Classes
CLASSES
The Poet’s Task
By Margaret Hoblitt
(In “Charities and Commons.”)
Wouldst thou be a poet of these latter days?
Turn then thine eye from joy, thine ear from praise!
Go where the city’s pallid millions throng,
And of their sorrows fashion thee a song.
Sing of unending toil,—of childhood’s blight—
Of weary day that dawns on weary night.
Sing, if thou canst, of womanhood in shame,—
Of manhood bartered for a place and name.
Sing of a flower that never knew the sun;
Sing of a virtue dead ere ’twas begun!
Then, lest our hearts break and our faith grow cold,
Sing better things to be, ere time is old.
Sing ’midst the tears, and touch men’s souls with fire,
Till God fulfill through thee His Great Desire.
Out of the Darkness
By Voltairine de Cleyre
(Poet and essayist. Died 1912.)
Who am I? Only one of the commonest common people,
Only a worked-out body, a shriveled and withered soul;
What right have I to sing, then? None; and I do not, I cannot.
Why ruin the rhythm and rhyme of the great world’s songs with moaning?
I know not—nor why whistles must shriek, wheels ceaselessly mutter;
Nor why all I touch turns to clashing and clanging and discord;
I know not; I know only this,—I was born to this, live in it hourly,
Go ’round with it, hum with it, curse with it, would laugh with it, had
it laughter;
It is my breath—and that breath goes outward from me in moaning.
O you, up there, I have heard you; I am “God’s image defaced”,
“In heaven reward awaits me,” “hereafter I shall be perfect”;
Ages you’ve sung that song, but what is it to me, think you?
If you heard down here in the smoke and the smut, in the smear and the
offal,
In the dust, in the mire, in the grime and in the slime, in the hideous
darkness,
How the wheels turn your song into sounds of horror and loathing and
cursing,
The offer of lust, the sneer of contempt and acceptance, thieves’
whispers,
The laugh of the gambler, the suicide’s gasp, the yell of the drunkard,
If you heard them down here you would cry, “The reward of such is
damnation,”
If you heard them, I say, your song of “rewarded hereafter” would
fail....
Oh, is there no one to find or to speak a meaning to _me_
To me as I am,—the hard, the ignorant, withered-souled worker?
To me upon whom God and science alike have stamped “failure”,
To me who know nothing but labor, nothing but sweat, dirt and sorrows?
To me whom you scorn and despise, you up there who sing while I moan?
To me as I am—for me as I am—not dying but living;
_Not_ my future—my present! my body, my needs, my desires! Is there no
one?
In the midst of this rushing of phantoms—of Gods, of Science, of Logic,
Of Philosophy, Morals, Religion, Economy,—all this that helps not,
All these ghosts at whose altars you worship, these ponderous,
marrowless Fictions,
Is there no one who thinks, is there nothing to help this dull
moaning _Me_?
Two Sides of the Shield
By Princess Lazarovick-Hrebelianovich
(Nee, Eleanor Calhoun—Actress of American birth. From an article in
“Century Magazine.”)
Nowhere more than in London does the blazing shield show a dark reverse.
For, along with the splendors of life, that ancient city brought me, too,
the first overwhelming sense of the world’s misery. For sometime my life
took me daily through a large stretch of London. It seemed to me that I
was wandering through vast tides of woe. Age-long tyrannies of ignorance
and vice and suffering have welded a fixity of type in the flesh, binding
enormous segregations into more or less uniform kinds of peoples. The
misery-sodden “lower classes,” as I heard them called, seemed narrowed
and fixed and starved and warped forever. The “lower middle classes” gave
the impression of being jammed in between walls from above and below,
as if all broad or wholesome feeling, or generous enjoyment of beauty
were kept from penetrating to them or issuing from them. The “upper
middle classes” and the “higher classes” appeared to look with horror
upon any real contact with the others, while intermarrying with them was
impossible.... It was the vast crowds of the others, “the wholesale lot”,
that reflected their discouragement in my mind.
Women and the Oppressed
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(From “Aurora Leigh.”)
