winds, and took the form
Of him who in the stithy gave command.
A shadow between day and men he stood;
His eyes looked forth on nothingness; his wings
Domed desolations, and the scarlet sun
Glowed through their darkness like a seal that God
Might set on Hell forever. Then the pyre
Shrank, and he reeled. Whereat, to save that shape
Their madness had evoked in death and pain,
Men rose and made a second sacrifice.
Sartor Resartus
BY THOMAS CARLYLE
(See pages 31, 74, 133, 488)
What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net-purport
and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there
dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually
some five hundred souls. From these, by certain "Natural
Enemies" of the French, there are successfully selected, during
the French war, say thirty able-bodied men: Dumdrudge, at
her own expense, has suckled and nursed them: she has, not
without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even
trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build,
another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone
avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing,
they are selected; all dressed in red, and shipped away, at
the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to
the south of Spain; and fed there till wanted. And now to that
same spot, in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French
artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending;
till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come
into actual juxtaposition, and Thirty stands fronting Thirty,
each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word "Fire!" is
given and they blow the souls out of one another, and in place
of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead
carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had
these men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest!
They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers;
nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even, unconsciously,
by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then?
Simpleton! their Governors had fallen out; and, instead of
shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor
blockheads shoot.--Alas, so is it in Deutschland, and hitherto
in all other lands; still as of old, "what devilry soever Kings
do, the Greeks must pay the piper!"--In that fiction of the
English Smollett, it is true, the final Cessation of War is
perhaps prophetically shadowed forth; where the two Natural
Enemies, in person, take each a Tobacco-pipe, filled with
Brimstone; light the same, and smoke in one another's faces,
till the weaker gives in: but from such predicted Peace-Era,
what blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may
still divide us!
The Soldier's Oath
BY KAISER WILHELM OF GERMANY
(Speech delivered in 1891)
Recruits! Before the altar and the servant of God you have
given me the oath of allegiance. You are too young to know
the full meaning of what you have said, but your first care
must be to obey implicitly all orders and directions. You have
sworn fidelity to me, you are the children of my guard, you
are my soldiers, you have surrendered yourselves to me, body
and soul. Only one enemy can exist for you--my enemy. With the
present Socialist machinations, it may happen that I shall
order you to shoot your own relatives, your brothers, or even
your parents--which God forbid--and then you are bound in duty
implicitly to obey my orders.
The Coming of War
BY LEO TOLSTOY
(See pages 88, 110, 148, 276, 374, 416)
The bells will peal, long-haired men will dress in golden sacks
to pray for successful slaughter. And the old story will begin
again, the awful customary acts.
The editors of the daily Press will begin virulently to stir
men up to hatred and manslaughter in the name of patriotism,
happy in the receipt of an increased income. Manufacturers,
merchants, contractors for military stores, will hurry joyously
about their business, in the hope of double receipts.
All sorts of Government officials will buzz about, foreseeing
a possibility of purloining something more than usual. The
military authorities will hurry hither and thither, drawing
double pay and rations, and with the expectation of receiving
for the slaughter of other men various silly little ornaments
which they so highly prize, as ribbons, crosses, orders, and
stars. Idle ladies and gentlemen will make a great fuss,
entering their names in advance for the Red Cross Society, and
ready to bind up the wounds of those whom their husbands and
brothers will mutilate; and they will imagine that in so doing
they are performing a most Christian work.
And, smothering despair within their souls by songs,
licentiousness, and wine, men will trail along, torn
from peaceful labor, from their wives, mothers and
children--hundreds of thousands of simple-minded, good-natured
men with murderous weapons in their hands--anywhere they may be
driven.
They will march, freeze, hunger, suffer sickness, and die from
it, or finally come to some place where they will be slain by
thousands or kill thousands themselves with no reason--men whom
they have never seen before, and who neither have done nor
could do them any mischief.
And when the number of sick, wounded, and killed becomes so
great that there are not hands enough left to pick them up,
and when the air is so infected with the putrefying scent
of the "food for powder" that even the authorities find it
disagreeable, a truce will be made, the wounded will be picked
up anyhow, the sick will be brought in and huddled together in
heaps, the killed will be covered with earth and lime, and once
more all the crowd of deluded men will be led on and on till
those who have devised the project, weary of it, or till those
who thought to find it profitable receive their spoil.
And so once more men will be made savage, fierce, and brutal,
and love will wane in the world, and the Christianizing of
mankind, which has already begun, will lapse for scores and
hundreds of years. And so once more the men who reaped profit
from it all, will assert with assurance that since there has
been a war there must needs have been one, and that other wars
must follow, and they will again prepare future generations for
a continuance of slaughter, depraving them from their birth.
Slavery
BY WILLIAM COWPER
(English poet, 1731-1800)
O for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumor of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more. My ear is pained,
My soul is sick, with every day's report
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.
There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart,
It does not feel for man; the natural bond
Of brotherhood is severed as the flax
That falls asunder at the touch of fire.
He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not colored like his own; and having power
To enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.
Lands intersected by a narrow frith
Abhor each other. Mountains interposed
Make enemies of nations, who had else
Like kindred drops been mingled into one.
Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys;
And, worse than all, and most to be deplored,
As human nature's broadest, foulest blot,
Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat
With stripes, that Mercy, with a bleeding heart,
Weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast.
The Biglow Papers
BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
(These poems, first published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in
1846, voiced the bitter opposition of New England to the
Mexican war as a slave-holders' enterprise)
Thrash away, you'll _hev_ to rattle
On them kittle-drums o' yourn,--
'Tain't a knowin' kind o' cattle
Thet is ketched with mouldy corn;
Put in stiff, you fifer feller,
Let folks see how spry you be,--
Guess you'll toot till you are yeller
'Fore you git ahold o' me!...
Ez fer war, I call it murder,--
There you hev it plain an' flat;
I don't want to go no furder
Than my Testyment fer that;
God hez sed so plump an' fairly,
It's ez long ez it is broad,
An' you've got to git up airly
Ef you want to take in God.
'Tain't your eppyletts an' feathers
Make the thing a grain more right;
'Tain't afollerin' your bell-wethers
Will excuse ye in His sight;
Ef you take a sword an' dror it,
An' go stick a feller thru,
Guv'mint ain't to answer for it,
God'll send the bill to you.
Wut's the use o' meetin'-goin'
Every Sabbath, wet or dry,
Ef it's right to go amowin'
Feller-men like oats an' rye?
I dunno but wut it's pooty
Trainin' round in bobtail coats,--
But it's curus Christian dooty
This 'ere cuttin' folks's throats....
Tell ye jest the eend I've come to
Arter cipherin' plaguey smart,
An' it makes a handy sum, tu,
Any gump could larn by heart;
Laborin' man an' laborin' woman
Hev one glory an' one shame.
Ev'y thin' thet's done inhuman
Injers all on 'em the same.
'Tain't by turnin' out to hack folks
You're agoin' to git your right,
Nor by lookin' down on black folks
Coz you're put upon by white;
Slavery ain't o' nary color,
'Tain't the hide thet makes it wus,
All it keers fer in a feller
'S jest to make him fill its pus.
To a Nine-inch Gun
BY P. F. MCCARTHY
(This poem came to the New York _World_ office on a crumpled
piece of soiled paper. The author's address was given as Fourth
Bench, City Hall Park)
Whether your shell hits the target or not,
Your cost is Five Hundred Dollars a Shot.
You thing of noise and flame and power,
We feed you a hundred barrels of flour
Each time you roar. Your flame is fed
With twenty thousand loaves of bread.
Silence! A million hungry men
Seek bread to fill their mouths again.
Kruppism
(_From "The Present Hour"_)
BY PERCY MACKAYE
(American poet and dramatist, born 1875)
Crowned on the twilight battlefield, there bends
A crooked iron dwarf, and delves for gold,
Chuckling: "One hundred thousand gatlings--sold!"
And the moon rises, and a moaning rends
The mangled living, and the dead distends,
And a child cowers on the chartless wold,
Where, searching in his safety vault of mold,
The kobold kaiser cuts his dividends.
We, who still wage his battles, are his thralls,
And dying do him homage; yea, and give
Daily our living souls to be enticed
Into his power. So long as on war's walls
We build engines of death that he may live,
So long shall we serve Krupp instead of Christ.
BY THE EMPRESS CATHERINE II OF RUSSIA
(1729-1796)
The only way to save our empires from the encroachment of
the people is to engage in war, and thus substitute national
passions for social aspirations.
BY FREDERICK THE GREAT OF PRUSSIA
(1712-1786)
If my soldiers were to begin to reflect, not one of them would
remain in the ranks.
Our Father Which Art in Heaven
(_From "The Human Slaughter-House"_)
BY WILHELM LAMSZUS
(A novel by a Hamburg school-teacher, published in 1913.
Although banned by the authorities in some places, over 100,000
copies were sold in Germany in a few weeks)
We rejoined the Colors on Friday. On Monday we are to move out.
Today, being Sunday, is full-dress Church Parade.
I slept badly last night, and am feeling uneasy and limp.
And now we are sitting close-packed in church.
The organ is playing a voluntary.
I am leaning back and straining my ears for the sounds in the
dim twilight of the building. Childhood's days rise before my
eyes again. I am watching a little solemn-faced boy sitting
crouched in a corner and listening to the divine service. The
priest is standing in front of the altar, and is intoning the
Exhortation devoutly. The choir in the gallery is chanting
the responses. The organ thunders out and floods through the
building majestically. I am rapt in an ecstasy of sweet terror,
for the Lord God is coming down upon us. He is standing before
me and touching my body, so that I have to close my eyes in a
terror of shuddering ecstasy....
That is long, long ago, and is all past and done with, as youth
itself is past and done with....
Strange! After all these years of doubt and unbelief, at this
moment of lucid consciousness, the atmosphere of devoutness,
long since dead, possesses me, and thrills me so passionately
that I can hardly resist it. This is the same heavy
twilight--these are the same yearning angel voices--the same
fearful sense of rapture--
I pull myself together, and sit bolt upright on the hard wooden
pew.
In the main and the side aisles below, and in the galleries
above, nothing but soldiers in uniform, and all, with level
faces, turned toward the altar, toward that pale man in his
long dignified black gown, toward that sonorous, unctuous
mouth, from whose lips flows the name of God.
Look! He is now stretching forth his hands. We incline our
heads. He is pronouncing the Benediction over us in a voice
that echoes from the tomb. He is blessing us in the name of
God, the Merciful. He is blessing our rifles that they may not
fail us; he is blessing the wire-drawn guns on their patent
recoilless carriages; he is blessing every precious cartridge,
lest a single bullet be wasted, lest any pass idly through the
air; that each one may account for a hundred human beings, may
shatter a hundred human beings simultaneously.
Father in Heaven! Thou art gazing down at us in such terrible
silence. Dost Thou shudder at these sons of men? Thou poor and
slight God! Thou couldst only rain Thy paltry pitch and sulphur
on Sodom and Gomorrah. But we, Thy children, whom Thou hast
created, we are going to exterminate them by high-pressure
machinery, and butcher whole cities in factories. Here we
stand, and while we stretch our hands to Thy Son in prayer,
and cry Hosannah! we are hurling shells and shrapnel in the
face of Thy Image, and shooting the Son of Man down from His
Cross like a target at the rifle-butts.
And now the Holy Communion is being celebrated. The organ is
playing mysteriously from afar off, and the flesh and blood of
the Redeemer is mingling with our flesh and blood.
There He is hanging on the Cross above me, and gazing down upon
me.
How pale those cheeks look! And those eyes are the eyes as of
one dead! Who was this Christ Who is to aid us, and Whose blood
we drink? What was it they once taught us at school? Didst Thou
not love mankind? And didst Thou not die for the whole human
race? Stretch out Thine arms toward me. There is something I
would fain ask of Thee.... Ah! they have nailed Thy arms to the
Cross, so that Thou canst not stretch out a finger toward us.
Shuddering, I fix my eyes on the corpse-like face and see that
He died long ago, that He is nothing more than wood, nothing
other than a puppet. Christ, it is no longer Thee to whom we
pray. Look there! Look there! It is he. The new patron saint
of a Christian State! Look there! It is he, the great Genghis
Khan. Of him we know that he swept through the history of the
world with fire and sword, and piled up pyramids of skulls.
Yes, that is he. Let us heap up mountains of human heads, and
pile up heaps of human entrails. Great Genghis Khan! Thou, our
patron saint! Do thou bless us! Pray to thy blood-drenched
father seated above the skies of Asia, that he may sweep with
us through the clouds; that he may strike down that accursed
nation till it writhes in its blood, till it never can rise
again. A red mist swims before my eyes. Of a sudden I see
nothing but blood before me. The heavens have opened, and the
red flood pours in through the windows. Blood wells up on the
altar. The walls run blood from the ceiling to the floor,
and--God the Father steps out of the blood. Every scale of his
skin stands erect, his beard and hair drip blood. A giant of
blood stands before me. He seats himself backward on the altar,
and is laughing from thick, coarse lips--there sits the King
of Dahomey, and he butchers his slaves. The black executioner
raises his sword and whirls it above my head. Another moment
and my head will roll down on the floor--another moment and the
red jet will spurt from my neck.... Murderers, murderers! None
other than murderers! Lord God in Heaven!
Then--
The church door opens creaking--
Light, air, the blue of heaven, burst in.
I draw a breath of relief. We have risen to our feet, and at
length pass out of the twilight into the open air.
My knees are still trembling under me.
We fall into line, and in our hob-nailed boots tramp in step
down the street toward the barracks. When I see my mates
marching beside me in their matter-of-fact and stolid way,
I feel ashamed, and call myself a wretched coward. What a
weak-nerved, hysterical breed, that can no longer look at blood
without fainting! You neurasthenic offspring of your sturdy
peasant forebears, who shouted for joy when they went out to
fight!
I pull myself together and throw my head back.
I never was a coward, and eye for eye I have always looked my
man in the face, and will so do this time, too, happen what
may.
The War Prayer[A]
[A] (Quoted by special permission of Harper & Brothers.)
BY MARK TWAIN
(American humorist. See page 265. This "War Prayer," withheld from
publication until after Mark Twain's death, pictures the assembling
of soldiers in church, and the prayer of the chaplain for victory.
In answer to the prayer, God sends down a white-robed messenger, who
voices the unspoken meaning of the prayer.)
"O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody
shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields
with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown
the thunder of the guns with the wounded, writhing in pain;
help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of
fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows
with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with
their little children to wander unfriended through wastes of
their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sport of
the sun-flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken
in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of
the grave and denied it--for our sakes, who adore Thee, Lord,
blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter
pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their
tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded
feet! We ask of one who is the Spirit of love and who is the
ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset, and
seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Grant our prayer,
O Lord, and Thine shall be the praise and honor and glory now
and ever, Amen."
(After a pause.) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it,
speak!--the messenger of the Most High waits."
The Illusion of War
BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
(American poet, born in England, 1866)
War I abhor, and yet how sweet
The sound along the marching street
Of drum and fife, and I forget
Wet eyes of widows, and forget
Broken old mothers, and the whole
Dark butchery without a soul.
Without a soul, save this bright drink
Of heady music, sweet as hell;
And even my peace-abiding feet
Go marching with the marching street--
For yonder, yonder goes the fife,
And what care I for human life!
The tears fill my astonished eyes,
And my full heart is like to break;
And yet 'tis all embannered lies,
A dream those little drummers make.
O, it is wickedness to clothe
Yon hideous grinning thing that stalks,
Hidden in music, like a queen,
That in a garden of glory walks,
Till good men love the thing they loathe.
Art, thou hast many infamies,
But not an infamy like this--
Oh, snap the fife, and still the drum,
And show the monster as she is!
Lay Down Your Arms
BY BARONESS BERTHA VON SUTTNER
(Austrian novelist and peace advocate, 1850-1914. Her protest against
war, published in 1889, made a deep impression throughout Europe. In
the following scene a woman is taken to visit a field of battle with
the hospital-corps)
No more thunder of artillery, no more blare of trumpets, no
more beat of drum; only the low moans of pain and the rattle
of death. In the trampled ground some redly-glimmering pools,
lakes of blood; all the crops destroyed, only here and there a
piece of land left untouched, and still covered with stubble;
the smiling villages of yesterday turned into ruins and
rubbish. The trees burned and hacked in the forests, the hedges
torn with grape-shot. And on this battle-ground thousands and
thousands of men dead and dying--dying without aid. No blossoms
of flowers are to be seen on wayside or meadow; but sabres,
bayonets, knapsacks, cloaks, overturned ammunition wagons,
powder wagons blown into the air, cannon with broken carriages.
Near the cannon, whose muzzles are black with smoke, the ground
is bloodiest. There the greatest number and the most mangled
of dead and half-dead men are lying, literally torn to pieces
with shot; and the dead horses, and the half-dead which raise
themselves on their feet--such feet as they have left--to sink
again; then raise themselves up once more and fall down again,
till they only raise their head to shriek out their pain-laden
death-cry. There is a hollow way quite filled with corpses
trodden into the mire. The poor creatures had taken refuge
there no doubt to get cover, but a battery has driven over
them, and they have been crushed by the horses' hoofs and the
wheels. Many of them are still alive--a pulpy, bleeding mass,
but "still alive".
And yet there is still something more hellish even than
all this, and that is the appearance of the most vile scum
of humanity, as it shows itself in war--the appearance and
activity of "the hyenas of the battlefield." "Then slink on
the monsters who grope after the spoils of the dead, and bend
over the corpses and over the living, mercilessly tearing off
their clothes from their bodies. The boots are dragged off the
bleeding limbs, the rings off the wounded hands, or to get the
ring the finger is simply chopped off, and if a man tries to
defend himself from such a sacrifice, he is murdered by these
hyenas; or, in order to make him unrecognizable, they dig his
eyes out."
I shrieked out loud at the doctor's last words. I again saw the
whole scene before me, and the eyes into which the hyena was
plunging his knife were Frederick's soft, blue, beloved eyes.
"Pray, forgive me, dear lady, but it was by your own wish----"
"Oh, yes; I desire to hear it all. What you are now describing
was the night that follows the battle; and these scenes are
enacted by the starlight?"
"And by torchlight. The patrols which the conquerors send out
to survey the field of battle carry torches and lanterns, and
red lanterns are hoisted on signal poles to point out the
places where flying hospitals are to be established."
"And next morning, how does the field look?"
"Almost more fearful still. The contrast between the bright
smiling daylight and the dreadful work of man on which it
shines has a doubly-painful effect. At night the entire picture
of horror is something ghostly and fantastic. By daylight it
is simply hopeless. Now you see for the first time the mass
of corpses lying around on the lanes, between the fields,
in the ditches, behind the ruins of walls. Everywhere dead
bodies--everywhere. Plundered, some of them naked; and just
the same with the wounded. Those who, in spite of the nightly
labor of the Sanitary Corps, are still always lying around in
numbers, look pale and collapsed, green or yellow, with fixed
and stupefied gaze, or writhing in agonies of pain, they beg
any one who comes near to put them to death. Swarms of carrion
crows settle on the tops of the trees, and with loud croaks
announce the bill of fare of the tempting banquet. Hungry dogs,
from the villages around, come running by and lick the blood
from wounds. Further afield there are a few hyenas to be seen,
who are still carrying on their work hastily. And now comes the
great interment."
"Who does that--the Sanitary Corps?"
"How could they suffice for such a mass of work? They have
fully enough to do with the wounded."
"Then troops are detailed for the work?"
"No. A crowd of men impressed, or even offering themselves
voluntarily--loiterers, baggage people, who are supporting
themselves by the market-stalls, baggage-wagons and so forth,
and who now have been hunted away by the force of the military
operations, together with the inhabitants of the cottages
and huts--to dig trenches--good large ones, of course--wide
trenches, for they are not made deep--there is no time for
that. Into these the dead bodies are thrown, heads up or heads
down just as they come to hand. Or it is done in this way:
A heap is made of the corpses, and a foot or two of earth
is heaped up over them, and then it has the appearance of a
tumulus. In a few days rain comes on and washes the covering
off the festering dead bodies! but what does that matter? The
nimble, jolly grave-diggers do not look so far forward. For
jolly, merry workmen they are, that one must allow. Songs are
piped out there, and all kinds of dubious jokes made--nay,
sometimes a dance of hyenas is danced round the open trench.
Whether life is still stirring in several of the bodies that
are shovelled into it or are covered with the earth, they give
themselves no trouble to think. The thing is inevitable, for
the stiff cramp often comes on after wounds. Many who have been
saved by accident have told of the danger of being buried alive
which they have escaped. But how many are there of those who
are not able to tell anything! If a man has once got a foot or
two of earth over his mouth he may well hold his tongue."
Before Sedan
BY AUSTIN DOBSON
(English poet and essayist, born 1840)
Here in this leafy place
Quiet he lies,
Cold, with his sightless face
Turned to the skies;
'Tis but another dead;
All you can say is said.
Carry his body hence,--
Kings must have slaves;
Kings climb to eminence
Over men's graves;
So this man's eye is dim;--
Throw the earth over him.
Doubt
(_From "The Present Hour"_)
BY PERCY MACKAYE
(One of a group of six sonnets, entitled "Carnage," written in
September, 1914)
So thin, so frail the opalescent ice
Where yesterday, in lordly pageant, rose
The monumental nations--the repose
Of continents at peace! Realities
Solid as earth they seemed; yet in a trice
Their bastions crumbled in the surging floes
Of unconceivable, inhuman woes,
Gulfed in a mad, unmeaning sacrifice.
We, who survive that world-quake, cower and start,
Searching our hidden souls with dark surmise:
So thin, so frail--is reason? Patient art--
Is it all a mockery, and love all lies?
Who sees the lurking Hun in childhood's eyes?
Is hell so near to every human heart?
The Wife of Flanders
BY GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
(See page 180)
Low and brown barns, thatched and repatched and tattered,
Where I had seven sons until to-day--
A little hill of hay your spur has scattered....
This is not Paris. You have lost your way.
You, staring at your sword to find it brittle,
Surprised at the surprise that was your plan;
Who, shaking and breaking barriers not a little,
Find never more the death-door of Sedan.
Must I for more than carnage call you claimant,
Pay you a penny for each son you slay?
Man, the whole globe in gold were no repayment
For what you have lost. And how shall I repay?
What is the price of that red spark that caught me
From a kind farm that never had a name?
What is the price of that dead man they brought me?
For other dead men do not look the same.
How should I pay for one poor graven steeple
Whereon you shattered what you shall not know?
How should I pay you, miserable people?
How should I pay you everything you owe?
Unhappy, can I give you back your honor?
Tho' I forgave, would any man forget?
While all our great green earth has, trampled on her,
The treason and terror of the night we met.
Not any more in vengeance or in pardon,
One old wife bargains for a bean that's hers,
You have no word to break; no heart to harden.
Ride on and prosper. You have lost your spurs.
Buttons
BY CARL SANDBURG
(Contemporary American poet)
I have been watching the war map slammed up for advertising in
front of the newspaper office.
Buttons--red and yellow buttons--blue and black buttons--are
shoved back and forth across the map.
A laughing young man, sunny with freckles,
Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd,
And then fixes a yellow button one inch west
And follows the yellow button with a black button one inch west.
(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in a red soak
along a river edge,
Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling death in
their throats.)
Who by Christ would guess what it cost to move two buttons one
inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper office where
the freckle-faced young man is laughing to us?
The Wine Press
BY ALFRED NOYES
(English poet, born 1880)
A Murdered man, ten miles away,
Will hardly shake your peace,
Like one red stain upon your hand;
And a tortured child in a distant land
Will never check one smile to-day,
Or bid one fiddle cease.
_The News_
It comes along a little wire,
Sunk in a deep sea;
It thins in the clubs to a little smoke
Between one joke and another joke,
For a city in flames is less than the fire
That comforts you and me.
_The Diplomats_
Each was honest after his way,
Lukewarm in faith, and old;
And blood, to them, was only a word,
And the point of a phrase their only sword,
And the cost of war, they reckoned it
In little disks of gold.
They were cleanly groomed. They were not to be bought.
And their cigars were good.
But they had pulled so many strings
In the tinselled puppet-show of kings
That, when they talked of war, they thought
Of sawdust, not of blood;
Not of the crimson tempest
Where the shattered city falls:
They thought, behind their varnished doors,
Of diplomats, ambassadors,
Budgets, and loans and boundary-lines,
Coercions and re-calls.
_The Charge_
_Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter!_
The cold machines whirred on.
And strange things crawled amongst the wheat
With entrails dragging round their feet,
And over the foul red shambles
A fearful sunlight shone....
The maxims cracked like cattle-whips
Above the struggling hordes.
They rolled and plunged and writhed like snakes
In the trampled wheat and the blackthorn brakes,
And the lightnings leapt among them
Like clashing crimson swords.
The rifles flogged their wallowing herds,
Flogged them down to die.
Down on their slain the slayers lay,
And the shrapnel thrashed them into the clay,
And tossed their limbs like tattered birds
Thro' a red volcanic sky.
War
(_From "Songs of Joy"_)
BY WILLIAM H. DAVIES
(An English poet whose "Autobiography of a Super-tramp" was
given to the world with an introduction by Bernard Shaw)
Ye Liberals and Conservatives,
Have pity on our human lives,
Waste not more blood on human strife;
Until we know some way to use
This human blood we take or lose,
'Tis sin to sacrifice our life.
When pigs are stuck we save their blood
And make puddings for our food,
The sweetest and the cheapest meat;
And many a woman, man and boy
Have ate those puddings with great joy,
And oft-times in the open street.
Let's not have war till we can make,
Of this sweet life we lose or take,
Some kind of pudding of man's gore;
So that the clergy in each parish
May save the lives of those that famish
Because meat's dear and times are poor.
In Praise of the Warrior
(_From "Don Quixote"_)
BY MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
(Best known of Spanish novelists, 1547-1616; himself a soldier,
captured and made a galley-slave in Algiers)
I am not a barbarian, and I love letters, but let us beware
of according them pre-eminence over arms, or even an equality
with arms. The man of letters, it is very true, instructs and
illuminates his fellows, softens manners, elevates minds, and
teaches us justice, a beautiful and sublime science. But the
warrior makes us observe justice. His object is to procure us
the first and sweetest of blessings, peace, gentlest peace, so
necessary to human happiness. This peace, adorable blessing,
gift divine, source of happiness, this peace is the object of
war. The warrior labors to procure it for us, and the warrior
therefore performs the most useful labor in the world.
Song of the Exposition
BY WALT WHITMAN
(See pages 184, 268)
Away with themes of war! away with War itself!
Hence from my shuddering sight, to never more return, that show
of blacken'd, mutilated corpses!
That hell unpent, and raid of blood--fit for wild tigers, or
for lop-tongued wolves--not reasoning men!
And in its stead speed Industry's campaigns!
With thy undaunted armies, Engineering!
Thy pennants, Labor, loosen'd to the breeze!
Thy bugles sounding loud and clear!
Woman and War
(_From "Woman and Labor"_)
BY OLIVE SCHREINER
(See pages 240, 246, 504)
In supplying the men for the carnage of a battlefield, women
have not merely lost actually more blood, and gone through a
more acute anguish and weariness, in the months of bearing and
in the final agony of child-birth, than has been experienced
by the men who cover it; but, in the months of rearing that
follow, the women of the race go through a long, patiently
endured strain which no knapsacked soldier on his longest
march has ever more than equalled; while, even in the matter
of death, in all civilized societies, the probability that the
average woman will die in child-birth is immeasurably greater
than the probability that the average male will die in battle.
There is, perhaps, no woman, whether she have borne children,
or be merely potentially a child-bearer, who could look
down upon a battlefield covered with slain, but the thought
would rise in her, "So many mothers' sons! So many young
bodies brought into the world to lie there! So many months of
weariness and pain while bones and muscles were shaped within!
So many hours of anguish and struggle that breath might be! So
many baby mouths drawing life at women's breasts;--all this,
that men might lie with glazed eyeballs, and swollen faces, and
fixed, blue, unclosed mouths, and great limbs tossed--this,
that an acre of ground might be manured with human flesh, that
next year's grass or poppies or karoo bushes may spring up
greener and redder, where they have lain, or that the sand of a
plain may have the glint of white bones!" And we cry, "Without
an inexorable cause, this must not be!" No woman who is a woman
says of a human body, "It is nothing!"
The Arsenal at Springfield
BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
(Probably the most popular of American poets, 1807-1882)
This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling,
Like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms;
But from their silent pipes no anthem pealing
Startles the villages with strange alarms.
Ah! what a sound will rise--how wild and dreary--
When the death-angel touches those swift keys!
What loud lament and dismal Miserere
Will mingle with their awful symphonies!
I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus--
The cries of agony, the endless groan,
Which, through the ages that have gone before us,
In long reverberations reach our own....
Is it, O man, with such discordant noises,
With such accursed instruments as these,
Thou drownest Nature's sweet and kindly voices,
And; arrest the celestial harmonies?
Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals or forts.
War and Peace
BY BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
(American statesman, 1706-1790)
I join with you most cordially in rejoicing at the return of
peace. I hope it will be lasting, and that mankind will at
length, as they call themselves reasonable creatures, have
reason enough to settle their differences without cutting
throats; for, in my opinion, there never was a good war or a
bad peace. What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts
of life might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in
wars had been employed in works of utility! What an extension
of agriculture, even to the tops of the mountains; what
rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges,
aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices and
improvements, rendering England a complete paradise, might not
have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good,
which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief--in
bringing misery into thousands of families, and destroying the
lives of so many working people, who might have performed the
useful labors.
A Prayer of the Peoples
(_From "The Present Hour"_)
BY PERCY MACKAYE
(See pages 561, 572)
God of us who kill our kind!
Master of this blood-tracked Mind
Which from wolf and Caliban
Staggers toward the star of Man--
Now, on Thy cathedral stair,
God, we cry to Thee in prayer!
Where our stifled anguish bleeds
Strangling through Thine organ reeds,
Where our voiceless songs suspire
From the corpses in Thy choir--
Through Thy charred and shattered nave,
God, we cry on Thee to save!
Save us from our tribal gods!
From the racial powers, whose rods--
Wreathed with stinging serpents--stir
Odin and old Jupiter
From their ancient hells of hate
To invade Thy dawning state....
Lord, our God! to whom, from clay,
Blood and mire, Thy peoples pray--
Not from Thy cathedral's stair
Thou hearest:--Thou criest _through_ our prayer
For our prayer is but the gate:
We, who pray, ourselves are fate.
War
BY THE GREAT INDIAN, CHIEF JOSEPH
Hear me, my warriors; my heart is sick and sad;
Our chiefs are killed,
The old men are all dead,
It is cold and we have no blankets;
The little children are freezing to death.
Hear me, my warriors; my heart is sick and sad;
From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever!
A Project for a Perpetual Peace
BY JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
(A document published 1756 in which the French philosopher
outlined in detail a plan for a European federation, which
seems in 1915 to have become the next step in civilization)
As a more noble, useful, and delightful Project never engaged
the human mind, than that of establishing a perpetual peace
among the contending nations of Europe, never did a writer
lay a better claim to the attention of the public than he who
points out the means to carry such a design into execution. It
is indeed very difficult for a man of probity and sensibility,
not to be fired with a kind of enthusiasm on such a subject;
nay, I am not clear that the very illusions of a heart truly
humane, whose warmth makes everything easily surmountable, are
not in this case more eligible than that rigid and forbidding
prudence, which finds in its own indifference and want of
public spirit, the chief obstacle to everything that tends to
promote the public good.
I doubt not that many of my readers will be forearmed with
incredulity, to withstand the pleasing temptation of being
persuaded; and indeed I sincerely lament their dullness in
mistaking obstinacy for wisdom. But I flatter myself, that
many an honest mind will sympathize with me in that delightful
emotion, with which I take up the pen to treat of a subject so
greatly interesting to the world. I am going to take a view, at
least in imagination, of mankind united by love and friendship:
I am going to take a contemplative prospect of an agreeable
and peaceful society of brethren, living in constant harmony,
directed by the same maxims, and joint sharers of one common
felicity; while, realizing to myself so affecting a picture,
the representation of such imaginary happiness will give me the
momentary enjoyment of a pleasure actually present.
Let the People Vote on War
BY ALLEN L. BENSON
(American Socialist writer, born 1871)
Each voter should sign his or her name to the ballot that is
voted. In counting, the ballots for war should be kept apart
from the ballots against war. In the event of more than half of
the population voting for war, those who voted for war should
be sent to the front in the order in which they appeared at
their respective polling places. Nobody who voted against war
should be called to serve until everybody who voted for war had
been sent to the front.
[Illustration: WAR
ARNOLD BÖCKLIN
(_German painter, 1827-1901. Painting in the Dresden Gallery_)]
[Illustration:
LONDON
PAUL GUSTAVE
DORÉ
_French illustrator,
1833-1883._
(_His pictures for
Dante's "Inferno"
are well known_)
]
Anti-Militarism
(_From "The Red Wave"_)
BY JOSEPH-HENRY ROSNY, THE ELDER
(French novelist, member of the Académie des Goncourts; born 1856.
A novel of revolutionary Syndicalism. The present scene describes
a debate organized between champions of the revolutionary and the
conservative labor unions, the "Reds" and the "Yellows"; a grand
Homeric combat of ideas, in which the audience is wrought to a furious
pitch of excitement, and does as much talking as the orators. In the
following extract, from about forty pages of mingled eloquence and
humor, the champion of the "Reds" announces "the grave and dreadful
problem of anti-militarism")
A long shudder agitated the hostile crowds. All the wild beasts
quivered in their cages. Rougemont, immobile, scarcely raised
his hand; never before had his voice sounded more grave and
more pathetic.
"Ah, yes! Question profound and dreadful. No one has been
troubled by it more than I, for I am not among those bold
internationalists who deny their country. I love my land of
France. To make our happiness perfect, we must have the land
of France. But who would dare to say that we, the poor, are
any other thing upon that land than food for suffering and
food for barracks? The worst Prussian, provided that he owns
a coin of a hundred sous--is he not superior to the unhappy
wretch who rummages in empty pockets? All the pleasures, all
the beauty, all the luxury, our most beautiful daughters,
belong to the rich cosmopolitan: he possesses the enchanter's
ring. If you have nothing, you will live more a stranger in
your country than the dog of a swindling millionaire. If you
have nothing, you will be insulted, scorned, hunted, locked in
prison for vagabondage. _La patrie!_ _La patrie_ of the poor!
It is a fable, a symbol, an inscription upon a military-list or
a school-book--the most bitter derision! Your right, unhappy
ones--it is to suffer and defend the soil, which belongs to
your master, to him who possesses. For him, for him alone, our
France devotes each year a billion francs for army and navy....
"It is necessary purely and simply to suppress the budget of
the army and navy," thundered Rougemont, with such force that
he broke the tumult. "France must give all at once, without
hesitation, the example of disarmament. And that would be a
thing so grand and so beautiful that the entire universe would
applaud, that all humanity would turn toward her. From that day
alone we should be at the head of the nations, and our country
would become the country of free men!"
"Under the heel of Wilhelm!"
"A Poland!"
"Guts for the cats!"
"Sold! Rubbish! Meat for sheenies!"
"... living in boiling water like lobsters!"
All at once, the tumult sank. The voice of the orator forced
itself upon the ear, high as a bell, precise as a clarion.
"Free, superb, and triumphant! Queen of the peoples, goddess
of the unfortunate! If we should disarm, before ten years,
France would become a land of pilgrimage, the Mecca of men.
Before twenty years, the other nations would have followed her
example. As for making of us a Poland, let them try it! Have
you then forgotten the teachings of history? Do you not know
that our grand armies, our innumerable victories--we have won
as many victories as all the rest of Europe together--have only
ended in the crushing of Waterloo and the collapse of Sedan? On
the contrary, Italy, dismembered for centuries, Italy, which
cannot count its defeats, is become a free nation. That is
because it is inhabited by a race, clean and well-defined, upon
which the foreigner has been unable to impress his mark. France
enslaved, she, the most intelligent of nations, she who has had
the most influence upon minds and hearts! Come now, that is
not possible, that will never happen! But the people who would
howl indignation at the dismembering of a disarmed France,
would let a war-like France go down to ruin: she would be only
one country like the others. So, I repeat it without scruple:
it is necessary that we should give the magnificent example of
disarmament. Only then shall we be a nation loved and admired
among nations. Only then will all hearts turn toward us. Only
then will the idea that anyone could touch France seem a
sacrilege such as no tyrant would risk!"
The Dawn
BY ÉMILE VERHAEREN
(In this play the Belgian poet has voiced his hopes for the
regeneration of human society. The city of Oppidomagne is besieged by
a hostile army, and the revolutionists in both armies conspire and
revolt. The gates of the city are thrown open, and the end of war
declared. A captain in the hostile army is speaking over the body of
Hérénian, leader of the revolutionists in the city)
I was his disciple, and his unknown friend. His books were
my Bible. It is men like this who give birth to men like me,
faithful, long obscure, but whom fortune permits, in one
overwhelming hour, to realize the supreme dream of their
master. If fatherlands are fair, sweet to the heart, dear
to the memory, armed nations on the frontiers are tragic and
deadly; and the whole world is yet bristling with nations.
It is in their teeth that we throw them this example of our
concord. (Cheers.) They will understand some day the immortal
thing accomplished here, in this illustrious Oppidomagne,
whence the loftiest ideas of humanity have taken flight, one
after another, through all the ages. For the first time since
the beginning of power, since brains have reckoned time, two
races, one renouncing its victory, the other its humbled
pride, are made one in an embrace. The whole earth must needs
have quivered, all the blood, all the sap of the earth must
have flowed to the heart of things. Concord and good will
have conquered hate. (Cheers.) Human strife, in its form of
bloodshed, has been gainsaid. A new beacon shines on the
horizon of future storms. Its steady rays shall dazzle all
eyes, haunt all brains, magnetize all desires. Needs must we,
after all these trials and sorrows, come at last into port,
to whose entrance it points the way, and where it gilds the
tranquil masts and vessels.
(Enthusiasm of all; the people shout and embrace. The former
enemies rise and surround the speaker. Those of Oppidomagne
stretch their arms towards him.)
The Springtime of Peace
(_From "Studies in Socialism"_)
BY JEAN LÉON JAURÉS
(Editor of _l'Humanité_, and leader of the French Socialist movement,
1859-1914; probably the most eminent of Socialist parliamentarians,
assassinated by a fanatic at the outbreak of the war with Germany. The
following is the peroration of a speech delivered at an Anglo-French
parliamentary dinner, 1903)
The majesty of suffering labor is no longer dumb: it speaks now
with a million tongues, and it asks the nations not to increase
the ills which crush down the workers by an added burden of
mistrust and hate, by wars and the expectation of wars.
Gentlemen, you may ask how and when and in what form this
longing for international concord will express itself to some
purpose.... I can only answer you by a parable which I gleaned
by fragments from the legends of Merlin, the magician, from the
Arabian Nights, and from a book that is still unread.
Once upon a time there was an enchanted forest. It had been
stripped of all verdure, it was wild and forbidding. The trees,
tossed by the bitter winter wind that never ceased, struck one
another with a sound as of breaking swords. When at last, after
a long series of freezing nights and sunless days that seemed
like nights, all living things trembled with the first call of
spring, the trees became afraid of the sap that began to move
within them. And the solitary and bitter spirit that had its
dwelling within the hard bark of each of them said very low,
with a shudder that came up from the deepest roots: "Have a
care! If thou art the first to risk yielding to the wooing of
the new season, if thou art the first to turn thy lancelike
buds into blossoms and leaves, their delicate raiment will be
torn by the rough blows of the trees that have been slower to
put forth leaves and flowers."
And the proud and melancholy spirit that was shut up within the
great Druidical oak spoke to its tree with peculiar insistence:
"And wilt thou, too, seek to join the universal love-feast,
thou whose noble branches have been broken by the storm?"
Thus, in the enchanted forest, mutual distrust drove back the
sap, and prolonged the death-like winter even after the call of
spring.
What happened at last? By what mysterious influence was the
grim charm broken? Did some tree find the courage to act alone,
like those April poplars that break into a shower of verdure,
and give from afar the signal for a renewal of all life? Or did
a warmer and more life-giving beam start the sap moving in all
the trees at once? For lo! in a single day the whole forest
burst forth into a magnificent flowering of joy and peace.
BY MICAH
(Hebrew prophet, B. C. 700)
He shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations
afar off: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a
sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig
tree; and none shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the
Lord of hosts hath spoken it.
BOOK XII
_Country_
The higher patriotism; the duty of man to his country as seen
from the point of view of those who would make the country the
parent and friend of all who dwell in it.
Our Country
(_Read July 4, 1883_)
BY JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
(New England Quaker poet, 1807-1892; a prominent anti-slavery
advocate)
We give thy natal day to hope,
O country of our love and prayer!
Thy way is down no fatal slope,
But up to freer sun and air.
Tried as by furnace fires, and yet
By God's grace only stronger made,
In future task before thee set
Thou shalt not lack the old-time aid.
Great, without seeking to be great
By fraud of conquest; rich in gold,
But richer in the large estate
Of virtue which thy children hold.
With peace that comes of purity,
And strength to simple justice due--
So runs our loyal dream of thee;
God of our fathers! make it true.
O land of lands! to thee we give
Our love, our trust, our service free;
For thee thy sons shall nobly live,
And at thy need shall die for thee.
The New Freedom
BY WOODROW WILSON
(President of the United States, born 1856. The following is
from his campaign speeches, 1912)
Are we preserving freedom in this land of ours, the hope of all
the earth? Have we, inheritors of this continent and of the
ideals to which the fathers consecrated it,--have we maintained
them, realizing them, as each generation must, anew? Are we,
in the consciousness that the life of man is pledged to higher
levels here than elsewhere, striving still to bear aloft the
standards of liberty and hope; or, disillusioned and defeated,
are we feeling the disgrace of having had a free field in which
to do new things and of not having done them?
The answer must be, I am sure, that we have been in a fair
way of failure,--tragic failure. And we stand in danger of
utter failure yet, except we fulfil speedily the determination
we have reached, to deal with the new and subtle tyrannies
according to their deserts. Don't deceive yourselves for
a moment as to the power of the great interests which now
dominate our development. They are so great that it is almost
an open question whether the government of the United States
can dominate them or not. Go one step further, make their
organized power permanent, and it may be too late to turn back.
The roads diverge at the point where we stand.
An Ode in Time of Hesitation
BY WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY
(In these noble words the poet voices his pain at the
Philippine war, and the wave of "imperialism" which then swept
over America)
Was it for this our fathers kept the law?
This crown shall crown their struggle and their ruth?
Are we the eagle nation Milton saw
Mewing its mighty youth,
Soon to possess the mountain winds of truth,
And be a swift familiar of the sun
Where aye before God's face his trumpets run?
Or have we but the talons and the maw,
And for the abject likeness of our heart
Shall some less lordly bird be set apart?--
Some gross-billed wader where the swamps are fat?
Some gorger in the sun? Some prowler with the bat?
Ah, no!
We have not fallen so.
We are our fathers' sons: let those who lead us know!...
We charge you, ye who lead us,
Breathe on their chivalry no hint of stain!
Turn not their new-world victories to gain!
One least leaf plucked for chaffer from the bays
Of their dear praise,
One jot of their pure conquest put to hire,
The implacable republic will require;
With clamor, in the glare and gaze of noon,
Or subtly, coming as a thief at night,
But surely, very surely, slow or soon
That insult deep we deeply will requite.
Tempt not our weakness, our cupidity!
For save we let the island men go free,
Those baffled and dislaureled ghosts
Will curse us from the lamentable coasts
Where walk the frustrate dead,
The cup of trembling shall be drained quite,
Eaten the sour bread of astonishment,
With ashes of the heart shall be made white
Our hair, and wailing shall be in the tent;
Then on your guiltier head
Shall our intolerable self-disdain
Wreak suddenly its anger and its pain;
For manifest in that disastrous light
We shall discern the right
And do it, tardily.--O ye who lead,
Take heed!
Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we will smite.
The Price of Liberty
BY THOMAS JEFFERSON
(See pages 228, 332)
Cherish the spirit of our people and keep alive their
attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim
them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to
public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges
and governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law
of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and
experience declares that man is the only animal which devours
his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments
of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
To the Goddess of Liberty
(_New York Harbor_)
BY GEORGE STERLING
(See pages 504, 552)
Oh! is it bale-fire in thy brazen hand--
The traitor-light set on betraying coasts
To lure to doom the mariner? Art thou
Indeed that Freedom, gracious and supreme,
By France once sighted over seas of blood--
A beacon to the ages, and their hope,
A star against the midnight of the race,
A vision, an announcement? Art thou she
For whom our fathers fought at Lexington
And trod the ways of death at Gettysburg?
Thy torch is lit, thy steadfast hand upheld,
Before our ocean-portals. For a sign
Men set thee there to welcome--loving men,
With faith in man. Thou wast upraised to tell,
To simple souls that seek from over-seas
Our rumored liberty, that here no chains
Are on the people, here no kings can stand,
Nor the old tyranny confound mankind,
Sapping with craft the ramparts of the Law
For such, O high presentment of their dream!
Thy pathless sandals wait upon the stone,
Thy tranquil face looks evermore to sea:
Now turn, and know the treason at thy back!
Turn to the anarchs' turrets, and behold
The cunning ones that reap where others sow!
In those great strongholds lifted to the sun
They plot dominion. Thronèd greeds conspire,
Half allied in a brotherhood malign,
Against the throneless many....
Would One might pour within thy breast of bronze
Spirit and life! Then should thy loyal hand
Cast down its torch, and thy deep voice should cry:
"Turn back! Turn back, O liberative ships!
Be warned, ye voyagers! From tyranny
To vaster tyranny ye come! Ye come
From realms that in my morning twilight wait
My radiant invasion. But these shores
Have known me and renounced me. I am raised
In mockery, and here the forfeit day
Deepens to West, and my indignant Star
Would hide her shame with darkness and the sea--
A sun of doom forecasting on the Land
The shadow of the sceptre and the sword."
To the United States Senate
BY VACHEL LINDSAY
(Upon the arrival of the news that the United States Senate had
declared the election of William Lorimer good and valid)
And must the Senator from Illinois
Be this squat thing, with blinking, half-closed eyes?
This brazen gutter idol, reared to power
Upon a leering pyramid of lies?
And must the Senator from Illinois
Be the world's proverb of successful shame,
Dazzling all State house flies that steal and steal,
Who, when the sad State spares them, count it fame?
If once or twice within his new won hall
His vote had counted for the broken men;
If in his early days he wrought some good--
We might a great soul's sins forgive him then.
But must the Senator from Illinois
Be vindicated by fat kings of gold?
And must he be belauded by the smirched,
The sleek, uncanny chiefs in lies grown old?
Be warned, O wanton ones, who shielded him--
Black wrath awaits. You all shall eat the dust.
You dare not say: "Tomorrow will bring peace;
Let us make merry, and go forth in lust."
What will you trading frogs do on a day
When Armageddon thunders thro' the land;
When each sad patriot rises, mad with shame,
His ballot or his musket in his hand?
The Duty of Civil Disobedience
BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU
(See page 295)
What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today?
They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition;
but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait,
well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no
longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote
and a feeble countenance and God-speed, to the right, as it
goes by them.
A Prophecy
(_Written during the Revolutionary War_)
BY THOMAS JEFFERSON
(See pages 228, 332, 596)
The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will
become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may become
persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too
often repeated that the time for fixing essential right, on a
legal basis, is while our rulers are honest, ourselves united.
_From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill._
It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the
people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and
their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves in the
sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting
to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles,
therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of
this war, will be heavier and heavier, till our rights shall
revive or expire in a convulsion.
An Election Campaign in New York
(_From "The House of Bondage"_)
BY REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN
(See pages 53, 167)
For many days previously, any outsider, reading the newspapers
or attending the mass-meetings in Cooper Union and Carnegie
Hall, would have supposed that a prodigious battle was waging
and that the result would be, until the last shot, in doubt.
