Book V
Revolt
The struggle to do away with injustice; the battle-cries of the new army which is gathering for the deliverance of humanity.
A Man's a Man for a' That
BY ROBERT BURNS
(Scotland's most popular poet, 1759-1796)
Is there, for honest poverty, That hangs his head, and a' that? The coward slave, we pass him by, We daur be puir, for a' that! For a' that, and a' that, Our toils obscure and a' that, The rank is but the guinea's stamp-- The man's the gowd for a' that.
What though on hamely fare we dine, Wear hoddin-grey and a' that; Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine-- A man's a man for a' that. For a' that, and a' that, Their tinsel show and a' that, The honest man, though e'er sae puir, Is king o' men for a' that.
Ye see yon birkie, ca'ed a lord, Wha struts, and stares, and a' that; Though hundreds worship at his word, He's but a coof for a' that: For a' that, and a' that, His riband, star, and a' that; The man of independent mind, He looks and laughs at a' that.
A king can make a belted knight, A marquis, duke, and a' that; But an honest man's aboon his might, Gude faith, he maunna fa' that! For a' that, and a' that, Their dignities and a' that, The pith o' sense and pride o' worth Are higher rank than a' that.
Then let us pray that come it may, (As come it will for a' that) That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth, May bear the gree and a' that. For a' that, and a' that-- It's coming yet, for a' that, When man to man, the warld o'er, Shall brithers be for a' that.
BY THOMAS JEFFERSON
(President of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence, 1743-1826)
All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.
A Vindication of Natural Society
BY EDMUND BURKE
(British statesman and orator, 1729-1797; defended the American colonies in Parliament during the Revolutionary War)
Ask of politicians the ends for which laws were originally designed, and they will answer that the laws were designed as a protection for the poor and weak, against the oppression of the rich and powerful. But surely no pretence can be so ridiculous; a man might as well tell me he has taken off my load, because he has changed the burden. If the poor man is not able to support his suit according to the vexatious and expensive manner established in civilized countries, has not the rich as great an advantage over him as the strong has over the weak in a state of nature?...
The most obvious division of society is into rich and poor, and it is no less obvious that the number of the former bear a great disproportion to those of the latter. The whole business of the poor is to administer to the idleness, folly, and luxury of the rich, and that of the rich, in return, is to find the best methods of confirming the slavery and increasing the burdens of the poor. In a state of nature it is an invariable law that a man's acquisitions are in proportion to his labors. In a state of artificial society it is a law as constant and invariable that those who labor most enjoy the fewest things, and that those who labor not at all have the greatest number of enjoyments. A constitution of things this, strange and ridiculous beyond expression! We scarce believe a thing when we are told it which we actually see before our eyes every day without being in the least surprised. I suppose that there are in Great Britain upwards of an hundred thousand people employed in lead, tin, iron, copper, and coal mines; these unhappy wretches scarce ever see the light of the sun; they are buried in the bowels of the earth; there they work at a severe and dismal task, without the least prospect of being delivered from it; they subsist upon the coarsest and worst sort of fare; they have their health miserably impaired, and their lives cut short, by being perpetually confined in the close vapors of these malignant minerals. An hundred thousand more at least are tortured without remission by the suffocating smoke, intense fires, and constant drudgery necessary in refining and managing the products of those mines. If any man informed us that two hundred thousand innocent persons were condemned to so intolerable slavery, how should we pity the unhappy sufferers, and how great would be our just indignation against those who inflicted so cruel and ignominious a punishment! This is an instance--I could not wish a stronger--of the numberless things which we pass by in their common dress, yet which shock us when they are nakedly represented....
In a misery of this sort, admitting some few lenitives, and those too but a few, nine parts in ten of the whole race of mankind drudge through life. It may be urged, perhaps, in palliation of this, that at least the rich few find a considerable and real benefit from the wretchedness of the many. But is this so in fact?...
The poor by their excessive labor, and the rich by their enormous luxury, are set upon a level, and rendered equally ignorant of any knowledge which might conduce to their happiness. A dismal view of the interior of all civil society! The lower part broken and ground down by the most cruel oppression; and the rich by their artificial method of life bringing worse evils on themselves than their tyranny could possibly inflict on those below them.
The Antiquity of Freedom
BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
(American poet and editor, 1794-1878; author of "Thanatopsis")
O freedom! thou art not, as poets dream, A fair young girl, with light and delicate limbs, And wavy tresses gushing from the cap With which the Roman master crowned his slave When he took off the gyves. A bearded man, Armed to the teeth, art thou; one mailed hand Grasps the broad shield, and one the sword; thy brow, Glorious in beauty though it be, is scarred With tokens of old wars; thy massive limbs Are strong with struggling. Power at thee has launched His bolts, and with his lightnings smitten thee; They could not quench the life thou hast from heaven. Merciless Power has dug thy dungeon deep, And his swart armorers, by a thousand fires, Have forged thy chain; yet, while he deems thee bound, The links are shivered, and the prison walls Fall outward; terribly thou springest forth, As springs the flame above a burning pile, And shoutest to the nations, who return Thy shoutings, while the pale oppressor flies.
BY LORD BYRON
(English poet of liberty, 1788-1824; died while taking part in the war for the liberation of Greece)
Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow? By their right arms the conquest must be wrought?
Concerning Moderation
BY LAFCADIO HEARN
(A writer of Irish and Greek parentage, 1850-1904; became a lecturer on English in the University of Tokio. Japan's ablest interpreter to the western world)
Permit me to say something in opposition to a very famous and very popular Latin proverb--In medio tutissimus ibis--"Thou wilt go most safely by taking the middle course." In speaking of two distinct tendencies in literature, you might expect me to say that the aim of the student should be to avoid extremes, and to try not to be either too conservative or too liberal. But I should certainly never give any such advice. On the contrary, I think that the proverb above quoted is one of the most mischievous, one of the most pernicious, one of the most foolish, that ever was invented in the world. I believe very strongly in extremes--in violent extremes; and I am quite sure that all progress in this world, whether literary, or scientific, or religious, or political, or social, has been obtained only with the assistance of extremes. But remember that I say, "With the assistance,"--I do not mean that extremes alone accomplish the aim: there must be antagonism, but there must also be conservatism. What I mean by finding fault with the proverb is simply this--that it is very bad advice for a young man. To give a young man such advice is very much like telling him not to do his best, but only to do half of his best--or, in other words, to be half-hearted in his undertaking.... It is not the old men who ever prove great reformers: they are too cautious, too wise. Reforms are made by the vigor and courage and the self-sacrifice and the emotional conviction of young men, who did not know enough to be afraid, and who feel much more deeply than they think. Indeed great reforms are not accomplished by reasoning, but by feeling.
The First Issue of "The Liberator"
(January 1, 1831)
BY WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
(America's most ardent anti-slavery agitator, 1805-1879. The following pronouncement marked the beginning of the anti-slavery campaign)
I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as Truth, and as uncompromising as Justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen--but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch--and I will be heard. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead.
Working and Taking
(From the Lincoln-Douglas debates, 1858)
BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN
That is the real issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles, right and wrong, throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time. The one is the common right of humanity, the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says "you toil and work and earn bread and I'll eat it."
Address to President Lincoln
BY THE INTERNATIONAL WORKINGMEN'S ASSOCIATION
(Drafted by Karl Marx)
When an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders, for the first time in the annals of the world, dared to inscribe "Slavery" on the banner of armed revolt; when on the very spot where hardly a century ago the idea of one great democratic republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century, when on that very spot the counter-revolution cynically proclaimed property in man to be "the corner-stone of the new edifice"--then the working classes of Europe understood at once that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy war of property against labor; and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic.
Boston Hymn
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON
(American essayist, philosopher and poet. The two stanzas following, which may be said to sum up the revolutionary view of the subject of "confiscation," are taken from a poem read in Boston on Emancipation day, January 1, 1863)
Today unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound; Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!
Pay ransom to the owner And fill the bag to the brim. Who is the owner? The slave is owner, And ever was. Pay him.
Battle Hymn of the Chinese Revolution (1912)
(From the Chinese)
Freedom, one of the greatest blessings of Heaven, United to Peace, thou wilt work on this earth ten thousand wonderful new things.
Grave as a spirit, great as a giant rising to the very skies, With the clouds for a chariot and the wind for a steed, Come, come to reign over the earth!
For the sake of the black hell of our slavery, Come, enlighten us with a ray of thy sun!...
In this century we are working to open a new age. In this century, with one voice, all virile men Are calling for a new making of heaven and earth.
Hin-Yun, our ancestor, guide us! Spirit of Freedom, come and protect us!
The Revolution
BY RICHARD WAGNER
(It is not generally recalled that the composer of the world's greatest music-dramas, 1813-1883, was an active revolutionist, who took part in street fighting in the German Revolution of 1848, and escaped a long imprisonment only by flight. The following is from his contributions to the Dresden Volksblätter)
I am the secret of perpetual youth, the everlasting creator of life; where I am not, death rages. I am the comfort, the hope, the dream of the oppressed. I destroy what exists; but from the rock whereon I light new life begins to flow. I come to you to break all chains which bear you down; to free you from the embrace of death, and instill a new life into your veins. All that exists must perish; that is the eternal condition of life, and I the all-destroying fulfil that law to create a fresh, new existence. I will renovate to the very foundations the order of things in which you live, for it is the offspring of sin, whose blossom is misery and whose fruit is crime. The grain is ripe, and I am the reaper. I will dissipate every delusion which has mastery over the human race. I will destroy the authority of the one over the many; of the lifeless over the living; of the material over the spiritual. I will break into pieces the authority of the great; of the law of property. Let the will of each be master of mankind, one's own strength be one's one property, for the freeman is the sacred man, and there is nothing sublimer than he....
I will destroy the existing order of things which divides one humanity into hostile peoples, into strong and weak, into privileged and outlawed, into rich and poor; for that makes unfortunate creatures of one and all. I will destroy the order of things which makes millions the slaves of the few, and those few the slaves of their own power, of their own wealth. I will destroy the order of things which severs enjoyment from labor, which turns labor into a burden and enjoyment into a vice, which makes one man miserable through want and another miserable through super-abundance. I will destroy the order of things which consumes the vigor of manhood in the service of the dead, of inert matter, which sustains one part of mankind in idleness or useless activity, which forces thousands to devote their sturdy youth to the indolent pursuits of soldiery, officialism, speculation and usury, and the maintenance of such like despicable conditions, while the other half, by excessive exertion and sacrifice of all the enjoyment of life, bears the burden of the whole infamous structure. I will destroy even the very memory and trace of this delirious order of things which, pieced together out of force, falsehood, trouble, tears, sorrow, suffering, need, deceit, hypocrisy and crime, is shut up in its own reeking atmosphere, and never receives a breath of pure air, to which no ray of pure joy ever penetrates....
Arise, then, ye people of the earth, arise, ye sorrow-stricken and oppressed. Ye, also, who vainly struggle to clothe the inner desolation of your hearts, with the transient glory of riches, arise! Come and follow in my track with the joyful crowd, for I know not how to make distinction between those who follow me. There are but two peoples from henceforth on earth--the one which follows me, and the one which resists me. The one I will lead to happiness, but the other I will crush in my progress. For I am the Revolution, I am the new creating force. I am the divinity which discerns all life, which embraces, revives, and rewards.
Cry of the People
BY JOHN G. NEIHARDT
(Western poet and novelist, born 1881)
Tremble before your chattels, Lords of the scheme of things! Fighters of all earth's battles, Ours is the might of kings! Guided by seers and sages, The world's heart-beat for a drum, Snapping the chains of ages, Out of the night we come!
Lend us no ear that pities! Offer no almoner's hand! Alms for the builders of cities! When will you understand? Down with your pride of birth And your golden gods of trade! A man is worth to his mother, Earth, All that a man has made!
We are the workers and makers! We are no longer dumb! Tremble, O Shirkers and Takers! Sweeping the earth--we come! Ranked in the world-wide dawn, Marching into the day! _The night is gone and the sword is drawn And the scabbard is thrown away!_
Woman's Right
(From "Woman and Labor")
BY OLIVE SCHREINER
(South African novelist, born 1859. In the preface to this book one learns that it is only a faint sketch from memory of part of a great work, the manuscript of which was destroyed during the Boer war)
Thrown into strict logical form, our demand is this: We do not ask that the wheels of time should reverse themselves, or the stream of life flow backward. We do not ask that our ancient spinning-wheels be again resuscitated and placed in our hands; we do not demand that our old grindstones and hoes be returned to us, or that man should again betake himself entirely to his ancient province of war and the chase, leaving to us all domestic and civil labor. We do not even demand that society shall immediately so reconstruct itself that every woman may be again a childbearer (deep and overmastering as lies the hunger for motherhood in every virile woman's heart!); neither do we demand that the children we bear shall again be put exclusively into our hands to train. This, we know, cannot be. The past material conditions of life have gone for ever; no will of man can recall them. But this is our demand: We demand that, in that strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman, where nothing is as it was, and all things are assuming new shapes and relations, that in this new world we also shall have our share of honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labor of the Children of Woman. We demand nothing more than this, and will take nothing less. This is our "WOMAN'S RIGHT!"
Ladies in Rebellion
BY ABIGAIL ADAMS
(Wife of one president of the United States, and mother of another. From a letter to her husband written in 1774, during the session of the first Continental Congress)
I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.... If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
A Doll's House
BY HENRIK IBSEN
(Norwegian dramatist, 1828-1906. A play which may be called the source of the modern Feminist movement. In the following scene a young wife announces her revolt)
NORA:--While I was at home with father, he used to tell me his opinions, and I held the same opinions. If I had others, I concealed them, because he wouldn't have liked it. He used to call me his doll-child, and played with me as I played with my dolls. Then I came to live in your house--
HELMER:--What an expression to use about our marriage!
NORA (undisturbed):--I mean I passed from father's hands into yours. You settled everything according to your taste; and I got the same tastes as you; or I pretended to--I don't know which--both ways, perhaps. When I look back on it now, I seem to have been living here like a beggar, from hand to mouth. I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald. But you would have it so. You and father have done me a great wrong. It is your fault that my life has been wasted.
HELMER:--Why, Nora, how unreasonable and ungrateful you are. Haven't you been happy here?
NORA:--No, only merry. And you have always been so kind to me. But your house has been nothing but a play-room. Here I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I used to be papa's doll-child. And the children, in their turn, have been my dolls. I thought it fun when you played with me, just as the children did when I played with them. That has been our marriage, Torvald.... And that is why I am now leaving you!
HELMER (jumping up):--What--do you mean to say--
NORA:--I must stand quite alone, to know myself and my surroundings; so I can't stay with you.
HELMER:--Nora! Nora!
NORA:--I am going at once. Christina will take me for tonight.
HELMER:--You are mad! I shall not allow it. I forbid it.
NORA:--It is no use your forbidding me anything now. I shall take with me what belongs to me. From you I will accept nothing, either now or afterwards....
HELMER:--To forsake your home, your husband, and your children! You don't consider what the world will say.
NORA:--I can pay no heed to that. I only know what I must do.