I call you hard
To a general suffering. Here’s the world half blind
With intellectual light, half brutalized
With civilization, having caught the plague
In silks from Tarsus, shrieking East and West
Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain
And sin too!.... does one woman of you all,
(You who weep easily) grow pale to see
This tiger shake his cage?—does one of you
Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls,
And pine and die because of the great sum
Of universal anguish?—Show me a tear
Wet as Cordelia’s, in eyes bright as yours,
Because the world is mad. You cannot count,
That you should weep for this account, not you!
You weep for what you know. A red-haired child
Sick in a fever, if you touch him once,
Though but so little as with a finger-tip,
Will set you weeping; but a million sick—
You could as soon weep for the rule of three
Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world,
Uncomprehended by you.—Women as you are,
Mere women, personal and passionate,
You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives,
Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints!
We get no Christ from you,—and verily
We shall not get a poet, in my mind.
God and the Strong Ones
By Margaret Widdemer
(Contemporary American poet.)
“We have made them fools and weak!” said the Strong Ones:
“We have crushed 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_
_For 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._
My Sister’s Heritage
By Mary S. Edgar
(In “The Survey.”)
Budding tree and singing bird,
Joy of springtime seen and heard;
All the wealth of all the year,
Scattered by the wayside here.
But oh, little sister of mine in the shadowy places,
Where the wheel turns and the small young fingers ply,
I cannot forget that this is yours, too, to inherit—
The open fields and the streams, and the clear blue sky.
Stirring sap and quickening sod—
Miracles revealing God:
Prophets of the fatherhood,
Speaking from the field and wood.
But oh, little sister of mine in the shadowy places,
Where shoulders droop, eyes dim, and cheeks grow wan,
I yearn for your hand, and a road that leads to the open,
To the commonwealth of the fields, ere the light be gone.
Socialist Prayer
By Margaret Haile
(Contemporary American poet. In “The Vanguard.”)
Give us this day our daily bread, O God!
Not for _my_ bread alone I selfish pray.
Such prayer would never reach Thy loving ear;
Such prayer my human lips refuse to say.
I pray for those whom Thou hast given me here—
All men and women to be one with me,—
To soothe, sustain, and comfort, love and cheer,
And draw in loving service nearer Thee.
My sister suffers in a garret bare,
My brothers labor and grow faint and pine;
My baby wails—for food! I cannot bear it God,
For all the babies in the world are mine!
Father, and they are Thine! I claim Thine aid;
Thou needs must help us in our righteous cause!
Make strong our hands to tear Oppression down,
And build a world according to Thy laws!
I cannot eat my daily bread alone,
Give none to me if these cannot be fed.
With them I stand or fall, for we are one.
Father, give _all_ of us our daily bread.
Outcasts
By Eleanor Wentworth
(In “The International Socialist Review.”)
Outside the Rotunda of the Fine Arts Building of the Panama-Pacific
International Exposition is hunched a gripping, sorrowful figure—a figure
that crouches back amidst the foliage as if humbly seeking to escape
the eye of the passer. Meekly it bears the name of _Outcast_. About it,
fountains ripple; beyond, the sun joyfully sets agleam the somber greens
of olive; chuckling, sprightly Pans, with uptilted pipes, laugh to scorn
the chill atmosphere of the sorrowful one, set so far into the shadows
that the sun never reaches it, leaving its marble surface ghastly.
The figure, with arms clenched and head bowed, in its shadow seclusion
indomitably symbolizes the disowned of the ages—the iron-collared slave,
the branded thief, the wandering disbeliever, the woman scorned, the
helpless debtor. It symbolizes those passive sufferers, who, after
tilling and sowing the fields of life, so that they grow green and cool,
wander begrimed and thirsty in the waste desert stretches. Pitifully it
speaks of those who confidently threw their heart’s sweetest flowers in
the world they loved, receiving no return, living forevermore with barren
hopes. It whispers of those who flung their cries of joy to the winds,
and heard them wafted back as taunts. It speaks of builders, of whose
dream houses no cornerstone or cornice has been realized. Voicelessly it
proclaims the _Slave of the Past_.
And as I looked at it, so hopelessly resigned, I hated it, for all its
powerful symbolism.