There were terrible scareheads, brutal cartoons, and extra
editions. As the real problem was whether one organization
of needy men should remain in control, or whether another
should replace it, there were few matters of policy to be
discussed; and so the speechmaking and the printing resolved
themselves into personal investigations, and attacks upon
character. Private detectives were hired, records searched,
neighbors questioned, old enemies sought out, and family feuds
revived. Desks were broken open, letters bought, anonymous
communications mailed, boyhood indiscretions unearthed, and
women and men hired to wheedle, to commit perjury, to entrap.
Whatever was discovered, forged, stolen, manufactured--whatever
truth or falsehood could be seized by whatever means--was
blazoned in the papers, shrieked by the newsboys, bawled from
the cart-tails at the corners under the campaign banners, in
the light of the torches and before the cheering crowds. It
would be all over in a very short while; in a very short while
there would pass one another, with pleasant smiles, in court,
at church, and along Broadway, the distinguished gentlemen that
were now, before big audiences, calling one another adulterers
and thieves; but it is customary for distinguished gentlemen so
to call one another during a manly campaign in this successful
democracy of ours, and it seems to be an engrossing occupation
while the chance endures.
The Doom of Empires
BY ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
(American lawyer and lecturer, 1833-1899)
The traveler standing amid the ruins of ancient cities and
empires, seeing on every side the fallen pillar and the
prostrate wall, asks why did these cities fall, why did these
empires crumble? And the Ghost of the Past, the wisdom of ages,
answers: These temples, these palaces, these cities, the ruins
of which you stand upon, were built by tyranny and injustice.
The hands that built them were unpaid. The backs that bore
the burdens also bore the marks of the lash. They were built
by slaves to satisfy the vanity and ambition of thieves and
robbers. For these reasons they are dust.
Their civilization was a lie. Their laws merely regulated
robbery and established theft. They bought and sold the bodies
and souls of men, and the mournful wind of desolation, sighing
amid their crumbling ruins, is a voice of prophetic warning to
those who would repeat the infamous experiment, uttering the
great truth, that no nation founded upon slavery, either of
body or mind, can stand.
The Statue of Liberty
(_New York Harbor, A.D. 2900_)
BY ARTHUR UPSON
(American poet, 1877-1908)
Here once, the records show, a land whose pride
Abode in Freedom's watchword! And once here
The port of traffic for a hemisphere,
With great gold-piling cities at her side!
Tradition says, superbly once did bide
Their sculptured goddess on an island near,
With hospitable smile and torch kept clear
For all wild hordes that sought her o'er the tide.
'Twas centuries ago. But this is true:
Late the fond tyrant who misrules our land,
Bidding his serfs dig deep in marshes old,
Trembled, not knowing wherefore, as they drew
From out this swampy bed of ancient mould
A shattered torch held in a mighty hand.
BY FRANCIS BACON
(English philosopher and statesman, father of modern scientific
thought; 1561-1626)
Let states that aim at greatness take heed how their nobility
and gentlemen do multiply too fast. For that maketh the common
subject grow to be a peasant and base swain, driven out of
heart, and in effect but the gentleman's laborer.
BY DANIEL WEBSTER
(New England statesman and orator, 1782-1852)
The freest government cannot long endure when the tendency of
the law is to create a rapid accumulation of property in the
hands of a few, and to render the masses poor and dependent.
The Deserted Village
BY OLIVER GOLDSMITH
(English poet and novelist, 1728-1774)
Sweet-smiling village, loveliest of the lawn!
Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green;
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain;
No more thy glassy brook reflects the day,
But, choked with sedges, works its weedy way;
Along thy glades, a solitary guest,
The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest;
Amidst thy desert walks the lapwing flies,
And tires their echoes with unvaried cries;
Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all,
And the long grass o'ertops the mouldering wall;
And, trembling, shrinking from the spoiler's hand;
Far, far away thy children leave the land.
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade--
A breath can make them, as a breath has made:
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
A time there was, ere England's griefs began,
When every rood of ground maintained its man;
For him light labor spread her wholesome store,
Just gave what life required, but gave no more:
His best companions, innocence and health;
And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.
But times are altered: trade's unfeeling train
Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain;
Along the lawn, where scattered hamlets rose,
Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose;
And every want to luxury allied,
And every pang that folly pays to pride,
Those gentle hours that plenty bade to bloom,
Those calm desires that asked but little room,
Those healthful sports that graced the peaceful scene,
Lived in each look, and brightened all the green--
These, far departing, seek a kinder shore,
And rural mirth and manners are no more....
Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen, who survey
The rich man's joys increase, the poor's decay,
'Tis yours to judge how wide the limits stand
Between a splendid and a happy land.
Proud swells the tide with loads of freighted ore,
And shouting Folly hails them from her shore;
Hoards, e'en beyond the miser's wish, abound,
And rich men flock from all the world around.
Yet count our gains; this wealth is but a name,
That leaves our useful products still the same.
Not so the loss: the man of wealth and pride
Takes up a space that many poor supplied;
Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds,
Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds;
The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth,
Has robbed the neighboring fields of half their growth;
His seat, where solitary sports are seen,
Indignant spurns the cottage from the green;
Around the world each needful product flies,
For all the luxuries the world supplies;
While thus the land, adorned for pleasure all,
In barren splendor, feebly waits the fall....
Where then, ah! where, shall poverty reside,
To 'scape the pressure of contiguous pride?
If, to some common's fenceless limits strayed,
He drives his flock to pick the scanty blade,
Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide,
And even the bare-worn common is denied.
If to the city sped, what waits him there?
To see profusion that he must not share;
To see ten thousand baneful arts combined
To pamper luxury, and thin mankind;
To see each joy the sons of pleasure know
Extorted from his fellow-creatures' woe.
Here while the courtier glitters in brocade,
There the pale artist plies the sickly trade;
Here while the proud their long-drawn pomps display,
There the black gibbet glooms beside the way.
The dome where Pleasure holds her midnight reign,
Here, richly decked, admits the gorgeous train;
Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square--
The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare.
Sure scenes like these no troubles e'er annoy!
Sure these denote one universal joy!
Are these thy serious thoughts? Ah! turn thine eyes
Where the poor, houseless, shivering female lies;
She once, perhaps, in village plenty blest,
Has wept at tales of innocence distrest;
Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,
Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn;
Now lost to all--her friends, her virtue fled--
Near her betrayer's door she lays her head;
And, pinched with cold, and shrinking from the shower,
With heavy heart deplores that luckless hour
When, idly first, ambitious of the town,
She left her wheel, and robes of country brown....
O luxury! thou curst by Heaven's decree,
How ill exchanged are things like these for thee!
How do thy potions, with insidious joy,
Diffuse their pleasures only to destroy!
Kingdoms by thee, to sickly greatness grown,
Boast of a florid vigor not their own.
At every draught more large and large they grow,
A bloated mass of rank unwieldy woe;
Till sapped their strength, and every part unsound,
Down, down they sink, and spread a ruin round.
England in 1819
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
(See page 272)
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,--
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn--mud from a muddy spring,--
Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow--
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,--
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,--
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless--a book sealed;
A Senate,--Time's worst statute unrepealed,--
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
The Victorian Age
BY EDWARD CARPENTER
(See pages 186, 541)
I found myself--and without knowing where I was--in the middle
of that strange period of human evolution, the Victorian Age,
which in some respects, one now thinks, marked the lowest
ebb of modern civilized society; a period in which not only
commercialism in public life, but cant in religion, pure
materialism in science, futility in social conventions, the
worship of stocks and shares, the starving of the human heart,
the denial of the human body and its needs, the huddling
concealment of the body in clothes, the "impure hush" on
matters of sex, class-division, contempt of manual labor,
and the cruel barring of women from every natural and useful
expression of their lives, were carried to an extremity of
folly difficult for us now to realize.
Coronation Day
(_From "The People of the Abyss"_)
BY JACK LONDON
(See pages 62, 125, 139, 519)
Vivat Rex Eduardus! They crowned a king this day, and there
have been great rejoicing and elaborate tomfoolery, and I am
perplexed and saddened. I never saw anything to compare with
the pageant, except Yankee circuses and Alhambra ballets; nor
did I ever see anything so hopeless and so tragic.
To have enjoyed the Coronation procession, I should have come
straight from America to the Hotel Cecil, and straight from
the Hotel Cecil to a five-guinea seat among the washed. My
mistake was in coming from the unwashed of the East End. There
were not many who came from that quarter. The East End, as a
whole, remained in the East End and got drunk. The Socialists,
Democrats, and Republicans went off to the country for a breath
of fresh air, quite unaffected by the fact that four hundred
millions of people were taking to themselves a crowned and
anointed ruler. Six thousand five hundred prelates, priests,
statesmen, princes and warriors beheld the crowning, and the
rest of us the pageant as it passed.
I saw it at Trafalgar Square, "the most splendid site in
Europe," and the very innermost heart of the empire. There
were many thousands of us, all checked and held in order
by a superb display of armed power. The line of march was
double-walled with soldiers. The base of the Nelson Column was
triple-fringed with bluejackets. Eastward, at the entrance to
the square, stood the Royal Marine Artillery. In the triangle
of Pall Mall and Cockspur Street, the statue of George III was
buttressed on either side by the Lancers and Hussars. To the
west were the red-coats of the Royal Marines, and from the
Union Club to the embouchure of Whitehall swept the glittering,
massive curve of the First Life Guards--gigantic men mounted
on gigantic chargers, steel-breastplated, steel-helmeted,
steel-caparisoned, a great war-sword of steel ready to the hand
of the powers that be. And further, throughout the crowd, were
flung long lines of the Metropolitan Constabulary, while in the
rear were the reserves--tall, well-fed men, with weapons to
wield and muscles to wield them in case of need.
And as it was thus at Trafalgar Square, so was it along the
whole line of march--force, overpowering force; myriads of men,
splendid men, the pick of the people, whose sole function in
life is blindly to obey, and blindly to kill and destroy and
stamp out life. And that they should be well fed, well clothed,
and well armed, and have ships to hurl them to the ends of
the earth, the East End of London, and the "East End" of all
England, toils and rots and dies.
There is a Chinese proverb that if one man lives in laziness
another will die of hunger; and Montesquieu has said, "The fact
that many men are occupied in making clothes for one individual
is the cause of there being many people without clothes." We
cannot understand the starved and runty toiler of the East End
(living with his family in a one-room den, and letting out the
floor space for lodgings to other starved and runty toilers)
till we look at the strapping Life Guardsmen of the West End,
and come to know that the one must feed and clothe and groom
the other....
In these latter days, five hundred hereditary peers own
one-fifth of England; and they, and the officers and servants
under the King, and those who go to compose the powers that
be, yearly spend in wasteful luxury $1,850,000,000, or
£370,000,000, which is thirty-two per cent of the total wealth
produced by all the toilers of the country.
At the Abbey, clad in wonderful golden raiment, amid fanfare
of trumpets and throbbing of music, surrounded by a brilliant
throng of masters, lords, and rulers, the King was being
invested with the insignia of his sovereignty. The spurs were
placed to his heels by the Lord Great Chamberlain, and a
sword of state, in purple scabbard, was presented him by the
Archbishop of Canterbury, with these words:--
"Receive this kingly sword brought now from the altar of God,
and delivered to you by the hands of the bishops and servants
of God, though unworthy."
Whereupon, being girded, he gave heed to the Archbishop's
exhortation:--
"With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity,
protect the Holy Church of God, help and defend widows and
orphans, restore the things that are gone to decay, maintain
the things that are restored, punish and reform what is amiss,
and confirm what is in good order...."
"And how did you like the procession, mate?" I asked an old man
on a bench in Green Park.
"'Ow did I like it? A bloomin' good chawnce, sez I to myself,
for a sleep, wi' all the coppers aw'y, so I turned into the
corner there, along wi' fifty others. But I couldn't sleep,
a-lyin' there 'ungry an' thinkin' 'ow I'd worked all the years
'o my life, an' now 'ad no plyce to rest my 'ead; an' the music
comin' to me, an' the cheers an' cannon, till I got almost
a hanarchist an' wanted to blow out the brains o' the Lord
Chamberlain."
Why the Lord Chamberlain I could not precisely see, nor could
he, but that was the way he felt, he said conclusively, and
there was no more discussion....
At three in the morning I strolled up the Embankment. It was
a gala night for the homeless, for the police were elsewhere;
and each bench was jammed with sleeping occupants. There were
as many women as men, and the great majority of them, male and
female, were old. Occasionally a boy was to be seen. On one
bench I noticed a family, a man sitting upright with a sleeping
babe in his arms, his wife asleep, her head on his shoulder,
and in her lap the head of a sleeping youngster. The man's eyes
were wide open. He was staring out over the water and thinking,
which is not a good thing for a shelterless man with a family
to do. It would not be a pleasant thing to speculate upon his
thoughts; but this I know, and all London knows, that the
cases of out-of-works killing their wives and babies is not an
uncommon happening.
One cannot walk along the Thames Embankment, in the small hours
of morning, from the Houses of Parliament, past Cleopatra's
Needle, to Waterloo Bridge, without being reminded of the
sufferings, seven and twenty centuries old, recited by the
author of "Job":--
"There are that remove the landmarks; they violently take away
flocks and feed them.
"They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the
widow's ox for a pledge.
"They turn the needy out of the way; the poor of the earth hide
themselves together.
"Behold, as wild asses in the desert they go forth to their
work, seeking diligently for meat; the wilderness yieldeth them
food for their children.
"They cut their provender in the field, and they glean the
vintage of the wicked.
"They lie all night naked without clothing, and have no
covering in the cold.
"They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace
the rock for want of a shelter.
"There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast, and take
a pledge of the poor.
"So that they go about naked without clothing, and being an
hungered they carry the sheaves."
Seven and twenty centuries agone! And it is all as true and
apposite today in the innermost centre of this Christian
civilisation whereof Edward VII is king.
The Wrongfulness of Riches
BY GRANT ALLEN
(See page 210)
Have you ever reflected with what equipment of rights the
average citizen is born endowed in England? With the right
of moving up and down the public roads till he drops from
exhaustion. That is all. Literally and absolutely all.
BY WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
(English poet and essayist, 1775-1864)
A want of the necessaries of life, in peasants or artisans,
when the seasons have been favorable, is a certain sign
of defect in the constitution, or of criminality in the
administration.
The True Imperialism
BY WILLIAM WATSON
(English poet, conspicuous for his courage in opposing the Boer
war; born 1858)
Here, while the tide of conquest rolls
Against the distant golden shore,
The starved and stunted human souls
Are with us more and more.
Vain is your Science, vain your Art,
Your triumphs and your glories vain,
To feed the hunger of their heart
And famine of their brain.
Your savage deserts howling near,
Your wastes of ignorance, vice, and shame,--
Is there no room for victories here,
No fields for deeds of fame?
Arise and conquer while ye can
The foe that in your midst resides,
And build within the mind of Man
The Empire that abides.
Letters from a Chinese Official
BY G. LOWES DICKINSON
(See page 510)
Like the prince in the fable, you seem to have released from
his prison the genie of competition, only to find that you are
unable to control him. Your legislation for the past hundred
years is a perpetual and fruitless effort to regulate the
disorders of your economic system. Your poor, your drunk,
your incompetent, your aged, ride you like a nightmare. You
have dissolved all human and personal ties, and you endeavor,
in vain, to replace them by the impersonal activity of the
State. The salient characteristic of your civilization is
its irresponsibility. You have liberated forces you cannot
control; you are caught yourselves in your own levers and cogs.
In every department of business you are substituting for the
individual the company, for the workman the tool. The making
of dividends is a universal preoccupation; the well-being of
the laborer is no one's concern but the State's. And this
concern even the State is incompetent to undertake, for the
factors by which it is determined are beyond its control.
You depend on variations of supply and demand which you can
neither determine nor anticipate. The failure of a harvest, the
modification of a tariff in some remote country, dislocates the
industry of millions, thousands of miles away. You are at the
mercy of a prospector's luck, an inventor's genius, a woman's
caprice--nay, you are at the mercy of your own instruments.
Your capital is alive, and cries for food; starve it and it
turns and throttles you. You produce, not because you will,
but because you must; you consume, not what you choose, but
what is forced upon you. Never was any trade so bound as this
which you call free; but it is bound, not by a reasonable will,
but by the accumulated irrationality of caprice.
Utopia
BY SIR THOMAS MORE
(See pages 160, 490)
When I consider and way in my mind all these common wealthes,
which now a dayes any where do florish, so god helpe me, I
can perceave nothing but a certain conspiracy of riche men
procuringe theire owne commodities under the name and title
of the commen wealth. They invent and devise all meanes and
craftes, first how to kepe safely, without feare of losing,
that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire
and abuse the worke and laboure of the poore for as litle money
as may be. These devises, when the riche men have decreed to
be kept and observed under coloure of the comminaltie, that
is to saye, also of the pore people, then they be made lawes.
But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their
unsatiable covetousnes devided among them selves al those
thinges, whiche woulde have sufficed all men, yet how faire be
they from the welth and felicitie of the Utopian commen wealth?
Tales of Two Countries
BY MAXIM GORKY
(A volume of short stories representing the later work of the Russian
novelist, the fruit of his sojourn in Capri. It is interesting to note
how this change of environment altered not merely his point of view,
but even his literary style. The following narrative has the clarity
and delicacy of the best French prose. It is the story of an Italian
workingman)
"I was born naked and stupid, like you and everybody else;
in my youth I dreamed of a rich wife; when I was a soldier I
studied in order to pass the examination for an officer's rank.
I was twenty-three when I felt that all was not as it should be
in this world, and that it was a shame to live as if it were....
"We, our whole regiment, were sent to Bologna. The peasantry
there were in revolt, some demanding that the rent of land
should be lowered, others shouting about the necessity for
raising wages: both parties seemed to be in the wrong. 'To
lower rents and increase wages, what nonsense!' thought
I. 'That would ruin the landowners.' To me, who was a
town-dweller, it seemed utter foolishness. I was very
indignant--the heat helped to make one so, and the constant
travelling from place to place and the mounting guard at night.
For, you know, these fine fellows were breaking the machinery
belonging to the landowners; and it pleased them to burn the
corn and to try to spoil everything that did not belong to
them. Just think of it!"
He sipped his wine and, becoming more animated, went on: "They
roamed about the fields in droves like sheep, always silently,
and as if they meant business. We used to scatter them,
threatening them with our bayonets sometimes. Now and then
we struck them with the butts of our rifles. Without showing
much fear, they dispersed in leisurely fashion, but always
came together again. It was a tedious business, like mass,
and it lasted for days, like an attack of fever. Luoto, our
non-commissioned officer, a fine fellow from Abruzzi, himself a
peasant, was anxious and troubled: he turned quite yellow and
thin, and more than once he said to us:
"'It's a bad business, boys; it will probably be necessary to
shoot, damn it!'
"His grumbling upset us still more; and then, you know, from
every corner, from every hillock and tree we could see peeping
the obstinate heads of the peasants; their angry eyes seemed to
pierce us. For these people, naturally enough, did not regard
us in a very friendly light....
"Once I stood on a small hillock near an olive grove, guarding
some trees which the peasants had been injuring. At the bottom
of the hill two men were at work, an old man and a youth. They
were digging a ditch. It was very hot, the sun burnt like fire,
one felt irritable, longed to be a fish, and I remember I eyed
them angrily. At noon they both left off work, and got out some
bread and cheese and a jug of wine. 'Oh, devil take them!'
thought I to myself. Suddenly the old man, who previously had
not once looked at me, said something to the youth, who shook
his head disapprovingly, but the old man shouted: 'Go on!' He
said this very sternly.
"The youth came up to me with the jug in his hand, and said,
not very willingly, you know: 'My father thinks that you would
like a drink and offers you some wine.'
"I felt embarrassed, but I was pleased. I refused, nodding at
the same time to the old man and thanking him. He responded by
looking at the sky. 'Drink it, signor, drink it. We offer this
to you as a man, not as a soldier. We do not expect a soldier
to become kinder because he has drunk our wine!'
"'D-- you, don't get nasty,' I thought to myself, and having
drunk about three mouthfuls I thanked him. Then they began
to eat down below. A little later I was relieved by Ugo from
Salertino. I told him quietly that these two peasants were
good fellows. The same night, as I stood at the door of a barn
where the machinery was kept, a slate fell on my head from the
roof. It did not do much damage, but another slate, striking my
shoulder edgewise, hurt me so severely that my left arm dropped
benumbed."
The speaker burst into a loud laugh, his mouth wide open, his
eyes half-closed. "Slates, stones, sticks," said he, through
his laughter, "in those days and at that place were alive. This
independent action of lifeless things made some pretty big
bumps on our heads. Wherever a soldier stood or walked, a stick
would suddenly fly at him from the ground, or a stone fall upon
him from the sky. It made us savage, as you can guess."
The eyes of his companion became sad, his face turned pale and
he said quietly: "One always feels ashamed to hear of such
things."
"What is one to do? People take time to get wise. Then I called
for help. I was led into a house where another fellow lay, his
face cut by a stone. When I asked him how it happened he said,
smiling, but not with mirth:
"'An old woman, comrade, an old gray witch struck me, and then
proposed that I should kill her!'
"'Was she arrested?'
"'I said that I had done it myself, that I had fallen and hurt
myself. The commander did not believe it, I could see it by his
eyes. But, don't you see, it was awkward to confess that I had
been wounded by an old woman. Eh? The devil! Of course they are
hard pressed, and one can understand that they do not love us!'
"'H'm!' thought I. The doctor came and two ladies with him, one
of them fair and very pretty, evidently a Venetian. I don't
remember the other. They looked at my wound. It was slight, of
course. They applied a poultice and went away....
"My comrade and I used to sit at the window. We sat in such a
way that the light did not fall on us, and there once we heard
the charming voice of this fair lady. She and her companion
were walking with the doctor in the garden outside the window
and talking in French, which I understand very well.
"'Did you notice the color of his eyes?' she asked. 'He is a
peasant of course, and once he has taken off his uniform will
no doubt become a Socialist, like all of them here. People with
eyes like that want to conquer the whole of life, to drive us
out, to destroy us in order that some blind, tedious justice
should triumph!'
"'Foolish fellows,' said the doctor--'half children, half
brutes.'
"'Brutes, that is quite true. But what is there childish about
them?'
"'What about those dreams of universal equality?'
"'Yes, just imagine it. The fellow with the eyes of an ox, and
the other with the face of a bird--our equals! You and I their
equals, the equals of these people of inferior blood! People
who can be bidden to come and kill their fellows, brutes like
them.' ...
"She spoke much and vehemently. I listened and thought: 'Quite
right, signora.' I had seen her more than once; and you know,
of course, that no one dreams more ardently of a woman than a
soldier. I imagined her to be kind and clever and warm-hearted;
and at that time I had an idea that the landed nobility were
especially clever, or gifted, or something of the kind. I don't
know why!
"I asked my comrade: 'Do you understand this language?'
"No, he did not understand. Then I translated for him the
fair lady's speech. The fellow got as angry as the devil, and
started to jump about the room, his one eye glistening--the
other was bandaged.
"'Is that so?' he murmured. 'Is that possible? She makes use
of me and does not look upon me as a man. For her sake I allow
my dignity to be offended and she denies it. For the sake of
guarding her property I risk losing my soul.'
"He was not a fool and felt that he had been very much
insulted, and so did I. The following day we talked about this
lady in a loud voice, not heeding Luoto, who only muttered:
"'Be careful, boys; don't forget that you are soldiers, and
that there is such a thing as discipline.'
"No, we did not forget it. But many of us, almost all, to tell
you the truth, became deaf and blind, and these young peasants
made use of our deafness and blindness to very good purpose.
They won. They treated us very well indeed. The fair lady could
have learnt from them: for instance, they could have taught
her very convincingly how honest people should be valued. When
we left the place whither we had come with the idea of shedding
blood, many of us were given flowers. As we marched along the
streets of the village, not stones and slates but flowers
were thrown at us, my friend. I think we had deserved it. One
may forget a cool reception when one has received such a good
send-off."
The Rights of Man
BY THOMAS PAINE
(English radical writer, who took a prominent part in the
American and French revolutions; 1737-1809)
The superstitious awe, the enslaving reverence, that formerly
surrounded affluence, is passing away in all countries,
and leaving the possessor of property to the convulsion of
accidents. When wealth and splendor, instead of fascinating the
multitude, excite emotions of disgust; when, instead of drawing
forth admiration, it is beheld as an insult upon wretchedness;
when the ostentatious appearance it makes serves to call the
right of it in question, the case of property becomes critical,
and it is only in a system of justice that the possessor can
contemplate security.
BY OTTO VON BISMARCK
(German statesman, 1815-1898)
I believe that those who profess horror at the intervention of
the state for the protection of the weak lay themselves open to
the suspicion that they are desirous of using their strength
for the benefit of a portion, for the oppression of the rest.
The Demand of Labor
BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN
(President of the United States; 1809-1865. A frequently quoted
passage attributed to Lincoln, prophesying the developments of modern
capitalist industry, has been proven to be spurious. It therefore
seems worth stating that the passages quoted in this volume have been
duly verified)
Inasmuch as most good things are produced by labor, it follows
that all such things ought to belong to those whose labor has
produced them. But it has happened in all ages of the world
that some have labored, and others, without labor, have enjoyed
a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should
not continue. To secure to each laborer the whole product of
his labor as nearly as possible is a worthy object of any good
government.
Bryanism
(_From the New York "Tribune"_)
(The following passage is given space as a curiosity of the
class-struggle, and by way of encouragement to social reformers who
may suffer under the lash of capitalist abuse. It is from an editorial
published in one of New York City's most conservative and respectable
journals on the day after the presidential election of 1896; its
subject is the Hon. William Jennings Bryan, now a conservative and
plodding Secretary of State)
The thing was conceived in iniquity and was brought forth in
sin. It had its origin in a malicious conspiracy against the
honor and integrity of the nation. It gained such monstrous
growth as it enjoyed from an assiduous culture of the basest
passions of the least worthy members of the community. It has
been defeated and destroyed because right is right and God
is God. Its nominal head was worthy of the cause. Nominal,
because the wretched, rattle-pated boy, posing in vapid vanity
and mouthing resounding rottenness, was not the real leader of
that league of hell. He was only a puppet in the blood-imbued
hands of Altgeld, the anarchist, and Debs, the revolutionist,
and other desperadoes of that stripe. But he was a willing
puppet, Bryan was--willing and eager. Not one of his masters
was more apt than he at lies and forgeries and blasphemies
and all the nameless iniquities of that campaign against the
Ten Commandments. He goes down with the cause, and must abide
with it in the history of infamy. He had less provocation than
Benedict Arnold, less intellectual force than Aaron Burr,
less manliness and courage than Jefferson Davis. He was the
rival of them all in deliberate wickedness and treason to
the Republic. His name belongs with theirs, neither the most
brilliant nor the most hateful of the list. Good riddance to
it all, to conspiracy and conspirators, and to the foul menace
of repudiation and anarchy against the honor and life of the
Republic!
BY FERDINAND LASSALLE
(German Socialist leader; 1825-1864)
It is the opposition of the personal interest of the higher
classes to the development of the nation in culture, which
causes the great and necessary immorality of the higher
classes.
The Rough Rider
BY BLISS CARMAN
(American poet of nature, born 1861)
Take up, who will, the challenge;
Stand pat on graft and greed;
Grow sleek on others' labor,
Surfeit on others' need;
Let paid and bloodless tricksters
Devise a legal way
Our common right and justice
"To sell, deny, delay."
Not yesterday nor lightly
We came to know that breed;
Our quarrel with that cunning
Is old as Runnymede.
We saw enfranchised insult
Deploy in kingly line,
When broke our sullen fury
On Rupert of the Rhine....
Now, masking raid and rapine
In debonair disguise,
The foe we thought defeated
Deludes our careless eyes,
Entrenched in law and largess
And the vested wrong of things,
Cloaking a fouler treason
Than any faithless king's.
He takes our life for wages,
He holds our land for rent,
He sweats our little children
To swell his cent per cent;
With secret grip and levy
On every crumb we eat,
He drives our sons to thieving,
Our daughters to the street....
Against the grim defenses
Where might and murrain hide,
Unswerving to the issue
Loose-reined and rough we ride
Full tardily, to rescue
Our heritage from wrong,
And stablish it on manhood,
A thousand times more strong.
BY WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE
(English liberal statesman, 1809-1898)
In almost every one, if not in every one, of the greatest
political controversies of the last fifty years, whether
they affected the franchise, whether they affected commerce,
whether they affected religion, whether they affected the bad
and abominable institution of slavery, or what subject they
touched, these leisured classes, these educated classes, these
titled classes, have been in the wrong.
The Bad Shepherds
BY OCTAVE MIRBEAU
(Celebrated French man-of-letters, born 1850. A play, first produced
in 1897, with Sarah Bernhardt in the leading rôle, presenting the
class-struggle from the point of view of the anti-parliamentarian.
At the height of a desperate strike of steel-workers, the leader of
the strikers is addressing a secret gathering in a forest, near a
religious shrine)
JEAN:--You reproach me--and this is the worst charge you bring
against me--that I refused the meeting with the radical and
socialist deputies who wanted to mix up in our affair, and take
the direction of the strike?
VOICES:--Yes--yes! Silence! Hear him!
JEAN:--Your deputies! Ah, if you had seen them at work! And
you, yourselves--have you forgotten the infamous rôle, the
pitiful, sinister comedy they played in the last strike? How,
having pushed the workers to a desperate resistance, they gave
them up weakened, despoiled, bound hands and feet, to the
master--the very day where a last effort, a last surge, would
have compelled him, perhaps, to surrender? Ah, no indeed! I
have not wished that intriguers, under the pretext of defending
you, should come to impose upon you combinations--wherein
you are nothing but a means to maintain and increase their
political power--a prey to satisfy their political appetites!
You have nothing in common with those people! Their interests
are not any more yours--than those of the usurer and the
creditor, of the assassin and his victim!
VOICE:--Bravo! It's true! Down with politics! Down with the
deputies!
JEAN:--Understand, then, that they exist only by your
credulity! Your brutalization, they exploit it as a farm--your
servitude, they treat it as an income. They grow fat upon your
poverty and your ignorance, while you are living; and when you
are dead they make a pedestal of your corpses! Is that what you
want?
VOICE:--No, no. He is right!
JEAN:--The master is at least a man like yourselves! You have
him before you--you speak to him--you make him angry--you
threaten him--you kill him. At least he has a face, a breast
into which you can thrust a knife! But go now, and move that
being without a face that is called a politician! Go kill
that thing that is known as politics! That slippery and
fugitive thing, that you think you have, and that always
escapes you--that you believe is dead, and it begins once
again--that abominable thing by which all has been made vile,
all corrupted, all bought, all sold--justice, love, beauty!
Which has made of the venality of conscience a national
institution of France--which has done worse yet, since with its
foul slime it has soiled the august face of the poor--worse
yet, since it has destroyed in you the last ideal--the faith
in the Revolution! Do you understand what I have desired of
you--that which I still demand of your energy, your dignity,
your intelligence? I have desired, and I desire, that you
shall show for once, to the world of political parasites, that
new example, fecund and terrible, of a strike made, at last,
by yourselves, for yourselves! And if once more you have to
die, in this struggle which you have undertaken, know how to
die--one time--for yourselves, for your sons, for those who
will be born of your sons--and no more for those who trade upon
your suffering, as always!
MADELEINE (_a girl-striker, springs up_):--March--march with
him, and no longer with those whose hands are red with the
blood of the poor! March! The road will be long and hard! You
will fall many times upon your broken knees--what matters it?
Stand up and march again! Justice is at the end!
A VOICE:--We will follow you!
MADELEINE:--And do not fear death! Love death! Death is
splendid--necessary and divine! It makes life young again! Ah,
do not give your tears! Through all the centuries that you
have wept, who has seen them, who has heard them flow? Give
your blood! If blood is as a hideous spot upon the face of the
hangmen, it shines upon the face of martyrs as an eternal sun!
Each drop of blood that flows from your veins--every stream of
blood that pours from your bosoms--will mean the birth of a
hero--a saint (_pointing to the crucifix_)--a god! Ah, would
that I had a thousand lives, that I might give them all for
you! Would that I had a thousand breasts, so that all that
blood of deliverance and love might pour out upon the ground
where you suffer!
The Cultured Classes
BY JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE
(German philosopher, 1762-1814)
It is particularly to the cultured classes that I wish to
direct my remarks in the present address. I implore these
classes to take the initiative in the work of reconstruction,
to atone for their past deeds, and to earn the right to
continue life in the future. It will appear in the course of
this address that hitherto all the advance in the German nation
has originated with the common people; that hitherto all the
great national interests have, in the first instance, been
the affair of the people, have been taken in hand and pushed
forward by the body of the people.
The Duty of Civil Disobedience
BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU
(See pages 295, 600)
The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but
as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army,
and the militia, gaolers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In
most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment
or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level
with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be
manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command
no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have
the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as
these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.
Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers,
and office-holders--serve the State chiefly with their heads;
and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as
likely to serve the devil, without _intending_ it, as God.
A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the
great sense, and _men_, serve the State with their consciences
also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they
are commonly treated as enemies by it.
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON
(See pages 235, 522)
Let man serve law for man;
Live for friendship, live for love,
For truth's and harmony's behoof;
The state may follow how it can,
As Olympus follows Jove.
The Happiness of Nations
BY JAMES MACKAYE
(American writer upon economics, born 1872)
Everywhere we are taught that "life is sacred," that "liberty
is sacred," that "property is sacred,"--but where are we taught
that happiness is sacred? And yet it is only because of their
relation to happiness that these other things have a trace of
sacredness.
Paris
BY ÉMILE ZOLA
(See page 91)
All boiled in the huge vat of Paris; the desires, the deeds
of violence, the strivings of one and another man's will, the
whole nameless medley of the bitterest ferments, whence, in all
purity, the wine of the future would at last flow.
Then Pierre became conscious of the prodigious work which
went on in the depths of the vat, beneath all the impurity
and waste. What mattered the stains, the egotism and greed of
politicians, if humanity were still on the march, ever slowly
and stubbornly stepping forward! What mattered, too, that
corrupt and emasculate _bourgeoisie_, nowadays as moribund as
the aristocracy, whose place it took, if behind it there ever
came the inexhaustible reserve of men who surged up from the
masses of the country-side and the towns!... If in the depths
of pestilential workshops and factories the slavery of ancient
times subsisted in the wage-earning system, if men still died
of want on their pallets like broken-down beasts of burden,
it was nevertheless a fact that once already, on a memorable
day of tempest, Liberty sprang forth from the vat to wing
her flight throughout the world. And why in her turn should
not Justice spring from it, proceeding from those troubled
elements, freeing herself from all dross, ascending with
dazzling splendor and regenerating the nations?
Farewell Address
BY GEORGE WASHINGTON
(See page 305)
Observe good faith and justice toward all nations, cultivate
peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this
conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin
it? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened and at no distant
period a great nation to give to mankind the magnanimous and
too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted
justice and benevolence. Who can doubt but, in the course
of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly
repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady
adherence to it; can it be that Providence has not connected
the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue. The
experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which
enobles human nature. Alas, is it rendered impossible by its
vices?
America the Beautiful
BY KATHARINE LEE BATES
(Professor at Wellesley College, born 1859. This poem has been
adopted as the official hymn of the American Federation of
Women's Clubs)
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine!
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
BOOK XIII
_Children_
Social injustice as it bears upon literature and the producers
of literature; pictures of the life of the outcast poet, and of
art in conflict with mammon.
The Children of the Poor
BY VICTOR HUGO
(See pages 182, 267)
(_Translated by Algernon Charles Swinburne_)
Take heed of this small child of earth;
He is great: he hath in him God most high.
Children before their fleshly birth
Are lights alive in the blue sky.
In our light bitter world of wrong
They come; God gives us them awhile.
His speech is in their stammering tongue,
And his forgiveness in their smile.
Their sweet light rests upon our eyes.
Alas! their right to joy is plain.
If they are hungry, Paradise
Weeps, and, if cold, Heaven thrills with pain.
The want that saps their sinless flower
Speaks judgment on sin's ministers.
Man holds an angel in his power.
Ah! deep in Heaven what thunder stirs,
When God seeks out these tender things
Whom in the shadow where we sleep
He sends us clothed about with wings,
And finds them ragged babes that weep!
In a Southern Cotton Mill
BY ELBERT HUBBARD
(American author and lecturer, born 1859; died May 7, 1915)
I thought to lift one of the little toilers to ascertain his
weight. Through his thirty-five pounds of skin and bone there
ran a tremor of fear, and he struggled forward to tie a broken
thread. I attracted his attention by a touch, and offered him a
silver dime. He looked at me dumbly through a face that might
have belonged to a man of sixty, so furrowed, tightly drawn,
and full of pain it was. He did not reach for the money--he
did not know what it was. There were dozens of such children,
in this particular mill. A physician who was with me said that
they would all be dead probably in two years, and their places
filled by others--there were plenty more. Pneumonia carries off
most of them. Their systems are ripe for disease, and when it
comes there is no rebound--no response. Medicine simply does
not act--nature is whipped, beaten, discouraged, and the child
sinks into a stupor and dies.
The Flower Factory
BY FLORENCE WILKINSON EVANS
(Contemporary American poetess)
Lizabetta, Marianina, Fiametta, Teresina,
They are winding stems of roses, one by one, one by one,
Little children who have never learned to play;
Teresina softly crying that her fingers ache to-day;
Tiny Fiametta nodding, when the twilight slips in, gray.
High above the clattering street, ambulance and fire-gong beat,
They sit, curling crimson petals, one by one, one by one.
Lizabetta, Marianina, Fiametta, Teresina,
They have never seen a rose-bush nor a dew-drop in the sun.
They will dream of the vendetta, Teresina, Fiametta,
Of a Black Hand and a Face behind a grating;
They will dream of cotton petals, endless, crimson, suffocating,
Never of a wild rose thicket or the singing of a cricket,
But the ambulance will bellow through the wanness of their dreams,
And their tired lids will flutter with the street's hysteric screams.
Lizabetta, Marianina, Fiametta, Teresina,
They are winding stems of roses, one by one, one by one.
Let them have a long, long play-time, Lord of Toil, when toil is done,
Fill their baby hands with roses, joyous roses of the sun.
The Beast
BY BEN B. LINDSEY AND HARVEY J. O'HIGGINS
("The Children's Judge," who founded the first children's court
in America, tells the story of his long fight with the powers of
privilege in Colorado. In the following extract, he narrates what came
of a newspaper interview on the subject of the revolting conditions
under which children were kept in prison)
The result was an article that took even _my_ breath away when
I read it next day on the front page of the newspaper. It was
the talk of the town. It was certainly the talk of the Police
Board; and Mr. Frank Adams talked to the reporters in a high
voice, indiscreetly. He declared that the boys were liars, that
I was "crazy," and that conditions in the jails were as good
as they could be. This reply was exactly what we wished. I
demanded an investigation. The Board professed to be willing,
but set no date. We promptly set one _for_ them--the following
Thursday at two o'clock in my chambers at the Court House--and
I invited to the hearing Governor Peabody, Mayor Wright,
fifteen prominent ministers in the city, and the Police Board
and some members of the City Council.
On Thursday morning--to my horror--I learned from a friendly
Deputy Sheriff that the subpœnas I had ordered sent to a number
of boys whom I knew as jail victims had not been served. I had
no witnesses. And in three hours the hearing was to begin. I
appealed to the Deputy Sheriff to help me. He admitted that he
could not get the boys in less than two days. "Well then," I
said, "for heaven's sake, get me Mickey."
And Mickey? Well, Mickey was known to fame as "the worst kid
in town." As such, his portrait had been printed in the
newspapers--posed with his shine-box over his shoulder, a
cigarette in the corner of his grin, his thumbs under his
suspenders at the shoulders, his feet crossed in an attitude
of nonchalant youthful deviltry. He had been brought before
me more than once on charges of truancy, and I had been using
him in an attempt to organize a newsboys' association under
the supervision of the court. Moreover, he had been one of the
boys who had been beaten by the jailer, and I knew he would be
grateful to me for defending him.
It was midday before the Sheriff brought him to me. "Mickey," I
said, "I'm in trouble, and you've got to help me out of it. You
know I helped _you_."
"Betcher life yuh did, Judge," he said. "I'm wit' yuh. W'at d'
yuh want?"
I told him what I wanted--every boy that he could get, who
had been in jail. "And they've got to be in this room by two
o'clock. Can you do it?"
Mickey threw out his dirty little hand. "Sure I kin. Don't yuh
worry, Judge. Get me a wheel--dhat's all."
I hurried out with him and got him a bicycle, and he flew off
down Sixteenth Street on it, his legs so short that his feet
could only follow the pedals half way round. I went back to my
chambers to wait....
As two o'clock approached, the ministers began to come into my
room, one by one, and take seats in readiness. Mr. Wilson of
the Police Board arrived to represent his fellow-commissioners.
The Deputy District Attorney came, the president of the upper
branch of the City Council came, Mayor Wright came, and even
Governor Peabody came--but no boys! I felt like a man who had
ordered a big dinner in a strange restaurant for a party of
friends, and then found that he had not brought his purse....
I was just about to begin my apologies when I heard an excited
patter of small feet on the stairs and the shuffle and crowding
of Mickey's cohorts outside in the hall. I threw open the door.
"I got 'em, Judge," Mickey cried.
He had them--to the number of about twenty. I shook him by the
shoulder, speechless with relief. "I tol' yuh we'd stan' by
yuh, Judge," he grinned.
He had the worst lot of little jailbirds that ever saw the
inside of a county court, and he pointed out the gem of his
collection proudly--"Skinny," a lad in his teens, who had been
in jail twenty-two times!" All right, boys," I told them, "I
don't know you all, but I'll take Mickey's word for you. You've
all been in jail and you know what you do there--all the dirty
things you hear and see and do yourselves. I want you to tell
some gentlemen in here about it. Don't be scared. They're your
friends the same as I am. The cops say you've been lying to me
about the way things are down in the jails there, and I want
you to tell the truth. Nothing but the truth, now. Mickey, you
pick them out and send them in one by one--your best witnesses
first."
I went back to my chambers. "Gentlemen," I said, "we're ready."
I sat down at the big table with the Governor at my right, the
Mayor at my left and the president of the Board of Supervisors
and Police Commissioner Wilson at either end of the table. The
ministers seated themselves in the chairs about my room. (We
allowed no newspaper reporters in, because I knew what sort of
vile and unprintable testimony was coming.) Mickey sent in his
first witness.
One by one, as the boys came, I impressed upon them the
necessity of telling the truth, encouraged them to talk, and
tried to put them at their ease. I started each by asking him
how often he had been in jail, what he had seen there, and so
forth. Then I sat back and let him tell his story.
And the things they told would raise your hair. I saw the
blushes rise to the foreheads of some of the ministers at
the first details. As we went on, the perspiration stood
on their faces. Some sat pale, staring appalled at these
freckled youngsters from whose little lips, in a sort of
infantile eagerness to tell all they knew, there came stories
of bestiality that were the more horrible because they were
so innocently, so boldly given. It was enough to make a man
weep; and indeed tears of compassionate shame came to the
eyes of more than one father there, as he listened. One boy
broke down and cried when he told of the vile indecencies
that had been committed upon him by the older criminals; and
I saw the muscles working in the clenched jaws of some of our
"investigating committee"--saw them swallowing the lump in the
throat--saw them looking down at the floor blinkingly, afraid
of losing their self-control. The Police Commissioner made the
mistake of cross-examining the first boy, but the frank answers
he got only exposed worse matters. The boys came and came, till
at last, a Catholic priest, Father O'Ryan, cried out: "My God!
I have had enough!" Governor Peabody said hoarsely: "I never
knew there was such immorality _in the world_!" Some one else
put in, "It's awful,--awful!" in a half groan.
"Gentlemen," I said, "there have been over two thousand Denver
boys put through those jails and those conditions, in the last
five years. Do you think it should go on any longer?"
Governor Peabody arose. "No," he said; "no. Never in my life
have I heard of so much rot--corruption--vileness--as I've
heard today from the mouths of these babies. I want to tell
you that nothing I can do in my administration can be of more
importance--nothing I can do will I do more gladly than sign
those bills that Judge Lindsey is trying to get through the
Legislature to do away with these terrible conditions. And if,"
he said, turning to the Police Commissioner, "Judge Lindsey is
'_crazy_,' I want my name written under his, among the _crazy_
people. And if any one says these boys are 'liars,' that man is
a liar himself!"
Phew! The "committee of investigation" dissolved, the boys
trooped away noisily, and the ministers went back to their
pulpits to voice the horror that had kept them silent in my
small chamber of horrors for two hours. Their sermons went into
the newspapers under large black headlines; and by the end
of the next week our juvenile court bills were passed by the
Legislature and made law in Colorado.
The Cry of the Children
BY ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
(See page 644)
Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers--
And _that_ cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
The young birds are chirping in the nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing toward the west--
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.
Do you question the young children in the sorrow
Why their tears are falling so?
The old man may weep for his to-morrow
Which is lost in Long Ago;
The old tree is leafless in the forest,
The old year is ending in the frost,
The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest,
The old hope is hardest to be lost:
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
Do you ask them why they stand
Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers,
In our happy Fatherland?
They look up with their pale and sunken faces,
And their looks are sad to see,
For the man's hoary anguish draws and presses
Down the cheeks of infancy;
"Your old earth," they say, "is very dreary,
Our young feet," they say, "are very weak;
Few paces have we taken, yet are weary--
Our grave-rest is very far to seek.
Ask the old why they weep, and not the children,
For the outside earth is cold,
And we young ones stand without, in our bewildering,
And the graves are for the old." ...
"For oh," say the children, "we are weary,
And we cannot run or leap;
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them and sleep.
Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping,
We fall upon our faces, trying to go;
And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping,
The reddest flower would look as pale as snow.
For, all day, we drag our burden tiring
Through the coal-dark, underground,
Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories, round and round.
"For, all day, the wheels are droning, turning;
Their wind comes in our faces,
Till our hearts turn, our head, with pulses burning,
And the walls turn in their places:
Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling,
Turns the long light that drops adown the wall,
Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling,
All are turning, all the day, and we with all.
And all day, the iron wheels are droning,
And sometimes we could pray,
'O ye wheels,' (breaking out in a mad moaning)
'Stop! be silent for to-day!'" ...
They look up, with their pale and sunken faces,
And their look is dread to see,
For they mind you of the angels in their places,
With eyes turned on Deity.
"How long," they say, "how long, O cruel nation,
Will you stand, to move the world, on a child's heart,--
Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,
And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper,
And your purple shows your path!
But the child's sob in the silence curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath."
Child Labor in England
(_From "An Industrial History of England"_)
BY HENRY DE B. GIBBINS
Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the
manufacturer, and transfer a number of children to a factory
district, and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar,
till they could hand them over to a mill owner in want of
hands, who would come and examine their height, strength, and
bodily capacities, exactly as did the slave owners in the
American markets. After that the children were simply at the
mercy of their owners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality
as mere slaves, who got no wages, and whom it was not worth
while even to feed and clothe properly, because they were so
cheap and their places could be so easily supplied. It was
often arranged by the parish authorities, in order to get rid
of imbeciles, that one idiot should be taken by the mill owner
with every twenty sane children. The fate of these unhappy
idiots was even worse than that of the others. The secret of
their final end has never been disclosed, but we can form some
idea of their awful sufferings from the hardships of the other
victims to capitalist greed and cruelty. The hours of their
labor were only limited by exhaustion, after many modes of
torture had been unavailingly applied to force continued work.
Children were often worked sixteen hours a day, by day and by
night.
Mill Children
(_From "Processionals"_)
BY JOHN CURTIS UNDERWOOD
(American poet, born 1874)
We have forgotten how to sing: our laughter is a godless thing:
listless and loud and shrill and sly.