HELMER:--It is exasperating! Can you forsake your holiest duties in this world?
NORA:--What do you call my holiest duties?
HELMER:--Do you ask me that? Your duties to your husband and your children.
NORA:--I have other duties equally sacred.
HELMER:--Impossible! What duties do you mean?
NORA:--My duties towards myself.
HELMER:--Before all else you are a wife and a mother.
NORA:--That I no longer believe. I think that before all else I am a human being, just as much as you are--or at least I will try to become one.
A Girl Strike-Leader
BY FLORENCE KIPER FRANK
(American poetess, born 1886)
A white-faced, stubborn little thing Whose years are not quite twenty years, Eyes steely now and done with tears, Mouth scornful of its suffering--
The young mouth!--body virginal Beneath the cheap, ill-fitting suit, A bearing quaintly resolute, A flowering hat, satirical.
A soul that steps to the sound of the fife And banners waving red to war, Mystical, knowing scarce wherefore-- A Joan in a modern strife.
Comrade Yetta[A]
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
BY ALBERT EDWARDS
(The story of an East Side sweat-shop worker who becomes a strike-leader. The present scene describes a meeting in Carnegie Hall)
Yetta stood there alone, the blood mounting to her cheeks, looking more and more like an orchid, and waited for the storm to pass.
"I'm not going to talk about this strike," she said when she could make herself heard. "It's over. I want to tell you about the next one--and the next. I wish very much I could make you understand about the strikes that are coming....
"Perhaps there's some of you never thought much about strikes till now. Well. There's been strikes all the time. I don't believe there's ever been a year when there wasn't dozens here in New York. When we began, the skirt-finishers was out. They lost their strike. They went hungry just the way we did, but nobody helped them. And they're worse now than ever. There ain't no difference between one strike and another. Perhaps they are striking for more pay or recognition or closed shops. But the next strike'll be just like ours. It'll be people fighting so they won't be so much slaves like they was before.
"The Chairman said perhaps I'd tell you about my experience. There ain't nothing to tell except everybody has been awful kind to me. It's fine to have people so kind to me. But I'd rather if they'd try to understand what this strike business means to all of us workers--this strike we've won and the ones that are coming....
"I come out of the workhouse today, and they tell me a lady wants to give me money to study, she wants to have me go to college like I was a rich girl. It's very kind. I want to study. I ain't been to school none since I was fifteen. I guess I can't even talk English very good. I'd like to go to college. And I used to see pictures in the papers of beautiful rich women, and of course it would be fine to have clothes like that. But being in a strike, seeing all the people suffer, seeing all the cruelty--it makes things look different.
"The Chairman told you something out of the Christian Bible. Well, we Jews have got a story too--perhaps it's in your Bible--about Moses and his people in Egypt. He'd been brought up by a rich Egyptian lady--a princess--just like he was her son. But as long as he tried to be an Egyptian he wasn't no good. And God spoke to him one day out of a bush on fire. I don't remember just the words of the story, but God said: 'Moses, you're a Jew. You ain't got no business with the Egyptians. Take off those fine clothes and go back to your own people and help them escape from bondage.' Well. Of course, I ain't like Moses, and God has never talked to me. But it seems to me sort of as if--during this strike--I'd seen a BLAZING BUSH. Anyhow I've seen my people in bondage. And I don't want to go to college and be a lady. I guess the kind princess couldn't understand why Moses wanted to be a poor Jew instead of a rich Egyptian. But if you can understand, if you can understand why I'm going to stay with my own people, you'll understand all I've been trying to say.
"We're a people in bondage. There's lots of people who's kind to us. I guess the princess wasn't the only Egyptian lady that was kind to the Jews. But kindness ain't what people want who are in bondage. Kindness won't never make us free. And God don't send any more prophets nowadays. We've got to escape all by ourselves. And when you read in the papers that there's a strike--it don't matter whether it's street-car conductors or lace-makers, whether it's Eyetalians or Polacks or Jews or Americans, whether it's here or in Chicago--it's my People--the People in Bondage who are starting out for the Promised Land."
She stopped a moment, and a strange look came over her face--a look of communication with some distant spirit. When she spoke again, her words were unintelligible to most of the audience. Some of the Jewish vest-makers understood. And the Rev. Dunham Denning, who was a famous scholar, understood. But even those who did not were held spellbound by the swinging sonorous cadence. She stopped abruptly.
"It's Hebrew," she explained. "It's what my father taught me when I was a little girl. It's about the Promised Land--I can't say it in good English--I----"
"Unless I've forgotten my Hebrew," the Reverend Chairman said, stepping forward, "Miss Rayefsky has been repeating God's words to Moses as recorded in the third chapter of Exodus. I think it's the seventh verse:--
"'And the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows;
"'And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey.'"
"Yes. That's it," Yetta said. "Well, that's what strikes mean. We're fighting for the old promises."
"New" Women
BY OLIVE SCHREINER
(See page 240)
We are not new! If you would understand us, go back two thousand years, and study our descent; our breed is our explanation. We are the daughters of our fathers as well as our mothers. In our dreams we still hear the clash of the shields of our forebears, as they struck them together before battle and raised the shout of "Freedom!" In our dreams it is with us still, and when we wake it breaks from our own lips. We are the daughters of these men.
Bread and Roses
BY JAMES OPPENHEIM
(In a parade of the strikers of Lawrence, Mass., some young girls carried a banner inscribed, "We want Bread, and Roses too!")
As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day, A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses, For the people hear us singing, "Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses."
As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men-- For they are women's children and we mother them again. Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes-- Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses!
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread; Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew-- Yes, it is bread we fight for--but we fight for Roses, too.
As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days-- The rising of the women means the rising of the race-- No more the drudge and idler--ten that toil where one reposes-- But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses!
The Great Strike[A]
[A] By permission of Doubleday, Page & Co.
(From "Happy Humanity")
BY FREDERIK VAN EEDEN
(The Dutch physician, poet and novelist has here told for American readers a personal experience in the labor struggles of his own country)
About forty of us were sent as delegates to different towns to lead and encourage the strikers there. The password was given and a date and hour secretly appointed. On Monday morning, the sixth of April, 1903, no train was to run on any railway in the Netherlands.
Sunday evening I set out, as one of the forty delegates, on the warpath. I took leave of my family, filled a suitcase with pamphlets and fly-leaves, and arrived in the middle of the night at the little town of Amersfoort, an important railway junction, to bring my message from headquarters that a strike would be declared that night in the whole country. Expecting the Government to be very active and energetic and not unlikely to arrest me, I took an assumed name, and was dressed like a laborer....
I stayed a week in that little town, living in the houses of the strikers, sharing their meals and their hours of suspense and anxiety. There was a dark, dingy meeting-room where they all preferred to gather, rather than stay at home. The women also regularly attended these meetings, sometimes bringing their children, and they all sought the comfort of being in company, talking of hopes and fears, cheering each other up by songs, and trying to raise each other's spirits during the long days of inaction. I addressed them, three or four times a day, trying to give them sound notions on social conditions and preparing them for the defeat which I soon knew to be inevitable. I may say, however, that, though I was of all the forty delegates the least hopeful of ultimate success, my little party was the last to surrender and showed the smallest percentage of fugitives.
I saw in those days of strife that of the two contending parties, the stronger, the victorious one, was by far the least sympathetic in its moral attitude and methods. The strikers were pathetically stupid and ignorant about the strength of their opponents and their own weakness. If they had unexpectedly gained a complete victory they would have been utterly unable to use it. If the political power had shifted from the hands of the Government to those of the leading staff of that general strike, the result would have been a terrible confusion. There was no mind strong enough, no hand firm enough among them to rule and reorganize that mass of workers, unaccustomed to freedom, untrained to self-control, unable to work without severe authority and discipline. Yet the feelings and motives of that multitude were fair and just--they showed a chivalry, a generosity, an idealism and an enthusiasm with which the low methods of their powerful opponents contrasted painfully.
Every striker had to fight his own fight at home. Every evening he had to face the worn and anxious face of his wife, the sight of his children in danger of starvation and misery. He had to notice the hidden tears of the woman, or to answer her doubts and reproaches, with a mind itself far from confident. He had to fight in his own heart the egotistical inclination to save himself and give up what he felt to be his best sentiment, solidarity, the faith towards his comrades.
I believe no feeling man of the leisure class could have gone through a week in those surroundings and taken part in a struggle like this without acquiring a different conception of the ethics of socialism and class war.
For on the other side there were the Government, the companies, the defendants of existing order, powerful by their wealth, by their routine, by their experience, and supported by the servility of the great public and the army. They had not to face any real danger (the strikers showed no inclination to deeds of violence), and the arms they used were intimidation and bribery. The only thing for them to do was to demoralize the striker, to make him an egoist, a coward, a traitor to his comrades. And this was done quietly and successfully.
Demoralizing the enemy may be the lawful object of every war--the unavoidable evil to prevent a greater wrong; yet in this case, where the method of corruption could be used only on one side, it showed the ugly character of the conflict. This was no fair battle with common moral rules of chivalry and generosity; it was a pitiful and hopeless struggle between a weak slave and a strong usurper, between an ill-treated, revolting child and a brutal oppressor, who cared only for the restoration of his authority, not for the morals of the child.
What Meaneth a Tyrant, and how he Useth his Power in a Kingdom When he hath Obtained it
(From "Las Siete Partidas")
BY ALFONSO THE WISE
(A Spanish king of great learning; 1226-1284)
A tyrant doth signify a cruel lord, who, by force or by craft, or by treachery, hath obtained power over any realm or country; and such men be of such nature, that when once they have grown strong in the land, they love rather to work their own profit, though it be to the harm of the land, than the common profit of all, for they always live in an ill fear of losing it. And that they may be able to fulfil this their purpose unencumbered, the wise of old have said that they use their power against the people in three manners. The first is, that they strive that those under their mastery be ever ignorant and timorous, because, when they be such, they may not be bold to rise against them, nor to resist their wills; and the second is, that their victims be not kindly and united among themselves, in such wise that they trust not one another, for while they live in disagreement, they shall not dare to make any discourse against their lord, for fear faith and secrecy should not be kept among themselves; and the third way is, that they strive to make them poor, and to put them upon great undertakings, which they can never finish, whereby they may have so much harm that it may never come into their hearts to devise anything against their ruler. And above all this, have tyrants ever striven to make spoil of the strong and to destroy the wise; and have forbidden fellowship and assemblies of men in their land, and striven always to know what men said or did; and do trust their counsel and the guard of their person rather to foreigners, who will serve at their will, than to them of the land, who serve from oppression.
An Open Letter to the Employers
BY "A.E." (GEORGE W. RUSSELL)
(This remarkable piece of eloquence, published in the Dublin Times at the time of the great strike of 1913, is said to have completely revolutionized public opinion on the question. The author, born 1867, is one of Ireland's greatest poets, and an ardent advocate of agricultural co-operation)
Sirs:--I address this warning to you, the aristocracy of industry in this city, because, like all aristocracies, you tend to grow blind in long authority, and to be unaware that you and your class and its every action are being considered and judged day by day by those who have power to shake or overturn the whole social order, and whose restlessness in poverty today is making our industrial civilization stir like a quaking bog. You do not seem to realize that your assumption that you are answerable to yourselves alone for your actions in the industries you control is one that becomes less and less tolerable in a world so crowded with necessitous life. Some of you have helped Irish farmers to upset a landed aristocracy in the island, an aristocracy richer and more powerful in its sphere than you are in yours, with its roots deep in history. They, too, as a class, though not all of them, were scornful or neglectful of the workers in the industry by which they profited; and to many who knew them in their pride of place and thought them all-powerful they are already becoming a memory, the good disappearing with the bad. If they had done their duty by those from whose labor came their wealth, they might have continued unquestioned in power and prestige for centuries to come. The relation of landlord and tenant is not an ideal one, but any relations in a social order will endure if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy which qualifies life for immortality. Despotisms endure while they are benevolent, and aristocracies while "noblesse oblige" is not a phrase to be referred to with a cynical smile. Even an oligarchy might be permanent if the spirit of human kindness, which harmonizes all things otherwise incompatible, were present....
Those who have economic power have civic power also, yet you have not used the power that was yours to right what was wrong in the evil administration of this city. You have allowed the poor to be herded together so that one thinks of certain places in Dublin as of a pestilence. There are twenty thousand rooms, in each of which live entire families, and sometimes more, where no functions of the body can be concealed, and delicacy and modesty are creatures that are stifled ere they are born. The obvious duty of you in regard to these things you might have left undone, and it be imputed to ignorance or forgetfulness; but your collective and conscious action as a class in the present labor dispute has revealed you to the world in so malign an aspect that the mirror must be held up to you, so that you may see yourself as every humane person sees you.
The conception of yourselves as altogether virtuous and wronged is, I assure you, not at all the one which onlookers hold of you.... The representatives of labor unions in Great Britain met you, and you made of them a preposterous, an impossible demand, and because they would not accede to it you closed the Conference; you refused to meet them further; you assumed that no other guarantees than those you asked were possible, and you determined deliberately, in cold anger, to starve out one-third of the population of this city, to break the manhood of the men by the sight of the suffering of their wives and the hunger of their children. We read in the Dark Ages of the rack and thumbscrew. But these iniquities were hidden and concealed from the knowledge of men in dungeons and torture-chambers. Even in the Dark Ages humanity could not endure the sight of such suffering, and it learnt of such misuse of power by slow degrees, through rumor, and when it was certain it razed its Bastilles to their foundations. It remained for the twentieth century and the capital city of Ireland to see an oligarchy of four hundred masters deciding openly upon starving one hundred thousand people, and refusing to consider any solution except that fixed by their pride. You, masters, asked men to do that which masters of labor in any other city in these islands had not dared to do. You insolently demanded of these men who were members of a trade union that they should resign from that union; and from those who were not members you insisted on a vow that they would never join it.
Your insolence and ignorance of the rights conceded to workers universally in the modern world were incredible, and as great as your inhumanity. If you had between you collectively a portion of human soul as large as a three-penny bit, you would have sat night and day with the representatives of labor, trying this or that solution of the trouble, mindful of the women and children, who at least were innocent of wrong against you. But no! You reminded labor you could always have your three square meals a day while it went hungry. You went into conference again with representatives of the State, because, dull as you are, you knew public opinion would not stand your holding out. You chose as your spokesman the bitterest tongue that ever wagged in this island, and then, when an award was made by men who have an experience in industrial matters a thousand times transcending yours, who have settled disputes in industries so great that the sum of your petty enterprises would not equal them, you withdraw again, and will not agree to accept their solution, and fall back again on your devilish policy of starvation. Cry aloud to Heaven for new souls! The souls you have got cast upon the screen of publicity appear like the horrid and writhing creatures enlarged from the insect world, and revealed to us by the cinematograph.
You may succeed in your policy and ensure your own damnation by your victory. The men whose manhood you have broken will loathe you, and will always be brooding and scheming to strike a fresh blow. The children will be taught to curse you. The infant being molded in the womb will have breathed into its starved body the vitality of hate. It is not they--it is you who are blind Samsons pulling down the pillars of the social order. You are sounding the death-knell of autocracy in industry. There was autocracy in political life, and it was superseded by democracy. So surely will democratic power wrest from you the control of industry. The fate of you, the aristocracy of industry, will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land if you do not show that you have some humanity still among you. Humanity abhors, above all things, a vacuum in itself, and your class will be cut off from humanity as the surgeon cuts the cancer and alien growth from the body. Be warned ere it is too late.