Did the world know no other Outcast than this shrinking, unreproachful
figure? Was this symbolism the whole truth? Were there no Outcasts
who dared accuse?—who dared fight for their inheritance? None to cry
dauntlessly, “We will not be cast aside, we who have builded and tilled
and dreamed!” Were there no outcasts with hope—with fighting blood?
In the far recesses of the Japanese Section, where only a few errant
footfalls echo solemnly through the spacious silence, I found that for
which I searched. There I found the symbol of the Outcast I dared hope
to see. A truly courageous figure it is, with Hope and the Spirit to be
Free stamped large upon it. It is the very antithesis of that bowed
figure out among the green vines and laughing Pans, which seem to beg
forgiveness for its very existence. This other figure is called “Strike”,
and proudly it bears its insignia of rebellion. The gaunt outlines and
the eyes overshadowed with a terrible fatigue brand this figure of a man,
as the other, with the marks of the Outcast. A woman leans upon him, and
in turn, a brood of young cling to her skirts. But this Outcast is no
craven. He neither cringes nor sorrows. He stands erect, and through the
shadows of fatigue, his eyes flash defiance out upon the world of the
Self-Satisfied. He seems to cry aloud:
“I suffer, my mate suffers, and our young; but you shall pay—pay in
full! You who stand between us and our inheritance, your time is drawing
near—prepare! For we declare that we, too, shall live, we, the sufferers!”
This Outcast, springing from the depths, flings a challenge where others
have only wept; dares where others have cowered in self-debasement.
This man of courage, standing erect under the scourges of suffering and
deprivation, gazing so steadfastly into the Beyond through overshadowed
eyes—he dares aspire to walk in the green fields of his making; already
he treads them in his imagination. He has sent a barely whispered hope of
joy out upon the winds and it is rushing back to him a mighty symphony of
realization. He dreams of a beautiful world, and builds it as he dreams.
He heralds the day when there will be no Outcasts, but all will be
Well-Beloved.
He is the _Master of the Future_.
The New Sense of Justice
By Elizabeth Cady Stanton
(From a letter to Susan B. Anthony on “Woman and War,” written just prior
to our war with Spain.)
The co-operative will remodel codes and constitutions, creeds and
catechisms, social customs and conventionalism, the curriculum of schools
and colleges. It will give a new sense of justice, liberty and equality
in all the relations of life....
The few have no right to the luxuries of life while the many are denied
its necessities.
Break Down the Wall
By Ellen Key
Men and women, upper and lower classes, are walking on different sides of
a wall. They can stretch their hands over it; the important thing to be
done is to break the wall down.
Class Intolerance Passing
By Elsie Clews Parsons
(See page 170)
Age-class, caste group, family, and race, each has its own closed
circle—but each of these vicious circles the modern spirit has begun to
invade and break down. In the spirit of our time fear of the unlike is
waning and _pari passu_ intolerance.
Servitude
By Maria Montessori
(Quoted from “The Larger Aspect of Socialism,” by Walling.)
Any nation that accepts the idea of servitude and believes that it is an
advantage for man to be served by man admits servility as an instinct,
and indeed we all too easily lend ourselves to obsequious service, giving
to it such complimentary names as courtesy, politeness, charity.
In reality, he who is served is limited in his independence. This concept
will be the foundation of the dignity of the man of the future; “I do
not wish to be served because I am not impotent.” And this idea must be
gained before men can feel themselves to be really free.
Factories Instead of Homes
By Mary E. McDowell
(Head of University Settlement House, Chicago. Writer and speaker for
suffrage, organized labor, etc.)
However earnestly we may deplore the fact that women are in factories
instead of homes, we must squarely face conditions as they exist. There
are hundreds of thousands of helpless, untrained, unorganized women
without the power of legislating for themselves, who are forced by the
stress of circumstances to earn their livelihood, and it is of vital
importance that they be given the chance to be decently self-supporting
under conditions which will unfit them for wifehood and motherhood and
the care of the homes.
The Voteless Sex
By Meta L. Stern
(American contemporary journalist and speaker. From a leaflet on
Suffrage.)