We have forgotten how to smile. Our lips, our voices too are
vile. We are all dead before we die.
Our mothers' mothers made us so: the father that we never know
in blindness and in wantonness
Caused us to come to question you. What is it that you others
do, that profit so by our distress?
You and your children softly sleep. We and our mothers vigil
keep. You cheated us of all delight,
Ere our sick spirits came to birth: you made our fair and
fruitful earth a nest of pestilence and blight.
Your black machines are never still, and hard, relentless as
your will, they card us like the cotton waste.
And flesh and blood more cheap than they, they seize and eat
and shred away, to feed the fever of your haste.
For we are waste and shoddy here, who know no God, no faith but
fear, no happiness, no hope but sleep.
Half imbecile and half obscene we sit and tend each tense
machine, too sick to sigh, too tired to weep,
Until the tortured end of day, when fevered faces turn away, to
see the stars from blackness leap.
[Illustration: OLIVER TWIST ASKS FOR MORE
GEORGE CRUIKSHANK
(_English caricaturist, 1792-1878. One of the illustrations of
the original edition of "Oliver Twist"_)]
[Illustration:
A CITIZEN LOST
RYAN WALKER
(_American Socialist cartoonist, born 1870_)
]
In the Slums of London
(_From "The People of the Abyss"_)
BY JACK LONDON
(See pages 62, 125, 139, 519, 609)
There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and
it is the children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder
goes his round. It is fascinating to watch them, the new-born,
the next generation, swaying and stepping, with pretty little
mimicries and graceful inventions all their own, with muscles
that move swiftly and easily, and bodies that leap airily,
weaving rhythms never taught in dancing school.
I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere,
and they struck me as being bright as other children, and
in many ways even brighter. They have most active little
imaginations. Their capacity for projecting themselves into the
realm of romance and fantasy is remarkable. A joyous life is
romping in their blood. They delight in music, and motion, and
color, and very often they betray a startling beauty of face
and form under their filth and rags.
But there is a Pied Piper of London Town who steals them all
away. They disappear. One never sees them again, or anything
that suggests them. You may look for them in vain among the
generation of grown-ups. Here you will find stunted forms, ugly
faces, and blunt and stolid minds. Grace, beauty, imagination,
all the resiliency of mind and muscle, are gone. Sometimes,
however, you may see a woman, not necessarily old, but twisted
and deformed out of all womanhood, bloated and drunken, lift
her draggled skirts and execute a few grotesque and lumbering
steps upon the pavement. It is a hint that she was once one of
those children who danced to the organ-grinder. Those grotesque
and lumbering steps are all that is left of the promise of
childhood. In the befogged recesses of her brain has arisen
a fleeting memory that she was once a girl. The crowd closes
in. Little girls are dancing beside her, about her, with all
the pretty graces she dimly recollects, but can no more than
parody with her body. Then she pants for breath, exhausted, and
stumbles out through the circle. But the little girls dance on.
The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which make
for noble manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like
an infuriated tigress turning on its young, turns upon and
destroys all these qualities, blots out the light and laughter,
and moulds those it does not kill into sodden and forlorn
creatures, uncouth, degraded, and wretched below the beasts of
the field.
Slum Children
(_From "Songs of Joy"_)
BY WILLIAM H. DAVIES
(See page 577)
Your songs at night a drunkard sings,
Stones, sticks and rags your daily flowers;
Like fishes' lips, a bluey white,
Such lips, poor mites, are yours.
Poor little things, so sad and solemn,
Whose lives are passed in human crowds--
When in the water I can see
Heaven with a flock of clouds.
Poor little mites that breathe foul air,
Where garbage chokes the sink and drain--
Now when the hawthorn smells so sweet,
Wet with the summer rain.
But few of ye will live for long;
Ye are but small new islands seen,
To disappear before your lives
Can grow and be made green.
No. 5 John Street
BY RICHARD WHITEING
(See page 137)
Some are locked in all day, "to keep 'em quiet," while their
owners go forth to work or to booze. The infant faces, lined
with their own dirt, and distorted by the smeared impurities
of the window-panes, seem like the faces of actors made up
for effects of old age. The poor little hands finger the
panes without ceasing, as they might finger prison bars. The
captives crawl over one another like caged insects, and all
their gestures show the irritation of contact. But the clearest
transmission through that foul medium is to the ear rather
than to the eye, in the querulous whimper, at times rising
to a wail, which betokens the agitation of their shattered
nerves. The children playing below look up at them, and beckon
them into the yard, or make faces at them, with the charitable
intent of provoking them to a smile.
Locksley Hall Fifty Years After
BY ALFRED TENNYSON
(See pages 77, 486)
Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time,
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?
There among the gloomy alleys Progress halts on palsied feet;
Crime and hunger cast out maidens by the thousand on the street;
There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread;
There the single sordid attic holds the living and the dead;
There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,
And the crowded couch of incest, in the warrens of the poor.
Past and Present
BY THOMAS CARLYLE
(See pages 31, 74, 133, 488, 553)
Descend where you will into the lower class, in Town or
Country, by what avenue you will, by Factory Inquiries,
Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by Mining-Laborer
Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking, the same
sorrowful result discloses itself: you have to admit that the
working body of this rich English Nation has sunk or is fast
sinking into a state, to which, all sides of it considered,
there was literally never any parallel. At Stockport Assizes, a
Mother and a Father are arraigned and found guilty of poisoning
three of their children, to defraud a "burial-society" of some
£3 8s. due on the death of each child: they are arraigned,
found guilty; and the official authorities, it is whispered,
hint that perhaps the case is not solitary, that perhaps you
had better not probe farther into that department of things....
In the British land, a human Mother and Father, of white skin
and professing the Christian religion, had done this thing;
they, with their Irishism and necessity and savagery, had been
driven to do it. Such instances are like the highest mountain
apex emerged into view; under which lies a whole mountain
region and land, not yet emerged. A human Mother and Father had
said to themselves, what shall we do to escape starvation? We
are deep sunk here, in our dark cellar; and help is far.--Yes,
in the Ugolino Hunger-tower stern things happen; best-loved
little Gaddo fallen dead on his father's knees!--The Stockport
Mother and Father think and hint: Our poor little starveling
Tom, who cries all day for victuals, who will see only evil
and not good in this world: if he were out of misery at once;
he well dead, and the rest of us perhaps kept alive? It is
thought, and hinted; at last it is done. And now Tom being
killed, and all spent and eaten, Is it poor little starveling
Jack that must go, or poor little starveling Will?--What a
committee of ways and means!
Waifs and Strays
BY ARTHUR RIMBAUD
(French poet, 1854-1891)
Black in the fog and in the snow,
Where the great air-hole windows glow,
With rounded rumps,
Upon their knees five urchins squat,
Looking down where the baker, hot,
The thick dough thumps.
They watch his white arm turn the bread,
Ere through an opening flaming red
The loaf he flings.
They smell the good bread baking, while
The chubby baker with a smile
An old tune sings.
Breathing the warmth into their soul,
They squat around the red air-hole,
As a breast warm;
And when, for feasters' midnight bout,
The ready bread is taken out,
In a cake's form--
Sigh with low voices like a prayer,
Bending toward the light, down there
Where heaven gleams
--So eager that they burst their breeches,
And in the winter wind that screeches
Their linen streams!
Oliver Twist
BY CHARLES DICKENS
(See page 88)
The room in which the boys were fed, was a large stone hall,
with a copper at one end; out of which the master, dressed in
an apron for the purpose, and assisted by one or two women,
ladled the gruel at meal times. Of this festive composition
each boy had one porringer, and no more--except on occasions of
great public rejoicing, when he had two ounces and a quarter
of bread besides. The bowls never wanted washing. The boys
polished them with their spoons till they shone again; and
when they had performed this operation (which never took very
long, the spoons being nearly as long as the bowls) they would
sit staring at the copper, with such eager eyes, as if they
could have devoured the very bricks of which it was composed;
employing themselves, meanwhile, in sucking their fingers most
assiduously, with the view of catching up any stray splashes of
gruel that might have been cast thereon. Boys have generally
excellent appetites. Oliver Twist and his companions suffered
the tortures of slow starvation for three months; at last they
got so voracious and wild with hunger, that one boy, who was
tall for his age, and hadn't been used to that sort of thing
(for his father had kept a small cook-shop), hinted darkly to
his companions, that unless he had another basin of gruel _per
diem_, he was afraid he might some night happen to eat the
boy who slept next to him, who happened to be a weakly youth
of tender age. He had a wild, hungry eye; and they implicitly
believed him. A council was held; lots were cast who should
walk up to the master after supper that evening, and ask for
more; and it fell to Oliver Twist.
This evening arrived; the boys took their places. The master,
in his cook's uniform, stationed himself at the copper; his
pauper assistants ranged themselves behind him; the gruel was
served out; and a long grace was said over the short commons.
The gruel disappeared; the boys whispered to each other, and
winked at Oliver; while his next neighbors nudged him. Child as
he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery.
He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and
spoon in hand, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:
"Please, sir, I want some more."
The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale.
He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for
some seconds, and then clung for support to the copper. The
assistants were paralyzed with wonder; the boys with fear.
"What!" said the master at length, in a faint voice.
"Please, sir," replied Oliver, "I want some more."
The master aimed a blow at Oliver's head with the ladle;
pinioned him in his arms; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.
The board were sitting in solemn conclave, when Mr. Bumble
rushed into the room in great excitement, and addressing the
gentleman in the high chair, said:
"Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist has asked
for more!"
There was a general start. Horror was depicted on every
countenance.
"For _more_!" said Mr. Limbkins. "Compose yourself, Bumble, and
answer me distinctly. Do I understand that he asked for more,
after he had eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?"
"He did, sir," replied Bumble.
"That boy will be hung," said the gentleman in the white
waistcoat. "I know that boy will be hung."
Nobody controverted the prophetic gentleman's opinion. An
animated discussion took place. Oliver was ordered into instant
confinement; and a bill was next morning pasted on the outside
of the gate, offering a reward of five pounds to anybody who
would take Oliver Twist off the hands of the parish. In other
words, five pounds and Oliver Twist were offered to any man
or woman who wanted an apprentice to any trade, business, or
calling.
"I never was more convinced of anything in my life," said the
gentleman in the white waistcoat, as he knocked at the gate and
read the bill the next morning: "I never was more convinced of
anything in my life, than I am that that boy will come to be
hung."
The Children's Auction
BY CHARLES MACKAY
(English Chartist poet, 1814-1889)
Who bids for the little children--
Body, and soul and brain?
Who bids for the little children--
Young and without a stain?
"Will no one bid," said England,
"For their souls so pure and white,
And fit for all good or evil
The world on their page may write?"
"We bid," said Pest and Famine;
"We bid for life and limb;
Fever and pain and squalor,
Their bright young eyes shall dim.
When the children grow too many,
We'll nurse them as our own,
And hide them in secret places
Where none may hear their moan."
"I bid," said Beggary, howling;
"I bid for them one and all!
I'll teach them a thousand lessons--
To lie, to skulk, to crawl!
They shall sleep in my lair like maggots,
They shall rot in the fair sunshine;
And if they serve my purpose
I hope they'll answer thine."
"I'll bid you higher and higher,"
Said Crime, with a wolfish grin;
"For I love to lead the children
Through the pleasant paths of sin.
They shall swarm in the streets to pilfer,
They shall plague the broad highway,
They shall grow too old for pity
And ripe for the law to slay.
"Give me the little children,
Ye good, ye rich, ye wise,
And let the busy world spin round
While ye shut your idle eyes;
And your judges shall have work,
And your lawyers wag the tongue,
And the jailers and policemen
Shall be fathers to the young!"
A Modest Proposal
BY JONATHAN SWIFT
(English man of letters, 1667-1745; dean of St. Patrick's
Cathedral, Dublin. Master of the bitterest satiric pen in
English)
(_From "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People
from Being a Burthen to their Parents or Country, and for making them
Beneficial to the Public"_)
It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great
town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the
roads, and cabin-doors, crowded with beggars of the female
sex, followed by three, four or six children, _all in rags_,
and importuning every passenger for an alms. These mothers
instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are
forced to employ all their time in strolling, to beg sustenance
for their helpless infants, who, as they grow up, either turn
thieves for want of work, or leave their dear Native Country
to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the
Barbadoes.
I think it is agreed by all parties, that this prodigious
number of children, in the arms, or on the backs, or at the
heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is
in the present deplorable state of the kingdom, a very great
additional grievance; and therefore whoever could find out a
fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound,
useful members of the commonwealth would deserve so well of the
public, as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the
nation.
But my intention is very far from being confined to provide
only for the children of professed beggars, it is of much
greater extent, and shall take in the whole numbers of infants
at a certain age, who are born of parents in effect as little
able to support them, as those who demand our charity in the
streets....
There is another great advantage in my scheme, that it will
prevent those voluntary abortions, and that horrid practice
of women murdering their bastard children, alas, too frequent
among us, sacrificing the poor innocent babes, I doubt, more to
avoid the expense, than the shame, which would move tears and
pity in the most savage and inhuman breast....
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my
acquaintance in London that a young healthy child well nursed
is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome
food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no
doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.
I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration, that
of the hundred and twenty thousand children, already computed,
twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one
fourth part to be males, which is more than we allow to sheep,
black-cattle, or swine; and my reason is that these children
are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much
regarded by our savages; therefore only one male will be
sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred
thousand may at a year old be offered in sale to the persons of
quality, and fortune, through the kingdom, always advising the
mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to
render them plump, and fat for a good table....
I am not so violently bent upon my own opinion, as to reject
any offer, proposed by wise men, which shall be found equally
innocent, cheap, easy, and effectual. But before something of
that kind shall be advanced in contradiction to my scheme, and
offering a better, I desire the author, or authors will be
pleased maturely to consider two points. First, as things now
stand, how they will be able to find food and raiment for an
hundred thousand useless mouths and backs. And secondly, there
being a round million of creatures in human figure, throughout
this kingdom, whose whole subsistence put into a common stock,
would leave them in debt two millions of pounds sterling,
adding those, who are beggars by profession, to the bulk of
farmers, cottagers and laborers with their wives and children,
who are beggars in effect. I desire those politicians, who
dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold to attempt an
answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals,
whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness
to have been sold for food at a year old, in the manner I
prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of
misfortunes, as they have since gone through, by the oppression
of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or
trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor
clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and
the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like, or greater
miseries upon their breed for ever.
I profess in the sincerity of my heart that I have not the
least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this
necessary work, having no other motive than the _public good
of my country, by advancing our trade, providing for infants,
relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the rich_.
I have no children, by which I can propose to get a single
penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past
child-bearing.
Child Labor
BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
(See pages 200, 209, 421)
No fledgling feeds the father bird!
No chicken feeds the hen!
No kitten mouses for the cat--
This glory is for men:
We are the Wisest, Strongest Race--
Loud may our praise be sung!
The only animal alive
That lives upon its young!
Mother Wept
BY JOSEPH SKIPSEY
(Contemporary English poet, whose work possesses a quaint
simplicity, often suggesting Blake)
Mother wept, and father sighed;
With delight a-glow
Cried the lad, "Tomorrow," cried,
"To the pit I go."
Up and down the place he sped,--
Greeted old and young;
Far and wide the tidings spread;
Clapped his hands and sung.
Came his cronies; some to gaze
Rapt in wonder; some
Free with counsel; some with praise;
Some with envy dumb.
"May he," many a gossip cried,
"Be from peril kept;"
Father hid his face and sighed,
Mother turned and wept.
A Workingman's Home-Life
(_From "The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists"_)
BY ROBERT TRESSALL
(The life-story of an English house-painter who died of consumption,
leaving behind him a manuscript portraying the pitiful lives of the
half-starved English artisans. Published in book form, it proved to be
one of the literary events of the year 1914)
"Hark!" said the mother, holding up her finger.
"Dad!" cried Frankie, rushing to the door and flinging it open.
He ran along the passage and opened the staircase door before
Owen reached the top of the last flight of stairs.
"Why ever do you come up at such a rate?" exclaimed Owen's wife
reproachfully, as he came into the room exhausted from the
climb upstairs and sank panting into the nearest chair.
"I al--ways--for--get," he replied, when he had in some degree
recovered.
As he lay back in the chair, his face haggard and of a ghastly
whiteness, and with the water dripping from his saturated
clothing, Owen presented a terrible appearance.
Frankie noticed with childish terror the extreme alarm with
which his mother looked at his father.
"You're always doing it," he said with a whimper. "How many
more times will mother have to tell you about it before you
take any notice?"
"It's all right, old chap," said Owen, drawing the child nearer
to him and kissing the curly head. "Listen, and see if you can
guess what I've got for you under my coat."
"A kitten!" cried the boy, taking it out of its hiding place.
"All black, and I believe it's half a Persian. Just the very
thing I wanted."
While Frankie amused himself playing with the kitten, which had
been provided with another saucer of bread and milk, Owen went
into the bedroom to put on the dry clothes....
After the child was in bed, Owen sat alone by the table in the
draughty sitting-room, thinking.
Although there was a bright fire, the room was very cold, being
so close to the roof. The wind roared loudly round the gables,
shaking the house in a way that threatened every moment to hurl
it to the ground.
Staring abstractedly at the lamp, he thought of the future.
A few years ago the future had seemed a region of wonderful
and mysterious possibilities of good, but to-night the thought
brought no such illusions, for he knew that the story of the
future was to be much the same as the story of the past. He
would continue to work, and they would all three have to go
without most of the necessaries of life. When there was no work
they would starve.
For himself he did not care much, because he knew that, at
the best--or worst--it would be only a very few years. Even
if he were able to have proper food and clothing, and take
reasonable care of himself, he could not live much longer; but,
when that time came, what was to become of _them_?
There would be some hope for the boy if he were more robust and
if his character were less gentle and more selfish. In order to
succeed in the world it was necessary to be brutal, selfish,
and unfeeling; to push others aside and to take advantage of
their misfortunes.
Owen stood up and began walking about the room, oppressed with
a kind of terror. Presently he returned to the fire and began
rearranging his clothes that were drying. He found that the
boots, having been placed too near the fire, had dried too
quickly, and, consequently the sole of one of them had begun
to split away from the upper. He remedied this as well as he
was able, and, while turning the wetter parts of the clothing
to the fire, he noticed the newspaper in the coat pocket. He
drew it out with an exclamation of pleasure. Here was something
to distract his thoughts. But, as soon as he opened the paper,
his attention was riveted by the staring headlines of one of
the principal columns: TERRIBLE DOMESTIC TRAGEDY. _Wife and Two
Children Killed. Suicide of the Murderer._
It was one of the ordinary crimes of poverty. The man had been
without employment for many weeks and they had pawned or sold
their furniture and other possessions. But even this resource
must have failed at last, and one day the neighbors noticed
that the blinds remained down and that there was a strange
silence about the house. When the police entered they found, in
one of the upper rooms, the dead bodies of the woman and the
two children, with their throats cut, laid out side by side
upon the bed, which was saturated with their blood.
There was no bedstead, and no furniture in the room except the
straw mattress and the ragged clothes and blankets upon the
floor.
The man's body was found in the kitchen, lying with
outstretched arms face downward on the floor, surrounded by
the blood from the terrible wound in his throat, which had
evidently been inflicted by the razor that was grasped in his
right hand.
No particle of food was found, but, attached to a nail in the
kitchen wall, was a piece of blood-smeared paper, on which was
written in pencil:
"This is not _my_ crime, but Society's."
The report went on to explain that the deed must have been
perpetrated during a fit of temporary insanity brought on by
the sufferings the man had endured.
"Insanity!" muttered Owen, as he read this glib theory.
"Insanity! It seems to me that he would have been insane if he
had _not_ killed them."
Surely it was wiser and better and kinder to send them all to
sleep than to let them continue to suffer.
At the same time it seemed strange that the man should have
chosen to do it in that way, when there were so many other
cleaner, easier, and less painful ways of accomplishing his
object.
One could take poison. Of course, there was a certain amount
of difficulty in procuring it, and one would have to be very
careful not to select a poison that would cause a lot of pain.
Owen went over to his bookshelf, and took down "The Cyclopedia
of Practical Medicine," an old, rather out-of-date book, which
he thought might contain the required information. He was
astonished to find what a number of poisons there were within
easy reach of whoever wished to make use of them: poisons
which could be relied upon to do their work certainly, quickly,
and without pain. Why, it was not even necessary to buy them;
one could gather them from the hedges by the roadside and in
the fields.
The more he thought of it the stranger it seemed that such a
clumsy method as a razor should be so popular. Strangulation,
or even hanging would be better than that, though the latter
method could scarcely be adopted in their flat, because there
were no beams or rafters or anything from which it would be
possible to suspend a cord. Still, he could drive some large
nails or hooks into one of the walls. For that matter, there
were already some clothes hooks on some of the doors. He began
to think that this would be a more excellent way than poison:
he could pretend to Frankie that he was going to show him some
new kind of play. The boy would offer no resistance, and in a
few minutes it would all be over.
He threw down the book and pressed his hands over his ears. He
fancied he could hear the boy's hands and feet beating against
the panels of the door as he struggled in his death agony.
Then, as his arms fell nervelessly by his side again, he
thought he heard Frankie's voice calling:
"Dad! Dad!"
Owen hastily opened the door.
"Are you calling, Frankie?"
"Yes. I've been calling you quite a long time."
"What do you want?"
"I want you to come here. I want to tell you something."
"Well, what is it, dear? I thought you were asleep a long time
ago," said Owen, as he came into the room.
"That's just what I want to speak to you about. The kitten's
gone to sleep all right, but I can't go. I've tried all
different ways, counting and all, but it's no use, so I thought
I'd ask you if you'd mind coming and staying with me, and
letting me hold your hand for a little while, and then p'raps I
could go."
The boy twined his arms round Owen's neck and hugged him very
tightly.
"Oh, dad, I love you so much!" he said. "I love you so much I
could squeeze you to death."
"I'm afraid you will, if you squeeze me so tightly as that."
The boy laughed softly as he relaxed his hold.
"That _would_ be a funny way of showing you how much I loved
you, wouldn't it, dad? Squeezing you to death!"
"Yes, I suppose it would," replied Owen, huskily, as he tucked
the bedclothes round the child's shoulders. "But don't talk any
more, dear, just hold my hand and try to sleep."
Lying there very quietly, holding his father's hand and
occasionally kissing it, the child presently fell asleep....
Owen lay listening to the howling of the wind and the noise
of the rain as it poured heavily on the roof. But it was not
the storm only that kept him awake. Through the dark hours of
the night his thoughts were still haunted by the words on that
piece of blood-stained paper on a kitchen wall: "This is not my
crime, but Society's."
Behold the Future
(_From "The Red Wave"_)
BY JOSEPH-HENRY ROSNY, THE ELDER
(A glimpse of the home-life of a Syndicalist leader, an
interesting contrast with the passage from the English book
preceding)
François raised the little chap in his arms. "Well, my young
rebel, are you happy to be alive? Tomorrow I will teach you a
new game: the dance of the bourgeois."
He seated himself in an arm-chair and gazed at the child with
the grave and persuasive eyes of a leader of men. "You will
be a good Socialist, eh, little Antoine? You will love men;
you will not separate your life from that of others, like a
Robinson Crusoe of egoism. _Vive la revolution!_"
"_Vive la revolution!_" cried the child.
"Behold the future!" said François Rougemont, rocking the
little one upon his knees. "It will see the shining of the
great dawn, the dawn of a humanity as different from our
own as ours is different from the humanity of the pyramids.
Ah, my little man, you will know things beside which steam,
electricity, and radium are as nothing. You will see man in his
beauty, because he will no longer be hungry--and for a hundred
thousand years he has been hungry. He will no longer be hungry,
he will have all his force! He will no longer be hungry, he
will be able to unfold all his genius! He will no longer be
hungry, he will construct beneath the sea tunnels that will go
from one continent to another, and his aeroplanes will fill
the firmament; he will no longer be hungry, and he will build
cities out of fairy tales, with fields and forests upon the
roofs, with bridges of glass over the streets, with elevators
at every corner; he will no longer be hungry, he will draw
enormous energies from the ocean and from the warm bosom of the
earth. Ah! my little boy, in what gardens of enchantment you
are going to live!"
The little one listened hypnotized; the grandmother was
quivering with happiness. A shining glory passed over their
souls.
The Factories
BY MARGARET WIDDEMER
(See pages 256, 307)
I have shut my little sister in from life and light
(For a rose, for a ribbon, for a wreath across my hair),
I have made her restless feet still until the night,
Locked from sweets of summer and from wild spring air;
I who ranged the meadow lands, free from sun to sun,
Free to sing and pull the buds and watch the far wings fly,
I have bound my sister till her playing-time is done--
Oh, my little sister, was it I?--was it I?
I have robbed my sister of her day of maidenhood
(For a robe, for a feather, for a trinket's restless spark),
Shut from Love till dusk shall fall, how shall she know good,
How shall she pass scatheless through the sinlit dark?
I who could be innocent, I who could be gay,
I who could have love and mirth before the light went by,
I have put my sister in her mating-time away--
Sister, my young sister,--was it I?--was it I?
I have robbed my sister of the lips against her breast
(For a coin, for the weaving of my children's lace and lawn),
Feet that pace beside the loom, hands that cannot rest,
How can she know motherhood, whose strength is gone?
I who took no heed of her, starved and labor-worn,
I against whose placid heart my sleepy gold heads lie,
Round my path they cry to me, little souls unborn,
_God of Life--Creator! It was I! It was I!_
God and the Flowers
(_From "My Lady of the Chimney-Corner"_)
BY ALEXANDER IRVINE
(A tender and loving picture of the author's mother, an Irish
peasant-woman. See page 385)
That night there was an unusual atmosphere in her corner. She
had a newly tallied cap on her head and her little Sunday shawl
over her shoulders. Her candle was burning and the hearth
stones had an extra coat of whitewash. She drew me up close
beside her and told me a story.
"Once, a long, long time ago, God, feelin' tired, went to sleep
an' had a nice wee nap on His throne. His head was in His han's
an' a wee white cloud came down an' covered him up. Purty soon
He wakes up an' says He:
"'Where's Michael?'
"'Here I am, Father!' said Michael.
"'Michael, me boy,' says God, 'I want a chariot and a
charioteer!'
"'Right ye are!' says he. Up comes the purtiest chariot in the
city of Heaven an' the finest charioteer.
"'Me boy,' says God, 'take a million tons of th' choicest seeds
of th' flowers of Heaven an' take a trip around th' world wi'
them. Scatter them,' says He, 'be th' roadsides an' th' wild
places of th' earth where my poor live.'
"'Aye,' says the charioteer, 'that's jist like ye, Father. It's
th' purtiest job of m' afther-life an' I'll do it finely.'
"'It's jist come t' Me in a dream,' says th' Father, 'that th'
rich have all the flowers down there an' th' poor haave nown at
all."
At this point I got in some questions about God's language and
the kind of flowers.
"Well, dear," she said, "He spakes Irish t' Irish people, an'
the charioteer was an Irishman."
"Maybe it was a woman!" I ventured.
"Aye, but there's no difference up there."
"Th' flowers," she said, "were primroses, buttercups, an'
daisies, an' th' flowers that be handy t' th' poor, an' from
that day to this there's been flowers a-plenty for all of us
everywhere!"
The Leaden-Eyed
(_From "The Congo"_)
BY VACHEL LINDSAY
(See pages 335, 599)
Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.
Children and Economics
(_From "What Is It To Be Educated?"_)
BY C. HANFORD HENDERSON
(American educator; born 1861)
One will not talk economics in any formal way to children.
It is not necessary. But one cannot avoid the economic
implications upon which our current daily life and all history
and literature quite obviously rest.
Children are very explicit in their interest. They want to know
what the hero feeds upon, how he is dressed, where he sleeps.
If great deeds are in prospect, wars to be waged, palaces to
be built, pleasure parks to be laid out, princesses to be won,
tourneys to be run off, the little reader has a keen eye for
the sinews of war. In every tale worth the telling, the hero
sets out with the express purpose of seeking his fortune.
Parents and teachers do not have to drag in economics by the
heels. They may, of course, ignore the question, and allow the
children to grow up with confused and mediæval ideas; but if
they do so, they fail quite miserably to educate the children
in the fundamentals of a moral individual and social life.
The bread-and-butter question must be met by each parent and
teacher in his own personal life; and in dealing with the
children, it must be met constantly and in the most unexpected
quarters.
What to Do
BY LEO TOLSTOY
(See pages 88, 110, 148, 276, 374, 416, 555)
It is very easy to take a child away from a prostitute, or from
a beggar. It is very easy, when one has money, to have him
washed, cleaned and dressed in good clothes, fed up, and even
taught various sciences; but for us who do not earn our own
bread, it is not only difficult to teach him to earn his bread,
it is impossible; because by our example, and even by those
material improvements of his life which cost us nothing, we
teach the opposite.
True Education
(_From "Zadig"_)
BY VOLTAIRE
(French philosopher and poet, 1694-1778; a skeptic and bitter
satirist, imprisoned and exiled to England. One of the great
intellectual forces which prepared the French Revolution)
A widow, having a young son, and being possessed of a handsome
fortune, had given a promise of marriage to two magi, who were
both desirous of marrying her.
"I will take for my husband," said she, "the man who can give
the best education to my beloved son."
The two magi contended who should bring him up, and the cause
was carried before Zadig. Zadig summoned the two magi to attend
him.
"What will you teach your pupil?" he said to the first.
"I will teach him," said the doctor, "the eight parts of
speech, logic, astrology, pneumatics, what is meant by
substance and accident, abstract and concrete, the doctrine of
the monades, and the pre-established harmony."
"For my part," said the second, "I will endeavor to give him a
sense of justice, and to make him worthy the friendship of good
men."
Zadig then cried: "Whether thou art the child's favorite or
not, thou shalt have his mother."
New Worlds for Old
BY H. G. WELLS
(See page 519)
The Socialist holds that the community as a whole should be
responsible, and every individual in the community, married or
single, parent or childless, should be responsible, for the
welfare and upbringing of every child born into that community.
This responsibility may be delegated in whole or in part to
parent, teacher, or other guardian--but it is not simply
the right but the duty of the state--that is to say, of the
organized power and intelligence of the community--to direct,
to inquire, and to intervene in any default for the child's
welfare.
The Way to Freedom
BY FRANCISCO FERRER
(See page 336)
We must destroy all which in the present school answers to
the organization of constraint, the artificial surroundings
by which children are separated from nature and life, the
intellectual and moral discipline made use of to impose
ready-made ideas upon them, beliefs which deprave and
annihilate natural bent. Without fear of deceiving ourselves,
we can restore the child to the environment which entices
it, the environment of nature in which he will be in contact
with all that he loves, and in which impressions of life will
replace fastidious book-learning. If we did no more than that,
we should already have prepared in great part the deliverance
of the child.
BOOK XIV
_Humor_
Comedy of the social struggle; masterpieces from those who have
had the courage to fight the battle for social progress with
the weapon of laughter.
The Reserved Section
BY WILBUR D. NESBIT
(At the time of the great anthracite coal strike of 1902, George F.
Baer, head of the coal trust, was quoted as declaring: "The rights and
interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for, not
by labor and agitation, but by the Christian men to whom God in his
infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of this
country")
In the prehistoric ages, when the world was a ball of mist--
A seething swirl of something unknown in the planet list;
When the earth was vague with vapor, and formless and dark and void--
The sport of the wayward comet--the jibe of the asteroid--
Then the singing stars of morning chanted soft: "Keep out of there!
Keep off that spot which is sizzling hot--it is making coal for Baer!"
When the pterodactyl ambled, or fluttered, or swam, or jumped,
And the plesiosaurus rambled, all careless of what he bumped,
And the other old time monsters that thrived on the land and sea,
And did not know what their names were, any more than today do we--
Wherever they went they heard it: "You fellows keep out of there--
That place which shakes and quivers and quakes--it is making
coal for Baer."
The carboniferous era consumed but a million years;
It started when earth was shedding the last of her baby tears,
When still she was swaddled softly in clumsily tied on clouds,
When stars from the shop of nature were being turned out in crowds;
But high o'er the favored section this sign said to all: "Beware!
Stay back of the ropes that surround these slopes--they are
making coal for Baer!"
[Illustration: THE COAL FAMINE
"PLEASE, GOOD MR. DEVIL, FETCH MY MAMMA, TOO. IT'S SO NICE AND
WARM IN YOUR HOUSE"
THOMAS THEODOR HEINE
(_An example of German Socialist cartooning; from
"Simplizissimus"_)]
[Illustration: MY SOLICITOR SHALL HEAR OF THIS!
WILL DYSON
(_Cartoonist of the London "Daily Herald," born 1883. Dyson is
accustomed to describe the plutocracy as "Fat." In the present
instance the great man is discovered seeing himself as others see
him_) #/ ]
The Monthly Rent
(_From "The Game of Life"_)
BY BOLTON HALL
(American lawyer and single-taxer, born 1854)
They sheared the lamb twelve times a year,
To get some money to buy some beer;
The lamb thought this was extremely queer--
Poor little snow-white lamb!--OLD SONG.
"God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," said the deacon.
"I will shut the gate of the field so as to keep him warm,"
said the philanthropist.
"If you give me the tags of wool," said the charity clipper,
"I'll let the poor creature have half."
"The lambs we have always with us," said the wool broker.
"Lambs must always be shorn," said the business man; "hand me
the shears."
"We should leave him enough wool to make him a coat," said the
profit sharer.
"His condition is improving," said the land owner, "for his
fleece will be longer next year."
"We should prohibit cutting his flesh when we shear," said the
legislator.
"But I intend," said the radical, "to stop this shearing."
The others united to throw him out; then they divided the wool.
Penguin Island
BY ANATOLE FRANCE
(French man of letters, born 1844. In this masterpiece of social
satire the aged and half-blind Saint Maël has by mistake baptized a
flock of penguins. After a consultation of the heavenly powers, the
penguins are turned into human beings)
Now one autumn morning, as the blessed Maël was walking in
the valley of Clange in company with a monk of Yvern called
Bulloch, he saw bands of fierce-looking men loaded with stones
passing along the roads. At the same time he heard in all
directions cries and complaints mounting up from the valley
towards the tranquil sky.
And he said to Bulloch:
"I notice with sadness, my son, that since they became men the
inhabitants of this island act with less wisdom than formerly.
When they were birds they only quarrelled during the season
of their love affairs. But now they dispute all the time; they
pick quarrels with each other in summer as well as in winter.
How greatly have they fallen from that peaceful majesty which
made the assembly of the penguins look like the senate of a
wise republic!
"Look towards Surelle, Bulloch, my son. In yonder pleasant
valley a dozen men penguins are busy knocking each other down
with the spades and picks that they might employ better in
tilling the ground. The women, still more cruel than the men,
are tearing their opponents' faces with their nails. Alas!
Bulloch, my son, why are they murdering each other in this way?"
"From a spirit of fellowship, father, and through forethought
for the future," answered Bulloch. "For man is essentially
provident and sociable. Such is his character, and it is
impossible to imagine it apart from a certain appropriation of
things. Those penguins whom you see are dividing the ground
among themselves."
"Could they not divide it with less violence?" asked the aged
man. "As they fight they exchange invectives and threats. I do
not distinguish their words, but they are angry ones, judging
from the tone."
"They are accusing one another of theft and encroachment,"
answered Bulloch. "That is the general sense of their speech."
At that moment the holy Maël clasped his hands and sighed
deeply.
"Do you see, my son," he exclaimed, "that madman who with his
teeth is biting the nose of the adversary he has overthrown,
and that other one who is pounding a woman's head with a huge
stone?"
"I see them," said Bulloch. "They are creating law; they are
founding property; they are establishing the principles of
civilization, the basis of society, and the foundations of the
State."
"How is that?" asked old Maël.
"By setting bounds to their fields. That is the origin of all
government. Your penguins, O Master, are performing the most
august of functions. Throughout the ages their work will be
consecrated by lawyers, and magistrates will confirm it."
"Mr. Dooley" on Success
BY FINLEY PETER DUNNE
(American humorist and social philosopher, born 1867)
Th' millyionaire starts in as a foreman in a can facthry. By
an' by, he larns that wan iv th' men wurrukin' f'r him has
invinted a top that ye can opin with a pair iv scissors, an' he
throws him down an' takes it away fr'm him. He's a robber, says
ye? He is while he's got th' other man down. But whin he gets
up he's a magnate.
Diomedes the Pirate to Alexander
BY FRANÇOIS VILLON
(French poet and vagabond, 1431-1484)
The Emperor reasoned with him: "Why should you desire to be a
pirate?" And the other replied: "Why call me a pirate? Because
you see me going about in a little galley? If I could arm
myself like you, like you I would be an emperor."
The Leisure Classes
ANONYMOUS
There was a little beggar maid
Who wed a king long, long ago;
Of course the taste that he displayed
Was criticised by folks who know
Just what formalities and things
Are due to beggar maids and kings.
But straight the monarch made reply:
"There is small difference, as I live,
Between our stations! She and I
Subsist on what the people give.
We do not toil with strength and skill,
And, pleasing Heaven, never will."
The Influence of Servants
(_From "The Reign of Gilt"_)
BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS
(American novelist of radical sympathies, 1867-1911)
There is a woman in one of our big cities who is now a leader
of fashion, very "classy" indeed, most glib on the subject of
the "traditions of people of our station." Her father was an
excellent peddler, her mother a farmer's daughter who could be
induced to "help out" a neighbor in the rush of the harvest
time. This typical American woman behaved very sensibly so long
as her sensible father and mother were alive and until the
craze for English households arose. She fell into line. But
the haughty servants were most trying at first. For instance,
she loved bread spread with molasses. She ate it before the
butler once; his face told her what a hideous "break" she had
made. She tried to conquer this low taste--never did weak woman
fight harder against the gnawings of sinful appetite. At last
she gave way, and in secret and in stealth indulged. She was
not caught and, encouraged, she proceeded to add one low common
habit to another until she was leading a double life. It had
its terrors; it had its compensating joys. But before she had
gone too far she was happily saved. One morning her maid caught
her, and the whole household was agog. The miseries endured in
the few following weeks completely cured her. She is now in
private, as well as in public, as sound a snob as ever reveled
in "exclusiveness."
A Gentleman and His Boots
(_From "A Traveler from Altruria"_)
BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
(The "dean of American novelists," 1837-1919, here gently satirizes
his country. "A Traveler from Altruria" comes to America expecting to
find democracy; at a summer hotel he makes the mistake of helping the
porter to black boots. For this he is rebuked by a friend.)
"There are a great many things we are willing to do for
ourselves that we are not willing to do for others. But even on
that principle, which I think false and illogical, you could
not be justified. A gentleman is not willing to black _his own_
boots. It is offensive to his feelings, to his self-respect;
it is something he will not do if he can get anybody else to do
it for him."
"Then, in America," said the Altrurian, "it is not offensive to
the feelings of a gentleman to let another do for him what he
would not do for himself?"
"Certainly not."
"Ah," he returned, "then we understand something altogether
different by the word gentleman in Altruria."
Song of the Lower Classes
BY ERNEST JONES
(Chartist leader and poet, 1819-1869; sentenced in 1848 to two
years imprisonment)
We plow and sow, we're so very, very low,
That we delve in the dirty clay;
Till we bless the plain with the golden grain,
And the vale with the fragrant hay.
Our place we know, we're so very, very low,
'Tis down at the landlord's feet;
We're not too low the grain to grow,
But too low the bread to eat.
Down, down we go, we're so very, very low,
To the hell of the deep-sunk mines;
But we gather the proudest gems that glow,
When the crown of the despot shines;
And when'er he lacks, upon our backs
Fresh loads he deigns to lay;
We're far too low to vote the tax,
But not too low to pay.
We're low, we're low--we're very, very low,--
And yet from our fingers glide
The silken floss and the robes that glow
Round the limbs of the sons of pride;
And what we get, and what we give,
We know, and we know our share;
We're not too low the cloth to weave,
But too low the cloth to wear.
We're low, we're low, we're very, very low,
And yet when the trumpets ring,
The thrust of a poor man's arm will go
Through the heart of the proudest king.
We're low, we're low--mere rabble, we know--
We're only the rank and the file;
We're not too low to kill the foe,
But too low to share the spoil.
Tom Dunstan: or, the Politician
("_How Long, O Lord, How Long?_")
BY ROBERT BUCHANAN
(See pages 367, 412)
Cross-legg'd on the board we sat,
Like spiders spinning,
Stitching and sweating, while fat
Old Moses, with eyes like a cat,
Sat greasily grinning;
And here Tom said his say,
And prophesied Tyranny's death;
And the tallow burned all day,
And we stitch'd and stitch'd away
In the thick smoke of our breath.
Poor worn-out slops were we,
With hearts as heavy as lead;
But "Patience! she's coming!" said he;
"Courage, boys! wait and see!
_Freedom's_ ahead!" ...
But Tom was little and weak,
The hard hours shook him;
Hollower grew his cheek,
And when he began to speak
The coughing took him.
And at last the cheery sound
Of his voice among us ceased,
And we made a purse, all round,
That he mightn't starve, at least.
His pain was awful to see,
Yet there, on his poor sick-bed,
"She's coming, in spite of me!
Courage, and wait!" cried he;
"_Freedom's_ ahead!"
Ay, now Tom Dunstan's cold,
All life seems duller;
There's a blight on young and old,
And our talk has lost the bold
Red-republican color.
But we see a figure gray,
And we hear a voice of death,
And the tallow burns all day,
And we stitch and stitch away
In the thick smoke of our breath;
Ay, while in the dark sit we,
Tom seems to call from the dead--
"She's coming! she's coming!" says he;
"Courage, boys! wait and see!
_Freedom's_ ahead!"
Lines
BY STEPHEN CRANE
(See page 217)
"Have you ever made a just man?"
"Oh, I have made three," answered God,
"But two of them are dead,
And the third--
Listen! listen,
And you will hear the thud of his defeat...."
The Memoirs of Li Hung Chang
(See page 196)
A poor man is ever at a disadvantage in matters of public
concern. When he rises to speak, or writes a letter to his
superiors, they ask: Who is this fellow that offers advice? And
when it is known that he is without coin they spit their hands
at him, and use his letters in the cooks' fires. But if it be
a man of wealth who would speak, or write, or denounce, even
though he have the brain of a yearling dromedary, or a spine as
crooked and unseemly, the whole city listens to his words and
declares them wise.
FROM ECCLESIASTICUS
A rich man speaketh, and all keep silence; and what he saith
they extol to the clouds: A poor man speaketh, and they say,
Who is this? and if he stumble, they will help to overthrow him.
The Pauper's Drive
BY T. NOEL
(English poet of the Chartist period)
There's a grim one-horse hearse in a jolly round trot;
To the churchyard a pauper is going, I wot;
The road it is rough, and the hearse has no springs,
And hark to the dirge that the sad driver sings:--
"Rattle his bones over the stones;
He's only a pauper, whom nobody owns!"
Oh, where are the mourners? alas! there are none;
He has left not a gap in the world now he's gone,
Not a tear in the eye of child, woman, or man--
To the grave with his carcase as fast as you can.
"Rattle his bones over the stones;
He's only a pauper, whom nobody owns!"
What a jolting and creaking, and splashing and din;
The whip how it cracks! and the wheels how they spin!
How the dirt, right and left, o'er the hedges is hurled!
The pauper at length makes a noise in the world.
"Rattle his bones over the stones;
He's only a pauper, whom nobody owns!" ...
You bumpkin, who stare at your brother conveyed;
Behold what respect to a cloddy is paid,
And be joyful to think, when by death you're laid low
You've a chance to the grave like a gemman to go.
"Rattle his bones over the stones;
He's only a pauper, whom nobody owns!"
But a truce to this strain--for my soul it is sad,
To think that a heart in humanity clad
Should make, like the brutes, such a desolate end,
And depart from the light without leaving a friend.
Bear softly his bones over the stones;
Though a pauper, he's one whom his Maker yet owns.
Complaint to My Empty Purse
BY GEOFFREY CHAUCER
(See page 423)
To you, my purse, and to none other wight
Complain I, for ye be my lady dear!
I am so sorry, now that ye be light;
For certès, but ye make me heavy cheer,
Me were as lief be laid upon my bier;
For which unto your mercy thus I cry:
Be heavy again, or elles might I die!
Now voucheth safe this day, or it be night,
That I of you the blissful sound may hear,
Or see your colour like the sun bright
That of yellowness had never a peer.
Ye be my life, ye be my hertes stere,
Queen of comfort and of good company:
Be heavy again, or elles might I die!
"Mr. Dooley" on Poverty
(See page 683)
Wan iv th' sthrangest things about life is that th' poor, who
need th' money th' most, ar-re th' very wans that niver have it.
Don Quixote
BY MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
(Sancho Panza, the servant of the half-crazed knight, has
accompanied him upon the promise of being promoted to a high
station)
"Troth, wife," quoth Sancho, "were not I in hopes to see
myself, ere it be long, governor of an island, on my conscience
I should drop down dead on the spot." "Not so, my chicken,"
quoth the wife, "'let the hen live, though it be with pip';
do thou live, and let all the governments in the world go
to the Devil. Thou camest out of thy mother's belly without
government, and thou mayest be carried to thy long home without
government, when it shall please the Lord. How many people in
this world live without government yet do well enough, and are
well looked upon? There is no sauce in the world like hunger;
and as the poor never want that, they always eat with a good
stomach."
The Freebooter's Prayer
(_Scotland, 1405_)
Thou That willed us naked-born,
Send us meat against the morn--
Got with right or got with wrong
So we fast not overlong.
Prosper "Snaffle, Spur and Spear!"
Grant us booty, horse and gear;
Save our necks from hempen thrall,
Bless the souls of them that fall.
_A Modern Version_
(_U. S. A., 1905_)
BY ARTHUR GUITERMAN
(Contemporary American poet)
Thou, Whom rich and poor adore,
Grant me fifty millions more,
Earned or pilfered, foul or pure;
From man's law hold me secure.
So, when I have gained of gold
All my coffers well can hold,
I may give, O Lord, for Thee,
One-sixteenth in Charity.
Zadig
BY VOLTAIRE
(See page 674)
The lord of the castle was one of those Arabians who are
commonly called robbers; but he now and then performed some
good actions amidst a multitude of bad ones. He robbed with
furious rapacity, and granted favors with great generosity.
"May I take the liberty of asking thee," said Zadig, "how long
thou hast followed this noble profession?"
"From my most tender youth," replied the lord. "I was servant
to a petty, good-natured Arabian, but could not endure the
hardships of my situation. I was vexed to find that fate had
given me no share of the earth which equally belongs to all
men. I imparted the cause of my uneasiness to an old Arabian,
who said to me:
"'My son, do not despair; there was once a grain of sand that
lamented that it was no more than a neglected atom in the
deserts; at the end of a few years it became a diamond, and it
is now the brightest ornament in the crown of the king of the
Indies.'
"This discourse made a deep impression on my mind. I was the
grain of sand, and I resolved to become the diamond. I began
by stealing two horses. I soon got a party of companions. I
put myself in a condition to rob small caravans; and thus,
by degrees, I destroyed the difference which had formerly
subsisted between me and other men. I had my share of the good
things of this world; and was even recompensed with usury for
the hardships I had suffered. I was greatly respected, and
became the captain of a band of robbers. I seized this castle
by force. The satrap of Syria had a mind to dispossess me of
it; but I was too rich to have anything to fear. I gave the
satrap a handsome present, by which I preserved my castle, and
increased my possessions. He even appointed me treasurer of
the tributes which Arabia Petraea pays to the king of kings.
I perform my office of receiver with great punctuality; but I
take the freedom to dispense with that of paymaster."
For the Other 365 Days
BY FRANKLIN P. ADAMS
(Contemporary American humorist)
Christmas is over. Uncork your ambition!
Back to the battle! Come on, competition!
Down with all sentiment, can scrupulosity!