God and the Strong Ones
BY MARGARET WIDDEMER
(Contemporary American poet)
"We have made them fools and weak!" said the Strong Ones: "We have bound them, they are dumb and deaf and blind; We have crushed them in our hands like a heap of crumbling sands, We have left them naught to seek or find: They are quiet at our feet!" said the Strong Ones; "We have made them one with wood and stone and clod; Serf and laborer and woman, they are less than wise or human!----" "I shall raise the weak!" saith God.
"They are stirring in the dark!" said the Strong Ones, "They are struggling, who were moveless like the dead; We can hear them cry and strain hand and foot against the chain, We can hear their heavy upward tread.... What if they are restless?" said the Strong Ones; "What if they have stirred beneath the rod? Fools and weak and blinded men, we can tread them down again----" "Shall ye conquer Me?" saith God.
"They will trample us and bind!" said the Strong Ones; "We are crushed beneath the blackened feet and hands; All the strong and fair and great they will crush from out the state; They will whelm it with the weight of pressing sands-- They are maddened and are blind!" said the Strong Ones; "Black decay has come where they have trod; They will break the world in twain if their hands are on the rein--" "What is that to me?" saith God.
_"Ye have made them in their strength, who were Strong Ones, Ye have only taught the blackness ye have known: These are evil men and blind?--Ay, but molded to your mind! How shall ye cry out against your own? Ye have held the light and beauty I have given Far above the muddied ways where they must plod: Ye have builded this your lord with the lash and with the sword-- Reap what ye have sown!" saith God._
The Weavers
BY GERHART HAUPTMANN
(German dramatist and poet, born 1862. The present play is a wonderful picture of the lives of the weavers of Silesia, driven to revolt by starvation. Moritz, a soldier, has just come home to his friends)
ANSORGE:--Come, then, Moritz, tell us your opinion, you that's been out and seen the world. Are things at all like improving for us weavers, eh?
MORITZ:--They would need to.
ANSORGE:--We're in an awful state here. It's not livin' an' it's not dyin'. A man fights to the bitter end, but he's bound to be beat at last--to be left without a roof over his head, you may say without ground under his feet. As long as he can work at the loom he can earn some sort o' poor, miserable livin'. But it's many a day since I've been able to get that sort o' job. Now I tries to put a bite into my mouth with this here basket-makin'. I sits at it late into the night, and by the time I tumbles into bed I've earned twelve pfennig. I put it to you if a man can live on that, when everything's so dear? Nine marks goes in one lump for house tax, three marks for land tax, nine marks for mortgage interest--that makes twenty-one marks. I may reckon my year's earnin's at just double that money, and that leaves me twenty-one marks for a whole year's food, an' fire, an' clothes, an' shoes; and I've got to keep up some sort of place to live in. Is it any wonder that I'm behind-hand with my interest payments?
OLD BAUMERT:--Some one would need to go to Berlin an' tell the King how hard put to it we are.
MORITZ:--Little good that would do, Father Baumert. There's been plenty written about it in the newspapers. But the rich people, they can turn and twist things round--as cunning as the devil himself.
OLD BAUMERT (shaking his head):--To think they've no more sense than that in Berlin!
ANSORGE:--And is it really true, Moritz? Is there no law to help us? If a man hasn't been able to scrape together enough to pay his mortgage interest, though he's worked the very skin off his hands, must his house be taken from him? The peasant that's lent the money on it, he wants his rights--what else can you look for from him? But what's to be the end of it all, I don't know.--If I'm put out o' the house.... (In a voice choked by tears.) I was born here, and here my father sat at his loom for more than forty years. Many was the time he said to mother: Mother, when I'm gone, the house'll still be here. I've worked hard for it. Every nail means a night's weaving, every plank a year's dry bread. A man would think that....
MORITZ:--They're quite fit to take the last bite out of your mouth--that's what they are.
ANSORGE:--Well, well, well! I would rather be carried out than have to walk out now in my old days. Who minds dyin'? My father, he was glad to die. At the very end he got frightened, but I crept into bed beside him, an' he quieted down again. I was a lad of thirteen then. I was tired and fell asleep beside him--I knew no better--and when I woke he was quite cold....
(They eat the food which the soldier has brought, but the old man Baumert is too far exhausted to retain it, and has to run from the room. He comes back crying with rage.)
BAUMERT:--It's no good! I'm too far gone! Now that I've at last got hold of somethin' with a taste in it, my stomach won't keep it. (He sits down on the bench by the stove crying.)
MORITZ (with a sudden violent ebullition of rage):--And yet there are people not far from here, justices they call themselves too, over-fed brutes, that have nothing to do all the year round but invent new ways of wasting their time. And these people say that the weavers would be quite well off if only they weren't so lazy.
ANSORGE:--The men as say that are no men at all, they're monsters.
MORITZ:--Never mind, Father Ansorge; we're making the place hot for 'em. Becker and I have been and given Dreissiger (the master) a piece of our mind, and before we came away we sang him "Bloody Justice."
ANSORGE:--Good Lord! Is that the song?
MORITZ:--Yes; I have it here.
ANSORGE:--They call it Dreissiger's song, don't they?
MORITZ:--I'll read it to you.
MOTHER BAUMERT:--Who wrote it?
MORITZ:--That's what nobody knows. Now listen. (He reads, hesitating like a schoolboy, with incorrect accentuation, but unmistakably strong feeling. Despair, suffering, rage, hatred, thirst for revenge, all find utterance.)
The justice to us weavers dealt Is bloody, cruel, and hateful; Our life's one torture, long drawn out: For lynch law we'd be grateful.
Stretched on the rack day after day, Hearts sick and bodies aching, Our heavy sighs their witness bear To spirit slowly breaking.
(The words of the song make a strong impression on Old Baumert. Deeply agitated, he struggles against the temptation to interrupt Moritz. At last he can keep quiet no longer.)
OLD BAUMERT (to his wife, half laughing, half crying, stammering):--"Stretched on the rack day after day." Whoever wrote that, mother, knew the truth. You can bear witness ... eh, how does it go? "Our heavy sighs their witness bear" ... what's the rest?
MORITZ:--"To spirit slowly breaking."
OLD BAUMERT:--You know the way we sigh, mother, day and night, sleepin' an' wakin'.
(Ansorge has stopped working, and cowers on the floor, strongly agitated. Mother Baumert and Bertha wipe their eyes frequently during the course of the reading.)
MORITZ (continues to read):--
The Dreissigers true hangmen are, Servants no whit behind them; Masters and men with one accord Set on the poor to grind them. You villains all, you brood of hell----
OLD BAUMERT (trembling with rage, stamping on the floor):--Yes, brood of hell!!!
MORITZ (reads):--
You fiends in fashion human, A curse will fall on all like you, Who prey on man and woman.
ANSORGE:--Yes, yes, a curse upon them!
OLD BAUMERT (clenching his fist, threateningly):--You prey on man and woman.
MORITZ (reads):--
Then think of all our woe and want, O ye who hear this ditty! Our struggle vain for daily bread Hard hearts would move to pity.
But pity's what you've never known,-- You'd take both skin and clothing, You cannibals, whose cruel deeds Fill all good men with loathing.
OLD BAUMERT (jumps up, beside himself with excitement):--Both skin and clothing. It's true, it's all true! Here I stand, Robert Baumert, master-weaver of Kaschbach. Who can bring up anything against me?... I've been an honest, hard-working man all my life long, an' look at me now! What have I to show for it? Look at me! See what they've made of me! Stretched on the rack day after day. (He holds out his arms.) Feel that! Skin and bone! "You villains all, you brood of hell!!" (He sinks down on a chair, weeping with rage and despair.)
ANSORGE (flings his basket from him into a corner, rises, his whole body trembling with rage, gasps):--And the time's come now for a change, I say. We'll stand it no longer! We'll stand it no longer! Come what may!
Alton Locke's Song: 1848
BY CHARLES KINGSLEY
(See pages 78, 84, 223)
Weep, weep, weep and weep For pauper, dolt and slave! Hark! from wasted moor and fen Feverous alley, stifling den, Swells the wail of Saxon men-- Work! or the grave!
Down, down, down and down, With idler, knave, and tyrant! Why for sluggards cark and moil? He that will not live by toil Has no right on English soil! God's word's our warrant!
Up, up, up and up! Face your game and play it! The night is past, behold the sun! The idols fall, the lie is done! The Judge is set, the doom begun! Who shall stay it?
BY G. BERNARD SHAW
Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the Rich is Uselessness.
BY ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
(American lawyer and lecturer, 1883-1899)
Whoever produces anything by weary labor, does not need a revelation from heaven to teach him that he has a right to the thing produced.
Labor
(A parody upon a poem by Rudyard Kipling; author unknown. The poem is frequently, but incorrectly, attributed to Mr. Kipling)
We have fed you all for a thousand years, And you hail us still unfed, Tho' there's never a dollar of all your wealth But marks the workers' dead. We have yielded our best to give you rest, And you lie on crimson wool; For if blood be the price of all your wealth Good God, we ha' paid in full!
There's never a mine blown skyward now But we're buried alive for you; There's never a wreck drifts shoreward now But we are its ghastly crew; Go reckon our dead by the forges red, And the factories where we spin. If blood be the price of your cursed wealth Good God, we ha' paid it in!
We have fed you all for a thousand years, For that was our doom, you know, From the days when you chained us in your fields To the strike of a week ago. You ha' eaten our lives and our babies and wives, And we're told it's your legal share; But, if blood be the price of your lawful wealth, Good God, we ha' bought it fair!
The Two "Reigns of Terror"
(From "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court")
(America's favorite humorist, 1837-1910)
There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with life-long death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror--that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
(Quoted by special permission of Harper & Brothers.)
In Trafalgar Square
(From "Songs of the Army of the Night")
BY FRANCIS W. L. ADAMS
(See page 219)
The stars shone faint through the smoky blue; The church-bells were ringing; Three girls, arms laced, were passing through, Tramping and singing.
Their heads were bare; their short skirts swung As they went along; Their scarf-covered breasts heaved up, as they sung Their defiant song.
It was not too clean, their feminine lay, But it thrilled me quite With its challenge to task-master villainous day And infamous night,
With its threat to the robber rich, the proud, The respectable free. And I laughed and shouted to them aloud, And they shouted to me!
"_Girls, that's the shout, the shout we will utter When, with rifles and spades, We stand, with the old Red Flag aflutter, On the barricades!_"
The Orator on the Barricade
(From "Les Miserables")
BY VICTOR HUGO
(See page 182)
Friends, the hour in which we live, and in which I speak to you, is a gloomy hour, but of such is the terrible price of the future. A revolution is a toll-gate. Oh! the human race shall be delivered, uplifted and consoled! We affirm it on this barricade. Whence shall arise the shout of love, if it be not from the summit of sacrifice? O my brothers, here is the place of junction between those who think and those who suffer; this barricade is made neither of paving-stones, nor of timbers, nor of iron; it is made of two mounds, a mound of ideas and a mound of sorrows. Misery here encounters the ideal. Here day embraces night, and says: I will die with thee and thou shalt be born again with me. From the pressure of all desolations faith gushes forth. Sufferings bring their agony here, and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are to mingle and compose our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a grave illumined by the dawn.
Europe: The 72nd and 73rd Years of These States
BY WALT WHITMAN
(The European revolutions of 1848-49)
Suddenly out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves, Like lightning it le'pt forth half startled at itself, Its feet upon the ashes and the rags, its hands tight to the throats of kings.
O hope and faith! O aching close of exiled patriots' lives! O many a sicken'd heart! Turn back unto this day, and make yourselves afresh.
And you, paid to defile the People! you liars, mark! Not for numberless agonies, murders, lusts, For court thieving in its manifold mean forms, worming from his simplicity the poor man's wages, For many a promise sworn by royal lips, and broken, and laugh'd at in the breaking, Then in their power, not for all these, did the blows strike revenge, or the heads of the nobles fall; The People scorn'd the ferocity of kings.
But the sweetness of mercy brew'd bitter destruction, and the frighten'd monarchs come back; Each comes in state, with his train--hangman, priest, tax-gatherer, Soldier, lawyer, lord, jailer, and sycophant.
Yet behind all, lowering, stealing--lo, a Shape, Vague as the night, draped interminable, head, front, and form, in scarlet folds, Whose face and eyes none may see, Out of its robes only this--the red robes, lifted by the arm, One finger, crook'd, pointed high over the top, like the head of a snake appears.
Meanwhile, corpses lie in new-made graves--bloody corpses of young men; The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of princes are flying, the creatures of power laugh aloud,
And all these things bear fruits--and they are good.
Those corpses of young men, Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets--those hearts pierc'd by the gray lead, Cold and motionless as they seem, live elsewhere with unslaughter'd vitality.
They live in other young men, O kings! They live in brothers again ready to defy you! They were purified by death--they were taught and exalted.
Not a grave of the murder'd for freedom, but grows seed for freedom, in its turn to bear seed, Which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the snows nourish.
Not a disembodied spirit can the weapons of tyrants let loose, But it stalks invisibly over the earth, whispering, counselling, cautioning.
Liberty! let others despair of you! I never despair of you.
Is the house shut? Is the master away? Nevertheless, be ready--be not weary of watching; He will return soon--his messengers come anon.
The Dead to the Living
BY FERDINAND FREILIGRATH
(German revolutionary poet, 1810-1876. Part of a poem written after the uprising of 1848, in Berlin, when the people marched past the palace-gates with their slain, and compelled the king to stand upon the balcony and take off his hat to the bodies)
With bullets through and through our breast--our forehead split with pike and spear, So bear us onward shoulder high, laid dead upon a blood-stained bier; Yea, shoulder-high above the crowd, that on the man that bade us die, Our dreadful death-distorted face may be a bitter curse for aye; That he may see it day and night, or when he wakes, or when he sleeps, Or when he opes his holy book, or when with wine high revel keeps; That always each disfeatured face, each gaping wound his sight may sear, And brood above his bed of death, and curdle all his blood with fear!
Free Speech
BY SIR LESLIE STEPHEN
(English essayist and critic, 1832-1904)
I, for one, am fully prepared to listen to any arguments for the propriety of theft or murder, or if it be possible, of immorality in the abstract. No doctrine, however well established, should be protected from discussion. If, as a matter of fact, any appreciable number of persons are so inclined to advocate murder on principle, I should wish them to state their opinions openly and fearlessly, because I should think that the shortest way of exploding the principle and of ascertaining the true causes of such a perversion of moral sentiment. Such a state of things implies the existence of evils which cannot be really cured till their cause is known, and the shortest way to discover the cause is to give a hearing to the alleged reasons.
BY WENDELL PHILLIPS
(American anti-slavery agitator, 1811-1884)
If there is anything that cannot bear free thought, let it crack.