Thousands of women today are working under conditions unfit for human
beings. At unguarded machinery they are risking their nimble fingers,
the only source of income they possess. In firetrap buildings they
are risking their lives. Badly ventilated workrooms, filled with
particles of flying dust, weaken their lungs and make them susceptible
to tuberculosis. Long working hours sap their strength and vitality.
Dangerous occupations make them physical wrecks in a few years and render
them unfit for wifehood and motherhood. In the case of married women
workers an appalling infant mortality is a concomitant of women’s labor.
But with all these sacrifices even the woman who performs a man’s work
does not get a man’s wages. Everywhere we find unequal pay for equal
work. The voteless sex is cheap.
The Glad Day of Universal Brotherhood
By Frances E. Willard
(Great temperance worker; the only woman whose statue is in the Hall of
Fame. From an address at the National W. C. T. U. Convention at Buffalo,
in 1897.)
Look about you; the products of labor are on every hand; you could not
maintain for a moment a well-ordered life without them; every object in
your room has in it, for discerning eyes, the mark of ingenious tools and
the pressure of labor’s hands. But is it not the cruelest injustice for
the wealthy, whose lives are surrounded and embellished by labor’s work,
to have a superabundance of the money which represents the aggregate of
labor in any country, while the laborer himself is kept so steadily at
work that he has no time to acquire the education and refinements of life
that would make him and his family agreeable companions to the rich and
cultured?...
I believe that competition is doomed. The trust, whose single object is
to abolish competition, has proved that we are better without it, than
with it, and the moment corporations control the supply of any product,
they combine. What the Socialist desires is that the corporation of
humanity should control all production. Beloved comrades, this is the
frictionless way; it is the higher way; it eliminates the motives for a
selfish life; it enacts into our every-day living the ethics of Christ’s
gospel. Nothing else will do it; nothing else can bring the glad day of
universal brotherhood.
Working Girls Must Cooperate
By Pauline M. Newman
(Organizer of working women. Former organizer for the International
Garment Workers’ Union. In “Life and Labor.”)
All those who work are aware of the fact that conditions today—insofar as
the working girl is concerned—are not what they should be....
Now, what is wrong? To begin with, the work day is too long, the wages
are too low. Good sanitary conditions are a rarity. Laws to protect the
lives of women and children workers are scarce—in reality.... There are
enough laws on the statute books, but very few are enforced. Labor laws
intended to protect women are constantly being violated. Why? Simply
because the women have, thus far, failed to cooperate with one another in
order to enforce them.
Nearly eight million working women are subjected to the conditions
described above. According to investigators—the writer of these lines
having been one of these—the average wage of these women does not exceed
seven dollars a week. A wage _proven_ insufficient to live on. Such
wages shape the lives of the women, and those dependent upon them. What
kind of a life, then, can they lead? A life which is a mere existence,
that is all. Because they are compelled to do so, they substitute cheap
amusement for something more refined. They live on a five-cent breakfast,
ten-cent lunch, and a twenty-cent dinner; live in a dingy room without
air and without comfort; wear clothes of cheap material, trying hard to
imitate those who are more fortunate than they. Their whole life is cheap
from beginning to end. Deprived of sunshine and fresh air, no time for
recreation, no time for rest, they have only time for _work_.
Organized Woman Labor
By Mrs. George Bass
(See page 38)
Almost every constructive statute of the past two decades that touches
the protection and prevents the exploitation of women and children, owes
its initiation and passage largely to the organized women.
The Enslaved
By The Countess of Warwick
(English contemporary. Once said to be the most beautiful woman in
England. Socialist, writer and speaker on labor and other modern
problems. From “Why I Became a Socialist.” In “Hearst’s Magazine.”)
At present women are the most enslaved part of the human race. They are
paid lower wages even than the average working man. When they are not in
the wage market as industrial workers, or clerks or civil servants, then
they are usually in the unsatisfactory position of being a wife who is,
economically speaking, a dependent on the wishes and purse of her father
or husband. They may work all day at the management of the children and
the home—much harder often, than the worker in the factory—but in return
these wives and mothers do not get, in the ordinary case, a fixed salary
or wage which they can call their own. Neither are the working hours of
the wife and mother fixed, as even in the case of factory workers. There
is in the life of the housewife of the manual laboring class scarcely an
hour a day when she is entirely free to go where she pleases or do what
she pleases. The woman who has not a private income of her own is, in the
general case, the economic dependent of the man, and in that class is the
large majority of my sex.