Commerce has nothing to gain by jocosity;
Money is all that is worth all your labors;
Crowd your competitors, nix on your neighbors!
Push 'em aside in a passionate hurry,
Argue and bustle and bargain and worry!
Frenzy yourself into sickness and dizziness--
Christmas is over and Business is Business.
The Road to Success
(_From "Random Reminiscences of Men and Events"_)
BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER
(See page 487)
If I were to give advice to a young man starting out in life,
I should say to him: If you aim for a large, broad-gauged
success, do not begin your business career, whether you sell
your labor or are an independent producer, with the idea of
getting from the world by hook or crook all you can. In the
choice of your profession or your business employment, let your
first thought be: Where can I fit in so that I may be most
effective in the work of the world? Where can I lend a hand in
a way most effective to advance the general interests? Enter
life in such a spirit, choose your vocation in that way, and
you have taken the first step on the highest road to a large
success. Investigation will show that the great fortunes which
have been made in this country, and the same is probably true
of other lands, have come to men who have performed great and
far-reaching economic services--men who, with great faith in
the future of their country, have done most for the development
of its resources. The man will be most successful who confers
the greatest service on the world.
The Latest Decalogue
BY ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
(See page 488)
Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be
Worshipped, except the currency.
Swear not at all; for, for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse.
At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world thy friend.
Honor thy parents; that is, all
From whom advancement may befall.
Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive.
Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it.
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When it's so lucrative to cheat.
Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly.
Thou shalt not covet, but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.
"Mr. Dooley" on the Trusts
(See pages 683, 692)
"Mind ye, Jawn, I've no wurrud to say again thim that sets back
in their own house an' lot an' makes th' food iv th' people
dear. They're good men, good men. Whin they tilt the price iv
beef to where wan pound iv it costs as much as many th' man in
this Ar-rchey Road 'd wurruk from th' risin' to th' settin' iv
th' sun to get, they have no thought iv th' likes iv you an'
me. 'Tis aisy come, aisy go with thim; an' ivry cint a pound
manes a new art musoom or a new church, to take th' edge off
hunger. They're all right, thim la-ads with their own porkchops
delivered free at th' door. 'Tis, 'Will ye have a new spring
dress, me dear? Willum, ring thim up, an' tell thim to hist the
price iv beef. If we had a few more pitchers an' statoos in th'
musoom 'twud ilivate th' people a sthory or two. Willum, afther
this steak 'll be twinty cints a pound.' Oh, they're all right,
on'y I was thinkin' iv th' Connock man's fam'ly back iv th'
dumps."
"For a man that was gay a little while ago, it looks to me as
if you'd grown mighty solemn-like," said Mr. McKenna.
"Mebbe so," said Mr. Dooley. "Mebbe so. What th' 'ell, annyhow.
Mebbe 'tis as bad to take champagne out iv wan man's mouth as
round steak out iv another's. Lent is near over. I seen Doherty
out shinin' up his pipe that's been behind th' clock since Ash
Winsdah. Th' girls 'll be layin' lilies on th' altar in a day
or two. The springs come on. Th' grass is growin' good; an', if
th' Connock man's children back iv th' dumps can't get meat,
they can eat hay."
What the Moon Saw
BY VACHEL LINDSAY
(See pages 335, 599, 672)
Two statesmen met by moonlight.
Their ease was partly feigned.
They glanced about the prairie,
Their faces were constrained.
In various ways aforetime
They had misled the state,
Yet did it so politely
Their henchmen thought them great.
They sat beneath a hedge and spake
No word, but had a smoke.
A satchel passed from hand to hand.
Next day the deadlock broke.
Portrait of a Supreme Court Judge
BY LOUIS UNTERMEYER
(See pages 42, 418, 515)
How well this figure represents the Law--
This pose of neuter Justice, sterile Cant;
This Roman Emperor with the iron jaw,
Wrapped in the black silk of a maiden-aunt.
The Furred Law-Cats
(_From "Pantagruel"_)
FRANÇOIS RABELAIS
(French satirist of the middle ages, 1483-1553)
The Furred Law-Cats are most terrible and dreadful monsters;
they devour little children, and trample over marble stones.
Pray tell me, noble topers, do they not deserve to have their
snouts slit? The hair of their hides doesn't lie outward, but
inwards, and every mother's son of them for his device wears a
gaping pouch, but not all in the same manner; for some wear it
tied to their neck scarfwise, others upon the breech, some on
the side, and all for a cause, with reason and mystery. They
have claws so very strong, long, and sharp that nothing can get
from 'em what is once fast between their clutches. Sometimes
they cover their heads with mortar-like caps, at other times
with mortified caparisons.
Examine well the countenance of these stout props and pillars
of this catch-coin law and iniquity; and pray observe, that
if you live but six olympiads, and the age of two dogs more,
you'll see these Furred Law-cats lords of all Europe, and in
peaceful possession of all the estates and domains belonging to
it; unless, by divine providence, what's got over the devil's
back is spent under his belly, or the goods which they unjustly
get perish with their prodigal heirs. Take this from an honest
beggar!
Among 'em reigns the sixth essence; by the means of which they
gripe all, devour all, conskite all, burn all, draw all, hang
all, quarter all, behead all, murder all, imprison all, waste
all, and ruin all, without the least notice of right and wrong;
for among them vice is called virtue; wickedness, piety;
treason, loyalty; robbery, justice. Plunder is their motto, and
when acted by them is approved by all men, except the heretics;
and all this they do because they dare; their authority is
sovereign and irrefragable. Should all their villany be once
displayed in its true colours and exposed to the people, there
never was, is, nor will be any spokesman could save 'em; nor
any magistrate so powerful as to hinder their being burnt alive
in their coney-burrows without mercy. Even their own furred
kittlings, friends and relations would abominate 'em.
The Gentleman Inside
BY DAMON RUNYON
(Contemporary American writer)
They's a banker that's a trusty workin' on the warden's books;
I kin see him from the rock pile where I'm sittin',
An' on his case I'm basin' this advice to feller crooks:
You'd better git a plenty while yer gittin'.
Now, this guy wrecked a county an' he copped his neighbor's dough;
He got six hundred thousand, which is some change, as you know;
They give him one or two years, an' the softest job here--Oh
It pays to git a plenty while yer gittin'.
Wit' me little flask o' nitro an' me bar o' laundry soap,
I blew a safe, an' then, as was befittin',
I took me ten years smilin', glad I didn't get the rope!--
But the next time! Oh, a plenty while I'm gittin'!
For this guy tore off half a state an' shook the other half;
He robbed his friends an' neighbors an' he handed both the laugh--
But you oughta heard him holler at that one or two year gaff.
You'd better git a plenty while yer gittin'!
An' so he's here a trusty, while I wear a ball an' chain--
(They say he beat most every statoot written.)
He's got a fortune planted an' all I've got's a pain;
You'd better git a plenty while yer gittin'!
He cost the state a million bucks before they put him here;
He had ten lawyers for his trial, w'ich lasted most a year;
An' the jedge who had to sentence him pronounced it wit' a tear--
It pays to git a plenty while yer gittin'!
The Memoirs of Li Hung Chang
(See pages 196, 689)
They showed me a beautifully shaped old bell, which is in
Independence Hall, and is called the Bell of Liberty; which
means that at its ringing all men within sound of its voice
know they are free. But they do not ring it any more because it
is cracked. Is Liberty cracked also?
Penguin Island
BY ANATOLE FRANCE
(See page 681. In the following passage one of the most learned
of the Penguins pays a visit to America)
After a voyage of fifteen days his steamer entered, during the
night, the harbor of Titanport, where thousands of ships were
anchored. An iron bridge thrown across the water and shining
with lights, stretched between two piers so far apart that
Professor Obnubile imagined he was sailing on the seas of
Saturn, and that he saw the marvellous ring which girds the
planet of the Old Man. And this immense conduit bore upon it
more than a quarter of the wealth of the world. The learned
Penguin, having disembarked, was waited on by automatons in a
hotel forty-eight stories high. Then he took the great railway
that led to Gigantopolis, the capital of New Atlantic. In the
train there were restaurants, gaming-rooms, athletic arenas,
telegraphic, commercial, and financial offices, a Protestant
Church, and the printing-office of a great newspaper, which
latter the doctor was unable to read, as he did not know the
language of the New Atlantans. The train passed along the banks
of great rivers, through manufacturing cities which concealed
the sky with the smoke from their chimneys, towns black in the
day, towns red at night, full of noise by day and full of noise
also by night.
"Here," thought the doctor, "is a people far too much engaged
in industry and trade to make war. I am already certain that
the New Atlantans pursue a policy of peace. For it is an axiom
admitted by all economists that peace without and peace within
are necessary for the progress of commerce and industry."
As he surveyed Gigantopolis, he was confirmed in this opinion.
People went through the streets so swiftly propelled by hurry
that they knocked down all who were in their way. Obnubile was
thrown down several times, but soon succeeded in learning how
to demean himself better; after an hour's walking he himself
knocked down an Atlantan.
Having reached a great square he saw the portico of a palace
in the classic style, whose Corinthian columns reared their
capitals of arborescent acanthus seventy metres above the
stylobate.
As he stood with his head thrown back admiring the building, a
man of modest appearance approached him and said in Penguin:
"I see by your dress that you are from Penguinia. I know your
language; I am a sworn interpreter. This is the Parliament
palace. At the present moment the representatives of the States
are in deliberation. Would you like to be present at the
sitting?"
The doctor was brought into the hall and cast his looks upon
the crowd of legislators who were sitting on cane chairs with
their feet upon their desks.
The president arose, and, in the midst of general inattention,
muttered rather than spoke the following formulas which the
interpreter immediately translated to the doctor.
"The war for the opening of the Mongol markets being ended to
the satisfaction of the States, I propose that the accounts be
laid before the finance committee...."
"Is there any opposition?..."
"The proposal is carried."
"The war for the opening of the markets of Third-Zealand being
ended to the satisfaction of the States, I propose that the
accounts be laid before the finance committee...."
"Is there any opposition?..."
"The proposal is carried."
"Have I heard aright?" asked Professor Obnubile. "What? you an
industrial people and engaged in all these wars!"
"Certainly," answered the interpreter, "these are industrial
wars. Peoples who have neither commerce nor industry are not
obliged to make war, but a business people is forced to adopt
a policy of conquest. The number of wars necessarily increases
with our productive capacity. As soon as one of our industries
fails to find a market for its products a war is necessary to
open new outlets. It is in this way we have had a coal war, a
copper war, and a cotton war. In Third-Zealand we have killed
two-thirds of the inhabitants in order to compel the remainder
to buy our umbrellas and braces."
At that moment a fat man who was sitting in the middle of the
assembly ascended the tribune.
"I claim," said he, "a war against the Emerald Republic, which
insolently contends with our pigs for the hegemony of hams and
sauces in all the markets of the universe."
"Who is that legislator?" asked Doctor Obnubile.
"He is a pig merchant."
"Is there any opposition?" said the President. "I put the
proposition to the vote."
The war against the Emerald Republic was voted with uplifted
hands by a very large majority.
"What?" said Obnubile to the interpreter; "you have voted a war
with that rapidity and that indifference!"
"Oh! it is an unimportant war which will hardly cost eight
million dollars."
"And men...."
"The men are included in the eight million dollars."
Then Doctor Obnubile bent his head in bitter reflection.
"Since wealth and civilization admit of as many causes of
poverty as war and barbarism, since the folly and wickedness
of men are incurable, there remains but one good action to
be done. The wise man will collect enough dynamite to blow
up this planet. When its fragments fly through space an
imperceptible amelioration will be accomplished in the universe
and a satisfaction will be given to the universal conscience.
Moreover, this universal conscience does not exist."
"Mr. Dooley" on the Tariff
(See pages 683, 692, 698)
"Well," said Mr. Hennessy, "what diff'rence does it make? Th'
foreigner pays th' tax annyhow."
"He does," said Mr. Dooley, "if he ain't turned back at Castle
Garden."
The Preacher and the Slave
BY J. HILL
(_Tune: "Sweet Bye and Bye"_)
(A sample of many parodies upon Christian hymns which are published
by the Industrial Workers of the World, and sung by the migratory
workers of the Far West in their camping-places, known as "jungles."
While this selection and the one following can hardly be classed as
literature, they have their interest as social documents. It was
Napoleon who said that if he could write a country's songs, he would
not care who wrote its laws.)
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:
CHORUS
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
And the Starvation Army they play,
And they sing and they clap and they pray,
Till they get all your coin on the drum,
Then they'll tell you when you're on the bum: (Chorus)
If you fight hard for children and wife--
Try to get something good in this life--
You're a sinner and bad man, they tell,
When you die you will sure go to hell. (Chorus)
Workingmen of all countries, unite,
Side by side we for freedom will fight;
When the world and its wealth we shall gain
To the grafters we'll sing this refrain:
CHORUS
You will eat, bye and bye,
When you've learned how to cook and to fry;
Chop some wood, 'twill do you good,
And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye.
Work for All but Father
BY HENRY M. TICHENOR
(The poet of the _Rip-Saw_, a revolutionary paper of the middle
West which has an immense circulation)
"Everybody works but father"--God, what a ghastly lay!
"Everybody works but father"--he wants too much pay! Mother
and Ann and Maggie, and tiny Tim and Bill, work like hell for
a paltry wage in the sweatshop and the mill. "Everybody works
but father"--he talks like a fool--he asks enough in wages to
send the kids to school--he wants more for his daily toil than
we pay the wife and brood--he says he ought to have enough to
keep them all in food! "Everybody works but father"--for him
we have no need--all we want of father is just to keep up the
breed. The mother and the babies, that's all we require, the
mother and the babies--those are the ones we hire. Just keep
on breeding babies--that's the bull moose hunch--just keep on
breeding babies, we can work the whole damn bunch!
Mr. "Dooley" on Industry
(See pages 683, 692, 698, 706)
'Tis a sthrange thing whin we come to think iv it that th' less
money a man gets f'r his wurruk, th' more nicissary it is to
th' wurruld that he shud go on wurrukin'. Ye'er boss can go to
Paris on a combination wedding an' divoorce thrip an' no wan
bothers his head about him. But if ye shud go to Paris--excuse
me f'r laughin' mesilf black in th' face--th' industhrees iv
the counthry pines away.
Lines to a Pomeranian Puppy Valued at $3,500
BY LOUIS UNTERMEYER
(See pages 42, 418, 515, 699)
Often as I strain and stew,
Digging in these dirty ditches,
I have dared to think of you--
You and all your riches.
Lackeys help you on and off;
And the bed is silk you lie in;
You have doctors when you cough,
Priests when you are dying.
Wrapt in soft and costly furs,
All sewed up with careful stitches,
You consort with proper curs
And with perfumed bitches....
You don't sweat to struggle free,
Work in rags and rotting breeches--
Puppy, have a laugh at me
Digging in the ditches!
Labor and Capital Are One
(_From The "Game of Life"_)
BY BOLTON HALL
(See page 680)
"Times are hard," said the Picked Chicken.
"Why," said the Rat, "this is an era of prosperity; see how I
have feathered my nest."
"But," said the Picked Chicken, "you have gotten my feathers."
"You must not think," said the Rat, "that because I get more
comfort you get poorer."
"But," said the Chicken, "you produce no feathers, and I keep
none--"
"If you would use your teeth"--interrupted the Rat.
"If--" said the Picked Chicken.
"You could lay--"
"I--" said the Picked Chicken.
"--up as much as I do," concluded the Rat.
"Excuse me for living," said the Picked Chicken, "but--"
"Without consumers like me," said the Rat, "there would be no
demand for the feathers which you produce."
"I shall vote for a change," said the Picked Chicken.
"Only those who have feathers should have the Privilege of
voting," remarked the Rat.
"Mr. Dooley" on Prosperity
(See pages 683, 692, 698, 706, 709)
Yes, Prosperity has come hollerin' an' screamin'. To read th'
papers, it seems to be a kind iv a vagrancy law. No wan can
loaf anny more. Th' end iv vacation has gone f'r manny a happy
lad that has spint six months ridin' through th' counthry,
dodgin' wurruk, or loafin' under his own vine or hat-three.
Prosperity grabs ivry man be th' neck, an' sets him shovellin'
slag or coke or runnin' up an' down a ladder with a hod iv
mortar. It won't let th' wurruld rest.... It goes around like a
polisman givin' th' hot fut to happy people that are snoozin'
in th' sun. 'Get up,' says Prosperity. 'Get up, an' hustle
over to th' rollin' mills: there's a man over there wants ye
to carry a ton iv coal on ye'er back.' 'But I don't want to
wurruk,' says th' lad. 'I'm very comfortable th' way I am.' 'It
makes no difference,' says Prosperity. 'Ye've got to do ye'er
lick. Wurruk, f'r th' night is comin'. Get out, an' hustle.
Wurruk, or ye can't be unhappy; an', if th' wurruld isn't
unhappy, they'se no such a thing as Prosperity."
Why the Socialist Party Is Growing
(_Dedicated to the School of Journalism_)
BY FRANKLIN P. ADAMS
(See page 695)
"A story," the reporter said, "about commercial crime.
A merchant's been convicted of selling phony stuff.
The sentence is a thousand meg and seven years of time--"
"A hundred words," the city Ed. replied, "will be enough."
"A story," the reporter said, "about a crimson dame
Just landed from the steamer, wearing slippers that are red.
She used to be the Dearest Friend of Emperor Wotsisname--"
"Three columns and a layout!" cried the eager city Ed.
The Babble Machines
(_From "When the Sleeper Wakes"_)
BY H. G. WELLS
(One of the writer's earlier romances, telling of a man who sleeps
for two hundred years and wakens to find himself hailed as Master of
the World--through the operation of a bequest of money which has been
accumulating through that time. The power of this wealth is being
wielded in his name by a cynical and unscrupulous oligarchy which has
reduced the populace to a uniformed slave-caste, seething with futile
revolt. The following portrays the newspapers of that new world of
Capitalism triumphant)
Beyond this place they came into a closed hall, and Graham
discovered the cause of the noise that had perplexed him.
His attention was arrested by a violent, loud hoot, followed
by a vast leathery voice. He stopped and, looking up, beheld
a foolish trumpet face. This was the General Intelligence
Machine. For a space it seemed to be gathering breath, and a
regular throbbing from its cylindrical body was audible. Then
it trumpeted "Galloop, Galloop," and broke out again.
"Paris is now pacified. All resistance is over. Galloop! The
black police hold every position of importance in the city.
They fought with great bravery, singing songs written in
praise of their ancestors by the poet Kipling. Once or twice
they got out of hand, and tortured and mutilated wounded and
captured insurgents, men and women. Moral--don't go rebelling.
Haha! Galloop, Galloop! They are lively fellows. Lively brave
fellows. Let this be a lesson to the disorderly banderlog
of this city. Yah! Banderlog! Filth of the earth! Galloop,
Galloop!"
The voice ceased. There was a confused murmur of disapproval
among the crowd. "Damned niggers." A man began to harangue
near them. "Is this the Master's doing, brothers? Is this the
Master's doing?"
"Black police!" said Graham. "What is that? You don't mean----"
His companion touched his arm and gave him a warning look, and
forthwith another of these mechanisms screamed deafeningly and
gave tongue in a shrill voice. "Yahaha! Yahah, Yap! Hear a
live paper yelp! Live paper. Yaha! Shocking outrage in Paris.
Yahahah! The Parisians exasperated by the black police to the
pitch of assassination. Dreadful reprisals. Savage times come
again. Blood! Blood! Yahah!" The nearer Babble Machine hooted
stupendously, "Galloop, Galloop," drowned the end of the
sentence, and proceeded in a rather flatter note than before
with novel comments on the horrors of disorder. "Law and order
must be maintained," said the nearer Babble Machine....
The Ballad of Kiplingson
BY ROBERT BUCHANAN
(An English poet and journalist, 1841-1901, who through his
lifetime fought valiantly against militarism and imperialism.
See pages 367, 412, 687)
There came a knock at the Heavenly Gate, where the good St.
Peter sat,--
"Hi, open the door, you fellah there, to a British rat-tat-tat!"
The Saint sat up in his chair, rubbed eyes, and prick'd his holy ears,
"Who's there?" he muttered, "a single man, or a regiment of
Grenadiers?"
"A single man," the voice replied, "but one of prodigious size,
Who claims by Jingo, his patron Saint, the entry to Paradise!"
The good St. Peter open'd the Gate, but blocking the entry scan'd
The spectacled ghost of a little man, with an infant's flag in
his hand....
"Wot! haven't you heard of Kiplingson? whose name and fame have spread
As far as the Flag of England waves, and the Tory prints are read?
"I was raised in the lap of Jingo, sir, till I grew to the
height of man,
And a wonderful Literary Gent, I emerged upon Hindostan!...
"And rapid as light my glory spread, till thro' cockaigne it flew,
And I grew the joy of the Cockney cliques, and the pet of the
Jingo Jew!
"For the Lord my God was a Cockney Gawd, whose voice was a savage yell,
A fust-rate Gawd who dropt, d'ye see, the 'h' in Heaven and Hell!...
"Oh I was a real Phenomenon," continued Kiplingson,
"The only genius ever born who was Tory at twenty-one!"
"Alas! and alas!" the good Saint said, a tear in his eye serene,
"A Tory at twenty-one! Good God! At fifty what _would_ you have been?
"There's not a spirit now here in Heaven who wouldn't at twenty-one
Have tried to upset the very Throne, and reform both Sire and Son!
"The saddest sight my eyes have seen, down yonder on earth or here,
Is a brat that talks like a weary man, or a youth with a cynic's leer.
"Try lower down, young man," he cried, and began to close the Gate--
"Hi, here, old fellah," said Kiplingson, "by Jingo! just you wait--
"I've heaps of Criticisms here, to show my claims are true,
That I'm 'cute in almost everything, and have probed Creation through!"
"And what have you _found_?" the Saint inquired, a frown on his
face benign--
"The Flag of England!" cried Kiplingson, "and the thin black
penny-a-line!
"Wherever the Flag of England waves, down go all other flags;
Wherever the thin black line is spread, the Bulldog bites and brags!...
"O Gawd, beware of the Jingo's wrath! the Journals of Earth are mine!
Across the plains of the earth still creeps the thin black
penny-a-line!
"For wherever the Flag of England waves"--but here, we grieve to state,
His voice was drown'd in a thunder-crash, for the Saint
bang'd-to the Gate!
Militancy
BY ISRAEL ZANGWILL
(See page 136)
Heckling became a fine art, and even a joyous: for, despite
all the suffering it cost them, they carried it through with
such inexhaustible spirit and invention as to restore a touch
of chic and bravado to our drab life and add to the gaiety
of nations. Miss Pankhurst even managed to badger Cabinet
Ministers in the witness-box.... There was no meeting, however
guarded, to which, by hook or crook, organ-pipe or drain-pipe,
she did not gain admission, padlocking herself against easy
expulsion; while, even were her bodily presence averted,
always, like the horns of Elfland faintly blowing, came from
some well-placed megaphone that inevitable and implacable
slogan "Votes for Women." Chalked on pavement or scrawled
on walls or blazoned on sky-signs, it became a universal,
ubiquitous obsession. Streamers carried it under the terrace
of Parliament or balloons suspended it from above. Cabinet
Ministers were dogged to their privatest haunts, for the
leakages of information were everywhere. Since Christianity no
such force has arisen to divide families. No household, however
Philistine, was safe from a jail-bird. If Lady Anon asked Lady
Alamode when her daughter was coming out, it no longer referred
to the young lady's début. The most obstinate autocrat since
Pharaoh, Mr. Asquith, has been shown similar signs and wonders.
"We are the appointed plagues," said Mrs. Pankhurst, with a
rare touch of humor. And nothing has plagued British society
more than that outbreak of religion which brought disgrace upon
so many respectable homes. Incidentally, the prisons and the
courts were improved by receiving critics instead of criminals.
"We do not care for ourselves," cried Christabel Pankhurst at
the London Police Court, "because prison is nothing to us. But
the injustice done here to thousands of helpless creatures is
too terrible to contemplate." Warders and wardresses, too,
profited by the society of their new prisoners. It was like a
rise in the social scale to them. Nor was even the Bench immune
from education.
"Boyle!" called the magistrate. "_Miss_ Boyle" corrected the
prisoner. "We always call our prisoners by their surnames,"
explained the magistrate. "We are here to teach you better
manners" said the Suffragette.
"Mr. Dooley" on Woman Suffrage
(See pages 683, 692, 698, 706, 709, 711)
Don't ask f'r rights. Take thim. An' don't let anny wan give
thim to ye. A right that is handed to ye f'r nawthin' has
somethin' the matther with it. It's more than likely it's on'y
a wrong turned inside out.
Heloise sans Abelard
(_A Modern Scholar on a Mediæval Nun_)
BY JOEL ELIAS SPINGARN
(A professor in America's most prosperous university was discharged
for his protests against commercialized education. In the following
poem he has paid his respects to his colleagues, likening them to nuns
in a convent, and himself to Heloise, who ran away)
In the cool, calm palace of prayer
She sought her haven of dreams;
She gave up her dower of air,
Of stars, and cities, and streams.
On the cold, sweet steps of prayer
She sought what young girls seek;
She laid her bosom bare,
And asked for the stones to speak.
Who wonders she could not hear
What silence and stones belie?
Who wonders where love may steer?
Not I, not I, not I!
O passionate Heloise,
I, too, have lived under the ban,
With seven hundred professors,
And not a single man.
In the Shadows: the Priest
BY ARTHUR UPSON
(American poet, 1877-1908)
How long is it now, I wonder--
A thousand years, at least,
Here the dark vault under,
Feet to the East,
Supposed to be Paradise-walking, a purgèd priest!
Well, none of them see me, thank heaven,
As they pass me here on the hill--
So long as they live they're shriven,
And when they come here--they are still.
Thinking
BY ANATOLE FRANCE
(See pages 681, 703)
'Tis a great infirmity to think. God preserve you from it, my
son, as He has preserved His greatest saints, and the souls
whom He loves with especial tenderness and destines to eternal
felicity.
The Tail of the World
BY JOHN AMID
(Contemporary American poet)
The world is a beast with a long fur tail,
With an angry tooth, and a biting nail;
And she's headed the way that she ought not to go
For the Lord he designed and decreed her so.
The point of the game is to drag the beast
While she's headed sou-west, toward the nor-nor-east;
God made the beast, and he drew the plan,
And he left the bulk of the haul to man.
So primitive man dug a brace for his sandal.
Took hold of the tail, as the logical handle;
Got a last good drink, and a bite of bread,
And pulled till the blood ran into his head.
At first he gained till it looked like a cinch,
But then the beast crawled back an inch;
And ever since then it's been Nip and Tuck,
Sometimes moving, but oftener stuck.
Most of the gains have been made by the crowd--
Sweating nobly, and swearing aloud.
Yet sometimes a single man could land
A good rough jerk, or a hand-over-hand.
They say Confucius made her come--
Homer and Dante--they each pulled some!
Bill Schopenhauer's foot slipped, rank,
While Shakespeare, he fetched her a horrible yank.
The beast has hollered and frequently spit,
Often scratched, and sometimes bit,
And the men who were mauled, or laid out cold,
Were the very ones with the strangle hold.
Why he did it, I don't know;
But the Lord he designed and decreed it so.
Of course he knew that the game was no cinch,
So he gave man some trifles to help in a pinch.
One was an instinct, that might be read:
"Lay hold of something, and pull till you're dead!"
Another, that can't be translated as well,
Was, "Le' go my tail--and go to Hell!"
But the strongest card in the whole blame pack
Was the fine sensation that paid man back;
For the finest feeling that's been unfurled
Is the feel of the fur on the tail of the world!
BOOK XV
The Poet
Social injustice as it bears upon the future generation;
pictures of child labor, and of the degradation of children in
slums; also hopes for the future deliverance of the child.
By-the-Way
(_From "Songs of the Dead End"_)
BY PATRICK MACGILL
(See pages 32, 47, 122, 406)
These be the little verses, rough and uncultured, which
I've written in hut and model, deep in the dirty ditch,
On the upturned hod by the palace made for the idle rich.
Out on the happy highway, or lines where the engines go,
Which fact you may hardly credit, still for your doubts 'tis so,
For I am the person who wrote them, and surely to God, I know!
Wrote them beside the hot-plate, or under the chilling skies,
Some of them true as death is, some of them merely lies,
Some of them very foolish, some of them otherwise.
Little sorrows and hopings, little and rugged Rhymes,
Some of them maybe distasteful to the moral men of our times,
Some of them marked against me in the Book of the Many Crimes.
These, the Songs of a Navvy, bearing the taint of the brute,
Unasked, uncouth, unworthy, out to the world I put,
Stamped with the brand of labor, the heel of a navvy's boot.
Democratic Vistas
BY WALT WHITMAN
(See pages 184, 268, 578)
Literature, strictly considered, has never recognized the
people, and, whatever may be said, does not today. Speaking
generally, the tendencies of literature, as hitherto pursued,
have been to make mostly critical and querulous men. It seems
as if, so far, there were some natural repugnance between a
literary and professional life, and the rude rank spirit of
the democracies. There is, in later literature, a treatment
of benevolence, a charity business, rife enough it is true;
but I know nothing more rare, even in this country, than a fit
scientific estimate and reverent appreciation of the People--of
their measureless wealth of latent worth and capacity, their
vast, artistic contrasts of lights and shades--with, in
America, their entire reliability in emergencies, and a certain
breadth of historic grandeur, of peace or war, far surpassing
all the vaunted samples of book-heroes, or any _haut ton_
coteries, in all the records of the world....
Dominion strong is the body's; dominion stronger is the mind's.
What has filled, and fills today our intellect, our fancy,
furnishing the standards therein, is yet foreign. The great
poems, Shakespeare's included, are poisonous to the idea of
the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of
democracy. The models of our literature, as we get it from
other lands, ultramarine, have had their birth in courts, and
basked and grown in castle sunshine; all smells of princes'
favors. Of workers of a certain sort, we have, indeed, plenty,
contributing after their kind; many elegant, many learned,
all complacent. But touched by the national test, or tried by
the standards of democratic personality, they wither to ashes.
I say I have not seen a single writer, artist, lecturer, or
what not, that has confronted the voiceless but ever erect and
active, pervading, underlying will and typic inspiration of the
land, in a spirit kindred to itself. Do you call these genteel
little creatures American poets? Do you term that perpetual,
pistareen, pastepot work, American art, American drama, taste,
verse? I think I hear, echoed as from some mountain-top afar in
the west, the scornful laugh of the Genius of these States....
Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for
elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy
is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower
and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction
between men, and their beliefs--in religion, literature,
colleges, and schools--democracy in all public and private
life, and in the army and navy.
Today
BY HELEN GRAY CONE
(Contemporary American poet)
Voice, with what emulous fire thou singest free hearts of old fashion,
English scorners of Spain, sweeping the blue sea-way,
Sing me the daring of life for life, the magnanimous passion
Of man for man in the mean populous streets of To-day!
Hand, with what color and power thou couldst show, in the ring
hot-sanded,
Brown Bestiarius holding the lean tawn tiger at bay,
Paint me the wrestle of Toil with the wild-beast Want, bare-handed;
Shadow me forth a soul steadily facing Today!
What Is Art?
BY LEO TOLSTOY
(See pages 88, 110, 148, 276, 374, 416, 555, 674)
Art of the future, that is to say, such part of art as will
be chosen from among all the art diffused among mankind,
will consist, not in transmitting feelings accessible only
to members of the rich classes, as is the case today, but in
transmitting such feelings as embody the highest religious
perceptions of our times. Only those productions will be
considered art which transmit feelings drawing men together
in brotherly union, or such universal feelings as can unite
all men. Art transmitting feelings flowing from antiquated,
worn-out religious teachings--church art, patriotic art,
voluptuous art, transmitting feelings of superstitious fear,
of pride, of vanity, of ecstatic admiration for national
heroes--art exciting exclusive love of one's own people, or
sensuality, will be considered bad, harmful art, and will be
censured and despised by public opinion. All the rest of art,
transmitting feelings accessible only to a section of the
people, will be considered unimportant, and will be neither
blamed nor praised. And the appraisement of art in general
will devolve, not, as is now the case, on a separate class
of rich people, but on the whole people; so that for a work
to be esteemed good, and to be approved of and diffused, it
will have to satisfy the demands, not of a few people living
in identical and often unnatural conditions, but it will have
to satisfy the demands of all those great masses of people who
are situated in the natural conditions of laborious life. And
the artists producing art will not be, as now, merely a few
people selected from a small section of the nation, members of
the upper classes or their hangers-on, but will consist of all
those gifted members of the whole people who prove capable of,
and are inclined towards, artistic activity.
A Catechism for Workers
BY AUGUST STRINDBERG
(Swedish poet, dramatist and novelist, 1849-1912; author of over a
hundred volumes, and probably the greatest genius that Sweden has
produced. It is not generally known that he was a Socialist, although
the labor unions and Social-democrats of his country marched in a body
at his funeral. The following are a few paragraphs from a "catechism"
covering every aspect of life from the worker's point of view)
_What is philosophy_?
A seeking of the truth.
_Then how can philosophy be the friend of the upper classes?_
The upper classes pay the philosopher, in order that he may
discover only such truths as are expedient in their eyes.
_But suppose uncomfortable truths should be discovered?_
They are called lies, and the philosopher gets no pay.
_What is history?_
The story of the past, presented in a light favorable to the
interests of the upper classes.
_Suppose the light is unfavorable?_
That is scandalous.
_What is a scandal?_
Anything offending the upper classes.
_What is esthetics?_
The art of praising or belittling works of art.
_What works of art must be praised?_
Those that glorify the upper classes.
Therefore Raphael and Michaelangelo are the most famous
artists, for they glorified the religious falsehoods of
the upper classes. Shakespeare magnified kings, and Goethe
magnified himself, the writer for the upper classes.
_But how about other works of art?_
There must not be others.
The Superior Classes
BY GEORGE D. HERRON
(American clergyman and college professor, born 1862; resigned
to become an active Socialist)
It is customary to speak of the unpreparedness of the
proletary for Socialism. But I am sure that, even today, the
working-class would give a vastly better organization of
industrial forces, a profoundly nobler and freer society, than
ever the world has had. The ignorance of the working-class
and the superior intelligence of the privileged class are
superstitions--are superstitions fostered by intellectual
mercenaries, by universities and churches, and by all
the centers of privilege. And the assumption of superior
intelligence on the part of the privileged is not warranted by
a single historical experience. The derangements and miseries
of mankind are precisely due to the ignorant and arrogant rule
of "superior" classes and persons. The mental and spiritual
capacity of these classes is a myth; their so-called culture
but thinly veneers their essential savagery, their social
rapacity and impudence....
The system that divides society into classes can bring forth no
true knowledge, no living truth, no industrial competence, no
fundamental social decency. It can only continue the desolation
of labor and increase the blindness and depravity of the
privileged. So long as some people own the tools upon which
others depend for bread, so long as the few possess themselves
of the fruits of the labor of the many, so long as the arts
and the institutions and the sciences are built upon exploited
workers, just so long will our so-called progress be through
the perennial exhaustion of generations and races; just so long
will successive civilizations be but voracious parasites upon
the spirit and body of mankind.
The Midnight Lunch Room
(_From "The Frozen Grail and Other Poems"_)
BY ELSA BARKER
(See pages 315, 359)
With little silver one may enter here,
And yet those hungry faces watch outside
The frosty window--and the door is wide!
The clatter to my unaccustomed ear
Of dishes and harsh tongues, is like a spear
Shaken within the sensitive wounded side
Of Silence. Soiled, indifferent hands provide
Pitiful fare, and cups of pallid cheer.
In my warm, fragrant home an hour ago
I wrote a sonnet on the peace they win
Who worship Beauty! Let me breathe it low.
What would it mean if chanted in this din?
What would it say to those out in the snow,
Who hunger, and who may not enter in?
What Life Means to Me
(_From "Revolution"_)
BY JACK LONDON
(See pages 62, 125, 139, 519, 609, 649)
I was born into the working class. I early discovered
enthusiasm, ambition, and ideals; and to satisfy these became
the problem of my childlife. My environment was crude and rough
and raw. I had no outlook, but an uplook rather. My place
in society was at the bottom. Here life offered nothing but
sordidness and wretchedness, both of the flesh and the spirit;
for here flesh and spirit were alike starved and tormented.
Above me towered the colossal edifice of society, and to
my mind the only way out was up. Into this edifice I early
resolved to climb. Up above, men wore black clothes and boiled
shirts, and women dressed in beautiful gowns. Also, there were
good things to eat, and there was plenty to eat. This much for
the flesh. Then there were the things of the spirit. Up above
me, I knew, were unselfishness of the spirit, clean and noble
thinking, keen intellectual living. I knew all this because I
read "Seaside Library" novels, in which, with the exception
of the villains and adventuresses, all men and women thought
beautiful thoughts, spoke a beautiful tongue, and performed
glorious deeds. In short, as I accepted the rising of the sun,
I accepted that up above me was all that was fine and noble and
gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to life, all that
made life worth living and that remunerated one for his travail
and misery.
But it is not particularly easy for one to climb up out of
the working class--especially if he is handicapped by the
possession of ideals and illusions. I lived on a ranch in
California, and I was hard put to find the ladder whereby to
climb. I early inquired the rate of interest on invested money,
and worried my child's brain into an understanding of the
virtues and excellences of that remarkable invention of man,
compound interest. Further, I ascertained the current rates of
wages for workers of all ages, and the cost of living. From all
these data I concluded that if I began immediately and worked
and saved until I was fifty years of age, I could then stop
working and enter into participation in a fair portion of the
delights and goodnesses that would then be open to me higher up
in society. Of course, I resolutely determined not to marry,
while I quite forgot to consider at all that great rock of
disaster in the working class world--sickness.
But the life that was in me demanded more than a meager
existence of scraping and scrimping. Also, at ten years of
age, I became a newsboy on the streets of a city, and found
myself with a changed uplook. All about me were still the same
sordidness and wretchedness, and up above me was still the
same paradise waiting to be gained; but the ladder whereby to
climb was a different one. It was now the ladder of business.
Why save my earnings and invest in government bonds, when by
buying two newspapers for five cents, with a turn of the wrist
I could sell them for ten cents and double my capital? The
business ladder was the ladder for me, and I had a vision of
myself becoming a baldheaded and successful merchant prince....
[The author became the owner of an oyster-boat, and thereby a
capitalist; but was ruined by the burning of his boat.]
From then on I was mercilessly exploited by other capitalists.
I had the muscle, and they made money out of it while I made
but a very indifferent living out of it. I was a sailor before
the mast, a longshoreman, a roustabout; I worked in canneries,
and factories, and laundries; I mowed lawns, and cleaned
carpets, and washed windows. And I never got the full product
of my toil. I looked at the daughter of the cannery owner, in
her carriage, and knew that it was my muscle, in part, that
helped drag along that carriage on its rubber tires. I looked
at the son of the factory owner, going to college, and knew
that it was my muscle that helped, in part, to pay for the wine
and good-fellowship he enjoyed.
But I did not resent this. It was all in the game. They were
the strong. Very well, I was strong. I would carve my way to a
place among them, and make money out of the muscles of other
men. I was not afraid of work. I loved hard work. I would pitch
in and work harder than ever and eventually become a pillar of
society.
And just then, as luck would have it, I found an employer that
was of the same mind. I was willing to work, and he was more
than willing that I should work. I thought I was learning a
trade. In reality, I had displaced two men. I thought he was
making an electrician out of me; as a matter of fact, he was
making fifty dollars per month out of me. The two men I had
displaced had received forty dollars each per month; I was
doing the work of both for thirty dollars per month.
This employer worked me nearly to death. A man may love
oysters, but too many oysters will disincline him toward that
particular diet. And so with me. Too much work sickened me. I
did not wish ever to see work again. I fled from work. I became
a tramp, begging my way from door to door, wandering over the
United States, and sweating bloody sweats in slums and prisons.
I had been born in the working class, and I was now, at the age
of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was
down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths
of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak.
I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles
and the charnel house of our civilization. This is the part of
the edifice of society that society chooses to ignore. Lack of
space compels me here to ignore it, and I shall say only that
the things I there saw gave me a terrible scare....
[The author reflected, and decided that it was better to sell
brains than muscle.] Then began a frantic pursuit of knowledge.
I returned to California and opened the books. While thus
equipping myself to become a brain merchant, it was inevitable
that I should delve into sociology. There I found, in a
certain class of books, scientifically formulated, the simple
sociological concepts I had already worked out for myself.
Other and greater minds, before I was born, had worked out all
that I had thought, and a vast deal more. I discovered that I
was a Socialist.
The Socialists were revolutionists, inasmuch as they
struggled to overthrow the society of the present, and out
of the material to build the society of the future. I, too,
was a Socialist, and a revolutionist. I joined the groups
of working-class and intellectual revolutionists, and for
the first time came into intelligent living. Here I found
keen-flashing intellects and brilliant wits; for here I met
strong and alert-brained, withal horny-handed, members of
the working class; unfrocked preachers too wide in their
Christianity for any congregation of Mammon-worshippers;
professors broken on the wheel of university subservience to
the ruling class and flung out because they were quick with
knowledge which they strove to apply to the affairs of mankind.
Here I found, also, warm faith in the human, glowing idealism,
sweetness of unselfishness, renunciation and martyrdom--all
the splendid, stinging things of the spirit. Here life was
clean, noble, and alive. Here life rehabilitated itself, became
wonderful and glorious; and I was glad to be alive. I was
in touch with great souls who exalted flesh and spirit over
dollars and cents; and to whom the thin wail of the starved
slum-child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of
commercial expansion and world-empire. All about me were
nobleness of purpose and heroism of effort, and my days and
nights were sunshine and starshine, all fire and dew, with
before my eyes, ever burning and blazing, the Holy Grail,
Christ's own Grail, the warm human, long suffering and
maltreated, but to be rescued and saved at the last....
As a brain merchant I was a success. Society opened its
portals to me. I entered right in on the parlor floor, and my
disillusionment proceeded rapidly. I sat down to dinner with
the masters of society, and with the wives and daughters of
the masters of society. The women were gowned beautifully, I
admit; but to my naive surprise I discovered that they were of
the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known down
below in the cellar. "The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady were
sisters under their skins"--and gowns.
It was not this, however, so much as their materialism, that
shocked me. It is true these beautifully gowned, beautiful
women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities;
but in spite of their prattle the dominant key of the life
they lived was materialistic. And they were so sentimentally
selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet little charities,
and informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they
ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of
dividends stained with the blood of child labor, and sweated
labor, and of prostitution itself. When I mentioned such facts,
expecting in my innocence that these sisters of Judy O'Grady
would at once strip off their blood-dyed silks and jewels,
they became excited and angry, and read me preachments about
the lack of thrift, the drink, and the innate depravity that
caused all the misery in society's cellar. When I mentioned
that I couldn't quite see that it was the lack of thrift, the
intemperance, and the depravity of a half-starved child of six
that made it work twelve hours every night in a Southern cotton
mill, these sisters of Judy O'Grady attacked my private life
and called me an "agitator"--as though that, forsooth, settled
the argument.
Nor did I fare better with the masters themselves. I had
expected to find men who were clean, noble and alive, whose
ideals were clean, noble and alive. I went out amongst the men
who sat in the high places, the preachers, the politicians, the
business men, the professors, and the editors. I ate meat with
them, drank wine with them, automobiled with them, and studied
them. It is true, I found many that were clean and noble; but,
with rare exceptions, they were not alive. I do verily believe
I could count the exceptions on the fingers of my two hands.
Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean
life, they were merely the unburied dead--clean and noble, like
well-preserved mummies, but not alive. In this connection I may
especially mention the professors I met, the men who live up
to that decadent university ideal, "the passionless pursuit of
passionless intelligence."
I met men who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in
their diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the hands
of Pinkertons with which to shoot down strikers in their
own factories. I met men incoherent with indignation at the
brutality of prize-fighting, and who, at the same time, were
parties to the adulteration of food that killed each year more
babies than even red-handed Herod had killed....
I discovered that I did not like to live on the parlor floor of
society. Intellectually I was bored. Morally and spiritually
I was sickened. I remembered my intellectuals and idealists,
my unfrocked preachers, broken professors, and clean-minded,
class-conscious workingmen. I remembered my days and nights of
sunshine and starshine, where life was all a wild wonder, a
spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure and ethical romance.
And I saw before me, ever blazing and burning, the Holy Grail.
So I went back to the working-class, in which I had been born
and where I belonged. I care no longer to climb. This imposing
edifice of society above my head holds no delight for me. It
is the foundation of the edifice that interests me. There I am
content to labor, crowbar in hand, shoulder to shoulder with
intellectuals, idealists, and class-conscious workingmen,
getting a solid pry now and again and setting the whole edifice
rocking. Some day, when we get a few more hands and crowbars
to work, we'll topple it over, along with all its rotten
life and unburied dead, its monstrous selfishness and sodden
materialism. Then we'll cleanse the cellar and build a new
habitation for mankind, in which there will be no parlor floor,
in which all the rooms will be bright and airy, and where the
air that is breathed will be clean, noble and alive.
Fires
BY WILFRID WILSON GIBSON
(Contemporary English poet of the lives of the poor)
Snug in my easy chair,
I stirred the fire to flame.
Fantastically fair
The flickering fancies came,
Born of heart's desire:
Amber woodlands streaming;
Topaz islands dreaming,
Sunset-cities gleaming,
Spire on burning spire;
Ruddy-windowed taverns;
Sunshine-spilling wines;
Crystal-lighted caverns
Of Golconda's mines;
Summers, unreturning;
Passion's crater yearning;
Troy, the ever-burning;
Shelley's lustral pyre;
Dragon-eyes, unsleeping;
Witches' cauldrons leaping;
Golden galleys sweeping
Out from sea-walled Tyre:
Fancies, fugitive and fair,
Flashed with winging through the air;
Till, dazzled by the drowsy glare,
I shut my eyes to heat and light;
And saw, in sudden night,
Crouched in the dripping dark,
With streaming shoulders stark,
The man who hews the coal to feed my fire.
Alton Locke
BY CHARLES KINGSLEY
(A young poet is taken out by an old Scotchman, to make his
first acquaintance with the world of misery)
It was a foul, chilly, foggy Saturday night. From the butchers'
and greengrocers' shops the gas-lights flared and flickered,
wild and ghastly, over haggard groups of slip-shod dirty
women, bargaining for scraps of stale meat and frost-bitten
vegetables, wrangling about short weight and bad quality.
Fish-stalls and fruit-stalls lined the edge of the greasy
pavement, sending up odors as foul as the language of sellers
and buyers. Blood and sewer-water crawled from under doors
and out of spouts, and reeked down the gutters among the
offal, animal and vegetable, in every stage of putrefaction.
Foul vapors rose from cowsheds and slaughter-houses, and the
doorways of undrained alleys, where the inhabitants carried
the filth out on their shoes from the back-yard into the court,
and from the court up into the main street; while above,
hanging like cliffs over the streets--those narrow, brawling
torrents of filth, and poverty, and sin--the houses with their
teeming load of life were piled up into the dingy, choking
night. A ghastly, deafening, sickening sight it was. Go,
scented Belgravian! and see what London is! and then go to the
library which God has given thee--one often fears in vain--and
see what science says this London might be!
"Ay," he muttered to himself, as he strode along, "sing awa;
get yoursel' wi' child wi' pretty fancies and gran' words, like
the rest o' the poets, and gang to hell for it."
"To hell, Mr. Mackaye?"
"Ay, to a verra real hell, Alton Locke, laddie--a warse ane
than ony fiends' kitchen, or subterranean Smithfield that
ye'll hear o' in the pulpits--the hell on earth o' being a
flunkey, and a humbug, and a useless peacock, wasting God's
gifts on your ain lusts and pleasures--and kenning it--and
not being able to get oot o' it, for the chains o' vanity and
self-indulgence. I've warned ye. Now look there----"
He stopped suddenly before the entrance of a miserable alley--
"Look! there's not a soul down that yard but's either beggar,
drunkard, thief, or warse. Write anent that! Say how you
saw the mouth o' hell, and the two pillars thereof at the
entry--the pawn-broker's shop o' one side, and the gin palace
at the other--twa monstrous deevils, eating up men, and women,
and bairns, body and soul. Look at the jaws o' the monsters,
how they open and open, and swallow in anither victim and
anither. Write anent that."