The Mask of Anarchy
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
(English poet of nature and human liberty, 1792-1822, whose whole life was a cry for beauty and freedom. He died in obloquy and neglect, and today is known as "the Poets' Poet")
Men of England, Heirs of Glory, Heroes of unwritten story, Nurslings of one mighty mother, Hopes of her, and one another!
Rise, like lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fall'n on you. Ye are many, they are few.
What is Freedom! Ye can tell That which Slavery is too well, For its very name has grown To an echo of your own.
'Tis to work, and have such pay As just keeps life from day to day In your limbs as in a cell For the tyrants' use to dwell:
So that ye for them are made, Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade; With or without your own will, bent To their defence and nourishment.
'Tis to see your children weak With their mothers pine and peak, When the winter winds are bleak:-- They are dying whilst I speak.
'Tis to hunger for such diet As the rich man in his riot Casts to the fat dogs that lie Surfeiting beneath his eye.
'Tis to be a slave in soul, And to hold no strong control Over your own wills, but be All that others make of ye.
Real Liberty
BY HENRIK IBSEN
(See page 241)
Away with the State! I will take part in that revolution. Undermine the whole conception of a state, declare free choice and spiritual kinship to be the only all-important conditions of any union, and you will have the commencement of a liberty that is worth something.
Christmas in Prison
(From "The Jungle")
BY UPTON SINCLAIR
(See pages 43, 143, 194)
In the distance there was a church-tower bell that tolled the hours one by one. When it came to midnight Jurgis was lying upon the floor with his head in his arms, listening. Instead of falling silent at the end, the bell broke out into a sudden clangor. Jurgis raised his head; what could that mean--a fire? God! suppose there were to be a fire in this jail! But then he made out a melody in the ringing; there were chimes. And they seemed to waken the city--all around, far and near, there were bells, ringing wild music; for fully a minute Jurgis lay lost in wonder, before, all at once, the meaning of it broke over him--that this was Christmas Eve!
Christmas Eve--he had forgotten it entirely! There was a breaking of flood-gates, a whirl of new memories and new griefs rushing into his mind. In far Lithuania they had celebrated Christmas; and it came to him as if it had been yesterday--himself a little child, with his lost brother and his dead father in the cabin in the deep black forest, where the snow fell all day and all night and buried them from the world. It was too far off for Santa Claus in Lithuania, but it was not too far for peace and good-will to men, for the wonder-bearing vision of the Christ-child.
But no, their bells were not ringing for him--their Christmas was not meant for him, they were simply not counting him at all. He was of no consequence, like a bit of trash, the carcass of some animal. It was horrible, horrible! His wife might be dying, his baby might be starving, his whole family might be perishing in the cold--and all the while they were ringing their Christmas chimes! And the bitter mockery of it--all this was punishment for him! They put him in a place where the snow could not beat in, where the cold could not eat through his bones; they brought him food and drink--why, in the name of heaven, if they must punish him, did they not put his family in jail and leave him outside--why could they find no better way to punish him than to leave three weak women and six helpless children to starve and freeze?
That was their law, that was their justice! Jurgis stood upright, trembling with passion, his hands clenched and his arms upraised, his whole soul ablaze with hatred and defiance. Ten thousand curses upon them and their law! Their justice--it was a lie, a sham and a loathsome mockery. There was no justice, there was no right, anywhere in it--it was only force, it was tyranny, the will and the power, reckless and unrestrained!
These midnight hours were fateful ones to Jurgis; in them was the beginning of his rebellion, of his outlawry and his unbelief. He had no wit to trace back the social crime to its far sources--he could not say it was the thing men have called "the system" that was crushing him to the earth; that it was the packers, his masters, who had bought up the law of the land, and had dealt out their brutal will to him from the seat of justice. He only knew that he was wronged, and that the world had wronged him; that the law, that society, with all its powers, had declared itself his foe. And every hour his soul grew blacker, every hour he dreamed new dreams of vengeance, of defiance, of raging, frenzied hate.
Robbers and Governments
BY LEO TOLSTOY
(See pages 88, 110, 148)
The robber generally plundered the rich, the governments generally plunder the poor and protect those rich who assist in their crimes. The robber doing his work risked his life, while the governments risk nothing, but base their whole activity on lies and deception. The robber did not compel anyone to join his band, the governments generally enrol their soldiers by force.... The robber did not intentionally vitiate people, but the governments, to accomplish their ends, vitiate whole generations from childhood to manhood with false religions and patriotic instruction.
"Gunmen" in Israel
(From "A Sociological Study of the Bible")
BY LOUIS WALLIS
We saw that the great revolt under David was put down by the assistance of mercenary troops, or hired "strong men," and that by their aid Solomon was elevated to the throne against the wishes of the peasantry. In the Hebrew text, these men of power are called gibborim. They were among the principal tools used by the kings in maintaining the government. It was the gibborim who garrisoned the royal strongholds that held the country in awe. In cases where the peasants refused to submit, bands of gibborim were sent out by the kings and the great nobles. Through them the peasantry were "civilized"; and through them, apparently, the Amorite law was enforced in opposition to the old justice.
Hence the prophets were very bitter against these tools of the ruling class. Hosea writes: "Thou didst trust in thy way, in the multitude of thy gibborim; therefore shall a tumult arise against thy people; and all thy fortresses shall be destroyed." Amos, the shepherd, says that when Jehovah shall punish the land, the gibborim shall fall: "Flight shall perish from the swift ... neither shall the gibbor deliver himself; neither shall he stand that handeth the bow; and he that is swift of foot shall not deliver himself; ... and he that is courageous among the gibborim shall flee away naked in that day, saith Jehovah."
"Gunmen" in West Virginia
("When the Leaves Come Out")
BY A PAINT CREEK MINER
(Written during the terrible strike of 1911-12)
The hills are very bare and cold and lonely; I wonder what the future months will bring. The strike is on--our strength would win, if only-- O, Buddy, how I'm longing for the spring!
They've got us down--their martial lines enfold us; They've thrown us out to feel the winter's sting, And yet, by God, those curs can never hold us, Nor could the dogs of hell do such a thing!
It isn't just to see the hills beside me Grow fresh and green with every growing thing; I only want the leaves to come and hide me, To cover up my vengeful wandering.
I will not watch the floating clouds that hover Above the birds that warble on the wing; I want to use this GUN from under cover-- O, Buddy, how I'm longing for the spring!
You see them there, below, the damned scab-herders! Those puppets on the greedy Owners' String; We'll make them pay for all their dirty murders-- We'll show them how a starveling's hate can sting!
They riddled us with volley after volley; We heard their speeding bullets zip and ring, But soon we'll make them suffer for their folly-- O, Buddy, how I'm longing for the spring!
FROM ECCLESIASTES
Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad.
Political Violence
(From an Anarchist pamphlet published in London; author unknown)
Under miserable conditions of life, any vision of the possibility of better things makes the present misery more intolerable, and spurs those who suffer to the most energetic struggles to improve their lot; and if these struggles only result in sharper misery, the outcome is sheer desperation. In our present society, for instance, an exploited wage worker, who catches a glimpse of what life and work ought to be, finds the toilsome routine and the squalor of his existence almost intolerable; and even when he has the resolution and courage to continue steadily working his best, and waiting until new ideas have so permeated society as to pave the way for better times, the mere fact that he has such ideas and tries to spread them, brings him into difficulties with his employers. How many thousands of Socialists, and above all Anarchists, have lost work and even the chance of work, solely on the ground of their opinions. It is only the specially gifted craftsman who, if he be a zealous propagandist, can hope to retain permanent employment. And what happens to a man with his brain working actively with a ferment of new ideas, with a vision before his eyes of a new hope dawning for toiling and agonizing men, with the knowledge that his suffering and that of his fellows in misery is not caused by the cruelty of fate, but by the injustice of other human beings,--what happens to such a man when he sees those dear to him starving, when he himself is starved? Some natures in such a plight, and those by no means the least social or the least sensitive, will become violent, and will even feel that their violence is social and not anti-social, that in striking when and how they can, they are striking, not for themselves, but for human nature, outraged and despoiled in their persons and in those of their fellow sufferers. And are we, who ourselves are not in this horrible predicament, to stand by and coldly condemn those piteous victims of the Furies and Fates? Are we to decry as miscreants these human beings who act with heroic self-devotion, sacrificing their lives in protest, where less social and less energetic natures would lie down and grovel in abject submission to injustice and wrong? Are we to join the ignorant and brutal outcry which stigmatizes such men as monsters of wickedness, gratuitously running amuck in a harmonious and innocently peaceful society? No! We hate murder with a hatred that may seem absurdly exaggerated to apologists for Matabele massacres, to callous acquiescers in hangings and bombardments; but we decline in such cases of homicide, or attempted homicide, as those of which we are treating, to be guilty of the cruel injustice of flinging the whole responsibility of the deed upon the immediate perpetrator. The guilt of these homicides lies upon every man and woman who, intentionally or by cold indifference, helps to keep up social conditions that drive human beings to despair. The man who flings his whole life into the attempt, at the cost of his own life, to protest against the wrongs of his fellow-men, is a saint compared to the active and passive upholders of cruelty and injustice, even if his protest destroys other lives besides his own. Let him who is without sin in society cast the first stone at such an one.
The Bomb
BY FRANK HARRIS
(The English author, born 1855, author of "The Man Shakespeare," has in this novel told the inside story of the Haymarket explosion in Chicago in 1886. The following passage describes the treatment which the strikers received from the police)
A meeting was called on a waste space in Packingtown, and over a thousand workmen came together. I went there out of curiosity. Lingg, I may say here, always went alone to these strike meetings. Ida told me once that he suffered so much at them that he could not bear to be seen, and perhaps that was the explanation of his solitary ways. Fielden, the Englishman, spoke first, and was cheered to the echo; the workmen knew him as a working-man and liked him; besides, he talked in a homely way, and was easy to understand. Spies spoke in German and was cheered also. The meeting was perfectly orderly when three hundred police tried to disperse it. The action was ill-advised, to say the best of it, and tyrannical; the strikers were hurting no one and interfering with no one. Without warning or reason the police tried to push their way through the crowd to the speakers; finding a sort of passive resistance and not being able to overcome it, they used their clubs savagely. One or two of the strikers, hot-headed, bared their knives, and at once the police, led on by that madman, Schaack, drew their revolvers and fired. It looked as if the police had been waiting for the opportunity. Three strikers were shot dead on the spot, and more than twenty were wounded, several of them dangerously, before the mob drew sullenly away from the horrible place. A leader, a word, and not one of the police would have escaped alive; but the leader was not there, and the word was not given, so the wrong was done, and went unpunished.
I do not know how I reached my room that afternoon. The sight of the dead men lying stark there in the snow had excited me to madness. The picture of one man followed me like an obsession; he was wounded to death, shot through the lungs; he lifted himself up on his left hand and shook the right at the police, crying in a sort of frenzy till the spouting blood choked him--
"Bestien! Bestien!" ("Beasts! Beasts!")
I can still see him wiping the blood-stained froth from his lips; I went to help him; but all he could gasp was, "Weib! Kinder! (Wife, children!)" Never shall I forget the despair in his face. I supported him gently; again and again I wiped the blood from his lips; every breath brought up a flood; his poor eyes thanked me, though he could not speak, and soon his eyes closed; flickered out, as one might say, and he lay there still enough in his own blood; "murdered," as I said to myself when I laid the poor body back; "murdered!"
(As a result of this police action, the narrator goes to the next meeting of the strikers with a bomb in his pocket.)
The crowd began to drift away at the edges. I was alone and curiously watchful. I saw the mayor and the officials move off towards the business part of the town. It looked for a few minutes as if everything was going to pass over in peace; but I was not relieved. I could hear my own heart beating, and suddenly I felt something in the air; it was sentient with expectancy. I slowly turned my head. I was on the very outskirts of the crowd, and as I turned I saw that Bonfield had marched out his police, and was minded to take his own way with the meeting now that the mayor had left. I felt personal antagonism stiffen my muscles.... It grew darker and darker every moment. Suddenly there came a flash, and then a peal of thunder. At the end of the flash, as it seemed to me, I saw the white clubs falling, saw the police striking down the men running along the sidewalk. At once my mind was made up. I put my left hand on the outside of my trousers to hold the bomb tight, and my right hand into the pocket, and drew the tape. I heard a little rasp. I began to count slowly, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven;" as I got to seven the police were quite close to me, bludgeoning every one furiously. Two or three of the foremost had drawn their revolvers. The crowd were flying in all directions. Suddenly there was a shot, and then a dozen shots, all, it seemed to me, fired by the police. Rage blazed in me.
I took the bomb out of my pocket, careless whether I was seen or not, and looked for the right place to throw it; then I hurled it over my shoulder high in the air, towards the middle of the police, and at the same moment I stumbled forward, just as if I had fallen, throwing myself on my hands and face, for I had seen the spark. It seemed as if I had been on my hands for an eternity, when I was crushed to the ground, and my ears split with the roar. I scrambled to my feet again, gasping. Men were thrown down in front of me, and were getting up on their hands. I heard groans and cries, and shrieks behind me. I turned around; as I turned a strong arm was thrust through mine, and I heard Lingg say--
"Come, Rudolph, this way;" and he drew me to the sidewalk, and we walked past where the police had been.
"Don't look," he whispered suddenly; "don't look."
But before he spoke I had looked, and what I saw will be before my eyes till I die. The street was one shambles; in the very center of it a great pit yawned, and round it men lying, or pieces of men, in every direction, and close to me, near the side-walk as I passed, a leg and foot torn off, and near by two huge pieces of bleeding red meat, skewered together with a thigh-bone. My soul sickened; my senses left me; but Lingg held me up with superhuman strength, and drew me along.
"Hold yourself up, Rudolph," he whispered; "come on, man," and the next moment we had passed it all, and I clung to him, trembling like a leaf. When we got to the end of the block I realized that I was wet through from head to foot, as if I had been plunged in cold water.
"I must stop," I gasped. "I cannot walk, Lingg."
"Nonsense," he said; "take a drink of this," and he thrust a flask of brandy into my hand. The brandy I poured down my throat set my heart beating again, allowed me to breathe, and I walked on with him.
"How you are shaking," he said. "Strange, you neurotic people; you do everything perfectly, splendidly, and then break down like women. Come, I am not going to leave you; but for God's sake throw off that shaken, white look. Drink some more."
I tried to; but the flask was empty. He put it back in his pocket.
"Here is the bottle," he said. "I have brought enough; but we must get to the depot."
We saw fire engines with police on them, galloping like madmen in the direction whence we had come. The streets were crowded with people, talking, gesticulating, like actors. Every one seemed to know of the bomb already, and to be talking about it. I noticed that even here, fully a block away, the pavement was covered with pieces of glass; all the windows had been broken by the explosion.
As we came in front of the depot, just before we passed into the full glare of the arc-lamps, Lingg said--
"Let me look at you," and as he let go my arm, I almost fell; my legs were like German sausages; they felt as if they had no bones in them, and would bend in any direction; in spite of every effort they would shake.
"Come, Rudolph," he said, "we'll stop and talk; but you must come to yourself. Take another drink, and think of nothing. I will save you; you are too good to lose. Come, dear friend, don't let them crow over us."