Inequality for Women
By Mrs. Arthur Lyttleton
(From “Women and Their Work.”)
Here and there throughout history occur instances of women who have been
received as equals by men, but for the mass of women equality could only
be procured by civilization.
Lore of the Woods
By Ruby Archer
(Contemporary. Poet and journalist.)
Go not into the woods for rioting.
But sit thee down alone; lean on a tree,
And read the greatest volume of the world,
Writ in the letters of the leaves and birds.
Mark how the branches draw their fluid life
From the one stem deep nourished in the earth,
And on those boughs how individual leaves
Find neighbor kindness, yielding each to each.
They share the common good, yet with no loss;
What grace there is, unique, in every one!
And the glad birds! Only their nests have they,
And the great heritage of light and love
Which none has need of hoarding, yet not one
But greets the morning with the song, “I live,”
And warbles low at twilight, “Life is sweet.”
Study the helpful ants; the social bees;
The hovering, unbound insects of the air,
Swaying in cities light as gossamer
Along one sunbeam on one fragrant breeze;
And never dream that man may dare presume
To name himself the king of things create,
Till he shall learn the lessons of the leaves,
The birds, the ants, the bees, the winged dust:
_That life is born of brotherhood_.
Moses, the Strike Leader
By Frances Squire Potter
(American contemporary. Professor of English in the University of
Minnesota. Writer and speaker on labor and political problems.
Corresponding Secretary of the National American Woman’s Suffrage
Association, author “The Ballingtons,” etc. Died March, 1914. In “Life
and Labor.”)
Out of the waters of the Nile, Pharaoh’s daughter drew a Hebrew babe,
condemned to die. As her adopted son, he was taught at court all the
wisdom of the Egyptians. As an Egyptian prince he might have lived
and died in splendor, and his gold-cased mummy might have been on
some museum shelf today, a dead curiosity. An aristocrat, a lawyer, a
capitalist—these are what he was brought up to be.
Egypt was in the full afternoon of her grandeur. A Pharoah was on the
throne whose soul was filled with the ambition to build palaces and
temples and cities such as the world had never seen. His heavy hand fell
upon the free Hebrews in his kingdom, and sent them to the quarries and
the brick-yards to toil with slaves under the lash of merciless foreman.
And as his cities and monuments grew, he became drunk with his own
glory, and the slaves were flogged to ever more inhuman exertions in the
quarries.
“And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown up, that he went
out to his brethren, and looked on their burdens; and he saw an Egyptian
smiting an Hebrew. And he looked this way, and that way, and when he saw
that there was no man, he smote the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.”
I do not believe this was the first time he had walked abroad to view
his brother slaves toiling. His wrath had been long smouldering in him.
You notice he did not attack the Egyptian with blind rage. “He looked
this way and that”, and when he saw he was unobserved he deliberately
slew the oppressor and buried the body in the desert sands.
Thus the greatest law-giver in history began his career by committing the
greatest crime known to the law. He was not young. He was forty years of
age. He became a law-breaker only because the laws of Egypt no longer
protected the man who worked from the tyrant who confiscated his labor.
His soul was in rebellion against “the system”.
How did the workers take this “direct action”? Just as the workers of
today would. When he went back the next day, instead of being greeted
as a deliverer, he was repudiated by the Hebrews. They were justly
suspicious of a member of the system who eased his conscience for a
living in the royal family by killing a brutal foreman. “Who made thee a
prince and a judge over us?” was a very pertinent question. Who, indeed,
but Pharoah himself?
But Pharoah on his part was deeply incensed at this rebel in his own
family and Moses fled for his life into the deserts of Arabia, carrying
with him the consciousness of having made his brethren’s lot worse by his
blundering attempt to mend it....
