Chapter VIII: Book V: Revolt (2)

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."