"What jaws, Mr. Mackaye?"
"They faulding-doors o' the gin shop, goose. Are na they a
mair damnable man-devouring idol than ony red-hot statue o'
Moloch, or wicker Gogmagog, wherein thae auld Britons burnt
their prisoners? Look at thae bare-footed bare-backed hizzies,
with their arms roun' the men's necks, and their mouths full o'
vitriol and beastly words! Look at that Irishwoman pouring the
gin down the babbie's throat! Look at that rough o' a boy gaun
out o' the pawn shop, where he's been pledging the handkerchief
he stole the morning, into the gin shop, to buy beer poisoned
wi' grains o' paradise, and cocculus indicus, and saut, and a'
damnable, maddening, thirst-breeding, lust-breeding drugs! Look
at that girl that went in wi' a shawl on her back and cam' out
wi'out ane! Drunkards frae the breast! harlots frae the cradle!
damned before they're born! John Calvin had an inkling o' the
truth there, I'm a'most driven to think, wi' his reprobation
deevil's doctrines!"
"Well--but--Mr. Mackaye, I know nothing about these poor
creatures."
"Then ye ought. What do ye ken anent the Pacific? [Alton Locke
has been writing poems about the South Sea Islands.] Which is
maist to your business?--thae bare-backed hizzies that play
the harlot o' the other side o' the warld, or these--these
thousands o' bare-backed hizzies that play the harlot o' your
ain side--made out o' your ain flesh and blude? You a poet!
True poetry, like true charity, my laddie, begins at hame. If
ye'll be a poet at a', ye maun be a cockney poet; and while
the cockneys be what they be, ye maun write, like Jeremiah of
old, o' lamentation and mourning and woe, for the sins o' your
people. Gin you want to learn the spirit o' a people's poet,
down wi' your Bible and read thae auld Hebrew prophets; gin ye
wad learn the style, read your Burns frae morning till night;
and gin ye'd learn the matter, just gang after your nose, and
keep your eyes open, and ye'll no miss it."
"But all this is so--so unpoetical."
"Hech! Is there no the heeven above them there, and the hell
beneath them? and God frowning, and the deevil grinning? No
poetry there! Is no the verra idea of the classic tragedy
defined to be, man conquered by circumstance? Canna ye see it
there? And the verra idea of the modern tragedy, man conquering
circumstance?--and I'll show you that, too--in mony a garret
where no eye but the gude God's enters, to see the patience,
and the fortitude, and the self-sacrifice, and the luve
stronger than death, that's shining in thae dark places o' the
earth. Come wi' me, and see."
The Prophetic Book "Milton"
BY WILLIAM BLAKE
(See pages 98, 213)
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountain green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear: O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
BY HEINRICH HEINE
(See pages 97, 222)
I know not if I deserve that a laurel-wreath should one day
be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it, has
always been to me but a divine plaything. I have never attached
any great value to poetical fame; and I trouble myself very
little whether people praise my verses or blame them. But
lay on my coffin a _sword_; for I was a brave soldier in the
Liberation War of humanity.
[Illustration: THE MILITANT
CHARLES A. WINTER
(_Contemporary American illustrator_)]
[Illustration:
THE DEATH OF HATTERTON
HENRY WALLIS
(_English painter, born 1830_)
]
The Last Word
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
(See page 203)
They out-talk'd thee, hiss'd thee, tore thee.
Better men fared thus before thee;
Fired their ringing shot and pass'd,
Hotly charged--and broke at last.
Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall.
An Appeal to the Young
BY PETER KROPOTKIN
(See pages 308, 312)
If your heart really beats in unison with that of humanity, if
like a true poet you have an ear for Life, then, gazing out
upon this sea of sorrow whose tide sweeps up around you, face
to face with these people dying of hunger, in the presence of
these corpses piled up in the mines, and these mutilated bodies
lying in heaps on the barricades, looking on these long lines
of exiles who are going to bury themselves in the snows of
Siberia and in the marshes of tropical islands; in full view
of this desperate battle which is being fought, amid the cries
of pain from the conquered and the orgies of the victors, of
heroism in conflict with cowardice, of noble determination face
to face with contemptible cunning--you cannot remain neutral;
you will come and take the side of the oppressed because you
know that the beautiful, the sublime, the spirit of life itself
is on the side of those who fight for light, for humanity, for
justice!...
It rests with you either to palter continually with your
conscience, and in the end to say, one fine day: "Perish
humanity, provided I can have plenty of pleasures and enjoy
them to the full, so long as the people are foolish enough to
let me." Or, once more the inevitable alternative, to take
part with the Socialists and work with them for the complete
transformation of society. That is the logical conclusion which
every intelligent man must perforce arrive at, provided that he
reasons honestly about what passes around him, and discards the
sophisms which his bourgeois education and the interested views
of those about him whisper in his ear.
FROM THE BOOK OF PROVERBS
Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the
poor and needy.
Chants Communal
BY HORACE TRAUBEL
(See page 185)
What can I do? I can talk out when others are silent. I can
say man when others say money. I can stay up when others are
asleep. I can keep on working when others have stopped to play.
I can give life big meanings when others give life little
meanings. I can say love when others say hate. I can say every
man when others say one man. I can try events by a hard test
when others try it by an easy test.
What can I do? I can give myself to life when other men refuse
themselves to life.
No Enemies
BY CHARLES MACKAY
(See page 657)
You have no enemies, you say?
Alas! my friend, the boast is poor;
He who has mingled in the fray
Of duty, that the brave endure,
_Must_ have made foes! If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done.
You've hit no traitor on the hip,
You've dashed no cup from perjured lip,
You've never turned the wrong to right,
You've been a coward in the fight.
The Revolution
BY RICHARD WAGNER
(See page 236)
Unhappy man! uplift thine eyes, look up to where a thousand
thousand gather on the hills in joyous expectation of the
dawn! Regard them, they are all thy brothers, sisters, the
troops of those poor wights who hitherto knew naught of life
but suffering, have been but strangers on this earth of Joy;
they all are waiting for that Revolution which affrights thee,
their redeemer from this world of sorrow, creator of a new
world that blesses all! See there, there stream the legions
from the factories; they have made and fashioned lordly
stuffs,--themselves and children, they are naked, frozen,
hungry; for not to them belongs the fruit of all their labor,
but to the rich and mighty one who calls men and the earth his
own! So, there they troop, from fields and farmyards; they have
tilled the earth and turned it to a smiling garden, and fruits
in plenty, enough for all who live, have paid their pains,--yet
poor are they, and naked, starving; for not to them, nor to
others who are needy, belongs earth's blessing, but solely to
the rich and mighty one who calls men and the earth his own.
They all, the hundred-thousands, millions, are camped upon
the hills and gaze into the distance, where thickening clouds
proclaim the advent of emancipating Revolution; they all, to
whom nothing is left to grieve for, from whom men rob the sons
to train them into sturdy gaolers of their fathers; whose
daughters walk the city's streets with burden of their shame,
an offering to the baser lusts of rich and mighty; they all,
with the sallow, careworn faces, the limbs devoured by frost
and hunger, they all who have never known joy, encamp there on
the heights and strain their eyes in blissful expectation of
its coming, and listen in rapt silence to the rustle of the
rising storm, which fills their ears with Revolution's greeting.
The Refusal
(_Addressed to General Sebastiani_)
BY PIERRE JEAN DE BERANGER
(French lyric poet, of great popularity, 1780-1857; twice
prosecuted by the government for his republican utterances)
A minister offers me gold!
Not a creature, of course, to be told,
Not a word to appear in the press!
My wants are but few, to be sure,
And yet, when I think of the poor,
I long to be rich, I confess!
With the poor, as the world is aware,
Stars and ribands one cannot well share,
But gold is a different thing!
Yes, just for a hundred francs down
I'd cheerfully pawn both my crown
And my sceptre, if I were king!
When money does come in my way,
It goes the next moment astray,
How and where I can't really explain;
My pocket is cursed with a hole
Which my grandmother, excellent soul,
All her days would have stitched at in vain!
All the same, my good friend, keep your gold!
In my teens, if the truth must be told,
Proud Freedom I fervently woo'd;
Yes, I, who have vaunted in song
Lax loveliness all my life long,
Am wedded in fact to a prude!
Ay, Liberty, Sir, you must learn,
Is a bigot inflexibly stern,
Who, heedless of time and of place,
Directly the tinsel she spies
On Servility's livery, cries,
"Away with the rascally lace!"
Your dross she an insult would deem!
But, frankly, how came you to dream
Of attempting to treat with _my_ muse?
As it is, I'm at least a good "sou,"
But lacquer me over, and you
Make me counterfeit ev'n among "sous."
Keep your pelf; I'm no hero, I fear,
But if the world happens to hear
Of this secret you think so profound,
You'll know whence the story has sprung--
My heart's like a lyre newly strung,
One touch, and you make it resound!
To the Retainers
(_From "Socialism and Success"_)
BY W. J. GHENT
(American Socialist writer, born 1866)
You retainers and servitors of the men of wealth--you who
from rostrum, pulpit and sanctum, from bar and bench, defend
the existing régime and oppose the struggles of the working
class for a better life; you whose business it is to find a
practical, a judicial, an ethical and even a spiritual sanction
for things as they exist, and who devise the cheap moralities
which are the reflex of the interests of the class that employs
you--there is a word to say to you which needs to be spoken.
Upon those who take part in the forward movement of the time no
more pressing duty is laid than that of telling you in plain
words what millions of men are thinking of you....
With what eager impulse and with what compliant will do you
make yourselves the defenders of the present scheme of things
and the assailants of the coming order! Now that in every
civilized land the working class, sick of the reign of cruelty
and wrong, is awakening to a consciousness of its power, and
to a determination to ordain a fairer life, you take upon
yourselves the mission to ridicule its aims and ideals and to
discredit its leaders.
It is only the unsuccessful, you say, who attack our existing
institutions. You cannot understand, such is your subservient
complacence, that multitudes among this revolutionary working
class are proud of their unsuccess and wear it as a badge of
honor. Pray you, under the existing scheme of things, how many,
and what quality of men achieve "success," and what must they
do to achieve it? It is not, except in rare cases, probity,
honor, truthfulness, nor humaneness, nor fellow service, that
wins this fallacious good. It is, in the majority of cases,
grafting and lying, fawning and cringing, selfishness and
brutality, restrained only by that Chinese ethical standard,
the necessity of "saving your face," that give victory in the
struggle. And the men who are seeking the overthrow of this
system disdain to make use of these means. They leave that
function to you. They do not, like your bishops, lend their
presence to chambers of commerce at banquets, and give to the
gamblers in the world's wealth the benediction of divine favor.
They do not, like your Board of Foreign Missions, solicit the
profits of law breaking and theft for their propaganda, and
promise an intercession at the throne of grace. They do not,
like your college heads, prescribe the dainty punishment of
"social ostracism" for the world's robbers, crying out from
their gables, "Bring on your tainted money!" Nor do they, like
your journalists, make themselves the servile lackeys of the
ruling class; nor, like your economists, constitute themselves
the secular priests of capital, perpetually renewing their
character of "pests of society and persecutors of the poor."
Many of them might be "successful" if they chose to do these
things. Rather they chose, like Francis of Assisi, the bride of
Poverty, instead of the harlot Success. And so you are right in
your statement. But you utter your own condemnation when you
speak it.
Ad Valorem
BY JOHN RUSKIN
(See pages 106, 491)
In a community regulated by laws of demand and supply, but
protected from open violence, the persons who become rich are,
generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous,
prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive, and
ignorant. The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish,
the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the
thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the
well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively
wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely
merciful, just, and godly person.
The Lost Leader
BY ROBERT BROWNING
(Celebrated English poet, 1812-1889. The present poem has been
generally taken to refer to Wordsworth, who became in his old age a
conservative and the poet-laureate of a reactionary government)
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat--
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote;
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,
So much was theirs who so little allowed:
How all our copper had gone for his service!
Rags--were they purple, his heart had been proud!
We that had loved him so, followed him, honored him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us,--they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,
He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!
We shall march prospering,--not thro' his presence;
Songs may inspirit us,--not from his lyre;
Deeds will be done,--while he boasts his quiescence,
Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire:
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,
One more devil's-triumph and sorrow for angels,
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Journalism
BY JOHN SWINTON
(One of America's oldest and most beloved journalists was
tendered a banquet by his fellow-editors, and surprised his
hosts by the following words)
There is no such thing in America as an independent press,
unless it is in the country towns.
You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to
write his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand
that it would never appear in print.
I am paid $150.00 a week for keeping my honest opinions out of
the paper I am connected with--others of you are paid similar
salaries for similar things--and any of you who would be so
foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the
streets looking for another job.
The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the
truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the
feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his
daily bread.
You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be
toasting an "Independent Press."
We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We
are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our
talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property
of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
The Rebel
BY HILAIRE BELLOC
(English historian and poet, born 1871; resigned from
parliament to conduct a campaign against the control of
England's political machinery by vested wealth)
There is a wall of which the stones
Are lies and bribes and dead men's bones.
And wrongfully this evil wall
Denies what all men made for all,
And shamelessly this wall surrounds
Our homestead and our native grounds.
But I will gather and I will ride,
And I will summon a countryside,
And many a man shall hear my halloa
Who never had thought the horn to follow;
And many a man shall ride with me
Who never had thought on earth to see
High Justice in her armoury.
When we find them where they stand,
A mile of men on either hand,
I mean to charge from right away
And force the flanks of their array,
And press them inward from the plains,
And drive them clamoring down the lanes,
And gallop and harry and have them down,
And carry the gates and hold the town.
Then shall I rest me from my ride
With my great anger satisfied.
Only, before I eat and drink,
When I have killed them all, I think
That I will batter their carven names,
And slit the pictures in their frames,
And burn for scent their cedar door,
And melt the gold their women wore,
And hack their horses at the knees,
And hew to death their timber trees,
And plough their gardens deep and through--
And all these things I mean to do
For fear perhaps my little son
Should break his hands, as I have done.
BY JOHN RUSKIN
(See pages 106, 491, 752)
I feel the force of mechanism and the fury of avaricious
commerce to be at present so irresistible, that I have seceded
from the study not only of architecture, but nearly of all art;
and have given myself, as I would in a besieged city, to seek
the best modes of getting bread and water for its multitudes.
BY Ō-SHI-O
(Japanese scholar of the Eighteenth Century)
I have a suit of new clothes in this happy new year;
Hot rice cake soup is excellent to my taste;
But when I think of the hungry people in this city,
I am ashamed of my fortune in the presence of God.
Jean-Christophe
BY ROMAIN ROLLAND
(French novelist and critic, born 1866; lecturer at the University
of Paris. This epoch-making ten-volume novel, probably the greatest
published in France since "Les Miserables," tells the life story of
a German-born musician. The following passage describes his attitude
towards the revolutionary movement in Paris)
Christophe was dragged into the wake of force in the track of
the army of the working-classes in revolt. But he was hardly
aware that it was so; and he would tell his companions in the
restaurant that he was not with them.
"As long as you are only out for material interests," he would
say, "you don't interest me. The day when you march out for a
belief, then I shall be with you. Otherwise, what have I to
do with the conflict between one man's belly and another's? I
am an artist; it is my duty to defend art; I have no right to
enroll myself in the service of a party. I am perfectly aware
that recently certain ambitious writers, impelled by a desire
for an unwholesome popularity, have set a bad example. It seems
to me that they have not rendered any great service to the
cause which they defended in that way; but they have certainly
betrayed art. It is our business--the artists'--to save the
light of the intellect. We have no right to obscure it with
your blind struggles. Who shall hold the light aloft if we let
it fall? You will be glad enough to find it still intact after
the battle. There must always be workers busy keeping up the
fire in the engine, while there is fighting on the deck of the
ship. To understand everything is to hate nothing. The artist
is the compass which, through the raging of the storm, points
steadily to the north."
They regarded him as a maker of phrases, and said that, if he
were talking of compasses, it was very clear that he had lost
his: and they gave themselves the pleasure of indulging in
a little friendly contempt at his expense. In their eyes an
artist was a shirker who contrived to work as little and as
agreeably as possible.
He replied that he worked as hard as they did, even harder, and
that he was not nearly so afraid of work. Nothing disgusted him
so much as _sabotage_, the deliberate bungling of work, and
skulking raised to the level of a principle.
"All these wretched people," he would say, "afraid for their
own skins!... Good Lord! I've never stopped working since I was
eight. You people don't love your work; at heart you're just
common men.... If only you were capable of destroying the old
world! But you can't do it. You don't even want to. No, you
don't even want to. It is all very well for you to go about
shrieking menace and pretending you're going to exterminate the
human race. You have only one thought: to get the upper hand
and lie snugly in the warm beds of the middle classes...."
Thereupon they would all lose their tempers and all talk at
once. And in the heat of the argument it would often happen
that Christophe, whirled away by his passion, would become more
revolutionary than the others. In vain did he fight against
it; his intellectual pride, his complacent conception of a
purely esthetic world, made for the joy of the spirit, would
sink deep into the ground at the sight of injustice. Esthetic,
a world in which eight men out of ten live in nakedness and
want, in physical and moral wretchedness? Oh, come! A man must
be an impudent creature of privilege who would dare to claim
as much. An artist like Christophe, in his inmost conscience,
could not but be on the side of the working-classes. What
man more than the spiritual worker has to suffer from the
immorality of social conditions, from the scandalously unequal
partition of wealth among men? The artist dies of hunger or
becomes a millionaire for no other reason than the caprice
of fashion and of those who speculate on fashion. A society
which suffers its best men to die or gives them extravagant
rewards is a monstrous society: it must be swept and put
in order. Every man, whether he works or no, has a right
to a living minimum. Every kind of work, good or mediocre,
should be rewarded, not according to its real value--(who
can be the infallible judge of that?)--but according to the
normal legitimate needs of the worker. Society can and should
assure the artist, the scientist, and the inventor an income
sufficient to guarantee that they have the means and the time
yet further to grace and honor it. Nothing more. The _Gioconda_
is not worth a million. There is no relation between a sum
of money and a work of art: a work of art is neither above
nor below money: it is outside it. It is not a question of
payment: it is a question of allowing the artist to live. Give
him enough to feed him, and allow him to work in peace. It is
absurd and horrible to try to make him a robber of another's
property. This thing must be put bluntly: every man who has
more than is necessary for his livelihood and that of his
family, and for the normal development of his intelligence, is
a thief and a robber. If he has too much, it means that others
have too little. How often have we smiled sadly to hear tell
of the inexhaustible wealth of France, and the number of great
fortunes--we workers, and toilers, and intellectuals, and men
and women who from our very birth have been given up to the
wearying task of keeping ourselves from dying of hunger, often
struggling in vain, often seeing the very best of us succumbing
to the pain of it all,--we who are the moral and intellectual
treasure of the nation! You who have more than your share of
the wealth of the world are rich at the cost of our suffering
and our poverty. That troubles you not at all; you have
sophistries and to spare to reassure you: the sacred rights of
property, the fair struggle for life, the supreme interests of
that Moloch, the State, and Progress, that fabulous monster,
that problematical Better to which men sacrifice the Good,--the
Good of other men. But for all that, the fact remains, and all
your sophistries will never manage to deny it: "You have too
much to live on. We have not enough. And we are as good as
you. And some of us are better than the whole lot of you put
together."
The Problem Play
BY G. BERNARD SHAW
(See pages 193, 212, 263, 402)
When we succeed in adjusting our social structure in such a
way as to enable us to solve social questions as fast as they
become really pressing, they will no longer force their way
into the theatre. Had Ibsen, for instance, had any reason to
believe that the abuses to which he called attention in his
prose plays would have been adequately attended to without his
interference, he would no doubt have gladly left them alone.
The same exigency drove William Morris in England from his
tapestries, his epics, and his masterpieces of printing, to try
and bring his fellow citizens to their senses by the summary
process of shouting at them in the streets and in Trafalgar
Square. John Ruskin's writing began with Modern Painters;
Carlyle began with literary studies of German culture and the
like; both were driven to become revolutionary pamphleteers. If
people are rotting and starving in all directions, and nobody
else has the heart or brains to make a disturbance about it,
the great writers must.
Fleet Street Eclogues
BY JOHN DAVIDSON
(In these dialogues a number of English journalists discuss their
views of life. The author, by his tragic death, may be said to have
put the seal of sincerity upon his bitter utterances. See page 216)
I too, for light the world explore,
And, trembling, tread where angels trod;
Devout at every shrine adore,
And follow after each new god.
But by the altar everywhere
I find the money-changer's stall;
And littering every temple-stair
The sick and sore like maggots crawl....
And always divers undertones
Within the roaring tempest throb--
The chink of gold, the laborer's groans,
The infant's wail, the woman's sob.
Hoarsely they beg of Fate to give
A little lightening of their woe,
A little time to love, to live,
A little time to think and know.
I see where from the slums may rise
Some unexpected dreadful dawn--
The gleam of steeled and scowling eyes,
A flash of women's faces wan!
To a Bourgeois Litterateur
(_Who referred to a group of agitators as "Professional
Hoboes"_)
BY MAX EASTMAN
(See page 408)
How old, my friend, is that fine-pointed pen
Wherewith in smiling quietude you trace
The maiden maxims of your writing-place,
And o'er this gripped and mortal-sweating den
And battle-pit of hunger, now and then
Dip out, with nice and intellectual grace,
The faultless wisdoms of a nurtured race
Of pale-eyed, pink, and perfect gentlemen?
How long have art and wit and poetry,
With all their power, been content, like you,
To gild the smiling fineness of the few,
To filmy-curtain what they dare not see
In multudinous reality--
The rough and bloody soul of what is true?
The Scholar as Revolutionist
(_From "Anatole France"_)
BY GEORG BRANDES
(Danish critic, born 1842)
What gives Anatole France his lasting hold over his hearers is
not his cleverness, but himself--the fact that this savant who
bears the heavy load of three cultures, nay, who is in himself
a whole little culture--this sage, to whom the whole life of
the earth is but an ephemeral eruption on its surface, and who
consequently regards all human endeavor as finally vain--this
thinker, who can see everything from innumerable sides and
might have come to the conclusion that, things being bad at the
best, the existing state of matters was probably as good as the
untried: that this man should proclaim himself a son of the
Revolution, side with the workingman, acknowledge his belief
in liberty, throw away his load and draw his sword--this is
what moves a popular audience, this is what plain people can
understand and can prize. It has shown them that behind the
author there dwells a man--behind the great author a brave man.
A Warning
BY HEINRICH HEINE
(_Translated by Louis Untermeyer_)
(See pages 97, 222, 744)
You will print such books as these!
Then you're lost, my friend, that's certain.
If you wish for gold and honor,
Write more humbly--bend your knees!
Aye, you must have lost your senses
Thus to speak before the people;
Thus to dare to speak of Preachers
And of Potentates and Princes.
Friend, you're lost--so it appears--
For the Princes have long arms,
And the Preachers have long tongues,
--And the masses have long ears!
Stoning the Prophets
(On page 623 appears a sample of the weapons with which Privilege
defends itself upon the political field. It seems worth while to
include at this place a sample of what the revolutionary poet has to
encounter. The following are comments of newspapers and weekly reviews
in London at the time of the first productions of the plays of Henrik
Ibsen, in 1891. They are taken partly from an article by William
Archer, "Ghosts and Gibberings," _Pall Mall Gazette_, April 8, 1891;
and partly from another article by the same writer, "The Mausoleum of
Ibsen," _Fortnightly Review_, July, 1893)
London _Truth_, March 19, 1891, discussing a reading of
"Ghosts":
An obscure Scandinavian dramatist and poet, a crazy fanatic, and
determined Socialist, is to be trumpeted into fame for the sake of the
estimable gentleman who can translate his works, and the enterprising
tradesmen who publish them.... The unwomanly woman, the unsexed
female, and the whole army of unprepossessing cranks in petticoats
... sat open-mouthed and without a blush on their faces, whilst a
Socialist orator read aloud "Ghosts," the most loathsome of Ibsen's
plays.... If you have seen one play by Ibsen you have seen them all.
A disagreeable and nasty woman; an egotistical and preachy man; a
philosophical sensualist; dull and undramatic dialogue. The few
independent people who have sat out a play by Ibsen ... have said to
themselves, Put this stuff before the play-going public, risk it at
the evening theatre, remove your claque, exhaust your attendance of
the Socialistic and the sexless, and then see where your Ibsen will
be. I have never known an audience yet that cared to pay to be bored.
* * * * *
London _Daily Telegraph_, reviewing the first performance of
"Ghosts":
Ibsen's positively abominable play.... This disgusting
representation.... Reprobation due to such as aim at infecting the
modern theatre with poison after desperately inoculating themselves
and others.... An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act
done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open....
Candid foulness.... Kotzebue turned bestial and cynical.... Offensive
cynicism.... Ibsen's melancholy and malodorous world.... Absolutely
loathsome and fetid.... Gross, almost putrid indecorum.... Literary
carrion.... Crapulous stuff.... Novel and perilous nuisance.
* * * * *
Other London reviews of "Ghosts":
Unutterably offensive.... Prosecution under Lord Campbell's Act....
Abominable piece.... Scandalous.--_Standard._
Naked loathsomeness.... Most dismal and revolting production.--_Daily
News._
Revolting, suggestive and blasphemous.... Characters either
contradictory in themselves, uninteresting or abhorrent.--_Daily
Chronicle._
A repulsive and degrading work.--_Queen._
Morbid, unhealthy, unwholesome, disgusting story.... A piece to bring
the stage into disrepute and dishonor with every right-thinking man
and woman.--_Lloyds._
Merely dull dirt long drawn out.--_Hawk._
If any repetition of this outrage be attempted, the authorities will
doubtless wake from their lethargy.--_Sporting and Dramatic News._
Most loathsome of all Ibsen's plays.... Garbage and offal.--_Truth._
Ibsen's putrid play called "Ghosts." ... So loathsome.--_Academy._
As foul and filthy a concoction as has ever been allowed to disgrace
the boards in an English theatre.... Dull and disgusting.... Nastiness
and malodorousness laid on thickly as with a trowel.--_Era._
Noisome corruption.--_Stage._
For Hire
BY MORRIS ROSENFELD
(See page 56. Translation by Rose Pastor Stokes)
Work with might and main,
Or with hand or heart,
Work with soul and brain,
Or with holy art,
Thread, or genius' fire--
Make a vest, or verse--
If 'tis done for hire,
It is done the worse.
A Man of Genius
(_From "The New Grub Street"_)
BY GEORGE GISSING
(A novel portraying the lives of the innumerable hack-writers
who starve in the garrets of modern London. See page 104)
His name was Harold Biffen, and, to judge from his appearance,
he did not belong to the race of common mortals. His excessive
meagerness would all but have qualified him to enter an
exhibition in the capacity of living skeleton, and the garments
which hung upon this framework would perhaps have sold for
three and sixpence at an old-clothes dealer's. But the man was
superior to these accidents of flesh and raiment. He had a fine
face: large, gentle eyes, nose slightly aquiline, small and
delicate mouth. Thick black hair fell to his coat-collar; he
wore a heavy moustache and a full beard. In his gait there was
a singular dignity; only a man of cultivated mind and grateful
character could move and stand as he did.
His first act on entering the room was to take from his pocket
a pipe, a pouch, a little tobacco-stopper, and a box of
matches, all of which he arranged carefully on a corner of the
central table. Then he drew forward a chair and seated himself.
"Take your top-coat off," said Reardon.
"Thanks, not this evening."
"Why the deuce not?"
"Not this evening, thanks."
The reason, as soon as Reardon sought for it, was obvious.
Biffen had no ordinary coat beneath the other. To have referred
to this fact would have been indelicate; the novelist of
course understood it, and smiled, but with no mirth.
"Let me have your Sophocles," were the visitor's next words.
Reardon offered him a volume of the Oxford Pocket Classics.
"I prefer the Wunder, please."
"It's gone, my boy."
"Gone?"
"Wanted a little cash."
Biffen uttered a sound in which remonstrance and sympathy were
blended.
"I'm sorry to hear that; very sorry. Well, this must do. Now, I
want to know how you scan this chorus in the 'Oedipus Rex.'"
Reardon took the volume, considered, and began to read aloud
with metric emphasis.
"Choriambics, eh?" cried the other. "Possible, of course; but
treat them as Ionics _a minore_ with an anacrusis, and see if
they don't go better."
He involved himself in terms of pedantry, and with such delight
that his eyes gleamed. Having delivered a technical lecture,
he began to read in illustration, producing quite a different
effect from that of the rhythm as given by his friend. And the
reading was by no means that of a pedant, rather of a poet.
For half an hour the two men talked Greek metres as if they
lived in a world where the only hunger known could be satisfied
by grand or sweet cadences....
Biffen was always in dire poverty, and lived in the oddest
places; he had seen harder trials than even Reardon himself.
The teaching by which he partly lived was of a kind quite
unknown to the respectable tutorial world. In these days
of examinations, numbers of men in a poor position--clerks
chiefly--conceive a hope that by "passing" this, that, or the
other formal test they may open for themselves a new career.
Not a few such persons nourish preposterous ambitions; there
are warehouse clerks privately preparing (without any means or
prospect of them) for a call to the Bar, drapers' assistants
who "go in" for the preliminary examination of the College
of Surgeons, and untaught men innumerable, who desire to
procure enough show of education to be eligible for a curacy.
Candidates of this stamp frequently advertise in the newspapers
for cheap tuition, or answer advertisements which are intended
to appeal to them; they pay from sixpence to half a crown
an hour--rarely as much as the latter sum. Occasionally it
happened that Harold Biffen had three or four such pupils in
hand, and extraordinary stories he could draw from his large
experience in this sphere....
_Biffen Falls in Love_
A fatal day. There was an end of all his peace, all his
capacity for labor, his patient endurance of penury. Once,
when he was about three and twenty, he had been in love with
a girl of gentle nature and fair intelligence; on account
of his poverty, he could not even hope that his love might
be returned, and he went away to bear the misery as best he
might. Since then the life he had led precluded the forming of
such attachments; it would never have been possible for him
to support a wife of however humble origin. At intervals he
felt the full weight of his loneliness, but there were happily
long periods during which his Greek studies and his efforts in
realistic fiction made him indifferent to the curse laid upon
him. But after that hour of intimate speech with Amy, he never
again knew rest of mind or heart....
He was not the kind of man that deceives himself as to his own
aspect in the eyes of others. Be as kind as she might, Amy
could not set him strutting Malvolio-wise; she viewed him as
a poor devil who often had to pound his coat--a man of parts
who could never get on in the world--a friend to be thought
of kindly because her dead husband had valued him. Nothing
more than that; he understood perfectly the limits of her
feeling. But this could not put restraint upon the emotion
with which he received any trifling utterance of kindness from
her. He did not think of what was, but of what, under changed
circumstances, might be. To encourage such fantasy was the
idlest self-torment, but he had gone too far in this form of
indulgence. He became the slave of his inflamed imagination....
Companionless, inert, he suffered the tortures which are so
ludicrous and contemptible to the happily married. Life was
barren to him, and would soon grow hateful; only in sleep could
he cast off the unchanging thoughts and desires which made all
else meaningless. And rightly meaningless; he revolted against
the unnatural constraints forbidding him to complete his
manhood. By what fatality was he alone of men withheld from the
winning of a woman's love?
He could not bear to walk the streets where the faces of
beautiful women would encounter him. When he must needs leave
the house, he went about in the poor, narrow ways, where only
spectacles of coarseness, and want, and toil would be presented
to him. Yet even here he was too often reminded that the
poverty-stricken of the class to which poverty is natural were
not condemned to endure in solitude. Only he who belonged to
no class, who was rejected alike by his fellows in privation
and by his equals in intellect, must die without having known
the touch of a loving woman's hand.
The summer went by, and he was unconscious of its warmth and
light. How his days passed he could not have said....
One evening in early autumn, as he stood before the book-stall
at the end of Goodge Street, a familiar voice accosted him. It
was Whelpdale's. A month or two ago he had stubbornly refused
an invitation to dine with Whelpdale and other acquaintances,
and since then the prosperous young man had not crossed his
path.
"I've something to tell you," said the assailer, taking hold
of his arm. "I'm in a tremendous state of mind, and want
someone to share my delight.... You know Dora Milvain; I have
asked her to marry me, and, by the Powers! she has given me an
encouraging answer! Not an actual yes, but encouraging! She's
away in the Channel Islands, and I wrote----"
He talked on for a quarter of an hour. Then, with a sudden
movement, the listener freed himself.
"I can't go any farther," he said hoarsely. "Goodbye!"
Whelpdale was disconcerted.
"I have been boring you. That's a confounded fault of mine; I
know it."
Biffen had waved his hand, and was gone.
A week or two would see him at the end of his money. He had no
lessons now, and could not write; from his novel nothing was
to be expected. He might apply again to his brother, but such
dependence was unjust and unworthy. And why should he struggle
to preserve a life which had no prospect but of misery?...
It was in the hours following his encounter with Whelpdale
that he first knew the actual desire of death, the simple
longing for extinction. One must go far in suffering before
the innate will-to-live is thus truly overcome; weariness of
bodily anguish may induce this perversion of the instincts;
less often, that despair of suppressed emotion which had fallen
upon Harold. Through the night he kept his thoughts fixed on
death in its aspect of repose, of eternal oblivion. And herein
he found solace.
The next night it was the same. Moving among many common needs
and occupations, he knew not a moment's cessation of heartache,
but when he lay down in the darkness a hopeful summons
whispered to him. Night, which had been the worst season of his
pain, had now grown friendly; it came as an anticipation of the
sleep that is everlasting.
A few more days, and he was possessed by a calm of spirit such
as he had never known. His resolve was taken, not in a moment
of supreme conflict, but as the result of a subtle process by
which his imagination had become in love with death. Turning
from contemplation of life's one rapture, he looked with the
same intensity of desire to a state that had neither fear nor
hope.
One afternoon he went to the Museum Reading Room, and was busy
for a few minutes in consultation of a volume which he took
from the shelves of medical literature. On his way homeward
he entered two or three chemists' shops. Something of which
he had need could be procured only in very small quantities;
but repetition of his demand in different places supplied him
sufficiently. When he reached his room, he emptied the contents
of sundry little bottles into one larger, and put this in his
pocket. Then he wrote rather a long letter, addressed to his
brother in Liverpool....
* * * * *
"Really," said Jasper, "one can't grieve. There seemed no
possibility of his ever earning enough to live decently
upon. But why the deuce did he go all the way out there?
Consideration for the people in whose house he lived, I dare
say; Biffen had a good deal of native delicacy...."
"Was he still so very poor?" asked Amy, compassionately.
"I'm afraid so. His book failed utterly."
"Oh, if I had imagined him still in such distress, surely I
might have done something to help him!"--So often the regretful
remark of one's friends, when one has been permitted to perish.
Letter to the Earl of Chesterfield
BY SAMUEL JOHNSON
(English man of letters, 1709-1784; maker of a celebrated English
dictionary, and the subject of one of the world's most famous
biographies. Dr. Johnson might be called the first professional
literary man; the first who lived by his trade and was respected for
it. So the present letter, addressed to one of the most powerful
personages of the time, may be said to mark the end of the age of
patronage in the literary world: the system whereby authors dedicated
their works to noblemen, and received food and favors in return)
My Lord, I have been lately informed, by the proprietor
of the World, that two papers, in which my Dictionary is
recommended to the publick, were written by your Lordship. To
be so distinguished, is an honour, which, being very little
accustomed to favours from the great, I know not well how to
receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.
When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your
Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by
the enchantment of your address, and could not forbear to
wish that I might boast myself _Le vainquer du vainqueur de
la terre_;--that I might obtain that regard for which I saw
the world contending; but I found my attendance so little
encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me
to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in
publick, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a
retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that
I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected,
be it ever so little.
Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited in your
outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which
time I have been pushing my work through difficulties, of which
it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the
verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word
of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did
not expect, for I never had a Patron before.
The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and
found him a native of the rocks.
Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a
man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached
ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have
been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had
been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and
cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till
I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical
asperity, not to confess obligations where no benefit has been
received, or to be unwilling that the Publick should consider
me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me
to do for myself.
Having carried my work thus far with so little obligation to
any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though
I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I
have been long wakened from that dream of hope in which I once
boasted myself with so much exultation,
My Lord,
Your Lordship's most humble
Most obedient servant,
SAM. JOHNSON.
Mother Hubbard's Tale
BY EDMUND SPENSER
(See page 493)
Full little knowest thou that hast not tride,
What hell it is in suing long to bide:
To loose good dayes, that might be better spent;
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow;
To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares;
To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires;
To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne.
Unhappie wight, borne to desastrous end,
That doth his life in so long tendence spend!
The Journal of Arthur Stirling
BY UPTON SINCLAIR
(A young poet, starving and about to commit suicide, leaves his
farewell testament to the world)
The poet! He comes with a heart trembling with gladness; he
comes with tears of rapture in his eyes. He comes with bosom
heaving and throat choking and heart breaking. He comes with
tenderness and with trust, with joy in the beauty that he
beholds. He comes a minstrel, with a harp in his hand--and you
set your dogs upon him, you drive him torn and bleeding from
your gates!
The poet! You make him go out into the market and chaffer for
his bread! You subject him to the same law to which you subject
your loafers and your louts--that he who will not work cannot
eat! Your drones and your drunkards--and your poets! Every man
must earn for himself, every man must pay his way! No man must
ask favors, no man must be helped, no man shall be different
from other men! For shame! For shame!...
I am to die now, therefore let me write it: that I was a man
of Genius. And that you have trodden me down in the struggle
for existence. I saw things that no other man has ever seen,
I would have written things that no other man can ever write.
And you have trodden me down in the struggle for existence--you
have trodden me down because I could not earn my bread!
This is what I tell you--this is what I cry out to you, that
the man of Genius _cannot_ earn his bread; that the work by
which he develops his power is something absolutely and utterly
different from the work by which he earns his bread; and that
every hour which he gives to the one, he lessens his power and
his capacity for the other. Every hour that he gives to the
earning of his bread, he takes from his soul, he weakens his
work, he destroys beauty which never again can he know or dream.
And this again is what I tell you, this again is what I cry
out to you: that the power by which a man of Genius does his
work, and the power by which he earns his bread, are things so
entirely distinct that _they may not occur together at all_!
The man may have both, but then again he may only have the
former. And in that case he will die like a poisoned rat in a
hole.
Last Verses
BY THOMAS CHATTERTON
(This boy, 1752-1770, came to London friendless and unknown, and on
account of starvation committed suicide at the age of eighteen. He has
become the classic example of the world's mistreatment of its poets.
The reference to Bristol is to his native city)
Farewell, Bristolia's dingy piles of brick,
Lovers of mammon, worshippers of trick!
Ye spurned the boy who gave you antique lays,
And paid for learning with your empty praise.
Farewell, ye guzzling aldermanic fools,
By nature fitted for corruption's tools!
I go to where celestial anthems swell;
But you, when you depart, will sink to hell.
Farewell, my mother!--cease, my anguished soul,
Nor let distraction's billows o'er me roll!
Have mercy, Heaven! when here I cease to live,
And this last act of wretchedness forgive.
The "Pinch of Poverty"
BY FRANCIS THOMPSON
(English poet, 1860-1907, who lived neglected and died in
misery)
'Tis the convinced belief of mankind that to make a poet sing
you must pinch his belly, as if the Almighty had constructed
him like a certain rudimentary vocal doll.
Man as God
(_From "A Ballad in Blank Verse"_)
BY JOHN DAVIDSON
(See pages 216, 761)
How vain! he cried. A God? a mole, a worm!
An engine frail, of brittle bones conjoined;
With tissue packed; with nerves, transmitting force;
And driven by water, thick and coloured red:
That may for some few pence a day be hired
In thousands to be shot at! Oh, a God,
That lies and steals and murders! Such a God
Passionate, dissolute, incontinent!
A God that starves in thousands, and ashamed,
Or shameless in the workhouse lurks; that sweats
In mines and foundries! An enchanted God,
Whose nostrils in a palace breathe perfume,
Whose cracking shoulders hold the palace up,
Whose shoeless feet are rotting in the mire!
A Preface to Politics
BY WALTER LIPPMANN
(American writer upon public questions, born 1889)
We have almost no spiritual weapons against classicalism:
universities, churches, newspapers are by-products of a
commercial success; we have no tradition of intellectual
revolt. The American college student has the gravity and
mental habits of a Supreme Court judge; his "wild oats" are
rarely spiritual; the critical, analytical habit of mind is
distrusted. We say that "knocking" is a sign of the "sorehead"
and we sublimate criticism by saying that "every knock is a
boost." America does not play with ideas; generous speculation
is regarded as insincere, and shunned as if it might endanger
the optimism which underlies success. All this becomes such an
insulation against new ideas that when the Yankee goes abroad
he takes his environment with him.
Learning
(_From "Thus Spake Zarathustra"_)
BY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
(German philosopher, 1844-1900, whose lofty utterance has
suffered from materialistic interpreters)
As I lay in sleep a sheep ate up the ivy crown of my head--ate
and then said: "Zarathustra is no more a scholar."
Said it and went strutting away, and proud. A child told it to
me....
This is the truth. I am gone out of the house of the scholars,
and have slammed to the door behind me....
I am too hot, and burning with my own thoughts; oft will it
take away my breath. I must into the open and out of all dusty
rooms.
But they sit cool in cool shadows; they wish in all things to
be but spectators, and guard themselves lest they sit where the
sun burn the steps.
Like those who stand upon the street and stare at the people
who go by; so they wait also and stare at the thoughts that
others have thought.
If one touches them with the hands, they make dust around them
like meal-sacks, and involuntarily; but who could guess that
their dust comes from corn and the golden rapture of the summer
fields?
BOOK XVI
_Socialism_
The most eloquent passages from the pens of those who foresee
the definite solution of the problems of economic inequality.
Every aspect of the Socialist movement is represented.
Is It Nothing to You?
(_From "Merrie England"_)
BY ROBERT BLATCHFORD
(See pages 66, 121, 170, 383)
Go out into the streets of any big English town, and use your
eyes, John. What do you find? You find some rich and idle,
wasting unearned wealth to their own shame and injury, and the
shame and injury of others. You find hard-working people packed
away in vile, unhealthy streets. You find little children,
famished, dirty, and half naked outside the luxurious clubs,
shops, hotels, and theatres. You find men and women overworked
and underpaid. You find vice and want and disease cheek by jowl
with religion and culture and wealth. You find the usurer,
the gambler, the fop, the finnikin fine lady, and you find
the starveling, the slave, the vagrant, the drunkard, and the
harlot.
Is it nothing to you, John Smith? Are you a citizen? Are you a
man? And will not strike a blow for the right nor lift a hand
to save the fallen, nor make the smallest sacrifice for the
sake of your brothers and your sisters! John, I am not trying
to work upon your feelings. This is not rhetoric, it is hard
fact. Throughout these letters I have tried to be plain and
practical, and moderate. I have never so much as offered you
a glimpse of the higher regions of thought. I have suffered
no hint of idealism to escape me. I have kept as close to the
earth as I could. I am only now talking street talk about the
common sights of the common town. I say that wrong and sorrow
are here crushing the life out of our brothers and sisters. I
say that you, in common with all men, are responsible for the
things that are. I say that it is your duty to seek the remedy;
and I say that if you seek it you will find it.
These common sights of the common streets, John, are very
terrible to me. To a man of a nervous temperament, at once
thoughtful and imaginative, those sights must be terrible. The
prostitute under the lamps, the baby beggar in the gutter, the
broken pauper in his livery of shame, the weary worker stifling
in his filthy slums, the wage slave toiling at his task,
the sweater's victim "sewing at once, with a double thread,
a shroud as well as a shirt," these are dreadful, ghastly,
shameful facts which long since seared themselves upon my heart.
All this sin, all this wretchedness, all this pain, in spite of
the smiling fields and the laughing waters, under the awful and
unsullied sky. And no remedy!
These things I saw, and I knew that I was responsible as a man.
Then I tried to find out the causes of the wrong and the remedy
therefor. It has taken me some years, John. But I think I
understand it now, and I want you to understand it, and to help
in your turn to teach the truth to others.
Sometimes while I have been writing these letters I have felt
bitter and angry. More than once I have thought that when I
got through the work I would ease my heart with a few lines of
irony or invective. But I have thought better of it. Looking
back now I remember my own weakness, folly, cowardice. I have
no heart to scorn or censure other men. Charity, John, mercy,
John, humility, John. We are poor creatures, all of us.
The Sign of the Son of Man
BY VIDA D. SCUDDER
(See page 289)
Thy Kingdom, Lord, we long for,
Where love shall find its own;
And brotherhood triumphant
Our years of pride disown.
Thy captive people languish
In mill and mart and mine;
We lift to Thee their anguish,
We wait Thy promised Sign!
Thy Kingdom, Lord, Thy Kingdom!
All secretly it grows;
In faithful hearts forever
His seed the Sower sows;
Yet ere its consummation
Must dawn a mighty doom;
For judgment and salvation
The Son of Man shall come.
If now perchance in tumult
His destined Sign appear,--
The rising of the people,--
Dispel our coward fear!
Let comforts that we cherish,
Let old traditions die,
Our wealth, our wisdom perish,
So that He draw but nigh!
Poverty Makes All Unhappy
BY JOHN RUSKIN
(See pages 106, 491, 752, 756)
For my own part, I will put up with this state of things,
passively, not an hour longer. I am not an unselfish person,
nor an evangelical one; I have no particular pleasure in doing
good; neither do I dislike doing it so much as to expect to be
rewarded for it in another world. But I simply cannot paint,
nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do anything else I like,
and the very light of the morning sky has become hateful to me,
because of the misery that I know of, and see signs of where I
know it not, which no imagination can interpret too bitterly.
The One Duty
(_From "The Measure of the Hours"_)
BY MAURICE MAETERLINCK
(Belgian poet, dramatist and philosopher, born 1862)
Let us start fairly with the great truth: for those who possess
there is only one certain duty, which is to strip themselves
of what they have so as to bring themselves into the condition
of the mass that possesses nothing. It is understood, in every
clear-thinking conscience, that no more imperative duty exists;
but, at the same time, it is admitted that this duty, for lack
of courage, is impossible of accomplishment.
For the rest, in the heroic history of duties, even at the
most ardent period, even at the beginning of Christianity and
in the majority of the religious orders that made a special
cult of poverty, this is perhaps the only duty that has
never been completely fulfilled. It behooves us, therefore,
when considering our subsidiary duties, to remember that the
essential one has been knowingly evaded. Let this truth govern
us. Let us not forget that we are speaking in shadow, and that
our boldest, our utmost steps will never lead us to the point
at which we ought to have been from the first.
Land Titles
BY HERBERT SPENCER
(See page 460)
It can never be pretended that the existing titles to landed
property are legitimate. The original deeds were written with
the sword, soldiers were the conveyancers, blows were the
current coin given in exchange, and for seals, blood. Those who
say that "time is a great legaliser" must find satisfactory
answers to such questions as--How long does it take for what
was originally wrong to become right? At what rate per annum do
invalid claims become valid?
The Rights of Labor
BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN
(See pages 234, 623)
It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with
capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning
capital, somehow by the use of it, induces him to labor. This
assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital
shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own
consent, or buy them and drive them to do it without their
consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded
that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call
slaves.
Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as
here assumed.... Labor is prior to and independent of capital.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, could never have existed if
labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital,
and deserves much the higher consideration.
A Marching Song
BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
(See pages 376, 637)
We mix from many lands,
We march for very far;
In hearts and lips and hands
Our staffs and weapons are;
The light we walk in darkens sun and moon and star.