My heart seemed to be in my mouth, but I swallowed it down. I took another swig of brandy, and then a long drink of it. It might have been water for all I tasted; but it seemed to do me some little good. In a minute or so I had got hold of myself.
"I'm all right," I said; "what is there to do now?"
"Simply to go through the depot," he said, "as if there were nothing the matter, and take the train."
Book VI
Martyrdom
Messages and records of the heroes of past and present who have sacrificed themselves for the sake of the future.
Social Ideals
BY VIDA D. SCUDDER
(Professor at Wellesley College, Mass.; born 1861)
Deeper than all theories, apart from all discussion, the mighty instinct for social justice shapes the hearts that are ready to receive it. The personal types thus created are the harbingers of the victory of the cause of freedom. The heralds of freedom, they are also its martyrs. The delicate vibrations of their consciousness thrill through the larger social self which more stolid people still ignore, and the pain of the world is their own. Not for one instant can they know an undimmed joy in art, in thought, in nature while part of their very life throbs in the hunger of the dispossessed. All this by no virtue, no choice of their own. So were they born: the children of the new age, whom the new intuition governs. In every country, out of every class, they gather: men and women vowed to simplicity of life and to social service; possessed by a force mightier than themselves, over which they have no control; aware of the lack of social harmony in our civilization, restless with pain, perplexity, distress, yet filled with deep inward peace as they obey the imperative claim of a widened consciousness. By active ministry, and yet more by prayer and fast and vigil, they seek to prepare the way for the spiritual democracy on which their souls are set.
Le Père Perdrix
BY CHARLES-LOUIS PHILIPPE
(A poor and obscure clerk of the municipality of Paris, 1875-1909, who wrote seven volumes of fiction which have placed his name among the masters of French literature. He wrote of the poor whose lives he knew, and his work is characterized by fidelity to truth, beauty of sentiment, and rare charm of style. The following scene is in the home of a workingman, who by heavy sacrifice has succeeded in educating his only son. One day unexpectedly the son returns home)
Pierre Bousset said, "How does it happen that you come to-day?"
Jean sat down with slowness enough, and one saw yet another thing sit down in the house. The mother said, "I guess you haven't eaten. I'll make a little chocolate before noon-time."
Jean's tongue was loosed. "Here it is. There is something new. It is necessary to tell you: I have left my place!"
"How! You have left your place!" They sat up all three--Pierre Bousset with his apron and his back of labor; and Jean saw that he had gray hair. The mother held a saucepan in her hand, careful like a kitchen-servant, but with feelings as if the saucepan were about to fall. Marguerite, the sister, was already weeping: "Ah, my God! I who was so proud!"
Pierre Bousset said, "And how did you manage that clever stroke?"
It was then that Jean felt his soul wither, and there rose up from the depths of his heart all the needs, all the mists of love. It was necessary that they should live side by side and understand one another, and it was necessary that someone should begin to weaken. He said, "Does one ever know what one does?"
"Ah, indeed!" said the father. "You don't know what you do?"
"There are moments," answered Jean, "when one loses his head, and afterwards I don't say one should not have regrets."
"For the matter of losing one's head, I know only one thing: It is that they pay you, and it is up to you always to obey whatever they command."
The mother watched the chocolate, from which the steam rose with a warmth of strong nutriment. They loved that in the family, like a Sunday morning indulgence, like a bourgeois chocolate for holiday folk. She said, "Anyhow, let it be as it will, he's got to eat."
Jean went on to speak. His blue eyes had undergone the first transformation which comes in a man's life, when he is no longer Jean, son of Pierre, pupil at the Central school, but Jean Bousset, engineer of applied chemistry. There remained in them, however, the shining of a young girl, that emotion which wakens two rays of sunlight in a spring. And now they kept a sort of supplication, like the sweetness of a naked infant.
"Oh, I know everything that you are going to say. You cannot excuse me, because you are not in my place, and I cannot condemn a movement of my heart. You know--I wrote it to you--the workers were about to go on strike. At once I said to myself that these were matters which did not concern me; because, when you are taking care of yourself, it is not necessary to look any farther. But Cousin François explained it all to me."
"Ah, I told you so!" cried Pierre Bousset. "When you wanted to take Cousin François into your factory, I said to you: 'Relatives, it is necessary always to keep them at a distance. They push themselves forward, and sometimes, to excuse them one is led to commit whole heaps of lowness.'"
"In truth," said Jean, "I would never have had to complain of him. On the contrary, he wore his heart on his sleeve."
"Oh, all drunkards are like that. One says: 'They wear their hearts on their sleeve,' and one does not count all the times when they lead the others away."
"Ah, I have understood many things, father. How can I explain everything that I have understood! There are moments still when, to see and to realize--that makes in my head a noise as if the world would not stay in place. I tell you again it was François who made me understand. I saw, in the evenings. I would say to him: 'I am bored, I haven't even a comrade, and I eat at hotel-tables a dinner too well served.' He said: 'Come to my house. You don't know what it is to eat good things, because you don't work, and because hunger makes a part of work. You will have some soup with us, and we will tell you at least that you are happy to be where you are, and to look upon the workingman while playing the amateur.' I said to him: 'But I work, also. To see, to understand, to analyze, to be an engineer! You, it's your arms; me, it's my head and my heart that ache.' He laughed: 'Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! When I come home in the evening with my throat dry and I eat my soup, I also have a headache, and I laugh at you with your heart-ache. I am as tired as a wolf. What's that you call your heart?'"
"Yes, he was right there," said Pierre Bousset. "For my part, I don't understand at all how you are going to pull through. You have understood a lot of things! As for me, I understand but one thing, which is you are unhappy over being too happy."
Jean went on speaking, with his blue eyes, like a madness, like a ribbon, like a rosette without any reason which a young girl puts on her forehead. A sweetness came out of his heart to spread itself in the room, where the furniture gave off angular and waxy reflections. Marguerite listened, with restlessness, listened to her father, like a child whose habit it is to be guided by her parents. The mother saw to the chocolate, in a state of confusion, shaking her head.
"Yesterday I was in the office of the superintendent. It was then that the delegation arrived. It seems to me that I see them again. There were three workingmen. They had taken to white shirts, and they had just washed their hands. You know how the poor come into the homes of the rich. There was a great racket, and their steps were put down with so much embarrassment that one felt in the hearts of the three men the shame of crushed things. I had already thought about that poverty which, knowing that it soils, hides itself, and dares not even touch an object. They said: 'Well, Mr. Superintendent, we have been sent to talk to you. For more than ten years now we have worked in the factory. We get seventy cents a day. That's not much to tell about. We have wives and children, and our seventy cents hardly carries us farther than a glass of brandy and a little plate of soup. We understand that you also have expenses. But we should like to get eighty cents a day, and for us to explain every thing to you, it is necessary that you should consent, because money gives courage to the workingman.' The other received them with that assurance of the rich, sitting straight up in his chair and holding his head as if it dominated your own. He would not have had much trouble, with his education, his habits of a master, his stability as a man of affairs, to put them all three ill at ease. 'Gentlemen, from the first word I say to you: No. The company cannot take account of your wishes. We pay you seventy cents a day, and we judge that it is up to you to lower your life to your wages. As for your insinuations, I shall employ such means as please me to fortify your courage. For the rest, our profits are not what you imagine, you who know neither our efforts nor our disappointments.' It was then, father, that I felt myself your son, and that I recalled your hands, your back which toils, and the carriage wheels that you make. The three workingmen seemed three children in their father's home, with hearts that swell and can feel no more. Ah, it was in vain I thought myself an engineer! On the benches of the school I imagined that my head was full of science, and that that sufficed. But all the blood of my father, the days that I passed in your shop, the storms which go to one's head and seem to come from far off, all that cried out like a grimace, like a lock, like a key.[A] I took up the argument. 'Mr. Superintendent, I know these men. There is my cousin who works in the factory. Do you understand what it is, the life of acids, and that of charcoal?' If you could have seen him! He looked at me with eyes, as if their pupils had turned to ice. 'Mr. Engineer, I don't permit either you, who are a child, or these, who are workingmen, a single word to discuss my sayings and my actions! Gentlemen, you may retire.' I went straight off the handle. A door opened at a single burst. We have at least insolence, we poor, and blows of the mouth, since their weapons stop our blows of the teeth. I went away like them. They lowered their heads and thought. For my part I cried out, I turned about and cried, 'You be hanged!'"
[A] Tout cela criait comme une grimace, comme une serrure, comme une clé.
"Ah, now, indeed! I didn't expect anything like that," said Pierre Bousset. "One raises children to make gentle-folk of them, so that they will work a little less than you. Now then, in God's name! go and demand a place of those for whom you have lost your own!"
The Duty of Civil Disobedience
BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU
(The New England essayist, 1817-1862, author of "Walden," went to prison because he refused to pay taxes to a government which returned fugitive slaves to the South. It is narrated that Emerson came to him and asked, "Henry, what are you doing in here?" "Waldo," was the answer, "what are you doing out of here?")
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on that separate but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her but against her--the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.
If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person.
Address to the Jury
BY ARTURO M. GIOVANNITTI
(Italian student and clergyman, born 1884, who left the Church for the labor movement. During the strike at Lawrence, Mass., he was arrested upon a charge of "constructive murder." He spoke in his own defense at Salem Court House, November 23, 1912)
MR. FOREMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY:--
It is the first time in my life that I speak publicly in your wonderful language, and the most solemn moment in my life. I know not if I will go to the end of my remarks. The District Attorney and the other gentlemen here who are used to measure all human emotions with the yardstick may not understand the tumult that is going on in my soul at this moment. But my friends and my comrades before me, these gentlemen here who have been with me for the last seven or eight months, know exactly, and if my words will fail before I reach the end of this short statement to you, it will be because of the superabundance of sentiments that are flooding to my heart.
I speak to you not because I want to review this evidence at all. I shall not enter into the evidence that has been offered here, as I feel that you gentlemen of the jury have by this time a firm and set conviction; by this time you ought to know, you ought to have realized whether I said or whether I did not say those words that have been put into my mouth by those two detectives. You ought to know whether it is possible, not for a man like me but for any living human being to say those atrocious, those flagitious words that have been attributed to me. I say only this in regard to the evidence that has been introduced in this case, that if there is or ever has been murder in the heart of any man that is in this courtroom today, gentlemen of the jury, that man is not sitting in this cage. We had come to Lawrence, as my noble comrade Mr. Ettor said, because we were prompted by something higher and loftier than what the District Attorney or any other man in this presence here may understand and realize. Were I not afraid that I was being somewhat sacrilegious, I would say that to go and investigate into the motives that prompted and actuated us to go into Lawrence would be the same as to inquire, why did the Saviour come on earth, or why was Lloyd Garrison in this very Commonwealth, in the city of Boston, dragged through the streets with a rope around his neck? Why did all the other great men and masters of thought--why did they go to preach this new gospel of fraternity and brotherhood? It is just that truth should be ascertained, it is right that the criminal should be brought before the bar of justice. But one side alone of our story has been told here. There has been brought only one side of this great industrial question, the method and the tactics. But what about, I say, the ethical part of this question? What about the human and humane part of our ideas? What about the grand condition of tomorrow as we see it, and as we foretell it now to the workers at large, here in this same cage where the felon has sat, in this same cage where the drunkard, where the prostitute, where the hired assassin has been? What about the better and nobler humanity where there shall be no more slaves, where no man will ever be obliged to go on strike in order to obtain fifty cents a week more, where children will not have to starve any more, where women no more will have to go and prostitute themselves; where at last there will not be any more slaves, any more masters, but one great family of friends and brothers. It may be, gentlemen of the jury, that you do not believe in that. It may be that we are dreamers; it may be that we are fanatics, Mr. District Attorney. But so was a fanatic Socrates, who instead of acknowledging the philosophy of the aristocrats of Athens, preferred to drink the poison. And so was a fanatic the Saviour Jesus Christ, who instead of acknowledging that Pilate, or that Tiberius was emperor of Rome, and instead of acknowledging his submission to all the rulers of the time and all the priestcraft of the time, preferred the cross between two thieves.
BY JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
(German philosopher and poet, 1749-1832)
All those who oppose intellectual truths merely stir up the fire; the cinders fly about and set fire to that which else they had not touched.
Essay on Liberty
BY JOHN STUART MILL
(English philosopher and economist, 1806-1873)
Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was once a man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities and public opinion of his time, there took place a memorable collision. Born in an age and country abounding in individual greatness, this man has been handed down to us by those who best knew both him and the age, as the most virtuous man in it; while we know him as the head and prototype of all subsequent teachers of virtue, the source equally of the lofty inspiration of Plato and the judicious utilitarianism of Aristotle, the two headsprings of ethical as of all other philosophy. This acknowledged master of all the eminent thinkers who have since lived--whose fame, still growing after more than two thousand years, all but outweighs the whole remainder of the names which make his native city illustrious--was put to death by his countrymen, after a judicial conviction, for impiety and immorality. Impiety, in denying the Gods recognized by the State; indeed his accusers asserted (see the "Apologia") that he believed in no gods at all. Immorality, in being, by his doctrines and instructions, a "corrupter of youth." Of these charges the tribunal, there is every ground for believing, honestly found him guilty, and condemned the man who probably of all then born had deserved best of mankind to be put to death as a criminal.
FROM THE EPISTLE OF JAMES
So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty.
The Walker
BY ARTURO M. GIOVANNITTI
(See page 296)
I hear footsteps over my head all night.
They come and they go. Again they come and they go all night.
They come one eternity in four paces and they go one eternity in four paces, and between the coming and the going there is Silence and the Night and the Infinite.
For infinite are the nine feet of a prison cell, and endless is the march of him who walks between the yellow brick wall and the red iron gate, thinking things that cannot be chained and cannot be locked, but that wander far away in the sunlit world, each in a wild pilgrimage after a destined goal.
* * * * *
Throughout the restless night I hear the footsteps over my head.
Who walks? I know not. It is the phantom of the jail, the sleepless brain, a man, the man, the Walker.
One--two--three--four: four paces and the wall.
One--two--three--four: four paces and the iron gate.
He has measured his space, he has measured it accurately, scrupulously, minutely, as the hangman measures the rope and the grave-digger the coffin--so many feet, so many inches, so many fractions of an inch for each of the four paces.
One--two--three--four. Each step sounds heavy and hollow over my head, and the echo of each step sounds hollow within my head as I count them in suspense and in dread that once, perhaps, in the endless walk, there may be five steps instead of four between the yellow brick wall and the red iron gate.
But he has measured the space so accurately, so scrupulously, so minutely that nothing breaks the grave rhythm of the slow, fantastic march....
* * * * *
All the sounds of the living beings and inanimate things, and all the noises of the night I have heard in my wistful vigil.