At last, amid the frowning precipices and lonely crags of Mount Sinai,
the cry of his race became too strong for him to resist.... And so Moses
turns his face once more toward the Nile country, and the great moment of
his life is upon him.... From now on the magnificent story represents
the struggle of the enslaved Hebrews for freedom as a duel between two
men—Pharoah on the throne, and Moses, the desert wanderer. The one stands
for entrenched tyranny, the other is a strike leader. Behind Pharoah is
all the power of Egypt, upheld by the armies of the empire. Behind Moses
is the mysterious pillar of cloud and of fire—the destiny of the race.
Between these two colossi cower the race of slaves whose destiny is at
hand....
Just as the Pharoahs of the Colorado coal fields are doing today, Pharoah
of Egypt hardened his heart, until the climax of the struggle came in
his cry of rage, “Get thee from me, take heed to thyself, see my face no
more: for in the day thou seest my face, thou shalt die!” And Moses said,
“Thou hast spoken well, I will see thy face no more.” ...
So Moses leads his people out into the wilderness of freedom....
Years passed, and the wilderness was whitened with the bones of the
slaves, whose free-born children grew up to higher manhood under their
aged leader’s constant counsels and warnings. At last the time came when
they were fit to take a place among the nations of the earth, and the
pillar of fire and of cloud turns and drifts toward Canaan.
With what longing the old man’s heart looked toward the land of promise,
the first fixed abiding place life seemed to offer, we can gather from
his own confession. But it was not to be. His course was run. He was a
strike leader, a nation-molder, a law-giver, not a military conqueror.
When the tribes reach the desert and look down into the green valley of
the Jordan, they are called together to hear his parting words. On the
slopes of Mount Nebo in the land of Moab, after the antiphonal chanting
of the blessings and curses, and the sounding of the trumpets of the
Levites, the dying leader stands for the last time before his people,
delivers the matchless farewell address recorded in Deuteronomy, blesses
them, and passes from their sight forever, up into the solitude of the
mountain peaks....
“And the children of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab, but no
man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day. And there hath not arisen a
prophet since in Israel like unto Moses....”
Dear God! The desert wandering is done,
A fixed abode has come to all—but one!
Command the muses of the sacred well
Say paeans for the sons of Israel!
But turn, oh, turn their silent lips away,
While he ascends the solitudes to pray!
Deep valley murmurings rise into peace,
At that still height his mission wins surcease,
And God in mercy lets his eyes undim,
Gaze long on glories that are not for him.
After the Fight
By Mary O’Reilly
(Chicago school teacher. Writer and speaker on labor questions. The
following poem was written for “Life and Labor.”)
A lull in the struggle,
A truce in the fight,
The whirr of machines
And the dearly-bought right
Just to labor for bread,—
Just to work and be fed.
For this we have marched
Through the snow-covered street;
Have borne our dead comrades
While muffled drums beat.
It is thus we have fought
For this boon dearly bought.
We measure our gain
By the price we have paid.
Call the victory great
As the struggle we made.
For we struggled to grow,
And we won. And we know....
Together we suffered
The weary weeks past;
Together we won,
And together at last
As we learn our own might,
We shall win the _great_ fight.
A lull in the struggle,
A truce in the fight,
The whirr of machines
And the dearly-bought right
Just to labor for bread,—
Just to work and be fed!
The Fool’s Christmas
By Florence May
On Christmas eve, the king, disconsolate,
Weary with all the round of pomp and state,
Gave whisper to his Fool: “A merry way
Have I bethought to spend our holiday.
Thou shalt be king, and I the fool will be—
And thou shalt rule the court in drollery
For one short day!” With caper, nod, and grin,
Full saucy replied the harlequin;
“A merry play; and sire, amazing strange
For one of us to suffer such a change!
But thou? Why all the kings of earth” said he,
“Have played the fool and played it skillfully!”
Then the king’s laugh stirred all the arras dim,
Till courtiers wondered at his humor grim.
And so it chanced when wintry sunbeams shone
From Christmas skies, lo! perched upon the throne
Sat Lionel the Fool, in purple drest,
The royal jewels blazing on his breast.