It doth not flame and wane
With years and spheres that roll,
Storm cannot shake nor stain
The strength that makes it whole,
The fire that moulds and moves it of the sovereign soul....
From the edge of harsh derision,
From discord and defeat,
From doubt and lame division,
We pluck the fruit and eat;
And the mouth finds it bitter, and the spirit sweet....
O nations undivided,
O single people and free,
We dreamers, we derided,
We mad blind men that see,
We bear you witness ere ye come that ye shall be.
Ye sitting among tombs,
Ye standing round the gate,
Whom fire-mouthed war consumes,
Or cold-lipped peace bids wait,
All tombs and bars shall open, every grave and grate....
O sorrowing hearts of slaves,
We heard you beat from far!
We bring the light that saves,
We bring the morning star;
Freedom's good things we bring you, whence all good things are....
Rise, ere the dawn be risen;
Come, and be all souls fed;
From field and street and prison
Come, for the feast is spread;
Live, for the truth is living; wake, for night is dead.
The Duties of Man
BY GIUSEPPE MAZZINI
(Italian patriot and statesman, 1805-1872; the deliverer of his
country here urges the deliverance of mankind)
We improve with the improvement of Humanity; nor without the
improvement of the whole can you hope that your own moral and
material conditions will improve. Generally speaking, you
cannot, even if you would, separate your life from that of
Humanity; you live in it, by it, for it. Your souls, with the
exception of the very few men of exceptional power, cannot
free themselves from the influence of the elements amid which
they exist, just as the body, however robust its constitution,
cannot escape from the effects of corrupt air around it. How
many of you have the strength of mind to bring up your sons to
be wholly truthful, knowing that you are sending them forth
to persecution in a country where tyrants and spies bid them
conceal or deny two-thirds of their real opinions? How many
of you resolve to educate them to despise wealth in a society
where gold is the only power which obtains honors, influence,
and respect, where indeed it is the only protection from the
tyranny and insults of the powerful and their agents? Who is
there among you who in pure love and with the best intentions
in the world has not murmured to his dear ones in Italy, _Do
not trust men_; _the honest man should retire into himself
and fly from public life_; _charity begins at home_,--and
such-like maxims, plainly immoral, but prompted by the general
state of society? What mother is there among you who, although
she belongs to a faith which adores the cross of Christ, the
voluntary martyr for humanity, has not flung her arms around
her son's neck and striven to dissuade him from perilous
attempts to benefit his brothers? And even if you had strength
to teach the contrary, would not the whole of society, with its
thousand voices, its thousand evil examples, destroy the effect
of your words? Can you purify, elevate your own souls in an
atmosphere of contamination and degradation?
And, to descend to your material conditions, do you think they
can be lastingly ameliorated by anything but the amelioration
of all? Millions of pounds are spent annually here in
England, where I write, by private charity, for the relief of
individuals who have fallen into want; yet want increases here
every year, and charity to individuals has proved powerless to
heal the evil--the necessity of collective organic remedies is
more and more universally felt....
There is no hope for you except in universal reform and in
the brotherhood of all the peoples of Europe, and through
Europe of all humanity. I charge you then, O my brothers, by
your duty and by your own interest, not to forget that your
first duties--duties without fulfilling which you cannot hope
to fulfil those owed to family and country--are to Humanity.
Let your words and your actions be for all, since God is for
all, in His Love and in His Law. In whatever land you may be,
wherever a man is fighting for right, for justice, for truth,
there is your brother; wherever a man suffers through the
oppression of error, of injustice, of tyranny, there is your
brother. Free men and slaves, YOU ARE ALL BROTHERS.
From Revolution to Revolution
BY GEORGE D. HERRON
(See page 730)
We have talked much of the brotherhood to come; but brotherhood
has always been the fact of our life, long before it became a
modern and insipid sentiment. Only we have been brothers in
slavery and torment, brothers in ignorance and its perdition,
brothers in disease and war and want, brothers in prostitution
and hypocrisy. What happens to one of us sooner or later
happens to all; we have always been unescapably involved in
a common destiny. We are brothers in the soil from which we
spring; brothers in earthquakes, floods and famines; brothers
in la grippe, cholera, smallpox and priestcraft. It is to the
interests of the whole of mankind to stamp out the disease that
may be starting tonight in some wretched Siberian hamlet; to
rescue the children of Egypt and India from the British cotton
mills; to escape the craze and blight of some new superstition
springing up in Africa or India or Boston. The tuberculosis of
the East Side sweatshops is infecting the whole of the city
of New York, and spreading therefrom to the Pacific and back
across the Atlantic. The world constantly tends to the level of
the downmost man in it; and that downmost man is the world's
real ruler, hugging it close to his bosom, dragging it down to
his death. You do not think so, but it is true, and it ought to
be true. For if there were some way by which some of us could
get free apart from others, if there were some way by which
some of us could have heaven while others had hell, if there
were some way by which part of the world could escape some form
of the blight and peril and misery of disinherited labor, then
would our world indeed be lost and damned; but since men have
never been able to separate themselves from one another's woes
and wrongs, since history is fairly stricken with the lesson
that we cannot escape brotherhood of some kind, since the whole
of life is teaching us that we are hourly choosing between
brotherhood in suffering and brotherhood in good, it remains
for us to choose the brotherhood of a co-operative world, with
all its fruits thereof--the fruits of love and liberty.
The March of the Workers
BY WILLIAM MORRIS
(English poet and artist, 1834-1896; founder of the "Arts and
Crafts" movement, and a lifelong Socialist)
What is this--the sound and rumor? What is this that all men hear,
Like the wind in hollow valleys when the storm is drawing near,
Like the rolling-on of ocean in the eventide of fear?
'Tis the people marching on.
CHORUS
Hark the rolling of the thunder!
Lo! the sun! and lo! thereunder
Riseth wrath, and hope, and wonder,
And the host comes marching on.
Forth they come from grief and torment; on they go towards
health and mirth.
All the wide world is their dwelling, every corner of the earth.
Buy them, sell them for thy service! Try the bargain what 'tis worth,
For the days are marching on. (Chorus)
Many a hundred years passed over have they labored deaf and blind;
Never tidings reached their sorrow, never hope their toil might find.
Now at last they've heard and hear it, and the cry comes down the wind
And their feet are marching on. (Chorus)
"Is it war then? Will ye perish as the dry wood in the fire?
Is it peace? Then be ye of us, let your hope be our desire.
Come and live! for life awaketh, and the world shall never tire;
And hope is marching on. (Chorus)
The Working Day
(_From "Capital"_)
BY KARL MARX
(A German Jew, father of modern revolutionary Socialism,
1818-1883. Of his epoch-making work the scope of this
collection permits but a brief passage, by way of illustration)
What is a working day? What is the length of time during
which capital may consume the labor-power whose daily value
it buys? How far may the working-day be extended beyond the
working time necessary for the reproduction of labor-power
itself? It has been seen that to these questions capital
replies: the working day contains the full twenty-four hours,
with the deduction of the few hours of repose without which
labor-power absolutely refuses its services again. Hence it is
self-evident that the laborer is nothing else, his whole life
through, than labor-power; that therefore all his disposable
time is by nature and law labor-time, to be devoted to the
self-expansion of capital. Time for education, for intellectual
development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for
social intercourse, for the free-play of his bodily and mental
activity, even the rest time of Sunday (and that in a country
of Sabbatarians!)--moonshine! But in its blind, unrestrainable
passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus-labor, capital
oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical
maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for
growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It
steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air
and sunlight. It higgles over a meal-time, incorporating
it where possible with the process of production itself,
so that food is given to the laborer as to a mere means of
production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil
to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed for the
restoration, reparation, refreshment of the bodily powers, to
just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism,
absolutely exhausted, renders essential. It is not the normal
maintenance of the labor-power which is to determine the
limits of the working-day; it is the greatest possible daily
expenditure of labor-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory
and painful it may be, which is to determine the limits of
the laborers' period of repose. Capital cares nothing for the
length of life of labor-power. All that concerns it is simply
and solely the maximum of labor-power, that can be rendered
fluent in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening
the extent of the laborer's life, as a greedy farmer snatches
increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.
The Organization of Labor
BY LOUIS BLANC
(Early French Utopian Socialist, 1811-1882)
What is competition, from the point of view of the workman? It
is work put up to auction. A contractor wants a workman; three
present themselves.
"How much for your work?"
"Half a crown; I have a wife and children."
"Well; and how much for yours?"
"Two shillings; I have no children, but I have a wife."
"Very well; and now how much for yours?"
"One and eightpence are enough for me; I am single."
"Then you shall have the work."
It is done; the bargain is struck. And what are the other two
workmen to do? It is to be hoped they will die quietly of
hunger. But what if they take to thieving? Never fear; we have
the police. To murder? We have the hangman. As for the lucky
one, his triumph is only temporary. Let a fourth workman make
his appearance, strong enough to fast every other day, and his
price will run down still lower; there will be a new outcast,
perhaps a new recruit for the prison.
The Wastes of Capitalism
(_From "The Laws of Social Evolution"_)
BY THEODOR HERTZKA
(An Austrian economist, one of the few in the world who have dealt
with the real problem of economic science, the elimination of waste
and the rationalizing of the system of production. In the following
passage he investigates the question what proportion of human labor
is lost through our competitive methods of industry. The passage has
been frequently quoted, in a mistranslation which obscures its real
significance. The following is not so much a translation as a summary
of the essential statements)
We are to investigate what labor-power is required, under
circumstances now existing in Austria (1886), to produce the
most essential food-stuffs, and suitable housing and clothing.
For every family has been allowed a separate, five-roomed
house, about forty feet square, and calculated to last fifty
years. I have reckoned all men between the ages of sixteen and
fifty as capable of working: there being of such in Austria
about five million. I find that it requires the labor of
615,000 workers to supply the population of 22,000,000 with
food, clothing and shelter: that is to say, it requires only
12.3 per cent of available labor-power, and each worker needs
to labor only six weeks in the year, in order to provide for
himself and his family the necessary means of life.
In order that no one should conclude that the production of the
luxuries of the better situated part of the population consumes
the balance of the available labor-power, let us add the
labor-cost of all the luxury-industries in the widest sense.
Including the labor-cost of transportation, these require
315,000 workers, or 6.3 per cent of the available labor-power.
As a precaution, I increase the total of 18.6 per cent to 20
per cent, and so find that by working sixty days in the year,
the actual existing consumption should be fully satisfied.
There remains now this double question: What becomes of the
additional two hundred and forty days, which are actually spent
in labor? What abyss swallows up the other 80 per cent of the
nation's labor-power? And second, how can it be that in spite
of hard work, the majority are the prey of misery, when at the
utmost 20 per cent of the available labor-power should suffice
for the maintenance of all?
BY G. BERNARD SHAW
Any person under the age of thirty, who, having any knowledge
of the existing social order, is not a revolutionist, is an
inferior.
From Revolution to Revolution
BY GEORGE D. HERRON
(See pages 730, 792)
Under the Socialist movement there is coming a time, and the
time may be even now at hand, when improved conditions or
adjusted wages will no longer be thought to be an answer to
the cry of labor; yes, when these will be but an insult to
the common intelligence. It is not for better wages, improved
capitalist conditions, or a share of capitalist profits that
the Socialist movement is in the world; it is here for the
abolition of wages and profits, and for the end of capitalism
and the private capitalist. Reformed political institutions,
boards of arbitration between capital and labor, philanthropies
and privileges that are but the capitalist's gifts--none of
these can much longer answer the question that is making the
temples, thrones and parliaments of the nations tremble. There
can be no peace between the man who is down and the man who
builds on his back. There can be no reconciliation between
classes; there can only be an end of classes. It is idle to
talk of good will until there is first justice, and idle to
talk of justice until the man who makes the world possesses the
work of his own hands. The cry of the world's workers can be
answered with nothing save the whole product of their work.
The Internationale
BY EUGENE POTTIER
(Hymn of the revolutionary working-class of all nations)
Arise, ye pris'ners of starvation!
Arise, ye wretched of the earth,
For Justice thunders condemnation,
A better world's in birth.
No more tradition's chains shall bind us,
Arise, ye slaves! No more in thrall!
The earth shall rise on new foundations,
We have been naught, we shall be all.
REFRAIN
'Tis the final conflict,
Let each stand in his place,
The International Party
Shall be the human race.
Behold them seated in their glory,
The kings of mine and rail and soil!
What would you read in all their story
But how they plundered toil?
Fruits of the people's work are buried
In the strong coffers of a few;
In voting for their restitution
The men will only ask their due. (Refrain)
Toilers from shops and fields united,
The party we of all who work;
The earth belongs to us, the people,
No room here for the shirk.
How many on our flesh have fattened!
But if the noisome birds of prey
Shall vanish from our sky some morning,
The blessed sunlight still will stay. (Refrain)
The Syndicalist
(_From "The Red Wave"_)
BY JOSEPH-HENRY ROSNY, THE ELDER
(See pages 585, 669)
Like a thousand others, Rougemont wanted the daily revolution,
which should ferment in the brain, not like a dream, but like
an energy, should manifest itself by a discipline and a method,
by daily exercises to keep it in condition. It was no longer
a question of brandishing the torch. It was necessary to
understand and to will, to organize social experience, to wage
petty warfare--sallies, raids, ambuscades; to entertain cold
hatreds, logical and continuous, to haggle over wages as the
Norman peasant haggles over chickens, and above all to create
a sort of happy excitement, a fraternal exaltation which would
bring to the gatherings ideas of security, of trust, of mutual
aid.
The strikes will be beautiful schools of social struggle.
They will open the path for magnanimous instincts, heroic and
adventurous, which air the human soul. Always better organized,
they will no longer reduce the artisan to famine, they will
demand of him only to undergo some privations which the
beauty of revolt will render almost joyous. They will develop
generosity, abnegation, the richest spirit of sacrifice. Their
recollection will awaken magnificent and powerful images; they
will lend to the social life that passionate unforeseen, which
is evoked in us by the virgin forest, the open plain, the
palpitant sea.... Everywhere, finally, the proletariat will
build its visions upon the basis of reality.
The Communist Manifesto (1848)
BY KARL MARX AND FREDERICK ENGELS
(See pages 234, 514, 795)
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They
openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the
forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let
the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a
world to win.
Workingmen of all countries, unite!
The Workingman's Program
BY FERDINAND LASSALLE
(One of the founders of the German Socialist movement,
1825-1864. Lassalle was arrested and sentenced to prison for
delivering the address from which the following paragraph is
taken)
Whoever invokes the idea of the working-class as the ruling
principle of society, does not put forth a cry that divides and
separates the classes of society. On the contrary, he utters a
cry of reconciliation, a cry which embraces the whole of the
community, a cry for the abolishing of all the contradictions
in every circle of society; a cry of union, in which all should
join who do not wish for privileges, for the oppression of the
people by privileged classes; a cry of love, which having once
gone up from the heart of the people, will forever remain the
true cry of the people, and whose meaning will still make it a
cry of love, even when it sounds as the people's war cry.
Jurgis Hears a Socialist Speech
(_From "The Jungle"_)
BY UPTON SINCLAIR
(See pages 43, 143, 194, 274, 403, 776)
It was like coming suddenly upon some wild sight of nature--a
mountain forest lashed by a tempest, a ship tossed about upon
a stormy sea. Jurgis had an unpleasant sensation, a sense of
confusion, of disorder, of wild and meaningless uproar. The man
was tall and gaunt, as haggard as his auditor himself; a thin
black beard covered half of his face, and one could see only
two black hollows where the eyes were. He was speaking rapidly,
in great excitement; he used many gestures--as he spoke he
moved here and there upon the stage, reaching with his long
arms as if to seize each person in his audience. His voice was
deep, like an organ; it was some time, however, before Jurgis
thought of the voice--he was too much occupied with his eyes
to think of what the man was saying. But suddenly it seemed
as if the speaker had been pointing straight at him, as if he
had been singled out particularly for his remarks; and so
Jurgis became suddenly aware of the voice, trembling, vibrant
with emotion, with pain and longing, with a burden of things
unutterable, not to be compassed by words. To hear it was to be
suddenly arrested, to be gripped, transfixed.
"You listen to these things," the man was saying, "and you say,
'Yes, they are true, but they have been that way always.' Or
you say, 'Maybe it will come, but not in my time--it will not
help me.' And so you return to your daily round of toil, you
go back to be ground up for profits in the world-wide mill of
economic might! To toil long hours for another's advantage;
to live in mean and squalid homes, to work in dangerous and
unhealthful places; to wrestle with the spectres of hunger
and privation, to take your chances of accident, disease and
death. And each day the struggle becomes fiercer, the pace more
cruel; each day you have to toil a little harder, and feel the
iron hand of circumstance close upon you a little tighter.
Months pass, years maybe--and then you come again; and again
I am here to plead with you, to know if want and misery have
yet done their work with you, if injustice and oppression
have yet opened your eyes! I shall still be waiting--there
is nothing else that I can do. There is no wilderness where
I can hide from these things, there is no haven where I can
escape them; though I travel to the ends of the earth, I find
the same accursed system,--I find that all the fair and noble
impulses of humanity, the dreams of poets and the agonies of
martyrs, are shackled and bound in the service of organized
and predatory Greed! And therefore I cannot rest, I cannot
be silent; therefore I cast aside comfort and happiness,
health and good repute--and go out into the world and cry out
the pain of my spirit! Therefore I am not to be silenced by
poverty and sickness, not by hatred and obloquy, by threats
and ridicule--not by prison and persecution, if they should
come--not by any power that is upon the earth or above the
earth, that was, or is, or ever can be created. If I fail
tonight, I can only try tomorrow; knowing that the fault must
be mine--that if once the vision of my soul were spoken upon
earth, if once the anguish of its defeat were uttered in human
speech, it would break the stoutest barriers of prejudice, it
would shake the most sluggish soul to action! It would abash
the most cynical, it would terrify the most selfish; and the
voice of mockery would be silenced, and fraud and falsehood
would slink back into their dens, and the truth would stand
forth alone! For I speak with the voice of the millions
who are voiceless! Of them that are oppressed and have no
comforter! Of the disinherited of life, for whom there is no
respite and no deliverance, to whom the world is a prison,
a dungeon of torture, a tomb! With the voice of the little
child who toils tonight in a Southern cotton-mill, staggering
with exhaustion, numb with agony, and knowing no hope but the
grave! Of the mother who sews by candle-light in her tenement
garret, weary and weeping, smitten with the mortal hunger of
her babes! Of the man who lies upon a bed of rags, wrestling
in his last sickness and leaving his loved ones to perish! Of
the young girl who, somewhere at this moment, is walking the
streets of this horrible city, beaten and starving, and making
her choice between the brothel and the lake! With the voice
of those, whoever and wherever they may be, who are caught
beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of Greed! With the voice
of humanity, calling for deliverance! Of the everlasting soul
of Man, arising from the dust; breaking its way out of its
prison--rending the bands of oppression and ignorance-groping
its way to the light!"
The Marseillaise
BY CLAUDE JOSEPH ROUGET DE LISLE
(French captain of engineers, 1760-1836. He composed this most famous
of all revolutionary songs in 1792, when the French republicans were
resisting the armies of all the kings and emperors of Europe. The
volunteers from Marseilles marched into Paris singing it--"seven
hundred Marseillais who know how to die")
Ye sons of toil, awake to glory!
Hark, hark, what myriads bid you rise;
Your children, wives and grandsires hoary--
Behold their tears and hear their cries!
Shall hateful tyrants, mischief breeding,
With hireling hosts, a ruffian band,--
Affright and desolate the land,
While peace and liberty lie bleeding?
CHORUS
To arms! to arms! ye brave!
Th' avenging sword unsheathe!
March on, march on, all hearts resolved
On Victory or Death.
With luxury and pride surrounded,
The vile, insatiate despots dare,
Their thirst for gold and power unbounded,
To mete and vend the light and air;
Like beasts of burden would they load us,
Like gods would bid their slaves adore,
But Man is Man, and who is more?
Then shall they longer lash and goad us? (Chorus)
O Liberty! can man resign thee,
Once having felt thy generous flame?
Can dungeons' bolts and bars confine thee,
Or whips thy noble spirit tame?
Too long the world has wept bewailing,
That Falsehood's dagger tyrants wield;
But Freedom is our sword and shield,
And all their arts are unavailing! (Chorus)
Trial for High Treason
(_From "My Life"_)
BY AUGUST BEBEL
(A German woodworker, 1840-1912, who founded the Social-democratic
party, and guided it for fifty years. In the following passage
from his memoirs he tells of his first imprisonment, as a part of
Bismarck's long campaign to destroy the Socialist movement in Germany)
The jury comprised six tradesmen, one aristocratic landowner,
one head forester, and a few small landowners. The court
was crowded every day. The Minister of Justice and the
Attorney-General were present on several occasions. As the
leading papers of Germany gave extensive reports of the
trial, their readers became for the first time aware of what
Socialism meant and at what it aimed. The trial thus became
eminently serviceable from the propagandist point of view;
and we, especially Liebknecht, who was the chief propagandist,
were not loath to avail ourselves of this opportunity. But
our opponents, day after day, were hard at work seeking to
prejudice the jury against us, meeting them in the restaurant,
when the events of the day were discussed, and exploiting these
to our disadvantage.
On the thirteenth day the "pleadings" for and against us
commenced. The Public Prosecutor closed his speech with the
words: "If you do not find against the accused, you will
sanction high treason for all time to come."
Our counsel replied, and tore the indictment to tatters; but
after two and a half hours of deliberation the jury came in
with a verdict of guilty. The Public Prosecutor demanded
two years' imprisonment in a fortress, and the court passed
judgment accordingly.
Our party friends were exceedingly angry on hearing the verdict
and sentence; but I, feeling reckless, proposed that we should
go together to Auerbach's cellar--rendered famous by the scene
in Goethe's _Faust_--and have a bottle of wine. Our wives,
who received us with tears, were not pleased with our levity;
but finally, plucky women that they were, they came with us.
My doctor consoled my wife in a curious way. "Frau Bebel," he
said, "if your husband gets a year in prison you may rejoice,
for he needs a rest!"
[Illustration: ONCE YE HAVE SEEN MY FACE YE DARE NOT MOCK
CARTOON FROM THE "NEW AGE," LONDON]
[Illustration: JUSTICE
WALTER CRANE
(_English artist and Socialist, 1845-1915_)]
Jimmie Higgins
BY BEN HANFORD
(A New York printer who literally gave his life for the
Socialist movement, dying of consumption caused by overwork. He
was the party's candidate for Vice-president in 1904)
A comrade who shall be called Jimmie Higgins because that is
not his name, and who shall be styled a painter for the very
good reason that he is not a painter, has perhaps had a greater
influence in keeping me keyed up to my work in the labor
movement than any other person.
Jimmie Higgins is neither broad-shouldered nor thick-chested.
He is neither pretty nor strong. A little, thin, weak,
pale-faced chap. But he is strong enough to support a mother
with equal physical disabilities. Strong enough to put in ten
years of unrecognized and unexcelled service to the cause of
Socialism.
What did he do? Everything.
He has made more Socialist speeches than any man in America.
Not that he did the talking; but he carried the platform on his
bent shoulders when the platform committee failed to be on hand.
Then he hustled around to another branch and got their platform
out. Then he got a glass of water for "the speaker." That
same evening or the day before he had distributed hand-bills
advertising the meeting.
Previously he had informed his branch as to "the best corner"
in the district for drawing a crowd. Then he distributed
leaflets at the meeting, and helped to take the platform down
and carry it back to headquarters, and got subscribers for
Socialist papers.
The next day the same, and so on all through the campaign, and
one campaign after another. When he had a job, which was none
too often, for Jimmie was not an extra good workman and was
always one of the first to be laid off, he would distribute
Socialist papers among his fellows during the noon hour, or
take a run down to the gate of some factory and give out
Socialist leaflets to the employees who came out to lunch.
What did he do? Jimmie Higgins did everything, anything.
Whatever was to be done, THAT was Jimmie's job.
First to do his own work; then the work of those who had become
wearied or negligent. Jimmie Higgins couldn't sing, nor dance,
nor tell a story--but he could DO the thing to be done.
Be you, reader, ever so great, you nor any other shall ever do
more than that. Jimmie Higgins had no riches, but out of his
poverty he always gave something, his all; be you, reader, ever
so wealthy and likewise generous, you shall never give more
than that.
Jimmie Higgins never had a front seat on the platform; he never
knew the tonic of applause nor the inspiration of opposition;
he never was seen in the foreground of the picture.
But he had erected the platform and painted the picture;
through his hard, disagreeable and thankless toil it had come
to pass that liberty was brewing and things were doing.
Jimmie Higgins. How shall we pay, how reward this man? What
gold, what laurels shall be his?
There's just one way, reader, that you and I can "make good"
with Jimmie Higgins and the likes of him. That way is to be
like him.
Take a fresh start and never let go.
Think how great his work, and he has so little to do with. How
little ours in proportion to our strength!
I know some grand men and women in the Socialist movement. But
in high self-sacrifice, in matchless fidelity to truth, I shall
never meet a greater man than Jimmie Higgins.
And many a branch has one of him.
And may they have more of him.
FROM THE EPISTLE OF PAUL TO THE CORINTHIANS
For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men
after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called:
but God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound
the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and
things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things
which are not, to bring to naught things that are.
Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket
BY VACHEL LINDSAY
(See pages 335, 599, 672, 699)
I am unjust, but I can strive for justice.
My life's unkind, but I can vote for kindness.
I, the unloving, say life should be lovely.
I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.
Man is a curious brute--he pets his fancies--
Fighting mankind to win sweet luxury;
So he will be, tho' law be clear as crystal,
Tho' all men plan to live in harmony.
Come, let us vote against our human nature,
Crying to God in all the polling places
To heal our everlasting sinfulness
And make us sages with transfigured faces.
Progressivism and After
BY WILLIAM ENGLISH WALLING
(American Socialist writer, born 1877)
A certain measure of progress is to be expected through the
self-interest of the governing classes. This is the national,
or industrial, efficiency movement.
Far greater progress is to be expected from the successive
rise into power and prosperity of new elements of the
middle-class--and of the upper layers of the wage-earners. This
is the progressive and the Laborite movement.
By far the greatest progress is to be expected as a direct or
indirect result of the revolt of the lower classes. For this is
the only force that can be relied upon to put an end to class
government and class exploitation of industry, and to establish
that social democracy which is the real or professed aim of
every progressive movement.
BY OTTO VON BISMARCK
(Speech in the German Reichstag, 1884)
I acknowledge unconditionally the right to work, and I will
stand up for it as long as I am in this place.
The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race
(_From the Preface_)
BY ROBERT OWEN
(Early English Utopian Socialist, 1771-1858)
The Past has been inevitable, and necessary to produce the
Present; as the Present will necessarily produce the Future
state of human existence. The past has produced a repulsive,
unorganized, ignorant, and to a great extent, miserable state
of society, over the world, as now existing. The present,
however, has been made to develop all the materials requisite
to produce an attractive, organized, enlightened and happy
future, for the human race, in all parts of the globe.
Those informed know that all the materials are amply prepared,
ready to create a happy future; but that to effect this result,
the materials must be wisely applied, to form a scientific
arrangement of society, based on an accurate knowledge of human
nature. Means are, therefore, now required to induce the public
to investigate this important subject, which is in direct
opposition to the false and fatal association of ideas which,
from birth, have been forced into the minds and upon the habits
of people.
Running a Socialist Paper
(_From "Comrade Yetta"_)
BY ALBERT EDWARDS
(See pages 205, 244)
For half an hour they bent their heads over balance-sheets.
It was an appalling situation. The debt was out of all
proportion to the property. To be sure much of it was held by
sympathizers, who were not likely to foreclose. But there was
no immediate hope of decreasing the burden. Any new income
would have to go into improvements. The future of the paper
depended not only on its ability to carry this dead weight, but
on the continuance of the Pledge Fund and on Isadore's success
in begging about a hundred dollars a week.
"It's hopeless," Yetta said. "You might run a good weekly on
these resources, but you need ten times as much to keep up a
good daily."
"Well, if you feel that way about it, Yetta, I hope you'll
resign at to-night's meeting." His eyes turned away from her
face about the busy room, and his discouraged look gave place
to one of conviction. A note of dogged determination rang in
his voice.--"Because it isn't hopeless! Our only real danger
is that the executive committee may kill us with cold water.
If we can get a committee that believes in us, we'll be all
right. A paper like this isn't a matter of finance. That's what
you--and the other discouragers--don't see. You look at it from
a bourgeois dollar-and-cents point of view. It's hopeless,
is it? Well, we've been doing this impossible thing for more
than a year. It's hopeless to carry such indebtedness? Good
God! We started with nothing but debts--nothing at all to
show. Every number that comes out makes it more hopeful. The
advertising increases. The Pledge Fund grows. Why, we've got
twelve thousand people in the habit of reading it now. That
habit is an asset which doesn't show in the books. Six months
ago we had nothing!--not even experience. Why, our office force
wasn't even organized! And now you say it's hopeless--want us
to quit--just when it's getting relatively easy. We----"
Levine's querulous voice rose above the din of the
machines--finding fault with something. A stenographer in a
far corner began to count, "One! two! three!" Every one in the
office, even the linotypers and printer's devil beyond the
partition took up the slogan.
"O-o-oh! Cut it out and work for Socialism."
The tense expression on Isadore's face relaxed into a confident
grin.
"That's it. You think we need money to run this paper? We're
doing it on enthusiasm. And nothing is going to stop us."
Renovating the State
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON
(See pages 235, 522, 631)
What is strange, there never was in any man sufficient faith in
the power of rectitude, to inspire him with the broad design
of renovating the State on the principle of right and love.
All those who have pretended this design have been partial
reformers, and have admitted in some manner the supremacy of
the bad State. I do not call to mind a single human being
who has steadily denied the authority of the laws, on the
simple ground of his own moral nature. Such designs, full
of genius and full of fate as they are, are not entertained
except avowedly as air-pictures. If the individual who exhibits
them dare to think them practicable, he disgusts scholars and
churchmen; and men of talent, and women of superior sentiments,
cannot hide their contempt. Not the less does nature continue
to fill the heart of youth with suggestions of this enthusiasm.
The New State
(_From the "Panama-Pacific Ode"_)
BY GEORGE STERLING
(See pages 504, 552, 597)
O dark and cruel State,
Whose towers are altars unto self alone,--
Whose streets with tears are wet,
And half thy councils given unto hate!
Shall Time not hurl thy temples stone from stone,
And o'er the ruin set
A fairer city than the years have known?
Out of thy darkness do we find us dreams,
And on the future gleams
The vision of thy ramparts built anew.
Mammon and War sit now a double throne,
Yet what we dream, a wiser Age shall do.
Be ye lift up, O everlasting gates
Of that far City men shall build for man!
O fairer Day that waits,
The splendor of whose dawn we shall not see,
When selfish bonds of family and clan
Melt in the higher love that yet shall be!
O State without a master or a slave,
Whose law of light we crave
Ere morning widen on a world set free!
The Coming Dawn
(_From "Woman"_)
BY AUGUST BEBEL
(See page 807)
Every day furnishes fresh proof of the rapid growth and
spread of the ideas that we represent. In all fields there is
tumult and push. The dawn of a fair day is approaching with
mighty strides. Let us then ever battle and strive forward,
unconcerned as to "where" and "when" the boundary-posts of the
new and better day for mankind will be raised. And if, in the
course of this great battle for the emancipation of the human
race, we should fall, those now in the rear will step forward;
and we shall fall with the consciousness of having done our
duty as human beings, and with the conviction that the goal
will be reached, however the powers hostile to humanity may
struggle or strain in resistance. _Ours is the world, despite
all; that is, for the workers and the woman._
Labor Irresistible
(_From "Violence and the Labor Movement"_)
BY ROBERT HUNTER
(American Socialist writer, born 1874)
Here it is, "the self-conscious, independent movement of the
immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority,"
already with its eleven million voters and its fifty million
souls. It has slowly, patiently, painfully toiled up to a
height where it is beginning to see visions of victory. It has
faith in itself and in its cause. It believes it has the power
of deliverance for all society and for all humanity. It does
not expect the powerful to have faith in it; but, as Jesus
came out of despised Nazareth, so the new world is coming out
of the multitude, amid the toil and sweat and anguish of the
mills, mines, and factories of the world. It has endured much;
suffered long ages of slavery and serfdom. From being mere
animals of production, the workers have become the "hands"
of production; and they are now reaching out to become the
masters of production. And, while in other periods of the
world their intolerable misery led them again and again to
strike out in a kind of torrential anarchy that pulled down
society itself, they have in our time, for the first time in
the history of the world, patiently and persistently organized
themselves into a world power. Where shall we find in all
history another instance of the organization in less than half
a century of eleven million people into a compact force for
the avowed purpose of peacefully and legally taking possession
of the world? They have refused to hurry. They have declined
all short cuts. They have spurned violence. The "bourgeois
democrats," the terrorists, and the syndicalists, each in
their time, have tried to point out a shorter, quicker path.
The workers have refused to listen to them. On the other hand,
they have declined the way of compromise, of fusions, and of
alliances, that have also promised a quicker and shorter road
to power. With most maddening patience they have declined to
take any other path than their own--thus infuriating not only
the terrorists in their own ranks but those Greeks from the
other side who came to them bearing gifts. Nothing seems to
disturb them or to block their path. They are offered reforms
and concessions, which they take blandly, but without thanks.
They move on and on, with the terrible, incessant, irresistible
power of some eternal, natural force. They have been fought;
yet they have never lost a single great battle. They have
been flattered and cajoled, without ever once anywhere being
appeased. They have been provoked, insulted, imprisoned,
calumniated, and repressed. They are indifferent to it all.
They move on and on--with the patience and the meekness of a
people with the vision that they are soon to inherit the earth.
From the Magnificat
BY MARY, MOTHER OF JESUS
He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the
proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the
mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He
hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath
sent empty away.
To Labor
(_From "In This Our World"_)
BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
(See pages 200, 209, 421, 662)
Shall you complain who feed the world?
Who clothe the world?
Who house the world?
Shall you complain who are the world,
Of what the world may do?
As from this hour
You use your power,
The world must follow you!
The world's life hangs on your right hand!
Your strong right hand,
Your skilled right hand,
You hold the whole world in your hand,
See to it what you do!
Or dark or light,
Or wrong or right,
The world is made by you!
Then rise as you never rose before!
Nor hoped before!
Nor dared before!
And show as was never shown before,
The power that lies in you!
Stand all as one!
See justice done!
Believe, and Dare, and Do!
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
BY ROBERT TRESSALL
(See page 663. In the character of "Owen," the author here
tells of his own efforts to awaken his fellow-workers in
England)
Toward the end of March the outlook began to improve. By
the middle of April Rushton and Company were working eleven
and a half hours a day. In May, as the jobs increased and
the days grew longer, they were allowed to put in overtime;
and, as the summer months came round, once more the crowd of
ragged-trousered philanthropists began to toil and sweat at
their noble and unselfish task of making money for Mr. Rushton.
Papering, painting, white-washing, distempering, digging
up drains, repairing roofs, their zeal and enthusiasm were
unbounded. Their operations extended all over the town. At all
hours of the day they were to be seen going to or returning
from jobs, carrying planks and ladders, paint and whitewash,
chimney pots and drain pipes, a crowd of tattered Imperialists,
in broken boots, paint-splashed caps, their clothing saturated
with sweat and plastered with mortar. The daily spectacle of
the workmen, tramping wearily home along the pavement of the
Grand Parade, caused some annoyance to the better classes, and
a letter appeared in _The Obscurer_ suggesting that it would
be better if they walked on the road. When they heard of this
letter most of the men adopted the suggestion and left the
pavement for their betters.
On the jobs themselves, meanwhile, the same old conditions
prevailed, the same frenzied hurry, the same scamping of the
work, slobbering it over, cheating the customers; the same
curses behind the foreman's back, the same groveling in his
presence, the same strident bellowing from Misery: "Get it
_Done_! For Gord's sake, get it _Done_! 'Aven't you finished
yet? We're losing money over this! If you chaps can't tear into
it we'll have an _Alteration_!" and the result was that the
philanthropists often tore into it to such an extent that they
worked themselves out of a job, for business fluctuated, and
occasionally everybody was "stood off" for a few days....
They were putting new floors where the old ones were decayed,
and making two rooms into one by demolishing the parting wall
and substituting an iron girder. They were replacing window
frames and sashes, replastering cracked ceilings and walls,
cutting openings and fitting doors where no doors had ever been
before. They were taking down broken chimney pots and fixing
new ones in their places. They were washing the old whitewash
off the ceilings, and scraping the old paper off the walls. The
air was full of the sounds of hammering and sawing, the ringing
of trowels, the rattle of pails, the splashing of water brushes
and the scraping of the stripping knives. It was also heavily
laden with dust and disease germs, powdered mortar, lime,
plaster, and the dirt that had been accumulating within the old
house for years. In brief, those employed there might be said
to be living in a Tariff Reform Paradise--they had Plenty of
Work.
At twelve o'clock Bob Crass, the painter's foreman, blew a
prolonged blast upon a whistle and all hands assembled in the
kitchen, where Bert the apprentice had already prepared the tea
in the large galvanized iron pail placed in the middle of the
floor. By the side of the pail were a number of old jam jars,
mugs, dilapidated teacups, and one or two empty condensed milk
tins. Each man on the "job" paid Bert threepence a week for
the tea and sugar--they did not have milk--and although they
had tea at breakfast time as well as at dinner the lad was
generally considered to be making a fortune....
As each man came in he filled his cup, jam jar, or condensed
milk tin with tea from the steaming pail, before sitting down.
Most of them brought their food in little wicker baskets, which
they held on their laps, or placed on the floor beside them.
At first there was no attempt at conversation and nothing was
heard but the sounds of eating and drinking and the frizzling
of the bloater which Easton, one of the painters, was toasting
on the end of a pointed stick at the fire.
"I don't think much of this bloody tea," suddenly remarked
Sawkins, one of the laborers.
"Well, it oughter be all right," retorted Bert; "it's bin
bilin' ever since 'arf past eleven...."
"Has anyone seen old Jack Linden since 'e got the push?"
inquired Harlow.
"I seen 'im Saturday," said Slyme.
"Is 'e doin' anything?"
"I don't know: I didn't 'ave time to speak to 'im."
"No, 'e ain't got nothing," remarked Philpot. "I seen 'im
Saturday night, an' 'e told me 'e's been walkin' about ever
since."
Philpot did not add that he had "lent" Linden a shilling, which
he never expected to see again.
"'E won't be able to get a job again in a 'urry," remarked
Easton; "'e's too old."
"You know, after all, you can't blame Misery for sackin' 'im,"
said Crass after a pause. "'E was too slow for a funeral."
"I wonder how much _you'll_ be able to do when you're as old as
he is?" said Owen.
"Praps I won't want to do nothing," replied Crass, with a
feeble laugh. "I'm goin' to live on me means."
"I should say the best thing old Jack could do would be to go
in the workhouse," said Harlow.
"Yes: I reckon that's what'll be the end of it," said Easton,
in a matter-of-fact tone.
"It's a grand finish, isn't it?" observed Owen. "After working
hard all one's life to be treated like a criminal at the end."
"I don't know what you call bein' treated like criminals,"
exclaimed Crass. "I reckon they 'as a bloody fine time of it,
an' we've got to find the money."
"Oh, for Gord's sake, don't start no more arguments," cried
Harlow, addressing Owen. "We 'ad enough of that last week. You
can't expect a boss to employ a man when 'e's too old to work."
"Of course not," said Crass.
Old Joe Philpot said--nothing.
"I don't see no sense in always grumblin'," Crass proceeded;
"these things can't be altered. You can't expect there can be
plenty of work for everyone with all this 'ere labor-savin'
machinery what's been invented."
"Of course," said Harlow, "the people what used to be employed
on the work what's now done by machinery has to find something
else to do. Some of 'em goes to our trade, for instance. The
result is there's too many at it, and there ain't enough work
to keep 'em all goin'."
"Yes," said Crass, eagerly, "that's just what I say. Machinery
is the real cause of all the poverty. That's what I said the
other day."
"Machinery is undoubtedly the cause of unemployment," replied
Owen, "but it's not the cause of poverty; that's another matter
altogether."
The others laughed derisively.
"Well, it seems to me to amount to the same thing," said
Harlow, and nearly everyone agreed.
"It doesn't seem to me to amount to the same thing," Owen
replied. "In my opinion we are all in a state of poverty even
when we have employment. The condition we are reduced to when
we're out of work is more properly described as destitution.
"Poverty," continued Owen after a short silence, "consists in a
shortage of the necessaries of life. When those things are so
scarce or so dear that people are unable to obtain sufficient
of them to satisfy all their needs, they are in a condition
of poverty. If you think that the machinery which makes it
possible to produce all the necessaries of life in abundance
is the cause of the shortage, it seems to me there must be
something the matter with your minds."
"Oh, of course we're all bloody fools, except you," snarled
Crass. "When they was servin' out the sense they give you such
a 'ell of a lot there wasn't none left for nobody else."
"If there wasn't something wrong with your minds," continued
Owen, "you would be able to see that we might have 'Plenty
of Work' and yet be in a state of destitution. The miserable
wretches who toil sixteen or eighteen hours a day--father,
mother, and even the little children--making matchboxes, or
shirts or blouses, have 'Plenty of Work,' but I for one don't
envy them. Perhaps you think that if there was no machinery,
and we all had to work thirteen or fourteen hours a day in
order to obtain a bare living, we should not be in a condition
of poverty? Talk about there being something the matter with
your minds--if there were not you wouldn't talk one day about
Tariff Reform as a remedy for unemployment, and then the next
day admit that machinery is the cause of it! Tariff Reform
won't do away with machinery, will it?" ...
No one answered, because none of them knew of any remedy; and
Crass began to feel sorry that he had reintroduced the subject
at all.
"In the near future," continued Owen, "it is probable that
horses will be almost entirely superseded by motor cars and
electric trams. As the services of horses will no longer be
required, all but a few will die out; they will no longer
be bred to the same extent as formerly. We can't blame the
horses for allowing themselves to be exterminated. They have
not sufficient intelligence to understand what's being done.
Therefore, they will submit tamely to the extinction of the
greater number of their kind.
"As we have seen, a great deal of the work which was formerly
done by human beings is now being done by machinery. This
machinery belongs to a few people; it is being worked for the
benefit of those few, just the same as were the human beings it
displaced.
"These few have no longer any need of the services of so
many human workers, so they propose to exterminate them! The
unnecessary human beings are to be allowed to starve to death!
And they are also to be taught that it is wrong to marry and
breed children, because the Sacred Few do not require so many
people to work for them as before!"
"Yes, and you'll never be able to prevent it, mate!" shouted
Crass.
"Why can't we?"
"Because it can't be done!" cried Crass, fiercely. "It's
impossible!" ...
There was a general murmur of satisfaction. Nearly everyone
seemed very pleased to think that the existing state of things
could not possibly be altered.
Wealth Against Commonwealth
BY HENRY DEMAREST LLOYD
(American social reformer, pioneer in what later came to be
known as "muck-raking"; 1847-1903)
One of the largest stones in the arch of "consolidation,"
perhaps the keystone, is that men have become so intelligent,
so responsive and responsible, so co-operative, that they can
be trusted in great masses with the care of vast properties
owned entirely by others; and with the operation of complicated
processes, although but a slender cost of subsistence is
awarded them out of fabulous profits. The spectacle of the
million and more employees of the railroads of this country
despatching trains, maintaining tracks, collecting fares and
freights, and turning over hundreds of millions of net profits
to the owners, not one in a thousand of whom would know how
to do the simplest of these things himself, is possible only
where civilization has reached a high average of morals and
culture. More and more the mills and mines and stores, and
even the farms and forests, are being administered by other
than the owners. The virtue of the people is taking the place
Poor Richard thought only the eye of the owner could fill. If
mankind driven by their fears and the greed of others can do
so well, what will be their productivity and cheer when the
"interest of all" sings them to their work?
Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution
BY PETER KROPOTKIN
(This work of the great Russian scientist is a most important
contribution to modern thought, overthrowing as it does the
old-fashioned view of "Nature red in tooth and claw with ravin," which
was the basis of early biologic teaching and is still the basis of all
bourgeois economic ideas)
As soon as we study animals--not in laboratories and museums
only, but in the forest and prairie, in the steppe and in
the mountains--we at once perceive that though there is an
immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst
various species, and especially amidst various classes of
animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps
even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence
amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to
the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as
mutual struggle. Of course it would be extremely difficult to
estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance
of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an indirect
test, and ask Nature: "Who are the fittest: those who are
continually at war with each other, or those who support one
another?" we at once see that those animals which acquire
habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have
more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective
classes, the highest development and bodily organization. If
the numberless facts which can be brought forward to support
this view are taken into account, we may safely say that mutual
aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle; but
that as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far
greater importance, inasmuch as it favors the development
of such habits and characters as insure the maintenance and
further development of the species, together with the greatest
amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual,
with the least waste of energy.
Co-operation and Nationality
BY "A.E." (GEORGE W. RUSSELL)
(See pages 252, 513)
Wherever there is mutual aid, wherever there is constant give
and take, wherever the prosperity of the individual depends
directly and obviously on the prosperity of the community about
him, there the social order tends to produce fine types of
character, with a devotion to public ideas; and this is the
real object of all government. The worst thing which can happen
to a social community is to have no social order at all, where
every man is for himself and the devil may take the hindmost.
Generally in such a community he takes the front rank as well
as the stragglers.
New Worlds for Old
BY H. G. WELLS
(See pages 519, 675, 712)
Socialism is to me a very great thing indeed, the form and
substance of my ideal life and all the religion I possess. I
am, by a sort of predestination, a Socialist. I perceive I
cannot help talking and writing about Socialism, and shaping
and forwarding Socialism. I am one of a succession--one of a
growing multitude of witnesses, who will continue. It does
not--in the larger sense--matter how many generations of us
must toil and testify. It does not matter, except as our
individual concern, how individually we succeed or fail, what
blunders we make, what thwartings we encounter, what follies
and inadequacies darken our private hopes and level our
personal imaginations to the dust. We have the light. We know
what we are for, and that the light that now glimmers so dimly
through us must in the end prevail.
Socialism and Motherhood
BY JOHN SPARGO
(American Socialist writer and lecturer, born in England, 1876)
The message of Socialism is a message of Life and Liberty
and Love. It promises to destroy the political, social, and
economic disabilities imposed upon womanhood; to give the
mothers of the race equal freedom with the fathers of the race.
It pledges itself to destroy those conditions of life and labor
which weaken the mothers and deny to their babies the right to
be well born. It claims for every child all the advantages of
healthful and beautiful environment. It would destroy the dread
fear of want which drives the mother from the service of her
child into the service of a great factory. It would bestow upon
every child, as its rightful heritage, opportunity to develop
all its powers. It would apply the principles of the family to
the state. It would abolish the body and soul debasing labor of
children, and give to the little ones their Kingdom of Laughter
and Dreams. It would end the waste of human lives by poverty,
and make true wealth possible for all. It would put an end to
war--the war of classes as well as the war of nations--and
organize and direct the genius and power of the race, now so
largely given to destruction, to the enrichment of life for all
and the realization of Human Brotherhood.
Socialism comes to the mother as an Angel of Light and Life,
bearing the torch of a great hope. "I am Life Abundant,"
cries the angel, "and I bring you as gifts the Freedom and
Opportunity and Joy and Peace for which you have prayed. See,
my Sister, Mother of Men, all these are yours if you will put
forth your hand and receive them."
Progress in Medicine
BY JAMES P. WARBASSE
(Contemporary American physician)
Servetus and Harvey were not spurred on to the discovery of the
circulation of the blood by the expectation of profits. One was
burned to the stake and the other was mobbed for his pains. The
whole history of medicine, with its splendid list of martyrs,
is a glorious refutation of the sophistry that competition for
profits is important to human progress. The competitive system,
which surrounds and harrasses medical advancement, hindered it
from the beginning, and retards it still.