I have heard the moans of him who bewails a thing that is dead and the sighs of him who tries to smother a thing that will not die;
I have heard the stifled sobs of the one who weeps with his head under the coarse blanket, and the whisperings of the one who prays with his forehead on the hard, cold stone of the floor;
I have heard him who laughs the shrill, sinister laugh of folly at the horror rampant on the yellow wall and at the red eyes of the nightmare glaring through the iron bars;
I have heard in the sudden icy silence him who coughs a dry, ringing cough, and wished madly that his throat would not rattle so and that he would not spit on the floor, for no sound was more atrocious than that of his sputum upon the floor;
I have heard him who swears fearsome oaths which I listen to in reverence and awe, for they are holier than the virgin's prayer;
And I have heard, most terrible of all, the silence of two hundred brains all possessed by one single, relentless, unforgiving, desperate thought.
All this I have heard in the watchful night,
And the murmur of the wind beyond the walls,
And the tolls of a distant bell,
And the woeful dirge of the rain,
And the remotest echoes of the sorrowful city,
And the terrible beatings, wild beatings, mad beatings of the One Heart which is nearest to my heart.
All this have I heard in the still night;
But nothing is louder, harder, drearier, mightier, more awful than the footsteps I hear over my head all night....
* * * * *
All through the night he walks and he thinks. Is it more frightful because he walks and his footsteps sound hollow over my head, or because he thinks and speaks not his thoughts?
But does he think? Why should he think? Do I think? I only hear the footsteps and count them. Four steps and the wall. Four steps and the gate. But beyond? Beyond? Where goes he beyond the gate and the wall?
He does not go beyond. His thought breaks there on the iron gate. Perhaps it breaks like a wave of rage, perhaps like a sudden flow of hope, but it always returns to beat the wall like a billow of helplessness and despair.
He walks to and fro within the narrow whirlpit of this ever storming and furious thought. Only one thought--constant, fixed, immovable, sinister, without power and without voice.
A thought of madness, frenzy, agony and despair, a hell-brewed thought, for it is a natural thought. All things natural are things impossible while there are jails in the world--bread, work, happiness, peace, love.
But he thinks not of this. As he walks he thinks of the most superhuman, the most unattainable, the most impossible thing in the world:
He thinks of a small brass key that turns just half around and throws open the red iron gate.
* * * * *
That is all the Walker thinks, as he walks throughout the night.
And that is what two hundred minds drowned in the darkness and the silence of the night think, and that is also what I think.
Wonderful is the supreme wisdom of the jail that makes all think the same thought. Marvelous is the providence of the law that equalizes all, even in mind and sentiment. Fallen is the last barrier of privilege, the aristocracy of the intellect. The democracy of reason has leveled all the two hundred minds to the common surface of the same thought.
I, who have never killed, think like the murderer;
I, who have never stolen, reason like the thief;
I think, reason, wish, hope, doubt, wait like the hired assassin, the embezzler, the forger, the counterfeiter, the incestuous, the raper, the drunkard, the prostitute, the pimp, I, I who used to think of love and life and flowers and song and beauty and the ideal.
A little key, a little key as little as my little finger, a little key of shining brass.
All my ideas, my thoughts, my dreams are congealed in a little key of shiny brass.
All my brain, all my soul, all the suddenly surging latent powers of my deepest life are in the pocket of a white-haired man dressed in blue.
He is great, powerful, formidable, the man with the white hair, for he has in his pocket the mighty talisman which makes one man cry, and one man pray, and one laugh, and one cough, and one walk, and all keep awake and listen and think the same maddening thought.
Greater than all men is the man with the white hair and the small brass key, for no other man in the world could compel two hundred men to think for so long the same thought. Surely when the light breaks I will write a hymn unto him which shall hail him greater than Mohammed and Arbues and Torquemada and Mesmer, and all the other masters of other men's thoughts. I shall call him Almighty, for he holds everything of all and of me in a little brass key in his pocket.
Everything of me he holds but the branding iron of contempt and the claymore of hatred for the monstrous cabala that can make the apostle and the murderer, the poet and the procurer, think of the same gate, the same key and the same exit on the different sunlit highways of life.
* * * * *
My brother, do not walk any more.
It is wrong to walk on a grave. It is a sacrilege to walk four steps from the headstone to the foot and four steps from the foot to the headstone.
If you stop walking, my brother, no longer will this be a grave, for you will give me back that mind that is chained to your feet and the right to think my own thoughts.
I implore you, my brother, for I am weary of the long vigil, weary of counting your steps, and heavy with sleep.
Stop, rest, sleep, my brother, for the dawn is well nigh and it is not the key alone that can throw open the gate.
BY GEORGE WASHINGTON
(First president of the United States, 1732-1799)
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence--it is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
Forcible Feeding
(From "The Suffragette")
BY E. SYLVIA PANKHURST
(English militant leader)
She was then surrounded and held down, whilst the chair was tilted backwards. She clenched her teeth, but the doctor pulled her mouth away to form a pouch and the wardress poured in milk and brandy, some of which trickled in through the crevices. Later in the day the doctors and wardresses again appeared. They forced her down on to the bed and held her there. One of the doctors then produced a tube two yards in length with a glass junction in the center and a funnel at one end. He forced the other end of the tube up her nostril, hurting her so terribly that the matron and two of the wardresses burst into tears and the second doctor interfered. At last the tube was pushed down into the stomach. She felt the pain of it to the end of the breast bone. Then one of the doctors stood upon a chair holding the funnel end of the tube at arm's length, and poured food down whilst the wardress and the other doctor all gripped her tight. She felt as though she would suffocate. There was a rushing, burning sensation in her head, the drums of her ears seemed to be bursting. The agony of pain in the throat and breast bone continued. The thing seemed to go on for hours. When at last the tube was withdrawn, she felt as though all the back of her nose and throat were being torn out with it.
Then almost fainting she was carried back to the punishment cell and put to bed. For hours the pain in the chest, nose and ears continued and she felt terribly sick and faint. Day after day the struggle continued; she used no violence, but each time resisted and was overcome by force of numbers. Often she vomited during the operation. When the food did not go down quickly enough the doctor pinched her nose with the tube in it, causing her even greater pain.
The Subjection of Women
BY JOHN STUART MILL
(See pages 199, 299)
In struggles for political emancipation, everybody knows how often its champions are bought off by bribes, or daunted by terrors. In the case of women, each individual of the subject class is in a chronic state of bribery and intimidation combined. In setting up the standard of resistance, a large number of the leaders, and still more of the followers, must make an almost complete sacrifice of the pleasures or the alleviations of their own individual lot. If ever any system of privilege and enforced subjection had its yoke tightly riveted on the necks of those who are kept down by it, this has.
The Old Suffragist
BY MARGARET WIDDEMER
(See page 256)
She could have loved--her woman-passions beat Deeper than theirs, or else she had not known How to have dropped her heart beneath their feet A living stepping-stone:
The little hands--did they not clutch her heart? The guarding arms--was she not very tired? Was it an easy thing to walk apart, Unresting, undesired?
She gave away her crown of woman-praise, Her gentleness and silent girlhood grace To be a merriment for idle days, Scorn for the market-place:
She strove for an unvisioned, far-off good, For one far hope she knew she should not see: These--not her daughters--crowned with motherhood And love and beauty--free.
Going to the People
(From "Memoirs of a Revolutionist")
BY PETER KROPOTKIN
(The Russian author and scientist, born 1842, who renounced the title of prince and spent many years in a dungeon for his faith, has here told his life story)
"It is bitter, the bread that has been made by slaves," our poet Nekrasoff wrote. The young generation actually refused to eat that bread, and to enjoy the riches that had been accumulated in their fathers' houses by means of servile labor, whether the laborers were actual serfs or slaves of the present industrial system.
All Russia read with astonishment, in the indictment which was produced at the court against Karakozoff and his friends, that these young men, owners of considerable fortunes, used to live three or four in the same room, never spending more than ten roubles (five dollars) apiece a month for all their needs, and giving at the same time their fortunes for co-operative associations, co-operative workshops (where they themselves worked), and the like. Five years later, thousands and thousands of the Russian youth--the best part of it--were doing the same. Their watch-word was, "V naród!" (To the people; be the people.) During the years 1860-65 in nearly every wealthy family a bitter struggle was going on between the fathers, who wanted to maintain the old traditions, and the sons and daughters, who defended their right to dispose of their life according to their own ideals. Young men left the military service, the counter and the shop, and flocked to the university towns. Girls, bred in the most aristocratic families, rushed penniless to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kieff, eager to learn a profession which would free them from the domestic yoke, and some day, perhaps, also from the possible yoke of a husband. After hard and bitter struggles, many of them won that personal freedom. Now they wanted to utilize it, not for their own personal enjoyment, but for carrying to the people the knowledge that had emancipated them.
In every town of Russia, in every quarter of St. Petersburg, small groups were formed for self-improvement and self-education; the works of the philosophers, the writings of the economists, the researches of the young Russian historical school, were carefully read in these circles, and the reading was followed by endless discussions. The aim of all that reading and discussion was to solve the great question which rose before them: In what way could they be useful to the masses? Gradually, they came to the idea that the only way was to settle among the people and to live the people's life. Young men went into the villages as doctors, doctors' assistants, teachers, village scribes, even as agricultural laborers, blacksmiths, woodcutters, and so on, and tried to live there in closest contact with the peasants. Girls passed teachers' examinations, learned midwifery or nursing, and went by the hundred into the villages, devoting themselves entirely to the poorest part of the population....
Here and there, small groups of propagandists had settled in towns and villages in various capacities. Blacksmiths' shops and small farms had been started, and young men of the wealthier classes worked in the shops or on the farms, to be in daily contact with the toiling masses. At Moscow, a number of young girls, of rich families, who had studied at the Zurich university and had started a separate organization, went even so far as to enter cotton factories, where they worked from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, and lived in the factory barracks the miserable life of the Russian factory girls. It was a grand movement, in which, at the lowest estimate, from two to three thousand persons took an active part, while twice or thrice as many sympathizers and supporters helped the active vanguard in various ways. With a good half of that army our St. Petersburg circle was in regular correspondence--always, of course, in cipher.
The literature which could be published in Russia under a rigorous censorship--the faintest hint of Socialism being prohibited--was soon found insufficient, and we started a printing office of our own abroad. Pamphlets for the workers and the peasants had to be written, and our small "literary committee," of which I was a member, had its hands full of work. Serghei wrote a couple of such pamphlets--one in the Lammenais style, and another containing an exposition of Socialism in a fairy tale--and both had a wide circulation. The books and pamphlets which were printed abroad were smuggled into Russia by thousands, stored at certain spots, and sent out to the local circles, which distributed them amongst the peasants and the workers. All this required a vast organization as well as much traveling about, and a colossal correspondence, particularly for protecting our helpers and our bookstores from the police. We had special ciphers for different provincial circles, and often, after six or seven hours had been passed in discussing all details, the women, who did not trust to our accuracy in the cipher correspondence, spent all the night in covering sheets of paper with cabalistic figures and fractions.
The Revolutionist
BY IVAN TURGÉNEV
(Russian writer, 1818-1883, one of the masters of the novel form. He was imprisoned and later exiled. In the original the present extract is a prose poem. The versification is by Arthur Guiterman)
I saw a spacious house. O'erhung with pall, A narrow doorway pierced the sombre wall. Within was chill, impenetrable shade; Without there stood a maid--a Russian maid, To whom the icy dark sent forth a slow And hollow-sounding Voice:
"And dost thou know, When thou hast entered, what awaits thee here?" "I know," she said, "and knowing do not fear." "Cold, hunger, hatred, Slander's blighting breath," The Voice still chanted, "suffering--and Death?" "I know," she said.
"Undaunted, wilt thou dare The sneers of kindred? Art thou steeled to bear From those whom most thou lovest, spite and scorn?" "Though Love be paid with Hate, that shall be borne," She answered.
"Think! Thy doom may be to die By thine own hand, with none to fathom why, Unthanked, unhonored, desolate, alone, Thy grave unmarked, thy toil, thy love unknown, And none in days to come shall speak thy name." She said: "I ask no pity, thanks or fame." "Art thou prepared for crime?"
She bowed her head: "Yes, crime, if that shall need," the maiden said. Now paused the Voice before it asked anew: "But knowest thou that all thou holdest true Thy soul may yet deny in bitter pain, So thou shalt deem thy sacrifice in vain?" "E'en this I know," she said, "and yet again I pray thee, let me enter."
"Enter then!" That hollow Voice replied. She passed the door. A sable curtain fell--and nothing more. "A fool!" snarled some one, gnashing. Like a prayer "A saint!" the whispered answer thrilled the air.
In a Russian Prison
(From "Memoirs of a Revolutionist")
BY PETER KROPOTKIN
(See page 308)
One day in the summer of 1875, in the cell that was next to mine I distinctly heard the light steps of heeled boots, and a few minutes later I caught fragments of a conversation. A feminine voice spoke from the cell, and a deep bass voice--evidently that of the sentry--grunted something in reply. Then I recognized the sound of the colonel's spurs, his rapid steps, his swearing at the sentry, and the click of the key in the lock. He said something, and a feminine voice loudly replied: "We did not talk. I only asked him to call the non-commissioned officer." Then the door was locked, and I heard the colonel swearing in whispers at the sentry.
So I was alone no more. I had a lady neighbor, who at once broke down the severe discipline which had hitherto reigned among the soldiers. From that day the walls of the fortress, which had been mute during the last fifteen months, became animated. From all sides I heard knocks with the foot on the floor: one, two, three, four, ... eleven knocks; twenty-four knocks, fifteen knocks; then an interruption, followed by three knocks, and a long succession of thirty-three knocks. Over and over again these knocks were repeated in the same succession, until the neighbor would guess at last that they were meant for "Kto vy?" (Who are you?), the letter v being the third letter in our alphabet. Thereupon conversation was soon established, and usually was conducted in the abridged alphabet; that is, the alphabet being divided into six rows of five letters, each letter marked by its row and its place in the row.
I discovered with great pleasure that I had at my left my friend Serdukóff, with whom I could soon talk about everything, especially when we used our cipher. But intercourse with men brought its sufferings as well as its joys. Underneath me was lodged a peasant, whom Serdukóff knew. He talked to him by means of knocks; and even against my will, often unconsciously during my work, I followed their conversations. I also spoke to him. Now, if solitary confinement without any sort of work is hard for educated men, it is infinitely harder for a peasant who is accustomed to physical work, and not at all wont to spend years in reading. Our peasant friend felt quite miserable, and having been kept for nearly two years in another prison before he was brought to the fortress--his crime was that he had listened to Socialists--he was already broken down. Soon I began to notice, to my terror, that from time to time his mind wandered. Gradually his thoughts grew more and more confused, and we two perceived, step by step, day by day, evidences that his reason was failing, until his talk became at last that of a lunatic. Frightful noises and wild cries came next from the lower story; our neighbor was mad, but was still kept for several months in the casemate before he was removed to an asylum, from which he never emerged. To witness the destruction of a man's mind, under such conditions, was terrible. I am sure it must have contributed to increase the nervous irritability of my good and true friend Serdukóff. When, after four years' imprisonment, he was acquitted by the court and released, he shot himself.
Batuschka
BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
(New England poet and journalist, 1836-1907)
From yonder gilded minaret Beside the steel-blue Neva set, I faintly catch, from time to time, The sweet, aerial midnight chime-- "God save the Tsar!"