On Christmas morning too, the king arose,
And donned with sense of ease, the silken hose
Of blue and scarlet; then the doublet red
With azure slashed; upon his kingly head
That wearied oft beneath a jeweled crown,
He drew the jingling hood, and tied it down.
All day he crouched among the chill and gloom
None seeking him—within the turret room.
But when calm night with starry lamps came down
Her purple stairs—he crept forth to the town
His scanty cape about his shoulders blew,
Close to his face the screening hood he drew.
He knocked first at a cottage of the poor,
And lo! flew open wide the door—
“We have not much to give, dear fool,” they said,
“But thou art cold; come share our fire and bread!”
With willing hands they freed his cape from snow
And warmed and cheered him ere they let him go.
And so’t was ever: By the firelight dim
Of many a hearth stone poor they welcomed him;
And children who would shun the king in awe,
Would scamper to the door way if they saw
The scarlet peak of Lionel’s red hood.
“Dear fool” they called him loudly, “thou wert good
To bring the frosted cake! Come in and see
Our little Lishelk—hark! she calls for thee!”
And so’t was ever. On his way the king
With softened heart saw many a grievous thing:
But love he found and charity. And when
He crept at dawn through palace gates again,
He knew that he who rules by fear alone
May sit securely on his throne;
But he who rules by love shall find it true
That love, the milder power, is mightier, too.
“Dear fool”, he said, “thou art the king of hearts insooth;
The king of hearts! Today no farce but truth!
For I have seen that thou, beneath my rule,
Hast often played the king,—and I the fool!”
Class Legislation
By M. Carey Thomas
(See page 10)
In the past we have no single instance of any class of men with the
ballot legislating fairly for any other class of men without the ballot.
How then can the men of the world all working and all voting protect the
special interests of the voteless women of the world who are emerging
as workers millions strong on the surface of our human bee-hive? They
cannot. If they have in the past done injustice to the disfranchised
classes of their fellow men, they will do far more terrible injustice
in the future to disfranchised classes of working women. If the vote
has been indispensable as a protection in the past, it will be still
more indispensable in the future because modern socialistic legislation
will increasingly control employers and employed. Thousands of English
women are to-day banded together in their suffrage unions demanding with
desperate courage from a reluctant parliament a vote to protect their
labor and their children for whom they labor.
Despair
By Lady Wilde
(Irish poet, mother of Oscar Wilde.)
Before us dies our brother of starvation;
Around are cries of famine and despair!
Where is hope for us, or comfort, or salvation—
Where—oh! where?
If the angels ever harken, downward bending,
They are weeping, we are sure,
At the litanies of human groans ascending
From the crushed hearts of the poor.
We never knew a childhood’s mirth and gladness,
Nor the proud heart of youth free and brave;
Oh, a death-like dream of wretchedness and sadness
Is life’s weary journey to the grave!
Day by day we lower sink, and lower,
Till the God-like soul within
Falls crushed beneath the fearful demon power
Of poverty and sin.
So we toil on, on with fever burning
In heart and brain;
So we toil on, on through bitter scorning,
Want, woe, and pain.
We dare not raise our eyes to the blue heavens
Or the toil must cease—
We dare not breathe the fresh air God has given
One hour in peace.
Breadth of Woman Suffrage
By Millicent Garrett Fawcett
(English contemporary. Introduction to “The Future of the Woman’s
Movement.”)
Other movements toward freedom have aimed at raising the status of a
comparatively small group or class. But the woman’s movement aims at
nothing less than raising the status of an entire sex—half of the human
race—to lift it up to the freedom and valor of womanhood.
The Poor Sex
By Mrs. H. W. Swanwick
(See page 205)
Women are notoriously the poor sex. Even a woman who figures as a rich
woman is often merely an article de luxe for the man who provides for
her, and though he may band her neck with jewels, he does not readily
give her a check for her suffrage society.
Of What Use Is It
By Ida M. Cannon
(Headworker of the Social Service Department Massachusetts General
Hospital.)
If a patient for whom a surgeon orders a back brace starves herself to
pay the bill?
If a workman, cured of rheumatism, goes back to his job in the damp
cellar which caused it?
