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Title: The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social
Protest

Editor: Upton Sinclair

Author of introduction, etc.: Jack London

Release date: July 5, 2021 [eBook #65775]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRY FOR
JUSTICE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF THE LITERATURE OF SOCIAL
PROTEST ***

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, E. M. Lilien 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]

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;
k h h l f

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?

THE VAMPIRE
E. M. LILIEN
(Contemporary German illustrator)

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[B] 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.

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[C]

(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

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[D]

(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[E]

(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[F]

(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 G d! th t b d h ld b d

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;

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[G]

(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

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.

THE HAND OF FATE
WILLIAM BALFOUR KER
(Contemporary American illustrator)
Copyright by J. A. Mitchell.

KING CANUTE
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[H]

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.)
/p “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.” p/
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[I]

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[J]

(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[K]

(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.

WITHOUT A KENNEL
RYAN WALKER
(American Socialist cartoonist, born 1870)

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[L]

(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:
Th h g ith hi littl b g

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!

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,

y,
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[M]

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

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,

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,

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.

COLD
ROGER BLOCHE (French sculptor; from the Luxembourg
Museum)

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!

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[N]

(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)

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,
(A i ill f ’ h )

(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.

OUTBREAK
KÄTHE KOLLWITZ
(Contemporary German etching; from the “Peasant-cycle”)

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[O]

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[P]

(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

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?”

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.[Q] 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!’”
“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.

THE SURPRISE
ILYÁ EFÍMOVITCH REPIN

(Russian painter, born 1844)

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