Above the ravelins and the moats Of the white citadel it floats; And men in dungeons far beneath Listen, and pray, and gnash their teeth-- "God save the Tsar!"
The soft reiterations sweep Across the horror of their sleep, As if some demon in his glee Were mocking at their misery-- "God save the Tsar!"
In his red palace over there, Wakeful, he needs must hear the prayer. How can it drown the broken cries Wrung from his children's agonies?-- "God save the Tsar!"
Father they called him from of old-- Batuschka!... How his heart is cold! Wait till a million scourgèd men Rise in their awful might, and then-- "God save the Tsar!"
Breshkovskaya
BY ELSA BARKER
(Contemporary American poet and novelist. Catherine Breshkovsky, called "Little Mother" by the Russian peasants, was sentenced to a long term of exile in Siberia when seventy-seven years of age)
How narrow seems the round of ladies' lives And ladies' duties in their smiling world, The day this Titan woman, gray with years, Goes out across the void to prove her soul! Brief are the pains of motherhood that end In motherhood's long joy; but she has borne The age-long travail of a cause that lies Still-born at last on History's cold lap.
And yet she rests not; yet she will not drink The cup of peace held to her parching lips By smug Dishonor's hand. Nay, forth she fares, Old and alone, on exile's rocky road-- That well-worn road with snows incarnadined By blood-drops from her feet long years agone.
Mother of power, my soul goes out to you As a strong swimmer goes to meet the sea Upon whose vastness he is like a leaf. What are the ends and purposes of song, Save as a bugle at the lips of Life To sound reveille to a drowsing world When some great deed is rising like the sun? Where are those others whom your deeds inspired To deeds and words that were themselves a deed? Those who believe in death have gone with death To the gray crags of immortality; Those who believed in life have gone with life To the red halls of spiritual death.
And you? But what is death or life to you? Only a weapon in the hand of faith To cleave a way for beings yet unborn To a far freedom you will never share! Freedom of body is an empty shell Wherein men crawl whose souls are held with gyves; For Freedom is a spirit, and she dwells As often in a jail as on the hills. In all the world this day there is no soul Freer than you, Breshkovsky, as you stand Facing the future in your narrow cell. For you are free of self and free of fear, Those twin-born shades that lie in wait for man When he steps out upon the wind-blown road That leads to human greatness and to pain. Take in your hand once more the pilgrim's staff-- Your delicate hand misshapen from the nights In Kara's mines; bind on your unbent back That long has borne the burdens of the race, The exile's bundle, and upon your feet Strap the worn sandals of a tireless faith.
You are too great for pity. After you We send not sobs, but songs; and all our days We shall walk bravelier knowing where you are.
In Siberia
BY KATHERINE BRESHKOVSKY
(Reported by Ernest Poole)
As punishment for my attempt at escape I was sentenced to four years' hard labor in Kara and to forty blows of the lash. Into my cell a physician came to see if I were strong enough to live through the agony. I saw at once that, afraid to flog a woman "political" without precedent, by this trick of declaring me too sick to be punished they wished to establish the precedent of the sentence in order that others might be flogged in the future. I insisted that I was strong enough, and that the court had no right to record such a sentence unless they flogged me at once. The sentence was not carried out.
A few weeks later eight of the men politicals escaped in pairs, leaving dummies in their places. As the guards never took more than a hasty look into that noisome cell, they did not discover the ruse for weeks. Then mounted Cossacks rode out. The man-hunt spread. Some of the fugitives struggled through jungles, over mountains and through swamps a thousand miles to Vladivostok, saw the longed-for American vessels, and there on the docks were re-captured. All were brought back to Kara.
For this we were all punished. One morning the Cossack guards entered our cells, seized us, tore off our clothes, and dressed us in convict suits alive with vermin. That scene cannot be described. One of us attempted suicide. Taken to an old prison we were thrown into the "black holes"--foul little stalls off a low grimy hall which contained two big stoves and two little windows. Each of us had a stall six feet by five. On winter nights the stall doors were left open for heat, but in summer each was locked at night in her own black hole. For three months we did not use our bunks, but fought with candles and pails of scalding water, until at last the vermin were all killed. We had been put on the "black hole diet" of black bread and water. For three years we never breathed the outside air. We struggled constantly against the outrages inflicted on us. After one outrage we lay like a row of dead women for nine days without touching food, until certain promises were finally exacted from the warden. This "hunger strike" was used repeatedly. To thwart it we were often bound hand and foot, while Cossacks tried to force food down our throats.
Kara grew worse after I left. To hint at what happened I tell briefly the story of my dear friend Maria, a woman of broad education and deep refinement. Shortly after my going, Maria saw Madame Sigida strike an official who had repeatedly insulted the women. Two days later she watched Sigida die, moaning and bleeding from the lash; that night she saw three women commit suicide as a protest to the world; she knew that twenty men attempted suicide on the night following, and she determined to double the protest by assassinating the Governor of Trans-Baikal, who had ordered Sigida's flogging. At this time Maria was pregnant. Her prison term over, she left her husband and walked hundreds of miles to the Governor's house and shot him. She spent three months in a cold, dirty, "secret cell" not long enough to lie down in or high enough to stand up in, wearing the cast-off suit of a convict, sleeping on the bare floor and tormented by vermin. She was then sentenced to be hanged. She hesitated now whether to save the life of her unborn child. She knew that if she revealed her condition her sentence would be changed to imprisonment. She decided to keep silence and sacrifice her child, that when the execution was over and her condition was discovered, the effect on Russia might be still greater. Her condition, however, became apparent, and she was started off to the Irkutsk prison. It was midwinter, forty degrees below zero. She walked. She was given no overcoat and no boots, until some common criminals in the column gave her theirs. Her child was born dead in prison, and soon after she too died.
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
BY ALEXANDER BERKMAN
(The life-story of a man who served a fourteen-year sentence in the Western Penitentiary of Pennsylvania for an attempt at assassination)
(Introduction by Hutchins Hapgood)
Not only has this book the interest of the human document, but it is also a striking proof of the power of the human soul. Alexander Berkman spent fourteen years in prison, under perhaps more than commonly harsh and severe conditions. Prison life tends to destroy the body, weaken the mind and pervert the character. Berkman consciously struggled with these adverse, destructive conditions. He took care of his body. He took care of his mind. He did so strenuously. It was a moral effort. He felt insane ideas trying to take possession of him. Insanity is a natural result of prison life. It always tends to come. This man felt it, consciously struggled against it, and overcame it. That the prison affected him is true. It always does. But he saved himself, essentially. Society tried to destroy him, but failed.
If people will read this book carefully it will tend to do away with prisons. The public, once vividly conscious of what prison life is and must be, would not be willing to maintain prisons. This is the only book that I know which goes deeply into the corrupting, demoralizing psychology of prison life. It shows, in picture after picture, sketch after sketch, not only the obvious brutality, stupidity, ugliness permeating the institution, but, very touching, it shows the good qualities and instincts of the human heart perverted, demoralized, helplessly struggling for life; beautiful tendencies basely expressing themselves. And the personality of Berkman goes through it all; idealistic, courageous, uncompromising, sincere, truthful; not untouched, as I have said, by his surroundings, but remaining his essential self....
The Russian Nihilistic origin of Berkman, his Anarchistic experience in America, his attempt on the life of Frick--an attempt made at a violent industrial crisis, an attempt made as a result of a sincere if fanatical belief that he was called on by his destiny to strike a psychological blow for the oppressed of the community--this part of the book will arouse extreme disagreement and disapproval of his ideas and his act. But I see no reason why this, with the rest, should not rather be regarded as an integral part of a human document, as part of the record of a life, with its social and psychological suggestions and explanations. Why not try to understand an honest man even if he feels called on to kill? There, too, it may be deeply instructive. There, too, it has its lessons. Read it not in a combative spirit. Read to understand. Do not read to agree, of course, but read to see.
The Dungeon
In the storeroom I am stripped of my suit of dark gray, and clad in the hateful stripes. Coatless and shoeless, I am led through hallways and corridors, down a steep flight of stairs, and thrown into the dungeon.
* * * * *
Total darkness. The blackness is massive, palpable--I feel its hand upon my head, my face. I dare not move, lest a misstep thrust me into the abyss. I hold my hand close to my eyes--I feel the touch of my lashes upon it, but I cannot see its outline. Motionless I stand on the spot, devoid of all sense of direction. The silence is sinister; it seems to me I can hear it. Only now and then the hasty scrambling of nimble feet suddenly rends the stillness, and the gnawing of invisible river rats haunts the fearful solitude.
Slowly the blackness pales. It ebbs and melts; out of the sombre gray, a wall looms above; the silhouette of a door rises dimly before me, sloping upward and growing compact and impenetrable.
The hours drag in unbroken sameness. Not a sound reaches me from the cell-house. In the maddening quiet and darkness I am bereft of all consciousness of time, save once a day when the heavy rattle of keys apprises me of the morning: the dungeon is unlocked, and the silent guards hand me a slice of bread and a cup of water. The double doors fall heavily to, the steps grow fainter and die in the distance, and all is dark again in the dungeon.
The numbness of death steals upon my soul. The floor is cold and clammy, the gnawing grows louder and nearer, and I am filled with dread lest the starving rats attack my bare feet. I snatch a few unconscious moments leaning against the door; and then again I pace the cell, striving to keep awake, wondering whether it be night or day, yearning for the sound of a human voice.
Utterly forsaken! Cast into the stony bowels of the underground, the world of man receding, leaving no trace behind.... Eagerly I strain my ear--only the ceaseless, fearful gnawing. I clutch the bars in desperation--a hollow echo mocks the clanking iron. My hands tear violently at the door--"Ho, there! Any one here?" All is silent. Nameless terrors quiver in my mind, weaving nightmares of mortal dread and despair. Fear shapes convulsive thoughts: they rage in wild tempest, then become calm, and again rush through time and space in a rapid succession of strangely familiar scenes, wakened in my slumbering consciousness.
Exhausted and weary I droop against the wall. A slimy creeping on my face startles me in horror, and again I pace the cell. I feel cold and hungry. Am I forgotten? Three days must have passed, and more. Have they forgotten me?...
The clank of keys sends a thrill of joy to my heart. My tomb will open--oh, to see the light, and breathe the air again....
"Officer, isn't my time up yet?"
"What's your hurry? You've only been here one day."
The doors fall to. Ravenously I devour the bread, so small and thin, just a bite. Only one day! Despair enfolds me like a pall. Faint with anguish, I sink to the floor....
The Sick Line
One by one the men augment the row; they walk slowly, bent and coughing, painfully limping down the steep flights. From every range they come; the old and decrepit, the young consumptives, the lame and asthmatic, a tottering old negro, an idiotic white boy. All look withered and dejected,--a ghastly line, palsied and blear-eyed, blanched in the valley of death.
The rotunda door opens noisily, and the doctor enters, accompanied by Deputy Warden Graves and Assistant Deputy Hopkins. Behind them is a prisoner, dressed in dark gray and carrying a medicine box. Dr. Boyce glances at the long line, and knits his brows. He looks at his watch, and the frown deepens. He has much to do. Since the death of the senior doctor, the young graduate is the sole physician of the big prison. He must make the rounds of the shops before noon, and visit the hospital before the Warden or the Deputy drops in.
Mr. Greaves sits down at the officers' desk, near the hall entrance. The Assistant Deputy, pad in hand, places himself at the head of the sick line. The doctor leans against the door of the rotunda, facing the Deputy. The block officers stand within call, at respectful distances.
"Two-fifty-five!" the Assistant Deputy calls out.
A slender young man leaves the line and approaches the doctor. He is tall and well featured, the large eyes lustrous in the pale face. He speaks in a hoarse voice:
"Doctor, there is something the matter with my side. I have pains, and I cough bad at night, and in the morning----"
"All right," the doctor interrupts, without looking up from his note book. "Give him some salts," he adds, with a nod to his assistant.
"Next!" the Deputy calls.
"Will you please excuse me from the shop for a few days?" the sick prisoner pleads, a tremor in his voice.
The physician glances questioningly at the Deputy. The latter cries, impatiently, "Next, next man!" striking the desk twice, in quick succession, with the knuckles of his hand.
"Return to the shop," the doctor says to the prisoner.
"Next," the Deputy calls, spurting a stream of tobacco juice in the direction of the cuspidor. It strikes sidewise, and splashes over the foot of the approaching new patient, a young negro, his neck covered with bulging tumors.
"Number?" the doctor inquires.
"One-thirty-seven, A one-thirty-seven!" the Deputy mumbles, his head thrown back to receive a fresh handful of "scrap" tobacco.
"Guess Ah's got de big neck, Ah is, Mistah Boyce," the negro says hoarsely.
"Salts. Return to work. Next!"
"A one-twenty-six!"
A young man with parchment-like face, sere and yellow, walks painfully from the line.
"Doctor, I seem to be gettin' worser, and I'm afraid----"
"What's the trouble?"
"Pains in the stomach. Gettin' so turrible, I----"
"Give him a plaster. Next!"
"Plaster hell!" the prisoner breaks out in a fury, his face growing livid. "Look at this, will you?" With a quick motion he pulls his shirt up to his head. His chest and back are entirely covered with porous plasters; not an inch of skin is visible. "Damn your plasters," he cries with sudden sobs, "I ain't got no more room for plasters. I'm putty near dyin', an' you won't do nothin' fer me."
The guards pounce upon the man, and drag him into the rotunda.
The Keepers
The comparative freedom of the range familiarizes me with the workings of the institution, and brings me in close contact with the authorities. The personnel of the guards is of very inferior character. I find their average intelligence considerably lower than that of the inmates. Especially does the element recruited from the police and the detective service lack sympathy with the unfortunates in their charge. They are mostly men discharged from city employment because of habitual drunkenness, or flagrant brutality and corruption. Their attitude toward the prisoners is summed up in coercion and suppression. They look upon the men as will-less objects of iron-handed discipline, exact unquestioning obedience and absolute submissiveness to peremptory whims, and harbor personal animosity toward the less pliant. The more intelligent among the officers scorn inferior duties, and crave advancement. The authority and remuneration of a Deputy Wardenship is alluring to them, and every keeper considers himself the fittest for the vacancy. But the coveted prize is awarded to the guard most feared by the inmates, and most subservient to the Warden,--a direct incitement to brutality on the one hand, to sycophancy on the other....
Daily I behold the machinery at work, grinding and pulverizing, brutalizing the officers, dehumanizing the inmates. Far removed from the strife and struggle of the larger world, I yet witness its miniature replica, more agonizing and merciless within the walls. A perfected model it is, this prison life, with its apparent uniformity and dull passivity. But beneath the torpid surface smolder the fires of being, now crackling faintly under a dun smothering smoke, now blazing forth with the ruthlessness of despair. Hidden by the veil of discipline rages the struggle of fiercely contending wills, and intricate meshes are woven in the quagmire of darkness and suppression.