The Socialist Faith
BY GEORGE D. HERRON
(See pages 730, 792, 799)
Despite the paradoxical and deathful nature of our capitalist
civilization, despite the industrial insanity and spiritual
chaos, a new world is surely forming; dimly may we discern the
white pinnacles and the green gardens of the gathering city
of man. There is approaching--and it is not so far off as it
seems--a world arranged by the wisdom hid in the human heart;
a world that is the organization of a strong and universal
kindness; a world redeemed from the fear of institutions and of
poverty. Even now, derided and discouraged as it is, socially
untrained and inexperienced as it is, if the instinctual and
repressed kindness of mankind were suddenly let loose upon the
earth, sooner than we think would we be members one of another,
sitting around one family hearthstone, and singing the song of
the new humanity....
BOOK XVII
_The New Day_
The deliverance of humanity and the triumph of labor
enfranchised; passages from Utopias new and old, and the
raptures of poets and prophets contemplating "the good time
coming."
As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free
BY WALT WHITMAN
(See pages 174, 268, 578, 726)
Beautiful World of new, superber Birth, that rises to my eyes,
Like a limitless golden cloud, filling the western sky....
Thou Wonder World, yet undefined, unformed--neither do I define thee;
How can I pierce the impenetrable blank of the future?
I feel thy ominous greatness, evil as well as good;
I watch thee, advancing, absorbing the present, transcending the past;
I see thy light lighting and thy shadow shadowing, as if the
entire globe;
But I do not undertake to define thee--hardly to comprehend thee;
I but thee name--thee prophesy--as now!
The Kingdom of Man
BY E. RAY LANKESTER
(English scientist, professor in the University of London, born
1847)
The new knowledge of Cature, the newly-ascertained capacity
of man for a control of Nature so thorough as to be almost
unlimited, has not as yet had an opportunity of showing what
it can do. No power has called on man to arise and enter upon
the possession of this kingdom--the "Kingdom of Man" foreseen
by Francis Bacon and pictured by him to an admiring but
incredulous age with all the fervor and picturesque detail of
which he was capable. And yet at this moment the mechanical
difficulties, the want of assurance and of exact knowledge,
which necessarily prevented Bacon's schemes from taking
practical shape, have been removed. The will to possess this
vast territory is alone wanting.
The weariness which is so largely expressed today in regard to
human effort is greatly due to the fact that we have exhausted
old sources of inspiration, and have not yet learned to believe
in the new. It is time for man to take up whole-heartedly the
Kingdom of Nature which it is his destiny to rule. New hope,
new life will, when he does this, be infused into every line of
human activity. To a community which believes in the destiny
of man as the controller of Nature and has consciously entered
upon its fulfilment, there can be none of the weariness and
even despair which comes from an exclusive worship of the past.
There can be only encouragement in every victory gained, hope
and the realization of hope.
On a Steamship
BY UPTON SINCLAIR
(See pages 43, 143, 194, 274, 403, 776, 803)
All night, without the gates of slumber lying,
I listen to the joy of falling water,
And to the throbbing of an iron heart.
In ages past, men went upon the sea,
Waiting the pleasure of the chainless winds:
But now the course is laid, the billows part;
Mankind has spoken: "Let the ship go there!"
I am grown haggard and forlorn, from dreams
That haunt me, of the time that is to be,
When man shall cease from wantonness and strife,
And lay his law upon the course of things.
Then shall he live no more on sufferance,
An accident, the prey of powers blind;
The untamed giants of nature shall bow down--
The tides, the tempest and the lightning cease
From mockery and destruction, and be turned
Unto the making of the soul of man.
BY THOMAS CARLYLE
(See pages 31, 74, 133, 488, 553, 652)
We must some day, at last and forever, cross the line between
Nonsense and Common Sense. And on that day we shall pass from
Class Paternalism, originally derived from fetish fiction
in times of universal ignorance, to Human Brotherhood in
accordance with the nature of things and our growing knowledge
of it; from Political Government to Industrial Administration;
from Competition in Individualism to Individuality in
Co-operation; from War and Despotism, in any form, to Peace and
Liberty.
The Revolution
BY RICHARD WAGNER
(See pages 236, 747)
Aye, we behold it, the old world crumbling; a new will rise
therefrom; for the lofty goddess Reason comes rustling on the
wings of storm, her stately head ringed round with lightnings,
a sword in her right hand, a torch in her left. Her eye is
stern, is punitive, is cold; and yet what warmth of purest
love, what wealth of happiness streams forth toward him who
dares to look with steadfast gazing into that eye! Rustling
she comes, the ever-rejuvenating mother of mankind; destroying
and fulfilling, she fares across the earth; before her soughs
the storm, and shakes so fiercely at man's handiwork that vast
clouds of dust eclipse the sky, and where her mighty foot is
set, there falls in ruins what an idle whim had built for
aeons; the hem of her robe sweeps its last remains away. But in
her wake there opens out a never-dreamt paradise of happiness,
illumined by kindly sunbeams; and where her foot had trodden
down, spring fragrant flowers from the soul, and jubilant songs
of freed mankind fill the air, scarce silent from the din of
battle.
In Memoriam
BY ALFRED TENNYSON
(See pages 77, 486, 652)
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying clouds, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind....
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
BY ISAIAH
They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for
the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the
waters cover the sea.
Makar's Dream
BY VLADAMIR G. KOROLENKO
(Contemporary Russian novelist. In this short story a drunken old
peasant is taken in a dream before the Taion, or god of the forest,
to be judged for his many sins. The sins are piled upon a wooden
scale-pan and the virtues upon a golden one--but alas, the virtues
rise high into the air. Thereupon old Makar, driven to despair, breaks
out into protest so eloquent that the judge is puzzled)
The scales trembled again ... the old Taion was lost in thought.
"How is this?" said he. "There are good people still living
on the earth. Their eyes are bright, and their faces shine,
and their robes are spotless.... Their hearts are as tender
as good soil; they receive the good seed, and bring forth
beautiful fruit and the perfume is sweet in my nostrils. Look
at yourself!"
All eyes were turned towards Makar, who felt ashamed of his
appearance. He knew that his eyes were not bright, and his
face begrimed, his hair and beard matted and tangled, and his
clothes torn. True, he had been thinking of buying a pair of
boots before his death, in order to appear at the judgment seat
as behooves an honest peasant. But he had always spent the
money on drink, and now he stood before the Taion in ragged
shoes, like the last of the Yakouts.... He would gladly have
sunk under the ground.
"Thy face is dark," went on the Taion. "Thy eyes are not
bright, and thy clothes are torn. And thy heart is overgrown
with weeds and thorns. That is the reason why I love mine own
that are pure and good and holy, and turn my face away from
such as you are."
Makar's heart was ready to break. He felt ashamed of his
existence. He hung his head, but suddenly lifted it and began
to speak again.
Who were those just and good men the Taion was speaking about?
If he meant those who were living in fine palaces on the earth
at the same time as Makar did, he knew them well enough. Their
eyes were bright because they had not shed as many tears as
he had, and their faces shone because they were bathed in
perfume, and their clean garments had been wrought by other
people's hands. Did he not see that he too had been born like
the others, with bright, open eyes, in which heaven and earth
were reflected as in a mirror, and with a pure heart which was
ready to take in all that was beautiful in the world. And if he
longed now to hide his wretched self under the ground, it was
no fault of his ... he did not know whose fault it was ... all
he knew was that all the patience had died in his heart.
If Makar had seen the effect which his speech had produced on
the old Taion, and that every word he said fell on the golden
scale like a weight of lead, his rebellious heart would have
been soothed. But he saw nothing, because he was full of blind
despair.
He thought of his past life, which had been so hard. How had he
been able to bear it so long? He had borne it because the star
of hope had shone through the darkness. And now the star had
vanished, and the hope was dead.... Darkness fell on his soul,
and a storm rose in it like the storm-wind which flies across
the steppe in the dead of night. He forgot where he was, before
whom he stood--forgot everything except his anger.
But the old Taion said to him: "Wait, poor man! You are no
longer on earth. There is justice for you here."
And Makar trembled. He realized that they pitied him; his
heart was softened; and, as he thought of his wretched life,
he burst into tears, weeping over himself. The old Taion wept
too, and so did the old father Ivan. Tears flowed from the eyes
of the young serving-men, and they wiped them with their wide
sleeves.
And the scales trembled, and the wooden scale rose higher and
higher!
The Desire of Nations
BY EDWIN MARKHAM
(See pages 27, 199)
Earth will go back to her lost youth,
And life grow deep and wonderful as truth,
When the wise King out of the nearing Heaven comes
To break the spell of long millenniums--
To build with song again
The broken hope of men--
To hush and heroize the world,
Beneath the flag of brotherhood unfurled.
And He will come some day;
Already is His star upon the way!
He comes, O world, He comes!
But not with bugle-cry nor roll of doubling drums....
And when He comes into the world gone wrong,
He will rebuild her beauty with a song.
To every heart He will its own dream be:
One moon has many phantoms in the sea.
Out of the North the norns will cry to men:
"Baldur the Beautiful has come again!"
The flutes of Greece will whisper from the dead:
"Apollo has unveiled his sunbright head!"
The stones of Thebes and Memphis will find voice:
"Osiris comes: O tribes of Time, rejoice!"
And social architects who build the State,
Serving the Dream at citadel and gate,
Will hail Him coming through the labor-hum.
And glad quick cries will go from man to man:
"Lo, he has come, our Christ the Artisan,
The King who loved the lilies, He has come!"
The Great Change
BY GEORGE D. HERRON
(See pages 730, 792, 799, 832)
Whatever definitions we use, or if we use none at all, we
cannot escape the sense of the passion and the peril, the joy
and the travail of the tremendous and transcendent change
we are inwardly and outwardly undergoing. We are already
appreciably transfigured by it, and soon shall the news of it
be upon pentecostal tongues, and in music such as man has never
heard, and in common deeds diviner than divinest dreams. In a
little while, in a few decades, in one or two or four hundred
years, the change will have been precipitated, the promise will
have been fulfilled, and all things will have passed into the
keeping of the expanded soul. Another, and different race of
men, splendid alike in strength and gentleness, will walk the
earth and climb its sky, bearing down the soul's constrictions
and frontiers, even unto the ramparts around the throne of
life. Man shall sit upon the throne; he shall hold the keys of
his kingdom; he shall make his universe his home, the house
of his heart's desire, shaping it according to the will that
love has begotten within him, and founding it upon the truth
wherewith love has made him free.
My Utopian Self
(_From "A Modern Utopia"_)
BY H. G. WELLS
(A vision of the future world which combines the insight of the poet
with the precision of the scientist. In this brief but poignant
passage the spiritual side of the problem is touched upon)
It falls to few of us to interview our better selves. My
Utopian self is, of course, my better self--according to my
best endeavors--and I must confess myself fully alive to the
difficulties of the situation. When I came to this Utopia I had
no thought of any such intimate self-examination.
The whole fabric of that other universe sways for a moment as
I come into his room, into his clear and ordered work-room. I
am trembling. A figure rather taller than myself stands against
the light.
He comes toward me, and I, as I advance to meet him, stumble
against a chair. Then, still without a word, we are clasping
hands.
I stand now so that the light falls upon him, and I can see his
face better. He is a little taller than I, younger looking and
sounder looking; he has missed an illness or so, and there is
no scar over his eye. His training has been subtly finer then
mine; he has made himself a better face than mine.... These
things I might have counted upon. I can fancy he winces with a
twinge of sympathetic understanding at my manifest inferiority.
Indeed, I come, trailing clouds of earthly confusion and
weakness; I bear upon me all the defects of my world. He wears,
I see, that white tunic with the purple band that I have
already begun to consider the proper Utopian clothing for grave
men, and his face is clean shaven. We forgot to speak at first
in the intensity of our mutual inspection....
I think of the confessions I have just made to him, the
strange admissions both to him and myself. I have stirred up
the stagnation of my own emotional life, the pride that has
slumbered, the hopes and disappointments that have not troubled
me for years. There are things that happened to me in my
adolescence that no discipline of reason will ever bring to a
just proportion for me, the first humiliations I was made to
suffer, the waste of all the fine irrevocable loyalties and
passions of my youth. The dull base caste of my little personal
tragi-comedy--I have ostensibly forgiven, I have for the most
part forgotten--and yet when I recall them I hate each actor
still. Whenever it comes into my mind--I do my best to prevent
it--there it is, and these detestable people blot out the stars
for me.
I have told all that story to my double, and he has listened
with understanding eyes. But for a little while those squalid
memories will not sink back into the deeps.
BY ISAIAH
The ransomed of the Lord shall return: they shall obtain joy
and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
Incentives
BY CHARLES FOURIER
(See page 202)
Up to the present time politicians and philosophers have not
dreamed of rendering industry attractive; to enchain the mass
to labor, they have discovered no other means, after slavery,
than the fear of want and starvation; if, however, industry is
the destiny which is assigned to us by the creator, how can we
think that he would wish to force us to it by violence, and
that he has no notion how to put in play some more noble lever,
some incentive capable of transforming its occupations into
pleasures?
For Lyric Labor
BY ELIZABETH WADDELL
(Apropos of a remark, attributed to an Italian girl of the
Garment Workers' Union, "It wouldn't be so bad if they would
only let us sing at our work")
Child of the Renaissance, and little sister
Of Ariosto and of Raphael,
If any hush the song within your bosom,
By all your lyric land, he does not well!
One day a traveller from our songless country,
Passing at morning through Saint Mark's great Square,
Marvelled, from workmen on the campanile,
To hear a song arising on the air.
Marvelled to see those stones of Venice rising
To Labor's matin chant intoned so clear,
As the great towers builded by Amphion
Rose to the lyre's strong throbbing, tier on tier.
Give us, O Child, the gifts we lack full sorely--
Give us your heritage of art and song,
The soul that in your fathers grew, sun-nourished,
Soaring above its poverty and wrong.
Of singing vintagers and laughing reapers
Teach us your happy, sunland way, nor we
In blind greed longer lay a stern proscription
Upon your song, O Heart of Italy!
Free and serene, in his reward unstinted,
The workman's hand shall mould his rhythmic thought;
How candid to the keen-eyed gods' appraisal
Shall be the work of Song's great ardor wrought--
When our young land, reborn in Beauty's image,
Unto the Morn of Prophecy shall come,
And every tower be raised with mirth and music,
And every harvest brought with singing home.
BY ISAIAH
The Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek;
he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim
liberty to the captives. They shall build the old wastes, they
shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair
the waste cities.
The Perfect City
(_From "The Republic"_)
BY PLATO
(Greek philosopher, B. C. 429-347. His "Republic" is the first, and
perhaps the most famous, of all efforts to portray an ideal Society.
The argument is in the form of a discussion between Socrates and some
of his friends and pupils)
First, then (said Socrates), let us consider in what manner
those who dwell in the city shall be supported. Is there any
other way than by making bread and wine, and clothes and
shoes, and building houses? They will be nourished, partly
with barley, making meal of it, and partly with wheat, making
loaves, boiling part, and toasting part, putting fine loaves
and cakes over a fire of stubble, or over dried leaves, and
resting themselves on couches strewed with smilax and myrtle
leaves. They and their children will feast, drinking wine, and
crowned, and singing to the Gods; and they will pleasantly
live together, begetting children not beyond their substance,
guarding against poverty or war.
Glauco, replying, said: You make the men to feast, as it
appears, without meats.
You say true, said I: for I forget that they need have meats
likewise. They shall have salt and olives and cheese, and
they shall boil bulbous roots and herbs of the field; and we
set before them desserts of figs and vetches and beans; and
they toast at the fire myrtle berries and the berries of the
beech-tree, drinking in moderation. Thus passing their life in
peace and health, and dying, as is likely, in old age, they
will leave to their children another such life.
If you had been making, Socrates, said he, a city of hogs, what
else would have fed them but these things?
But how should we do, Glauco, said I?
What is usually done, said he. They must, as I imagine, have
their beds and tables, and meats and desserts, as we now have,
if they are not to be miserable.
Be it so, said I: I understand you. We consider, it seems, not
only how a city may exist, but a luxurious city; and perhaps it
is not amiss; for in considering such a one, we may probably
see how justice and injustice have their origin in cities. The
true city seems to me to be such as we have described, like one
who is healthy; but if you prefer that we likewise consider
a city that is corpulent, nothing hinders it. For these
things will not, it seems, please some, nor this sort of life
satisfy them; but there shall be beds and tables and all other
furniture, seasonings, ointments, and perfumes, mistresses, and
confections: and various kinds of these. And we must no longer
consider as alone necessary what we mentioned at the first,
houses and clothes and shoes, but painting, too, and all the
curious arts must be set agoing, and carving, and gold, and
ivory; and all these things must be got, must they not?
Yes, said he.
Must not the city, then, be larger? For that healthy one is
no longer sufficient, but is already full of luxury, and of a
crowd of such as are in no way necessary to cities; such as all
kinds of sportsmen, and the imitative artists, many of them
imitating in figures, and colors; and others in music; and
poets too, and their ministers, rhapsodists, actors, dancers,
undertakers, workmen of all sorts of instruments, and what
hath reference to female ornament, as well as other things. We
shall need likewise many more servants. Do you not think they
will need pedagogues, and nurses, and tutors, hair-dressers,
barbers, victuallers too, and cooks? And further still, we
shall want swineherds likewise; of these there were none in the
other city (for there needed not); but in this we shall want
these, and many other sorts of herds likewise, if any eat the
several animals, shall we not?
Why not?
Shall we not, then, in this manner of life be much more in need
of physicians than formerly?
Much more.
And the country, which was then sufficient to support the
inhabitants, will, instead of being sufficient, become too
little; or how shall we say?
Just so, said he.
Must we not then encroach upon the neighboring country, if we
want to have sufficient for plough and pasture, and they in
like manner upon us, if they likewise suffer themselves to
accumulate wealth to infinity, going beyond the boundaries of
necessaries?
There is great necessity for it, Socrates.
Shall we afterwards fight, Glauco, or how shall we do?
We shall certainly, said he.
We say nothing, said I, whether war does any evil or any good,
but this much only: _that we have found the origin of war, from
which most especially arise the greatest mischiefs to states,
both private and public_.
Utopia
BY SIR THOMAS MORE
(The word "Utopia" means "No Place." It was first used in this book,
and has come to be a general name for pictures of a future society.
The book was written in Latin, and first published in Belgium in 1516.
The translation here quoted was published in England in 1551)
Every Cytie is devided into foure equall partes or quarters.
In the myddes of every quarter there is a market place of all
maner of things. Thether the workes of every familie be brought
into certeyne houses. And everye kynde of thing is layde up
severall in bernes or store houses. From hence the father of
everye familye, or every householder fetchethe whatsoever he
and his have neade of, and carieth it away with him without
money, without exchaunge, without any gage, pawne, or pledge.
For whye shoulde any thing be denyed unto him? Seynge there
is abundance of all things, and that it is not to bee feared,
leste anye man wyll aske more then he neadeth. For whie should
it be thoughte that that man woulde aske more then anough,
which is sewer never to lacke? Certeynely in all kyndes of
lyving creatures either feare of lacke dothe cause covetousnes
and ravyne, or in man only pryde, which counteth it a glorious
thinge to pass and excel other in the superfluous and vayne
ostentation of thinges. The whyche kynde of vice amonge the
Utopians can have no place.
Nowe I have declared and described unto you, as truelye as I
coulde the fourme and ordre of that common wealth, which verely
in my judgment is not only the beste, but also that which
alone of good right maye claime and take upon it the name of
a commonwealth or publique weale. For in other places they
speake stil of the common wealth. But every man procureth his
owne private gaine. Here where nothinge is private, the commen
affaires bee earnestlye loked upon.... For there nothinge is
distributed after a nyggyshe sorte, neither there is anye poore
man or beggar. And thoughe no man have anye thinge, yet everye
man is ryche. For what can be more ryche, than to lyve joyfully
and merely, without al griefe and pensifenes: not caring
for his owne lyving, nor vexed or troubled with his wifes
importunate complayntes, nor dreadynge povertie to his sonne,
nor sorrowyng for his doughters dowrey?
The Soul of Man Under Socialism
BY OSCAR WILDE
(See page 155)
The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks
were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the
ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation
become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure,
and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the
machine, the future of the world depends.
FROM THE BOOK OF LEVITICUS
(See page 477)
Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the
inhabitants thereof.
Cities, Old and New
(_From "In the Days of the Comet"_)
BY H. G. WELLS
(See pages 519, 675, 712, 830, 844)
Where is that old world now? Where is London, that somber city
of smoke and drifting darkness, full of the deep roar and
haunting music of disorder, with its oily, shining, mud-rimmed,
barge-crowded river, its black pinnacles, and blackened dome,
its sad wildernesses of smut-grayed houses, its myriads
of draggled prostitutes, its millions of hurrying clerks?
The very leaves upon its trees were foul with greasy black
defilements. Where is the lime-white Paris, with its green and
disciplined foliage, its hard unflinching tastefulness, its
smartly organized viciousness, and the myriads of workers,
noisily shod, streaming over the bridges in the gray cold
light of dawn? Where is New York, the high city of clangor and
infuriated energy, wind swept and competition swept, its huge
buildings jostling one another and straining ever upward for a
place in the sky, the fallen pitilessly overshadowed? Where are
its lurking corners of heavy and costly luxury, the shameful
bludgeoning bribing vice of its ill ruled underways, and all
the gaunt extravagant ugliness of its strenuous life?...
All these vast cities have given way and gone, even as my
native Potteries and the Black Country have gone, and the lives
that were caught, crippled, starved, and maimed amidst their
labyrinths, their forgotten and neglected maladjustments,
and their vast, inhuman, ill-conceived industrial machinery
have escaped--to life. Those cities of growth and accident
are altogether gone, never a chimney smokes about our world
today, and the sound of the weeping of children who toiled and
hungered, the dull despair of overburdened women, the noise of
brute quarrels in alleys, all shameful pleasures and all the
ugly grossness of wealthy pride have gone with them, with the
utter change of our lives. As I look back into the past I see a
vast exultant dust of house-breaking and removal rise up into
the clear air; I live again the Year of Tents, the Years of
Scaffolding, and like the triumph of a new theme in a piece of
music--the great cities of our new days arise.
Caesar and Cleopatra
BY G. BERNARD SHAW
(See pages 193, 212, 263, 402, 760, 798)
(_The Romans have set fire to the Library of Alexandria_)
THEODOTUS:--What is burning there is the memory of mankind.
CAESAR:--A shameful memory. Let it burn.
THEODOTUS (_wildly_):--Will you destroy the past?
CAESAR:--Ay, and build the future with its ruins.
BY ALFRED TENNYSON
(See pages 77, 486, 652, 838)
The old order changeth, yielding place to new
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
A Festival in Utopia
(_From "News from Nowhere"_)
BY WILLIAM MORRIS
(See page 793)
"Once a year, on May-day, we hold a solemn feast in those
easterly communes of London to commemorate the Clearing of
Misery, as it is called. On that day we have music and dancing,
and merry games and happy feasting on the site of some of the
worst of the old slums, the traditional memory of which we have
kept. On that occasion the custom is for the prettiest girls to
sing some of the old revolutionary songs, and those which were
the groans of discontent, once so hopeless, on the very spots
where those terrible crimes of class-murder were committed day
by day for so many years. To a man like me, who has studied
the past so diligently, it is a curious and touching sight
to see some beautiful girl, daintily clad, and crowned with
flowers from the neighboring meadows, standing among the happy
people, on some mound where of old time stood the wretched
apology for a house,--a den in which men and women lived packed
among the filth like pilchards in a cask; lived in such a way
that they could only have endured it, as I said just now, by
being degraded out of humanity. To hear the terrible words of
threatening and lamentation coming from her sweet and beautiful
lips, and she unconscious of their real meaning; to hear her
singing Hood's 'Song of the Shirt,' and think all the time
she does not understand what it is all about--a tragedy grown
inconceivable to her and her listeners. Think of that if you
can, and of how glorious life is grown!"
"Indeed," said I, "it is difficult for me to think of it."
The Utopian City
(_From "A Modern Utopia"_)
BY H. G. WELLS
(See pages 519, 675, 712, 830, 844, 853)
Here will be one of the great meeting places of mankind.
Here--I speak of Utopian London--will be the traditional centre
of one of the great races in the commonality of the World
State--and here will be its social and intellectual exchange.
There will be a mighty University here, with thousands of
professors and tens of thousands of advanced students, and
here great journals of thought and speculation, mature and
splendid books of philosophy and science, and a glorious
fabric of literature will be woven and shaped, and with a
teeming leisureliness, put forth. Here will be stupendous
libraries, and a mighty organization of museums. About these
centres will cluster a great swarm of people, and close at
hand will be another centre,--for I who am an Englishman must
needs stipulate that Westminster shall still be a seat of
world Empire, one of several seats, if you will--where the
ruling council of the world assembles. Then the arts will
cluster round this city, as gold gathers about wisdom, and
here Englishmen will weave into wonderful prose and beautiful
rhythms and subtly atmospheric forms, the intricate, austere
and courageous imagination of our race.
One will come into this place as one comes into a noble
mansion. They will have flung great arches and domes of glass
above the wider spaces of the town, the slender beauty of
the perfect metal-work far overhead will be softened to a
fairy-like unsubstantiality by the mild London air. It will be
the London air we know, clear of filth and all impurity, the
same air that gives our October days their unspeakable clarity
and makes every London twilight mysteriously beautiful. We
shall go along avenues of architecture that will be emancipated
from the last memories of the squat temple boxes of the Greek,
the buxom curvatures of Rome; the Goth in us will have taken
to steel and countless new materials as kindly as once he took
to stone. The gay and swiftly moving platforms of the public
ways will go past on either hand, carrying sporadic groups of
people, and very speedily we shall find ourselves in a sort
of central space, rich with palms and flowering bushes and
statuary. We shall look along an avenue of trees, down a wide
gorge between the cliffs of crowded hotels that are still
glowing with internal lights, to where the shining morning
river streams dawnlit out to sea.
The Utopia of Syndicalism
(_From "Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth"_)
BY ÉMILE PATAUD AND ÉMILE POUGET
(Two of the most prominent leaders of the revolutionary trade unions
of France have in this story, published in 1912, portrayed the
overthrow of the capitalist state by the method of the general strike,
and the form of society which they anticipate from the "direct action"
of the workers).
_The Trade Union Congress_
Delegates came from all parts of France. They came from all
trades, from all professions. In the enormous hall in which
the Congress was held, peasants, teachers, fishermen, doctors,
postmen, masons, sat beside market-gardeners, miners and
metal-workers. An epitome of the whole of society was there.
It was a stirring scene, this assembly, where were gathered
together the most energetic and most enthusiastic of the
combatants for the Revolution, who, inaugurating a new era,
were about to disentangle and sum up the aspirations of the
people; to point out the road along which they were resolved to
march.
The old militants, who had seen so many Congresses; who had
fought rough fights, and known the bitterness of struggles
against the employers and the State; who in their hours of
anxiety and doubt had despaired of ever seeing their hopes
materialize, were radiant with joy. Their bold thoughts of past
years were taking shape, they lived their dream! A happy moment
it was, when old comrades greeted each other. They met, their
hands held out; and trembling, and deeply moved, they embraced
each other--transfigured, radiant.
The new delegates, out of their element at first, in the midst
of this fever of life, were soon caught by the atmosphere of
enthusiasm. Many of them were the product of events. Before the
Revolution, they were ignorant of their own capacities; and if
it had not come to shake them out of their torpor, they would
have continued to vegetate; passive, indifferent, hesitating.
Thanks to it, their inner powers were revealed to themselves;
and now, overflowing with passion, energy, and enthusiasm, they
vibrated with an immense force.
_The Distribution of Wealth_
In the first place, a resolution was taken which there was
no need to discuss, or even to explain--it was so logical
and inevitable: the charging the community with the care of
the children, the sick, and the aged. This was a question of
principle which had the advantage of demonstrating, to those
who still retained prejudices with regard to the new régime,
how little the future was going to be like the past....
Two tendencies were shown; one, that of pure Communism,
which advocated complete liberty in consumption, without any
restriction; the other, inspired with Communist ideas, but
finding their strict application premature, and advocating a
compromise.
The latter view predominated. It was therefore agreed as
follows:--
That every human being, whatever his social function might be,
had a right to an equal remuneration, which would be divided
into two parts: the one for the satisfaction of ordinary needs;
the other for the needs of luxury. The remuneration would be
obtained, with regard to the first, by a permanent Trade Union
card; and with regard to the second, by a book of consumers'
"notes."
The first class included all kinds of commodities, all food
products, clothing, all that would be in such abundance that
the consumption of it need not be restricted; each one would
have the right to draw from the common stock, according to
his needs, without any other formality than having to present
his card in the shops and depots, to those in charge of
distribution.
In the second class would be placed products of various kinds,
which, being in too small a quantity to allow of their being
put at the free disposition of all, retained a purchase value,
liable to vary according to their greater or less rarity,
and greater or less demand. The price of these products was
calculated according to the former monetary method, and the
quantity of work necessary to produce them would be one of
the elements in fixing their value; they would be delivered on
the payment of "consumers' notes," the mechanism of whose use
recalled that of the cheque.
It was, however, agreed that in proportion as the products of
this second class became abundant enough to attain to the level
necessary for free consumption, they should enter into the
first class; and ceasing to be considered as objects of luxury,
they should be, without rationing, placed at the disposal of
all.
By this arrangement society approached, automatically, more and
more towards pure Communism.
The New Nationalism
BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT
(Ex-president of the United States, born 1858)
Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we
achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will
have a fair chance to make himself all that in him lies; to
reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted
by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special
privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself
and for his family substantially what he has earned. Second,
equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get
from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable.
No man who carries the burden of the special privileges of
another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it
is fairly entitled.
Looking Backward
BY EDWARD BELLAMY
(A story of the experience of a man who goes to sleep and wakes
up a hundred years later. See page 85)
"How do you regulate wages?" I asked.
Dr. Leete did not reply till after several moments of
meditative silence. "I know, of course," he finally said,
"enough of the old order of things to understand just what you
mean by that question; and yet the present order is so utterly
different at this point that I am a little at a loss how to
answer you best. You ask me how we regulate wages: I can only
reply that there is no idea in the modern social economy which
at all corresponds with what was meant by wages in your day."
"I suppose you mean that you have no money to pay wages in,"
said I. "But the credit given the worker at the Government
storehouse answers to his wages with us. How is the amount
of credit given respectively to the workers in different
lines determined? By what title does the individual claim his
particular share? What is the basis of allotment?"
"His title," replied Dr. Leete, "is his humanity. The basis of
his claim is the fact that he is a man."
"The fact that he is a man!" I repeated, incredulously. "Do you
possibly mean that all have the same share?"
"Most assuredly." ...
"But what inducement," I asked, "can a man have to put
forth his best endeavors when, however much or little he
accomplishes, his income remains the same? High characters may
be moved by devotion to the common welfare under such a system,
but does not the average man tend to rest back on his oar,
reasoning that it is of no use to make a special effort, since
the effort will not increase his income, nor its withholding
diminish it?"
"Does it then really seem to you," answered my companion, "that
human nature is insensible to any motives save fear of want and
love of luxury, that you should expect security and equality of
livelihood to leave them without possible incentives to effort?
Your contemporaries did not really think so, though they might
fancy they did. When it was a question of the grandest class
of efforts, the most absolute self-devotion, they depended on
quite other incentives. Not higher wages, but honor and hope of
men's gratitude, patriotism and the inspiration of duty, were
the motives which they set before their soldiers when it was a
question of dying for the nation; and never was there an age of
the world when these motives did not call out what is best and
noblest in men. And not only this, but when you come to analyze
the love of money which was the general impulse to effort
in your day, you find that the dread of want and desire of
luxury were two of several motives which the pursuit of money
represented; the others, and with many the more influential,
being desire of power, of social position and reputation for
ability and success. So you see that though we have abolished
poverty and the fear of it, and inordinate luxury with the hope
of it, we have not touched the greater part of the motives
which underlay the love of money in former times, or any of
those which prompted the supremer sorts of effort. The coarser
motives, which no longer move us, have been replaced by high
motives wholly unknown to the mere wage earners of your age.
Now that industry of any sort is no longer self-service, but
service of the nation, patriotism, passion for humanity, impel
the workers as in your day they did the soldier. The army
of industry is an army, not alone by virtue of its perfect
organization, but by reason also of the ardor of self-devotion
which animates its members.
"But as you used to supplement the motives of patriotism
with the love of glory, in order to stimulate the value of
your soldiers, so do we. Based as our industrial system is
on the principle of requiring the same unit of effort from
every man, that is the best he can do, you will see that the
means by which we spur the workers to do their best must be
a very essential part of our scheme. With us, diligence in
the national service is, the sole and certain way to public
repute, social distinction, and official power. The value of
a man's services in society fixes his rank in it. Compared
with the effect of our social arrangements in impelling men to
be zealous in business, we deem the object-lessons of biting
poverty and wanton luxury on which you depended a device as
weak and uncertain as it was barbaric."
Liberty in Utopia
(_From "A Modern Utopia"_)
BY H. G. WELLS
(See pages 519, 675, 712, 830, 844, 853, 856)
The idea of individual liberty is one that has grown in
importance and grows with every development of modern thought.
To the classical Utopists freedom was relatively trivial.
Clearly they considered virtue and happiness as entirely
separable from liberty, and as being altogether more important
things. But the modern view, with its deepening insistence
upon individuality and upon the significance of its uniqueness,
steadily intensifies the value of freedom, until at last we
begin to see liberty as the very substance of life, that indeed
it is life, and that only the dead things, the choiceless
things, live in absolute obedience to law. To have free play
for one's individuality is, in the modern view, the subjective
triumph of existence, as survival in creative work and
offspring is its objective triumph....
A Utopia such as this present one, written on the opening
of the Twentieth Century, and after the most exhaustive
discussion--nearly a century long--between Communistic and
Socialistic ideas on the one hand, and Individualism on
the other, emerges upon a sort of effectual conclusion to
these controversies.... In the very days when our political
and economic order is becoming steadily more Socialistic,
our ideals of intercourse turn more and more to a fuller
recognition of the claims of individuality. The State is to be
progressive, it is no longer to be static, and this alters the
general condition of the Utopian problem profoundly; we have to
provide not only for food and clothing, for order and health,
but for initiative. The factor that leads the World State on
from one phase of development to the next is the interplay of
individualities; to speak teleologically, the world exists for
the sake of and through initiative, and individuality is the
method of initiative.... The State is for Individuals, the law
is for freedoms, the world is for experiment, experience and
change: these are the fundamental beliefs upon which modern
Utopia must go.
FROM THE EPISTLE OF JAMES
Whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth
therein, he not being a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the
work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.
The Social Revolution and After
BY KARL KAUTSKY
(German Socialist editor, generally recognized as the
intellectual leader of the modern Social-democratic movement in
his country)
Freedom of education and of scientific investigation from the
fetters of capitalist dominion; freedom of the individual
from the oppression of exclusive, exhaustive physical labor;
displacement of capitalist industry in the intellectual
production of society by the free unions--along this road
proceeds the tendency of the proletarian régime....
Regulation of social chaos and liberation of the
individual--these are the two historical tasks that capitalism
has placed before society. They appear to be contradictory, but
they are simultaneously soluble because each of them belongs to
a different sphere of social life. Undoubtedly whoever should
seek to rule both spheres in the same manner would find himself
involved in insoluble contradictions....
_Communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual._
This is the type of the Socialist productive system which will
arise from the dominion of the proletariat.
The Understanding of Nature
(_From "Studies in Socialism"_)
BY JEAN LEON JAURÈS
(See page 589)
When Socialism has triumphed, when conditions of peace have
succeeded to conditions of combat, when all men have their
share of property in the immense human capital, and their share
of initiative and of the exercise of free-will in the immense
human activity, then all men will know the fulness of pride
and joy; and they will feel that they are co-operators in the
universal civilization, even if their immediate contribution
is only the humblest manual labor; and this labor, more noble
and more fraternal in character, will be so regulated that the
laborers shall always reserve for themselves some leisure hours
for reflection and for a cultivation of the sense of life.
They will have a better understanding of the hidden meaning of
life, whose mysterious aim is the harmony of all consciences,
of all forces, and of all liberties. They will understand
history better and will love it, because it will be their
history, since they are the heirs of the whole human race.
Finally, they will understand the universe better; because,
when they see conscience and spirit triumphing in humanity,
they will be quick to feel that this universe which has given
birth to humanity cannot be fundamentally brutal and blind;
that there is spirit everywhere, soul everywhere, and that the
universe itself is simply an immense confused aspiration toward
order, beauty, freedom, and goodness. Their point of view will
be changed; they will look with new eyes not only at their
brother men, but at the earth and the sky, rocks and trees,
animals, flowers, and stars.
The Future of Art
(_From "Collectivism and Industrial Evolution"_)
BY ÉMILE VANDERVELDE
(Belgian Socialist leader, since the war a member of the
Cabinet)
Many a time it has been said that art under all its forms is
only the mirror, more or less distorted, yet always faithful,
of society. Today it reflects the discouragements of a dying
_bourgeoisie_, the torments, the anguish, and also the hopes of
a proletariat which lives and grows in the midst of suffering.
Tomorrow, it will reflect the calm and peace of happy
generations which, escaped from the mire of poverty, will have
founded through their own efforts the sovereignty of labor and
the reign of brotherhood.
Art After the Revolution
(_From "Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth"_)
BY ÉMILE PATAUD AND ÉMILE POUGET
(See page 857)
Life was now to take its revenge. The human being was no longer
riveted to the chain of wages; his aim in life passed beyond
the mere struggle for a living. Industry was no longer his
master, but his servant. Freed from all hindrances, he would
be able to develop without constraint.
And there was no need to fear that the level of art would be
lowered as it became universalized. Far from this, it would
gain in extent and depth. Its domain would be unlimited. It
would enter into all production. It would not restrict itself
to painting large canvasses, to sculpturing marble, to moulding
bronze. There would be art in everything.
And we should no longer see great artists stifled by misery,
lost in the quicksands of indifference, as was too often the
case formerly.
Punishment in Utopia
(_From "A Modern Utopia"_)
BY H. G. WELLS
(See pages 519, 675, 712, 830, 844, 853, 856, 863)
You see the big convict steamship standing in to the Island of
Incurable Cheats. The crew are respectfully at their quarters,
ready to lend a hand overboard, but wide awake, and the captain
is hospitably on the bridge to bid his guests good-bye and keep
an eye on the movables. The new citizens for this particular
Alsatia, each no doubt with his personal belongings securely
packed and at hand, crowd the deck and study the nearing coast.
Bright, keen faces would be there, and we, were we by any
chance to find ourselves beside the captain, might recognize
the double of this great earthly magnate or that, Petticoat
Lane and Park Lane cheek by jowl. The landing part of the
jetty is clear of people, only a government man or so stands
there to receive the boat and prevent a rush; but beyond the
gates a number of engagingly smart-looking individuals loiter
speculatively. One figures a remarkable building labeled Custom
House, an interesting fiscal revival this population has made,
and beyond, crowding up the hill, the painted walls of a number
of comfortable inns clamor loudly. One or two inhabitants in
reduced circumstances would act as hotel touts, there are
several hotel omnibuses and a Bureau de Change, certainly a
Bureau de Change. And a small house with a large board, aimed
point-blank seaward, declares itself a Gratis Information
Office, and next to it rises the graceful dome of a small
Casino. Beyond, great hoardings proclaim the advantages of
many island specialities, a hustling commerce, and the opening
of a Public Lottery. There is a large cheap-looking barrack,
the school of Commercial Science for gentlemen of inadequate
training....
Altogether a very go-ahead looking little port it would be,
and though this disembarkation would have none of the flow of
hilarious good fellowship that would throw a halo of genial
noise about the Islands of Drink, it is doubtful if the new
arrivals would feel anything very tragic in the moment. Here at
last was scope for adventure after their hearts.
This sounds more fantastic than it is. But what else is there
to do, unless you kill? You must seclude, but why should you
torment? All modern prisons are places of torture by restraint,
and the habitual criminal plays the part of a damaged mouse
at the mercy of the cat of our law. He has his little painful
run, and back he comes again to a state more horrible even
than destitution. There are no Alsatias left in the world. For
my own part I can think of no crime, unless it is reckless
begetting or the wilful transmission of contagious disease,
for which the bleak terrors, the solitudes and ignominies of
the modern prison do not seem outrageously cruel. If you want
to go as far as that, then kill. Why, once you are rid of them,
should you pester criminals to respect an uncongenial standard
of conduct? Into such islands of exile as this a modern Utopia
will have to purge itself. There is no alternative that I can
contrive.
A Preface to Politics
BY WALTER LIPPMANN
(See page 779)
You don't have to preach honesty to men with a creative
purpose. Let a human being throw the energies of his soul into
the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will
take care of his honesty. The writers who have nothing to say
are the ones you can buy; the others have too high a price. A
genuine craftsman will not adulterate his product; the reason
isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says
he couldn't.
The Triumph of Love
(_From "Labor"_)
BY ÉMILE ZOLA
(In this novel the French writer gives his solution of the labor
problem, in the story of a young engineer who is led by the study of
Fourier to found a co-operative steel mill, which in the course of
time replaces all the old competitive establishments, and brings about
a reign of human brotherhood)
The triumphant spectacle that Luc had now always before his
eyes, that city of happiness, the gayly colored roofs of which
were spread out before his window, was admirable. The march of
progress which a former generation, sunk in ancient error, and
contaminated by an iniquitous environment, had so mournfully
begun in the midst of many obstacles and former hatreds, was to
be pursued by their children, instructed and disciplined by the
schools and workshops, advancing with a cheerful step, even to
the attainment of aims formerly declared chimerical. The long
effort of struggling humanity resulted in the free expansion
of the individual, in a society completely satisfied; in man
being fully man, and living his life in its entirety. The happy
city was thus realized in the religion of life; the religion
of humanity, freed at length from dogmas, became in itself all
glory and all joy....
Authority was at an end; the new social system had no other
foundation than the tie of labor accepted as necessary by all,
their law and the object of their worship. A number of groups
adopted the new system, breaking off from the old groups of
builders, dealers in clothing, metal-workers, artisans, and
farm laborers, each group increasing in number, each different,
each making itself essential to the rest, and satisfying
individual wants as well as the needs of a community. Nothing
impeded any man's expansion; a citizen working as a laborer
might unite himself with as many groups as he thought proper....
And in the city all was love. A pervading sense of love,
increasing, wholesome, purifying, became the perfume and the
sacred flame of daily life. Love, general and universal, had
its birth in youth; then it passed on and became mother love,
father love, filial love; it spread to relations, to neighbors,
to fellow-citizens, to all men upon earth, and as its waves
swept on and became stronger, it seemed to become a great sea
of love, bathing the shores of the whole earth. Charity--that
is, love of one's neighbors--was like the fresh air which
fills the lungs of all who breathe it; everywhere there was
this feeling of brotherly love; love alone had proved able to
realize the unity men had so long dreamed of, bringing all
into divine harmony. The human race, at last as well balanced
as the planets in their orbits by the law of attraction, the
laws of justice, solidarity, and love, would go joyfully on
its round through the ages of eternity. Such was the harvest
ever renewed and renewing, the great harvest of tenderness and
loving kindness, that Luc every morning saw growing up around
him in spots where he had sown his seed so bountifully in his
early days. In his whole city, in his school-rooms, in his
work-shops, in each house, and almost in each heart, for many
years he had been sowing the good seed with lavish hands.
The City of the Sun
BY CAMPANELLA
(A picture of an ideal community written about A.D. 1600 by an Italian
student who was imprisoned for twenty-seven years, and nine times
tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. See page 438)
Love is foremost in attending to the charge of the race. He
sees that men and women are joined together, that they bring
forth the best offspring. Indeed, they laugh at us who exhibit
a studious care for our breed of horses and dogs, but neglect
the breeding of human beings. Thus the education of children
is under his rule. So also is the medicine that is sold, the
sowing and collecting of fruits of the earth and of trees,
agriculture, pasturage, the preparations for the months, the
cooking arrangements, and whatever has any reference to food,
clothing, and the intercourse of the sexes. Love himself is
ruler, but there are many male and female magistrates dedicated
to these arts.
Love in Utopia
(_From "News from Nowhere"_)
BY WILLIAM MORRIS
(See pages 793, 855)
(A famous English Socialist romance; the dream of a poet made
heartsick by the sights and sounds of a machine civilization, and
yearning for beauty, simplicity, and peace)
"Ah," said I, "no doubt you wanted to keep them out of the
Divorce Court; but I suppose it often has to settle such
matters?"
"Then you suppose nonsense," said he. "I know that there
used to be such lunatic affairs as divorce courts; but just
consider, all the cases that came into them were matters of
property quarrels; and I think, dear guest, that though you do
come from another planet, you can see from the mere outside
look of our world that quarrel about private property could not
go on among us in our days."
Indeed, my drive from Hammersmith to Bloomsbury, and all the
quiet, happy life I had seen so many hints of, even apart from
my shopping, would have been enough to tell me that "the sacred
rights of property," as we used to think of them, were now no
more. So I sat silent while the old man took up the thread of
the discourse again....
"You must understand once for all that we have changed these
matters; or rather, that our way of looking at them has changed
within the last two hundred years. We do not deceive ourselves,
indeed, or believe that we can get rid of all the trouble that
besets the dealings between the sexes. We know that we must
face the unhappiness that comes of man and woman confusing
the relations between natural passion and sentiment, and the
friendship which, when things go well, softens the awakening
from passing illusions; but we are not so mad as to pile up
degradation on that unhappiness by engaging in sordid squabbles
about livelihood and position, and the power of tyrannizing
over the children who have been the results of love or lust."
...
He was silent for some time, and I would not interrupt him.
At last he began again: "But you must know that we of these
generations are strong and healthy of body, and live easily; we
pass our lives in reasonable strife with nature, exercising not
one side of ourselves only, but all sides, taking the keenest
pleasure in all the life of the world. So it is a point of
honor with us not to be self-centered,--not to suppose that the
world must cease because one man is sorry; therefore we should
think it foolish, or if you will, criminal, to exaggerate these
matters of sentiment and sensibility; we are no more inclined
to eke out our sentimental sorrows than to cherish our bodily
pains; and we recognize that there are other pleasures besides
love-making. You must remember, also, that we are long-lived,
and that therefore beauty both in man and woman is not so
fleeting as it was in the days when we were burdened so heavily
with self-inflicted diseases. So we shake off these griefs in
a way which perhaps the sentimentalist of other times would
think contemptible and unheroic, but which we think necessary
and manlike. As on the one hand, therefore, we have ceased to
be commercial in our love-matters, so also we have ceased to
be artificially foolish. The folly which comes by nature, the
unwisdom of the immature man, or the older man caught in a
trap, we must put up with that, nor are we much ashamed of it;
but to be conventionally sensitive or sentimental--my friend, I
am old and perhaps disappointed, but at least I think that we
have cast off _some_ of the follies of the older world."
Parentage and the State
BY H. G. WELLS
(See pages 519, 675, 712, 830, 844, 853, 856, 863, 868)
Parentage rightly undertaken is a service as well as a duty to
the world, carrying with it not only obligations but a claim,
the strongest of claims, upon the whole community. It must be
paid for like any other public service; in any completely
civilized state it must be sustained, rewarded, and controlled.
And this is to be done not to supersede the love, pride, and
conscience of the parent, but to supplement, encourage, and
maintain it.
The Deliverance of Woman
(_From "Woman and Labor"_)
BY OLIVE SCHREINER
(See pages 240, 247, 502, 579)
Always in our dreams we hear the turn of the key that shall
close the door of the last brothel; the clink of the last coin
that pays for the body and soul of a woman; the falling of the
last wall that encloses artificially the activity of woman and
divides her from man; always we picture the love of the sexes
as once a dull, slow, creeping worm; then a torpid, earthy
chrysalis; at last the full-winged insect, glorious in the
sunshine of the future.