Intrigue and counter-plot, violence and corruption, are rampant in cell-house and shop. The prisoners spy upon each other, and in turn upon the officers. The latter encourage the trusties in unearthing the secret doings of the inmates, and the stools enviously compete with each other in supplying information to the keepers. Often they deliberately inveigle the trustful prisoner into a fake plot to escape, help and encourage him in the preparations, and at the critical moment denounce him to the authorities. The luckless man is severely punished, usually remaining in utter ignorance of the intrigue. The provocateur is rewarded with greater liberty and special privileges. Frequently his treachery proves the stepping-stone to freedom, aided by the Warden's official recommendation of the "model prisoner" to the State Board of Pardons.
BY FREDERIC HARRISON
(English philosopher, born 1831)
Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives the preaching of a new gospel.
The Seven That Were Hanged
BY LEONID ANDREYEV
(One of the most famous of the Russian writer's stories, in which he describes the execution of a group of Terrorists, analyzing their sensations in their separate cells, and on their journey together to the foot of the gallows)
The Unknown, surnamed Werner, was a man fatigued by struggle. He had loved life, the theatre, society, art, literature, passionately. Endowed with an excellent memory, he spoke several languages perfectly. He was fond of dress, and had excellent manners. Of the whole group of terrorists he was the only one who was able to appear in society without risk of recognition.
For a long time already, and without his comrades having noticed it, he had entertained a profound contempt for men. More of a mathematician than a poet, ecstasy and inspiration had remained so far things unknown to him; at times he would look upon himself as a madman seeking to square the circle in seas of human blood. The enemy against which he daily struggled could not inspire him with respect; it was nothing but a compact network of stupidities, treasons, falsehoods, base deceits....
Werner understood that the execution was not simply death, but also something more. In any case, he was determined to meet it calmly, to live until the end as if nothing had happened or would happen. Only in this way could he repress the profoundest contempt for the execution and preserve his liberty of mind. His comrades, although knowing well his cold and haughty intrepidity, would perhaps not have believed it themselves; but in the courtroom he thought not of life or of death: he played in his mind a difficult game of chess, giving it his deepest and quietest attention. An excellent player, he had begun this game on the very day of his imprisonment, and he had kept it up continually. And the verdict that condemned him did not displace a single piece on the invisible board.
Now he was shrugging his shoulders and feeling his pulse. His heart beat fast, but tranquilly and regularly, with a sonorous force. Like a novice thrown into prison for the first time, he examined attentively the cell, the bolts, the chair screwed to the wall, and said to himself:
"Why have I such a sensation of joy, of liberty? Yes, of liberty; I think of to-morrow's execution, and it seems to me it does not exist. I look at the walls, and they seem to me not to exist either. And I feel as free as if, instead of being in prison, I had just come out of another cell in which I had been confined all my life."
Werner's hands began to tremble, a thing unknown to him. His thought became more and more vibrant. It seemed to him that tongues of fire were moving in his head, trying to escape from his brain to lighten the still obscure distance. Finally the flame darted forth, and the horizon was brilliantly illuminated.
The vague lassitude that had tortured Werner during the last two years had disappeared at sight of death; his beautiful youth came back. It was even something more than beautiful youth. With the astonishing clearness of mind that sometimes lifts man to the supreme heights of meditation, Werner saw suddenly both life and death; and the majesty of this new spectacle struck him. He seemed to be following a path as narrow as the edge of a blade, on the crest of the loftiest mountain. On one side he saw life, and on the other he saw death; and they were like two seas, sparkling and beautiful, melting into each other at the horizon in a single infinite extension.
"What is this, then? What a divine spectacle!" said he slowly.
He arose involuntarily and straightened up, as if in presence of the Supreme Being. And, annihilating the walls, annihilating space and time, by the force of his all-penetrating look, he cast his eyes into the depths of the life that he had quitted.
And life took on a new aspect. He no longer tried, as of old, to translate into words that he was; moreover, in the whole range of human language, still so poor and miserly, he found no words adequate. The paltry, dirty and evil things that suggested to him contempt and sometimes even disgust at the sight of men had completely disappeared, just as, to people rising in a balloon, the mud and filth of the narrow streets become invisible, and ugliness changes into beauty.
With an unconscious movement Werner walked toward the table and leaned upon it with his right arm. Haughty and authoritative by nature, he had never been seen in a prouder, freer, and more imperious attitude; never had his face worn such a look, never had he so lifted up his head, for at no previous time had he been as free and powerful as now, in this prison, on the eve of execution, at the threshold of death.
In his illuminated eyes men wore a new aspect, an unknown beauty and charm. He hovered above time, and never had this humanity, which only the night before was howling like a wild beast in the forest, appeared to him so young. What had heretofore seemed to him terrible, unpardonable and base, became suddenly touching and naïve, just as we cherish in the child the awkwardness of its behavior, the incoherent stammerings in which its unconscious genius glimmers, its laughable errors and blunders, its cruel bruises.
"My dear friends!" ...
What mysterious path had he followed to pass from a feeling of unlimited and haughty liberty to this passionate and moving pity? He did not know. Did he really pity his comrades, or did his tears hide something more passionate, something really greater? His heart, which had suddenly revived and reblossomed, could not tell him. Werner wept, and whispered:
"My dear comrades! My dear comrades!"
And in this man who wept, and who smiled through his tears, no one--not the judges, or his comrades, or himself--would have recognized the cold and haughty Werner, sceptical and insolent.
A Woman's Execution
BY EDWARD KING
(After the Paris Commune of 1871, the leaders of the people were led out and slaughtered by thousands. The author of this poem was an American journalist, 1848-1896)
Sweet-breathed and young, The people's daughter, No nerves unstrung, Going to slaughter!
"Good morning, friends, You'll love us better,-- Make us amends: We've burst your fetter!
"How the sun gleams! (Women are snarling): Give me your beams, Liberty's darling!
"Marie's my name; Christ's mother bore it. The badge? No shame: Glad that I wore it!"
(Hair to the waist, Limbs like a Venus): Robes are displaced: "Soldiers, please screen us!
"He at the front? That is my lover: Stood all the brunt;-- Now--the fight's over.
"Powder and bread Gave out together: Droll to be dead In this bright weather!
"Jean, boy, we might Have married in June! This is the wall? Right! Vive la Commune!"
BY THOMAS JEFFERSON
(See page 228)
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
These Shifting Scenes
BY CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL
(American editor and Socialist lecturer, born 1860. In the following paragraphs he has given a newspaper reporter's reminiscences of the Chicago Anarchists)
After so many years the passions and prejudices of the half-forgotten struggle ought to have died away, and men may now speak candidly and without restraint of these things as they really were. Let me then record my deliberate conviction that Albert Parsons never entertained the thought of harm against any human being, for I have seldom met a man of a more genuine kindness of heart; and if the men he denounced in his speeches had been in actual danger before him I am certain he would have been the first to rush to their defense from physical harm. And while I am on this subject, I may add an expression of a wonder growing upon me for many years, that no one has ever paid an adequate tribute to this man. I have not the slightest sympathy with his doctrines, if he believed in the violence he seemed sometimes to preach, which I could never tell. I have lived in the world long enough to know that the social wrongs that moved him to protest can never be cured by violence. Say, then, that the man erred grievously; if his error had been ten times as great it ought to have been wiped from human recollection by his sacrifice, and there should remain but the one image of him, leaving his place of safety and voluntarily entering the prisoner's dock. I doubt if that magnanimous act has its parallel in history. A hundred men have been elevated to be national heroes for deeds far less heroic. The fact that after all these years it is still obscured and men hesitate to speak about it is marvelous testimony to the power of the press to produce enduring impressions. Even the other staggering fact that in the history of American courts this is the only man that ever came voluntarily and gave himself up and then was hanged, even that seems to be eliminated from the little consideration that is ever bestowed upon a figure of courage so extraordinary.
Similarly I wondered while all these events were passing before me and wonder now, that no one ever stopped to inquire why such men as Parsons and Fielden were in revolt. Granted freely that their idea of the best manner of making a protest was utterly wrong and impossible; granted that they went not the best way to work. But what was it that drove them into attack against the social order as they found it? They and thousands of other men that stood with them were not bad men, nor depraved, nor bloodthirsty, nor hard-hearted, nor criminal, nor selfish, nor crazy. Then what was it that evoked a complaint so bitter and deep-seated? In all the clamor that filled the press for the execution of the law and the supremacy of order not one writer ever stopped to ask this obvious question. No one ever contemplated the simple fact that men do not band themselves together to make a protest without the belief that they have something to protest about, and that in any organized state of society a widespread protest is something for grave inquiry. I thought then and I think now that a few words devoted to this suggestion would have been of far greater service to society than the insensate demand for blood and more blood with which the journals of Chicago were mostly filled.
The Eagle that is Forgotten
BY VACHEL LINDSAY
(Poet and minstrel of Springfield, Illinois, born 1879; has tramped over many parts of the United States with his leaflet of "Rhymes to be Traded for Bread." He has rediscovered the Homeric chant, and poured into it the life of the Middle West. The following poem is addressed to John P. Altgeld, once Governor of Illinois, who, having convinced himself that the so-called Chicago Anarchists were innocent of the crime charged against them, pardoned them, and thereby sacrificed his political career)
Sleep softly ... eagle forgotten ... under the stone. Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own. "We have buried him now," thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced. They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced. They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you, day after day, Now you were ended. They praised you ... and laid you away. The others, that mourned you in silence and terror and truth, The widow bereft of her crust, and the boy without youth, The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor, That should have remembered forever ... remember no more. Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call, The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall? They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones, A hundred white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons. The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began, The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man. Sleep softly ... eagle forgotten ... under the stone. Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own. Sleep on, O brave-hearted, O wise man that kindled the flame-- To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name, To live in mankind, far, far more ... than to live in a name.
Immortality
(From the Will of Francisco Ferrer)
(Spanish educator and radical, 1859-1909, executed after the Barcelona riots by a plot of his clerical enemies)
I also wish my friends to speak little or not at all about me, because idols are created when men are praised, and this is very bad for the future of the human race. Acts alone, no matter by whom committed, ought to be studied, praised, or blamed. Let them be praised in order that they may be imitated when they seem to contribute to the common weal; let them be censured when they are regarded as injurious to the general well-being, so that they may not to be repeated.
I desire that on no occasion, whether near or remote, nor for any reason whatsoever, shall demonstrations of a political or religious character be made before my remains, as I consider the time devoted to the dead would be better employed in improving the condition of the living, most of whom stand in great need of this.
Light Upon Waldheim
BY VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE
(American anarchist writer, 1866-1912. Waldheim is a cemetery in Chicago, where the executed Anarchists were buried. Upon the monument is the figure of a woman holding a dying man upon her knees, with one hand pressing a crown upon his forehead, and with the other drawing a dagger)
Light upon Waldheim! And the earth is gray; A bitter wind is driving from the north; The stone is cold, and strange cold whispers say: "What do ye here with Death? Go forth! Go forth!"
Is this thy word, O Mother, with stern eyes, Crowning thy dead with stone-caressing touch? May we not weep o'er him that martyred lies, Slain in our name, for that he loved us much?
May we not linger till the day is broad? Nay, none are stirring in this stinging dawn-- None but poor wretches that make no moan to God: What use are these, O thou with dagger drawn?
"Go forth, go forth! Stand not to weep for these, Till, weakened with your weeping, like the snow Ye melt, dissolving in a coward peace!" Light upon Waldheim! Brother, let us go!
Assassination
BY AUGUSTE VAILLANT
(From the speech before the French Chamber of Deputies, 1894, prior to receiving sentence of death for a political crime)
Ah, gentlemen, if the governing classes could go down among the unfortunates! But no, they prefer to remain deaf to their appeals. It seems that a fatality impels them, like the royalty of the eighteenth century, toward the precipice which will engulf them; for woe be to those who remain deaf to the cries of the starving, woe to those who, believing themselves of superior essence, assume the right to exploit those beneath them! There comes a time when the people no longer reason; they rise like a hurricane, and rush onward like a torrent. Then we see bleeding heads impaled on pikes.
Among the exploited, gentlemen, there are two classes of individuals. Those of one class, not realizing what they are and what they might be, take life as it comes, believe that they are born to be slaves, and content themselves with the little that is given them in exchange for their labor. But there are others, on the contrary, who think, who study and, looking about them, discover social iniquities. Is it their fault if they see clearly and suffer at seeing others suffer? Then they throw themselves into the struggle, and make themselves the bearers of the popular claims.
I know very well that I shall be told that I ought to have confined myself to speech for the vindication of the people's claims. But what can you expect! It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear. Too long have they answered our voices by imprisonment, the rope, and rifle-volleys. Make no mistake; the explosion of my bomb is not only the cry of the rebel Vaillant, but the cry of an entire class which vindicates its rights, and which will soon add acts to words. For, be sure of it, in vain will they pass laws. The ideas of the thinkers will not halt!
Beyond Human Might
BY BJÖRNSTJERNE BJÖRNSON
(A drama of modern industry. See page 221. The masters meet in a great castle, the home of one of them, to plan the destruction of the labor unions; whereupon a group of conspirators blow up the castle with dynamite. In the scene following the author gives his reflections upon this event, in the words of the grief-stricken sister of the chief conspirator)
HALDEN:--Suppose what has happened should arouse the conscience of the people?
RACHEL:--Why, that's what he was saying--his very words, I think--Arouse the conscience of the people! After all these thousands of years that we have been subject to the influence of the family and of religion, can it be possible that we are unable to arouse the people's conscience except by--O ye silent and exalted witnesses, who hear without answering and see without reflecting what you see, why don't you show me how to reach the upward road? For in the midst of all this misery there is no road that leads upward--nothing but an endless circling around the same spot, by which I perish!
HALDEN:--Upward means forward.
RACHEL:--But there is no forward in this! We have been thrown back into sheer barbarism! Once more all faith in a happy future has been wiped out. Just ask a few questions around here!... And then the sun, the spring--ever since that dreadful night--nothing but fine weather, night and day--a stretch of it the like of which I cannot recall. Is it not as if nature itself were crying out to us: "Shame! shame! You sprinkle my leaves with blood, and mingle death-cries with my song. You darken the air for me with your gruesome complaints." That's what it is saying to us. "You are soiling the spring for me. Your diseases and your evil thoughts are crouching in the woods and on the greenswards. Everywhere a stink of misery is following you like that of rotting waters." That's what it is telling us. "Your greed and your envy are a pair of sisters who have fought each other since they were born"--that's what it says. "Only my highest mountain peaks, only my sandy wastes and icy deserts, have not seen those sisters; every other part of the earth has been filled by them with blood and brutal bawling. In the midst of eternal glory mankind has invented Hell and manages to keep it filled. And men, who should stand for perfection, harbor among them what is worthless and foul."
Chillon
BY LORD BYRON
(Bonnivard, a patriot of Switzerland, was imprisoned with his sons in Chillon Castle. The story is told in Byron's longer poem, "The Prisoner of Chillon")
Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeons, Liberty, thou art-- For there thy habitation is the heart-- The heart which love of thee alone can bind;
And when thy sons to fetters are consign'd-- To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom-- Their country conquers with their martyrdom, And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind.
Chillon! thy prison is a holy place, And thy sad floor an altar; for 'twas trod Until his very steps have left a trace Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod, By Bonnivard! May none those marks efface! For they appeal from tyranny to God.