Today, as we row hard against the stream of life, is it only
blindness in our eyes, which have been too long strained,
which makes us see, far up the river where it fades into the
distance, through all the mists that rise from the river-banks,
a clear, golden light? Is it only a delusion of the eyes which
makes us grasp our oars more lightly and bend our backs lower;
though we know well that, long before the boat reaches those
stretches, other hands than ours will man the oars and guide
its helm? Is it all a dream?
She Who Is to Come
(_From "In This Our World"_)
BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
(See pages 200, 209, 421, 662, 820)
A woman--in so far as she beholdeth
Her one Beloved's face;
A mother--with a great heart that enfoldeth
The children of the Race;
A body, free and strong, with that high beauty
That comes of perfect use, is built thereof;
A mind where Reason ruleth over Duty,
And Justice reigns with Love;
A self-poised, royal soul, brave, wise, and tender,
No longer blind and dumb;
A Human Being, of an unknown splendor,
Is she who is to come!
Woman in Freedom
(_From "Love's Coming of Age"_)
BY EDWARD CARPENTER
(See pages 186, 541, 608)
There is no solution except the freedom of woman--which means
of course also the freedom of the masses of the people, men
and women, and the ceasing altogether of economic slavery.
There is no solution which will not include the redemption of
the terms "free woman" and "free love" to their _true_ and
rightful significance. Let every woman whose heart bleeds for
the sufferings of her sex, hasten to declare herself and to
constitute herself, as far as she possibly can, a free woman.
Let her accept the term with all the odium that belongs to it;
let her insist on her right to speak, dress, think, act, and
above all to use her sex, as she deems best; let her face the
scorn and ridicule; let her "lose her own life" if she likes;
assured that only so can come deliverance, and that only when
the free woman is honored will the prostitute cease to exist.
And let every man who really would respect his counterpart,
entreat her also to act so; let him never by word or deed
tempt her to grant as a bargain what can only be precious as
a gift; let him see her with pleasure stand a little aloof;
let him help her to gain her feet; so at last, by what slight
sacrifices on his part such a course may involve, will it dawn
upon him that he has gained a real companion and helpmate on
life's journey.
The Free Woman
BY WALT WHITMAN
(See pages 184, 268, 578, 726, 835)
She is less guarded than ever, yet more guarded than ever,
The gross and soil'd she moves among do not make her gross and soiled,
She knows the thoughts as she passes, nothing is concealed from her,
She is none the less considerate or friendly therefor,
She is the best belov'd, it is without exception; she has no
reason to fear, and she does not fear.
The Coming Singer
BY GEORGE STERLING
(See pages 504, 552, 597, 816)
The Veil before the mystery of things
Shall stir for him with iris and with light;
Chaos shall have no terror in his sight
Nor earth a bond to chafe his urgent wings;
With sandals beaten from the crown of kings
He shall tread down the altars of their night,
And stand with Silence on her breathless height,
To hear what song the star of morning sings.
With perished beauty in his hands as clay,
Shall he restore futurity its dream.
Behold! his feet shall take a heavenly way
Of choric silver and of chanting fire,
Till in his hands unshapen planets gleam,
'Mid murmurs from the Lion and the Lyre.
Thus Spake Zarathustra
BY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
(See page 779)
When Zarathustra came into the next city, which lay beside the
forest, he found in that place much people gathered together
in the market; for they had been called that they should see a
rope-dancer. And Zarathustra spoke thus unto the people:
"_I teach ye the Over-man._ The man is something who shall be
overcome. What have ye done to overcome him?
"All being before this made something beyond itself: and you
will be the ebb of this great flood, and rather go back to the
beast than overcome the man?
"What is the ape to the man? A mockery or a painful shame. And
even so shall man be to the Over-man: a mockery or a painful
shame.
"Man is a cord, tied between Beast and Over-man--a cord above
an abyss.
"A perilous arriving, a perilous traveling, a perilous looking
backward, a perilous trembling and standing still.
"What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and no goal;
what can be loved in man is that he is a going-over and a
going-under.
"I love them that know not how to live, be it even as those
going under, for such are those going across.
"I love them that are great in scorn, because these are they
that are great in reverence, and arrows of longing toward the
other shore!"
_Index_
Index of Authors
Abercrombie, Lascelles, 537
Adams, Abigail, 241
Adams, Francis W. L., 219, 266, 348
Adams, Franklin P., 695, 711
"A.E." 252, 513, 829
Alcaeus, 440
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 314
Alfonso the Wise, 251
Allen, Grant, 210, 613
Ambrose, St., 397
Amid, John, 720
Amos, 524
Andreyev, Leonid, 92, 214, 327
Anonymous, 264, 278, 355, 684
Antiparos, 198
Arabian, 475
Archer, William, 764
Aristophanes, 442, 449
Aristotle, 480, 523
Arnold, Matthew, 203, 744
Augustine, St., 398
Aurelius, Marcus, 455, 474, 480
Bacon, Francis, 480, 603
Barbour, John, 470
Barker, Elsa, 315, 359, 731
Barrie, James Matthew, 31
Basil, St., 396
Bates, Katharine Lee, 633
Beals, May, 183, 533
Bebel, August, 807, 817
Bellamy, Edward, 85, 861
Belloc, Hilaire, 755
Benson, Allan L., 584
Beranger, Pierre Jean de, 748
Bergström, Hjalmar, 107
Berkman, Alexander, 320
Bismarck, Otto von, 622, 812
Björkman, Edwin, 505
Björnson, Björnstjerne, 221, 339
Blake, William, 98, 213, 743
Blanc, Louis, 796
Blatchford, Robert, 66, 121, 170, 383, 783
Boethius, 200
Bondareff, T. M., 414
Braley, Berton, 132
Brandes, George, 763
Breshkovsky, Katharine, 317
Brieux, Eugene, 152
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 208, 644
Browning, Robert, 753
Bryant, William Cullen, 231
Buchanan, Robert, 367, 412, 687, 714
Buddha, 461
Bunyan, John, 497
Burke, Edmund, 229
Burnet, Dana, 531, 537
Burns, Robert, 227
Byron, Lord, 232, 340, 491
Caine, Hall, 373
Campanella, Tommaso, 438, 873
Carlyle, Thomas, 31, 74, 133, 488, 553, 652, 837
Carman, Bliss, 625
Carpenter, Edward, 186, 541, 608, 877
Carter, George, 150
Catherine of Russia, 561
Cato, 452
Cervantes, Miguel de, 578, 692
Chatterton, Thomas, 777
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 423, 691
Chesterton, Gilbert K., 180, 573
Chinese, 236
Chrysostom, St., 398
Churchill, Winston, 386
Cicero, 472
Clemens, Samuel L., 265, 566
Clement of Alexandria, 396
de Cleyre, Voltairine, 337
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 488, 697
Comfort, Will Levington, 165
Cone, Helen Gray, 727
Confucius, 471, 478
Cowper, William, 557
Crabbe, George, 29, 134
Crane, Stephen, 217, 689
Crosby, Ernest Howard, 394
Cyprian, St., 396
Dante, 467, 469
Davidson, John, 216, 761, 778
Davies, William H., 577, 650
Debs, Eugene V., 144, 345
Defoe, Daniel, 204
Dehmel, Richard, 546
Deming, Seymour, 535
Dickens, Charles, 88, 655
Dickinson, G. Lowes, 510, 615
Dobson, Austin, 571
Dostojevsky, Féodor, 412
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt, 512
Dunne, Finley Peter, 683, 692, 698, 706, 709, 711, 718
Eastman, Max, 408, 762
Ecclesiastes, 278
Edwards, Albert, 205, 244, 814
Egyptian, 446, 457
Elliott, Ebenezer, 179
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 235, 522, 631, 815
Engels, Frederick, 514, 802
Enoch, 471
Euripides, 440, 466
Evans, Florence Wilkinson, 638
Ezekiel, 472
Ferrer, Francisco, 336, 676
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 629
Fisher, Jacob, 192
Fogazzaro, Antonio, 410
Fourier, Charles, 202, 846
France, Anatole, 681, 703, 720
Frank, Florence Kiper, 243
Franklin, Benjamin, 581
Frederick the Great, 562
Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 270
Froude, James Anthony, 214
Galsworthy, John, 57
Garrison, William Lloyd, 233
George, Henry, 116
George, W. L., 217, 538
Ghent, W. J., 750
Gibbins, Henry deB., 647
Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson, 739
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 200, 209, 421, 662, 820, 877
Giovannitti, Arturo, 296, 300
Gissing, George, 104, 767
Gladstone, William Ewart, 626
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 298, 394
Goldman, Emma, 147
Goldsmith, Oliver, 604
Gorky, Maxim, 141, 203, 544, 617
Gray, Thomas, 190
Greek, 471
Greeley, Horace, 128
Gregory, St., 398
Guiterman, Arthur, 311, 693
Habakkuk, 451
Hagedorn, Hermann, 500
Haggai, 442
Hall, Bolton, 680, 710
Hammurabi, 460
Hanford, Ben, 809
Hanna, Paul, 166
Hapgood, Hutchins, 320
Harris, Frank, 281
Harrison, Frederic, 68, 327
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 258
Hearn, Lafcadio, 232
Heine, Heinrich, 97, 222, 744, 763
Henderson, C. Hanford, 673
Herrick, Robert (American), 99
Herrick, Robert (English), 202
Herron, George D., 730, 792, 799, 832, 843
Hertzka, Theodor, 797
Herwegh, Georg, 67
Hesiod, 465
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 220
Hill, J., 707
Hindoo, 474
Hitopadesa, 468
Hodgson, Ralph, 511
Homer, 459
Hood, Thomas, 59, 171, 485
Horace, 452
Hoshi, Kenkō, 135, 151, 154
Howells, William Dean, 685
Hugo, Victor, 182, 267, 637
Hubbard, Elbert, 638
Hunter, Robert, 818
Hutchison, Percy Adams, 371
Ibsen, Henrik, 241, 273
Icelandic, 465
Im Bang, 453
Ingersoll, Robert G., 264, 602
Irvine, Alexander, 385, 671
Isaiah, 420, 447, 464, 473, 839, 845, 847
Isaiah II, 482
James, 300, 454, 865
Japanese, 441
Jaurès, Jean Leon, 589, 866
Jefferies, Richard, 29
Jefferson, Thomas, 228, 332, 596, 600
Jeremiah, 449
Jerome, St., 397
Job, 452
John, 386
Johnson, Samuel, 510, 773
Jones, Ernest, 686
Jones, Henry Arthur, 425
Jones, Sir William, 440
Joseph, Chief, 583
Kauffman, Reginald Wright, 53, 167, 601
Kautsky, Karl, 865
Keats, John, 102
Keller, Helen, 219
Kelly, Edmond, 424
Kemp, Harry, 37, 351, 551
Khayyam, Omar, 469
King, Edward, 331
Kingsley, Charles, 78, 84, 223, 263, 740
Kipling, Rudyard, 103
Korolenko, Vladimir G., 840
Kropotkin, Peter, 308, 312, 745, 828
Lafargue, Paul, 197
Lamennais, Robert de, 427
Lamszus, Wilhelm, 562
Landor, Walter Savage, 614
Langland, William, 447
Lankester, E. Ray, 835
Lassalle, Ferdinand, 624, 802
Lavelaye, Émile de, 395
Lawson, John R., 524
Lecky, William E. H., 168
Lee, Gerald Stanley, 525
LeGallienne, Richard, 567
Li Hung Chang, 196, 689, 702
Lincoln, Abraham, 234, 623, 788
Lindsay, Vachel, 335, 599, 672, 699, 811
Lindsey, Ben B., 640
Linn, Charles Weber, 56
Lippmann, Walter, 779, 870
Lisle, Claude Joseph Rouget de., 806
Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 827
London, Jack, 62, 125, 139, 519, 609, 649, 732
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth., 580
Lowell, James Russell, 189, 356, 558
Lowrie, Donald, 145
Lucretius, 468
Luke, 350, 385
Luther, 451, 453
McCarthy, P. F., 560
Macdonald, George, 495
MacGill, Patrick, 32, 47, 122, 406, 725
Mackay, Charles, 657, 747
Mackaye, James, 631
Mackaye, Percy, 561, 572, 582
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 406
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 786
Manning, Cardinal, 192
Manu, 464
Markham, Edwin, 27, 199, 842
Martial, 451
Marx, Karl, 234, 514, 795, 802
Masefield, John, 23, 35
Matthew, 358
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 790
Mencius, 455
Micah, 410, 590
Mill, John Stuart, 199, 299, 306
Milton, John, 452, 485
Mirbeau, Octave, 627
Monro, Harold, 516
Moody, William Vaughn, 188, 595
More, Sir Thomas, 160, 490, 616, 851
Morgan, J. Pierpont, 515
Morris, William, 793, 855, 873
Negro, 470
Neihardt, John G., 239
Nesbit, Wilbur D., 679
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 779, 879
Nintoku, 475
Nizami, 448
Noel, T., 690
Nordau, Max, 68
Norris, Frank, 111
Noyes, Alfred, 575
O'Higgins, Harvey J., 640
Oppenheim, James, 45, 129, 247, 426
O'Reilly, John Boyle, 497
Ō-Shi-O, 756
Owen, Robert, 813
Paine, Thomas, 622
"Paint Creek Miner," 277
Pankhurst, E. Sylvia, 305
Pataud, Émile, 857, 867
Paul, St., 811
Philippe, Charles-Louis, 290
Phillips, David Graham, 684
Phillips, Wendell, 271
Plato, 468, 479, 848
Plutarch, 432, 439, 476
Poole, Ernest, 39, 317
Pottier, Eugene, 800
Pouget, Émile, 857, 867
Psalms, 150
Ptah-Hotep, 465
Rabelais, François, 700
Raleigh, Walter, 535
Rauschenbusch, Walter, 346, 393
Renan, Ernest, 349
Rimbaud, Arthur, 654
Rockefeller, John D., 487, 696
Rolland, Romain, 757
Roosevelt, Theodore, 860
Rosenfeld, Morris, 56, 766
Rosny, Joseph-Henry, 585, 669, 801
Ross, Edward Alsworth, 517
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 478, 583
Runyon, Damon, 701
Ruskin, John, 106, 491, 752, 756, 786
Russell, Charles Edward, 333
Russell, George W., 252, 513, 829
Sadi, 456, 475
Samuel, 462
Sandburg, Carl, 574
Savonarola, 423
Schoonmaker, Edwin Davies, 392
Schreiner, Olive, 240, 247, 502, 579, 876
Scudder, Vida D., 289, 785
Service, Robert W., 51
Shakespeare, William, 181, 492, 507, 533
Shaw, G. Bernard, 193, 212, 263, 402, 760, 798, 854
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 272, 608
Sinclair, Mary Craig, 169
Sinclair, Upton, 43, 143, 194, 274, 403, 776, 803, 836
Skipsey, Joseph, 662
Solon, 477
Sophocles, 466
Southey, Robert, 73
Spargo, John, 830
Spencer, Herbert, 460, 787
Spenser, Edmund, 493, 775
Spingarn, Joel Elias, 719
Steffens, Lincoln, 422, 526
Stephen, Sir Leslie, 271
Sterling, George, 504, 552, 597, 816, 879
Stokes, Rose Pastor, 766
Strindberg, August, 729
Suttner, Bertha von, 562
Swift, Jonathan, 659
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 376, 637, 788
Swinton, John, 754
Symonds, John Addington, 438, 440
Symons, Arthur, 171
Taft, William Howard, 134
Tagore, Rabindranath, 426
Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, 77
Tennyson, Alfred, 77, 486, 652, 838, 854
Tertullian, 396
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 496
Thompson, Francis, 778
Thoreau, Henry David, 295, 600, 630
Tichenor, Henry M., 708
Tolstoy, Leo, 88, 110, 148, 276, 374, 416, 555, 674, 728
Towne, Charles Hanson, 52
Traubel, Horace, 185, 746
Tressall, Robert, 663, 821
"Tribune," New York, 623
Turgénev, Ivan, 311
Twain, Mark, 265, 566
Underwood, John Curtis, 648
Untermeyer, Louis, 42, 418, 515, 699, 709, 763
Upson, Arthur, 603, 720
Vaillant, Auguste, 338
Vandervelde, Émile, 867
van Eeden, Frederik, 248, 360, 368
Vaughan, Bernard, 498
Veblen, Thorstein, 507
Verhaeren, Émile, 541, 587
Villon, François, 683
Virgil, 466
Voltaire, 674, 694
Waddell, Elizabeth, 345, 846
Wagner, Richard, 236, 747, 838
Walling, William English, 812
Wallis, Louis, 276
Wang-An-Shih, 481
Warbasse, James P., 831
Ward, C. Osborne, 431
Washington, George, 305, 632
Watson, William, 614
Webster, Daniel, 604
Wells, H. G., 519, 675, 712, 830, 844, 853, 856, 863, 868, 875
Wharton, Edith, 500
White, Bouck, 353, 399
Whiteing, Richard, 137, 651
Whitlock, Brand, 161
Whitman, Walt, 184, 268, 578, 726, 835, 878
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 593
Widdemer, Margaret, 256, 307, 670
Wilde, Lady, 211
Wilde, Oscar, 155, 852
Wilhelm, Kaiser, 555
Wilson, Woodrow, 594
Wood, Clement, 409, 523
Wordsworth, William, 181
Wupperman, Carlos, 218
Wyckoff, Walter, 131
Xenophon, 469
Zangwill, Israel, 136, 717
Zola, Émile, 91, 631, 871
Index of Titles
PAGE
=Address to President Lincoln=, _Marx_, 234
=Address to the Jury=, _Giovannitti_, 296
=Ad Valorem=, _Ruskin_, 752
=Agis=, _Plutarch_, 432
=Alton Locke=, _Kingsley_, 84, 223, 740
=Alton Locke's Song=, _Kingsley_, 263
=A Man's a Man for a' That=, _Burns_, 227
=America the Beautiful=, _Bates_, 633
=Anatole France=, _Brandes_, 763
=Ancient Lowly=, _Ward_, 431
=Antigone=, _Sophocles_, 466
=Antiquity of Freedom=, _Bryant_, 231
=Appeal to the Young=, _Kropotkin_, 745
=Arsenal at Springfield=, _Longfellow_, 580
=As a Strong Bird=, _Whitman_, 835
=Aurora Leigh=, _Browning_, 208
=Babble Machines=, _Wells_, 712
=Bad Shepherds=, _Mirbeau_, 627
=Ballade of Misery and Iron=, _Carter_, 150
=Ballad in Blank Verse=, _Davidson_, 778
=Ballad of Dead Girls=, _Burnet_, 531
=Ballad of Kiplingson=, _Buchanan_, 714
=Ballad of Reading Gaol=, _Wilde_, 155
=Battle Hymn of the Chinese Revolution=, _Chinese_, 236
=Batuschka=, _Aldrich_, 314
=Beast=, _Lindsey and O'Higgins_, 640
=Bed of Roses=, _George_, 217, 538
=Before a Crucifix=, _Swinburne_, 376
=Before Sedan=, _Dobson_, 571
=Beggar's Complaint=, _Japanese_, 441
=Beyond Human Might=, _Björnson_, 221, 339
=Biglow Papers=, _Lowell_, 558
=Bomb=, _Harris_, 281
=Book of Enoch=, 471
=Book of Good Counsels=, _Sanscrit_, 466
=Book of Job=, 452
=Book of Proverbs=, 746
=Book of Samuel=, 462
=Book of Snobs=, _Thackeray_, 496
=Book of The People=, _Lamennais_, 427
=Boston Hymn=, _Emerson_, 235
=Bound=, _Beals_, 183
=Bread and Roses=, _Oppenheim_, 247
=Bread Line=, _Braley_, 132
=Breshkovskaya=, _Barker_, 315
=Bridge of Sighs=, _Hood_, 171
=Bryanism=, "_Tribune_", 623
=Butcher's Stall=, _Verhaeren_, 541
=Buttons=, _Sandburg_, 574
=By-the-Way=, _MacGill_, 725
=Caesar and Cleopatra=, _Shaw_, 854
=Caliban in the Coal Mines=, _Untermeyer_, 42
=Call of the Carpenter=, _White_, 353, 399
=Canterbury Tales=, _Chaucer_, 423
=Capital=, _Marx_, 795
=Catechism for Workers=, _Strindberg_, 729
=Chants Communal=, _Traubel_, 185, 746
=Charity=, _Lawson_, 524
=Child Labor=, _Gilman_, 662
=Children of the Dead End=, _MacGill_, 47, 122, 406
=Children of the Ghetto=, _Zangwill_, 136
=Children of the Poor=, _Hugo_, 637
=Children's Auction=, _Mackay_, 657
=Chillon=, _Byron_, 340
=Christian Church, Early=, 396
=Christianity and the Social Crisis=, _Rauschenbusch_, 346
=Church and the Workers=, _Rauschenbusch_, 393
=City of the Sun=, _Campanella_, 873
=Code of Hammurabi=, 460
=Collection=, _Crosby_, 394
=Collectivism and Industrial Evolution=, _Vandervelde_, 867
=Coming of War=, _Tolstoy_, 555
=Coming Singer=, _Sterling_, 879
=Communist Manifesto=, _Marx and Engels_, 514, 802
=Complaint to My Empty Purse=, _Chaucer_, 691
=Comrade Yetta=, _Edwards_, 244, 814
=Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court=, _Twain_, 265
=Consecration=, _Masefield_, 23
=Conventional Lies of Our Civilization=, _Nordau_, 68
=Convivio=, _Dante_, 467
=Co-operation and Nationality=, _Russell_, 513, 829
=Crowds=, _Lee_, 525
=Crown of Wild Olive=, _Ruskin_, 491
=Crusaders=, _Waddell_, 245
=Cry from the Ghetto=, _Rosenfeld_, 56
=Cry of the Children=, _Browning_, 644
=Cry of the People=, _Neihardt_, 239
=Dauber=, _Masefield_, 35
=Dawn=, _Verhaeren_, 587
=Dead to the Living=, _Freiligrath_, 270
=Death and the Child=, _Crane_, 217
=December 31st=, _Abercrombie_, 537
=Democratic Vistas=, _Whitman_, 726
=Deserted Village=, _Goldsmith_, 604
=Desire of Nations=, _Markham_, 842
=Despair=, _Lady Wilde_, 211
=Deuteronomy=, 477
=Dinner à la Tango=, _Björkman_, 505
=Diomedes the Pirate=, _Villon_, 683
=Dipsychus=, _Clough_, 488
=Discourse on the Origin of Inequality=, _Rousseau_, 478
=Doll's House=, _Ibsen_, 241
=Dooley, Mr.=, 683, 692, 698, 706, 709, 711, 718
=Don Juan=, _Byron_, 491
=Don Quixote=, _Cervantes_, 578, 692
=Doubt=, _Mackaye_, 572
=Duties of Man=, _Mazzini_, 790
=Duty of Civil Disobedience=, _Thoreau_, 295, 600, 630
=Dying Boss=, _Steffens_, 526
=Eagle That Is Forgotten=, _Lindsay_, 335
=Early Church=, 396
=Easter Children=, _Barker_, 359
=Ecclesiastes=, 278, 438, 488
=Ecclesiasticus=, 690
=Edda=, 463
=Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard=, _Gray_, 190
=Eloquent Peasant=, _Egyptian_, 457
=England in 1819=, _Shelley_, 608
=Essay on Liberty=, _Mill_, 299
=Europe=, _Whitman_, 268
=Exit Salvatore=, _Wood_, 409
=Exodus=, 437
=Factories=, _Widdemer_, 670
=Faerie Queene=, _Spenser_, 493
=Farewell Address=, _Washington_, 632
=Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe=, _Defoe_, 204
=Fifth Avenue, 1915=, _Hagedorn_, 500
=Fires=, _Gibson_, 739
=First Machine=, _Antiparos_, 198
=Fleet Street Eclogues=, _Davidson_, 761
=Flower Factory=, _Evans_, 638
=Fomá Gordyéeff=, _Gorky_, 203, 544
=For Hire=, _Rosenthal_, 766
=For Lyric Labor=, _Waddell_, 846
=For the other 364 Days=, _Adams_, 695
=Fredome=, _Barbour_, 470
=Freebooter's Prayer=, _Guiterman_, 693
=Freedom=, _Lowell_, 189
=Frogs=, _Aristophanes_, 449
=From Revolution to Revolution=, _Herron_, 792, 799
=From the Bottom Up=, _Irvine_, 385
=Furred Law-Cats=, _Rabelais_, 700
=Gentleman Inside=, _Runyon_, 701
=Girl Strike-Leader=, _Frank_, 243
=Gitanjali=, _Tagore_, 426
=Gloucester Moors=, _Moody_, 188
=God and My Neighbor=, _Blatchford_, 383
=God and the Strong Ones=, _Widdemer_, 256
=Gospel of Buddha=, 461
=Happiness of Nations=, _Mackaye_, 631
=Happy Humanity=, _Van Eeden_, 248
=Harbor=, _Poole_, 39
=Heirs of Time=, _Higginson_, 220
=Heloise sans Abelard=, _Spingarn_, 719
=History of European Morals=, _Lecky_, 168
=Hitopadesa=, _Hindu_, 468
=Hong's Experiences in Hades=, _Im Bang_, 453
=House of Bondage=, _Kauffman_, 53, 167, 601
=House of Mirth=, _Wharton_, 500
=Human Slaughter-House=, _Lamszus_, 562
=Hymn=, _Chesterton_, 180
=Ibsen=, 764
=Illusion of War=, _Le Gallienne_, 567
=Image in the Forum=, _Buchanan_, 367
=Impressions=, _Monro_, 516
=In Bohemia=, _O'Reilly_, 497
=Incentives=, _Fourier_, 846
=Industrial History of England=, _Gibbins_, 647
=In Memoriam=, _Tennyson_, 838
=Inside of the Cup=, _Churchill_, 386
=Insouciance in Storm=, _Kemp_, 37
=Instructions of Ptah-Hotep=, 465
=Internationale=, _Pottier_, 800
=In the Days of the Comet=, _Wells_, 853
=In the Market-Place=, _Sterling_, 504
=In the Shadows=, _Upson_, 720
=In the Strand=, _Symons_, 171
=In Trafalgar Square=, _Adams_, 266
=Isabella=, _Keats_, 102
=I Sing the Battle=, _Kemp_, 551
=Jean-Christophe=, _Rolland_, 757
=Jesus=, _Debs_, 245
=Jesus=, _Renan_, 349
=Jimmie Higgins=, _Hanford_, 809
=Journalism=, _Swinton_, 754
=Journal of Arthur Stirling=, _Sinclair_ 776
=Jungle=, _Sinclair_, 43, 194, 274, 803
=Kingdom of Man=, _Lankester_, 835
=King Hunger=, _Andreyev_, 92
=Koran=, 475, 479
=Kruppism=, _Mackaye_, 561
=Labor=, _Anonymous_, 264
=Labor=, _Zola_, 871
=Labor and Capital Are One=, _Hall_, 710
=Lady Poverty=, _Fisher_, 192
=Land Titles=, _Spencer_, 787
=Last Verses=, _Chatterton_, 777
=Last Word=, _Arnold_, 744
=Latest Decalogue=, _Clough_, 697
=Laws of Social Evolution=, _Hertzka_, 797
=Lawyer and the Farmer=, _Egyptian_, 446
=Lay Down Your Arms=, _von Suttner_, 568
=Lay Sermon to Preachers=, _Jones_, 425
=Lazarus=, _Anonymous_, 355
=Leaden-Eyed=, _Lindsay_, 672
=Leisure Classes=, _Anonymous_, 684
=Letters from a Chinese Official=, _Dickinson_, 510, 615
=Letter to Chesterfield=, _Johnson_, 773
=Let the People Vote on War=, _Benson_, 584
=Leviticus=, 477, 852
=Liberator=, _Garrison_, 233
=Life for a Life=, _Herrick_, 99
=Light Upon Waldheim=, _de Cleyre_, 337
=Lincoln-Douglas Debates=, _Lincoln_ 234
=Lines=, _Crane_, 689
=Lines to a Pomeranian Puppy=, _Untermeyer_, 709
=Locksley Hall Fifty Years After=, _Tennyson_, 652
=London=, _Blake_, 98
=London=, _Heine_, 97
=Looking Backward=, _Bellamy_, 85, 861
=Lost Leader=, _Browning_, 753
=Lotus Eaters=, _Tennyson_, 77
=Love's Coming of Age=, _Carpenter_, 541, 877
=Lynggaard & Co.=, _Bergström_, 107
=Major Barbara=, _Shaw_, 193, 402
=Makar's Dream=, _Korolenko_, 840
=Mammon Marriage=, _MacDonald_, 495
=Man Forbid=, _Davidson_, 216
=Manhattan=, _Towne_, 52
=Man's World=, _Edwards_, 205
=Man the Reformer=, _Emerson_, 522
=Man Under the Stone=, _Markham_, 199
=Man With the Hoe=, _Markham_, 27
=Marching Song=, _Swinburne_, 788
=March of the Workers=, _Morris_, 793
=Marseillaise=, _de Lisle_, 806
=Mask of Anarchy=, _Shelley_, 272
=Measure of the Hours=, _Maeterlinck_, 786
=Medea=, _Euripides_, 466
=Memoirs=, _Li Hung Chang_, 689, 702
=Memoirs of a Revolutionist=, _Kropotkin_, 308, 312
=Menagerie=, _Sinclair_, 143
=Merrie England=, _Blatchford_, 66, 783
=Midnight Lunch Room=, _Barker_, 731
=Midstream=, _Comfort_, 165
=Mill Children=, _Underwood_, 648
=Miner's Tale=, _Beals_, 533
=Miserables, Les=, _Hugo_, 182, 267
=Miss Kilmansegg=, _Hood_, 485
=Moderation=, _Hearn_, 232
=Modern Utopia=, _Wells_, 844, 856, 863, 868
=Modest Proposal=, _Swift_, 659
=Monthly Rent=, _Hall_, 680
=Mother Hubbard's Tale=, _Spenser_, 775
=Mother Wept=, _Skipsey_, 662
=Motley=, _Galsworthy_, 57
=Mutual Aid=, _Kropotkin_, 828
=My Lady of the Chimney-Corner=, _Irvine_, 671
=My Life=, _Bebel_, 807
=My Life in Prison=, _Lowrie_, 145
=My Religion=, _Tolstoy_, 110
=New Grub Street=, _Gissing_, 104, 767
=New Nationalism=, _Roosevelt_, 860
=New Rome=, _Buchanan_, 412
=News from Nowhere=, _Morris_, 855, 873
=New Worlds for Old=, _Wells_, 675, 830
=Night's Lodging=, _Gorky_, 141
=No. 5 John Street=, _Whiteing_, 137, 651
=No Enemies=, _Mackay_, 747
=Northern Farmer: New Style=, _Tennyson_, 486
=Not Guilty=, _Blatchford_, 121
=Octopus=, _Norris_, 111
=Ode in Time of Hesitation=, _Moody_, 595
=Oh, Freedom=, _Negro_, 470
=Old Suffragist=, _Widdemer_, 307
=Oliver Twist=, _Dickens_, 655
=On a Steamship=, _Sinclair_, 836
=Open Letter to the Employers=, _Russell_, 252
=Organization of Labor=, _Blanc_, 796
=Our Country=, _Whittier_, 593
=Out of the Dark=, _Keller_, 219
=Panama-Pacific Ode=, _Sterling_, 816
=Pantagruel=, _Rabelais_, 700
=Parable=, _Lowell_, 356
=Paradise Lost=, _Milton_, 485
=Paris=, _Zola_, 91, 631
=Parish Workhouse=, _Crabbe_, 134
=Past and Present=, _Carlyle_, 133, 488, 652
=Pauper's Drive=, _Noel_, 690
=Pay Envelopes=, _Oppenheim_, 129
=Penguin Island=, _France_, 681, 703
=People=, _Campanella_, 438
=People of the Abyss=, _London_, 62, 125, 139, 631, 649
=People's Anthem=, _Elliott_, 179
=Père Perdrix=, _Philippe_, 290
=Pilgrim's Progress=, _Bunyan_, 497
=Pittsburgh=, _Oppenheim_, 45
=Played Out=, _MacGill_, 32
=Plutus=, _Aristophanes_, 442
=Political Violence=, _Anonymous_, 278
=Politics=, _Aristotle_, 523
=Portrait of an American=, _Untermeyer_, 515
=Portrait of a Supreme Court Judge=, _Untermeyer_, 699
=Poverty=, _Alcaeus_, 440
=Prayer of the Peoples=, _Mackaye_, 582
=Preacher=, _Chaucer_, 423
=Preacher and the Slave=, _Hill_, 707
=Preface to Politics=, _Lippmann_, 779, 870
=Priest and the Devil=, _Dostoyevsky_, 412
=Priests=, _Oppenheim_, 426
=Prince=, _Machiavelli_, 406
=Prince Hagen=, _Sinclair_, 403
=Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist=, _Berkman_, 320
=Prisons=, _Goldman_, 147
=Problem Play=, _Shaw_, 760
=Progress and Poverty=, _George_, 116
=Progress in Medicine=, _Warbasse_, 831
=Progressivism and After=, _Walling_, 812
=Project for a Perpetual Peace=, _Rousseau_, 583
=Prophetic Book Milton=, _Blake_, 743
=Proverbs=, 746
=Psalms=, 479, 481
=Quest=, _van Eeden_, 360, 368
=Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists=, _Tressall_, 663, 821
=Random Reminiscences=, _Rockefeller_, 696
=Rebel=, _Belloc_, 755
=Red Robe=, _Brieux_, 152
=Red Wave=, _Rosny_, 585, 669, 801
=Refusal=, _Beranger_, 748
=Reign of Gilt=, _Phillips_, 684
=Reluctant Briber=, _Steffens_, 422
=Republic=, _Plato_, 468, 479, 848
=Reserved Section=, _Nesbit_, 679
=Resurrection=, _Tolstoy_, 148, 374, 416
=Revolution=, _London_, 732
=Revolution=, _Wagner_, 236, 747, 838
=Revolution in the Mind=, _Owen_, 813
=Revolutionist=, _Turgenev_, 311
=Riches=, _Bacon_, 480
=Rights of Labor=, _Lincoln_, 788
=Rights of Man=, _Paine_, 622
=Right to Be Lazy=, _Lafargue_, 197
=Romance=, _Deming_, 535
=Rough Rider=, _Carman_, 625
=Sad Sight of the Hungry=, _Li Hung Chang_, 196
=Saint=, _Fogazzaro_, 410
=Sartor Resartus=, _Carlyle_, 31, 74, 553
=Savva=, _Andreyev_, 214
=Sayings of Mencius=, 455
=Seven That Were Hanged=, _Andreyev_, 327
=She-ching=, _Chinese_, 463
=She Who Is to Come=, _Gilman_, 877
=Sign of the Son of Man=, _Scudder_, 785
=Sin and Society=, _Ross_, 517
=Sins of Society=, _Vaughan_, 498
=Sisterhood=, _Sinclair_, 169
=Sisters of the Cross of Shame=, _Burnet_, 537
=Slavery=, _Cowper_, 557
=Slum Children=, _Davies_, 650
=Social Ideals=, _Scudder_, 289
=Socialism and Motherhood=, _Spargo_, 830
=Social Revolution and After=, _Kautsky_, 865
=Sociological Study of the Bible=, _Wallis_, 276
=Soldier's Oath=, _Kaiser Wilhelm_, 555
=Solon=, _Plutarch_, 476
=Song of the Exposition=, _Whitman_, 578
=Song of the Lower Classes=, _Jones_, 686
=Song of the Shirt=, _Hood_, 59
=Song of the Wage Slave=, _Service_, 51
=Sons of Martha=, _Kipling_, 103
=Soul of Man Under Socialism=, _Wilde_, 852
=Soul's Errand=, _Raleigh_, 535
=Souls of Black Folk=, _Du Bois_, 512
=South-Sea Islander=, _Adams_, 219
=Springtime of Peace=, _Jaurès_, 589
=Statue of Liberty=, _Upson_, 603
=Straight Road=, _Hanna_, 166
=Studies in Socialism=, _Jaurès_, 589, 866
=Stupidity Street=, _Hodgson_, 511
=Subjection of Women=, _Mill_, 306
=Suffragette=, _Pankhurst_, 305
=Sunday=, _Untermeyer_, 418
=Swordless Christ=, _Hutchison_, 371
=Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth=, _Pataud and
Pouget_, 257, 267
=Tail of the World=, _Amid_, 720
=Tainted Wealth=, _Goethe_, 394
=Tale of Two Cities=, _Dickens_, 88
=Tales of Two Countries=, _Gorky_, 617
=Theory of the Leisure Class=, _Veblen_, 507
=These Shifting Scenes=, _Russell_, 333
=Thus Spake Zarathustra=, _Nietzsche_, 779, 879
=Tiberius Gracchus=, _Plutarch_, 439
=To a Bourgeois Litterateur=, _Eastman_, 762
=To a Certain Rich Young Ruler=, _Wood_, 523
=To a Foil'd European Revolutionaire=, _Whitman_, 184
=To a Nine-inch Gun=, _McCarthy_, 560
=Today=, _Cone_, 727
=To Labor=, _Gilman_, 820
=To the Retainers=, _Ghent_, 750
=Tom Dunstan=, _Buchanan_, 687
=Tonight=, _Wupperman_, 218
=Tono-Bungay=, _Wells_, 519
=To the "Christians,"= _Adams_, 348
=To the Goddess of Liberty=, _Sterling_, 597
=To the Preacher=, _Gilman_, 421
=To the United States Senate=, _Lindsay_, 599
=Towards Democracy=, _Carpenter_, 186
=Tramp's Confession=, _Kemp_, 351
=Traveler from Altruria=, _Howells_, 685
=Trinity Church=, _Schoonmaker_, 392
=True Imperialism=, _Watson_, 614
=Turn of the Balance=, _Whitlock_, 161
=Twentieth Century Socialism=, _Kelly_, 424
=Two Songs=, _Blake_, 213
=Utopia=, _More_, 160, 490, 616, 851
=Vanity Fair=, _Bunyan_, 497
=Vanity of Human Wishes=, _Johnson_, 510
=Veins of Wealth=, _Ruskin_, 106
=Venus Pandemos=, _Dehmel_, 546
=Victorian Age=, _Carpenter_, 603
=Village=, _Crabbe_, 29
=Vindication of Natural Society=, _Burke_, 229
=Violence and the Labor Movement=, _Hunter_, 818
=Vision of Piers Plowman=, _Langland_, 447
=Waifs and Strays=, _Rimbaud_, 654
=Walker=, _Giovannitti_, 300
=War=, _Chief Joseph_, 583
=War=, _Davies_, 577
=War=, _Sterling_, 552
=War and Peace=, _Franklin_, 581
=Warning=, _Heine_, 763
=War Prayer=, _Twain_, 566
=Wat Tyler=, _Southey_, 73
=Wealth Against Commonwealth=, _Lloyd_, 827
=Weavers=, _Hauptmann_, 258
=Weavers=, _Heine_, 222
=What Is Art?= _Tolstoy_, 728
=What Is It To Be Educated?= _Henderson_, 673
=What Life Means to Me=, _London_, 732
=What Meaneth a Tyrant=, _Alfonso the Wise_, 251
=What the Moon Saw=, _Lindsay_, 699
=What To Do=, _Tolstoy_, 674
=When the Leaves Come Out=, _Paint Creek Miner_, 277
=When the Sleeper Wakes=, _Wells_, 712
=Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket=, _Lindsay_, 811
=Why the Socialist Party Is Growing=, _Adams_, 711
=Wife of Flanders=, _Chesterton_, 573
=Will of Francisco Ferrer=, 336
=Wine Press=, _Noyes_, 575
=Wolf at the Door=, _Gilman_, 200
=Woman=, _Bebel_, 817
=Woman and Labor=, _Schreiner_, 240, 502, 579, 876
=Woman's Execution=, _King_, 331
=Women and Economics=, _Gilman_, 209
=Work According to the Bible=, _Bondareff_, 414
=Work and Pray=, _Herwegh_, 67
=Workers=, _Wyckoff_, 131
=Work for All but Father=, _Tichenor_, 708
=Workingman's Program=, _Lassalle_, 802
=World's Way=, _Shakespeare_, 181
=Written in London, September, 1802=, _Wordsworth_, 181
=Wrongfulness of Riches=, _Allen_, 613
=Yeast=, _Kingsley_, 78
=Zadig=, _Voltaire_, 674, 694
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Concerning
The Jungle
Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has
there been such an example of world-wide celebrity won in a day
by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair.--_New York Evening
World._
It is a book that does for modern industrial slavery what
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" did for black slavery. But the work is
done far better and more accurately in "The Jungle" than in
"Uncle Tom's Cabin."--_Arthur Brisbane in the New York Evening
Journal._
I never expected to read a serial. I am reading "_The Jungle_"
and I should be afraid to trust myself to tell how it affects
me. It is a great work. I have a feeling that you yourself will
be dazed some day by the excitement about it. It is impossible
that such a power should not be felt. It is so simple, so true,
so tragic and so human. It is so eloquent, and yet so exact. I
must restrain myself or you may misunderstand.--_David Graham
Phillips._
In this fearful story the horrors of industrial slavery are
as vividly drawn as if by lightning. It marks an epoch in
revolutionary literature.--_Eugene V. Debs._
Mr. Heinemann isn't a man to bungle;
He's published a book which is called "The Jungle."
It's written by Upton Sinclair, who
Appears to have heard a thing or two
About Chicago and what men do
Who live in that city--a loathsome crew.
It's there that the stockyards reek with blood,
And the poor man dies, as he lives, in mud;
The Trusts are wealthy beyond compare,
And the bosses are all triumphant there,
And everything rushes without a skid
To be plunged in a hell which has lost its lid.
For a country where things like that are done
There's just one remedy, only one,
A latter-day Upton Sinclairism
Which the rest of us know as Socialism.
Here's luck to the book! It will make you cower,
For it's written with wonderful, thrilling power.
It grips your throat with a grip Titanic,
And scatters shams with a force volcanic.
Go buy the book, for I judge you need it,
And when you have bought it, read it, read it.
--_Punch_ (_London_).
_A book which has been absolutely boycotted by the literary
reviews of America._
THE PROFITS OF RELIGION
BY UPTON SINCLAIR
A study of Supernaturalism as a Source of Income and a
Shield to Privilege; the first examination in any language
of institutionalized religion from the economic point of
view. "Has the labour as well as the merit of breaking virgin
soil," writes Joseph McCabe. The book has had practically
no advertising and only two or three reviews in radical
publications; yet forty thousand copies have been sold in the
first year.
_From the Rev. John Haynes Holmes_: "I must confess that it has fairly
made me writhe to read these pages, not because they are untrue or
unfair, but on the contrary, because I know them to be the real facts.
I love the church as I love my home, and therefore it is no pleasant
experience to be made to face such a story as this which you have
told. It had to be done, however, and I am glad you have done it, for
my interest in the church, after all, is more or less incidental,
whereas my interest in religion is a fundamental thing.... Let me
repeat again that I feel that you have done us all a service in the
writing of this book. Our churches today, like those of ancient
Palestine, are the abode of Pharisees and scribes. It is as spiritual
and helpful a thing now as it was in Jesus' day for that fact to be
revealed."
_From Luther Burbank_: "No one has ever told 'the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth' more faithfully than Upton Sinclair
in 'The Profits of Religion.'"
_From Louis Untermeyer_: "Let me add my quavering alto to the chorus
of applause of 'The Profits of Religion.' It is something more than a
book--it is a Work!"
Cloth $1.50; paper $1.00
UPTON SINCLAIR
Station A, Pasadena, California
CO-OP
_A Novel of Living Together_
_By_ UPTON SINCLAIR
_From a Sociologist_:
Every evening at 10:30 and again at 11:00 I lay down Sinclair's
"Co-op" to go to bed, but in half a minute I pick it up and go
on. It is the best thing of his I have ever read. It abounds
in character-drawing, incident, adventure, tension, climax,
humor and instruction. It is a ripping story. May it circulate
a million!
E. A. ROSS, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN.
_From a Philosopher_:
I began reading "Co-op" Friday p. m. and hardly laid it down
till I finished it Saturday. It is one of the finest things you
have done--or anybody else on the American scene has done.
JOHN DEWEY
_From a Novelist_:
I feel that it is socially important and that it would be a
fortunate thing for this country if it were widely read. I
really feel that if most of the previous works of Sinclair,
particularly "Oil," "The Brass Check," "The Profits of
Religion," "King Coal," "100%," "The Goose Step," "Money
Writes," had been widely read and distributed, this country
would be in a much better position to understand itself than it
is now. "Co-op" is a logical outcome of all the things which
Sinclair has protested against during his literary life. I
certainly wish for it a wide sale and consideration.
THEODORE DREISER.
_From an Editor_:
Every word is priceless. It's a GRAND JOB, Uppie, and I will
sing its song.... Your "Co-op" is a thrilling tale, beautifully
done.
ROB WAGNER.
_From a Reviewer_:
This is an engrossing, great-hearted and, of course,
desperately earnest novel that Upton Sinclair has written
in celebration of and pleading for the 250 co-operatives of
unemployed in America, most of them in California.... Not for a
long time has Upton Sinclair written so absorbing a novel, as
a novel, giving us fine human stories, produced so moving and
warming a book. It is a book as honest as the day is long....
Don't get it into your head that because this is a novel of
immediate intent it is a bore like campaign biographies and
novels of campaign issues and propaganda tracts. You don't
have to believe in the future of EPIC any more than I do
to recognize it as a great humanitarian story, alive and
powerful--and effective. It belongs to our times as "The
Jungle" belonged to its time. It belongs, too, on that shelf
which contains the noblest of social literature.
FRED T. MARSH, IN NEW YORK HERALD-TRIBUNE.
Cloth bound, 435 pages. Price $1.50
Upton Sinclair, New York City and Pasadena, California
The Brass Check
_A Study of American Journalism_
Who owns the press and why?
When you read your daily paper, are you reading facts or
propaganda? And whose propaganda?
Who furnishes the raw material for your thoughts about life? Is
it honest material?
No man can ask more important questions than these; and here
for the first time the questions are answered in a book.
The first edition of this book, 23,000 copies, was sold out
two weeks after publication. Paper could not be obtained for
printing, and a carload of brown wrapping paper was used. The
printings to date amount to 144,000 copies. The book is being
published in Great Britain and colonies, and in translations
in Germany, France, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Italy,
Hungary and Japan.
_HERMANN BESSEMER, in the "Neues Journal," Vienna_:
"Upton Sinclair deals with names, only with names, with balances, with
figures, with documents, a truly stunning, gigantic fact-material. His
book is an armored military train which with rushing pistons roars
through the jungle of American monster-lies, whistling, roaring,
shooting, chopping off with Berserker rage the obscene heads of these
evils. A breath-taking, clutching, frightful book."
_From the pastor of the Community Church, New York_:
"I am writing to thank you for sending me a copy of your new book,
'The Brass Check.' Although it arrived only a few days ago, I have
already read it through, every word, and have loaned it to one of my
colleagues for reading. The book is tremendous. I have never read a
more strongly consistent argument or one so formidably buttressed
by facts. You have proved your case to the handle. I again take
satisfaction in saluting you not only as a great novelist, but as the
ablest pamphleteer in America today. I am already passing around the
word in my church and taking orders for the book."--John Haynes Holmes.
Single copy, cloth, $2.00; paper, $1.00 postpaid
UPTON SINCLAIR, Pasadena, California
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes:
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Obvious printer's errors corrected, including unambiguous
typos, missing periods at the end of several sentences, and the
like.
Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully
as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings,
non-standard punctuation, inconsistently hyphenated words, and
other inconsistencies.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Cry for Justice - An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest" ***
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