If a clerk fitted to glasses, returns to the dim desk which crippled her
sight?
If an unmarried girl, delivered of her child, goes from the maternity
ward back to the neighborhood that ruined?
Breaking Up in Violence
By Clara E. Laughlin
(See page 68)
There must be a check on the ever-widening inequality between the richest
and the poorest, or our social structure will not endure; we shall have
revolution, not evolution; cataclysm, not growth.... In some of the old
world countries the inequality is of such long growth that one can
hardly imagine its breaking up without violence. With us it is not yet
adamantine. Pray God it never may be.
The Workers’ Right
By Helen Keller
(See page 209)
(From “Out of the Dark.”[18])
Their cause is my cause. If they are denied a living wage, I also am
defrauded. While they are industrial slaves, I cannot be free. My hunger
is not satisfied while they are unfed. I cannot enjoy the good things of
life which come to me, if they are hindered and neglected. I want all the
workers of the world to have sufficient money to provide the elements
of a normal standard of living—a decent home, healthful surroundings,
opportunity for education and recreation. I want them to have the same
blessings I have. I, deaf and blind, have been helped to overcome many
obstacles. I want them to be helped as generously in a struggle which
resembles my own in many ways.
Surely the things that the workers demand are not unreasonable. It
cannot be unreasonable to ask of society a fair chance for all.... Until
the spirit of love for our fellow men, regardless of race, color or
creed, shall fill the world, making real in our lives and our deeds the
actuality of human brotherhood—until the great mass of the people shall
be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare,
social injustice can never be attained.
[18] Doubleday, Page & Co.
Women’s Labor Organizations
By Ida Tarbell
(American contemporary. Author of “History of Standard Oil,” “The
Business of Being a Woman,” etc.)
Already there are signs that the woman’s labor organizations are willing
to recognize the inherent dignity of household service—and this is as it
should be. The woman who labors should be the one to recognize that all
labor is per se equally honorable—that there is no stigma in honestly
performed, useful service.
If she is to bring to the labor world the regeneration she dreams, she
must begin not by saying that the shop girl, the clerk, the teacher, are
in a higher class than the cook, the waitress, the maid, but that we are
all laborers alike, sisters by virtue of the service we are rendering
society. That is, labor should be the last to recognize the canker in the
caste.
The Happy Warrior
By Dorothea Hollins
(In “The Labor Leader.” J. Keir Hardie, English Labor leader,
Anti-militarist and Member of Parliament. Died September 26, 1915. It is
said the present war broke his heart.)
’Midst the world’s tumult, he lies very still
Humanity’s knight-errant, who ’gainst wrong
Ne’er sheathed his sword, but climbed the perilous long
And lengthening ascent to that far hill
Throning the city of God! What shapes of ill
He met, he recked not, so he might be strong
For the down-trodden at his side. His song
Of Brotherhood each failing heart did fill
With manly comfort, and from Womanhood
He smote the bands of tyranny and ease;
No knight was e’er more dauntless. Devil’s strife
Outbreaking, broke his heart, snapped the worn life,
Yet cannot dim the victory of good
Nor take from Righteousness the kiss of Peace.
Abolish “Dependent Classes”
By Josephine Shaw Lowell
(Quoted from “The Survey.” Mrs. Charles Russell Lowell. Mrs. Lowell
served 13 years as Charity Commissioner in New York, and in many other
ways was engaged in all good causes, municipal as well as philanthropic.)
I object to the term “dependent classes,” unless in speaking of the
insane. That such a class, not included among the insane, does exist
among us is a fact; in more than one county of this great, rich state,
there are families, as you know, who for five generations have been more
or less dependent on their fellow citizens and such families constitute
a class; but yet I protest against the use of this phrase in a way to
suggest that the existence of such a class should be recognized except to
be abolished.
There will always be _persons_ who must be helped, _individuals_ who must
depend upon public relief or on private charity for maintenance, it is
true, but it is a disgrace to any community to have a dependent _class_,
and the fact of its existence is a proof that the community has done its
duty neither to those who compose it, nor to those who maintain it.
The Servant Class
By Edna Kenton
(See page 71)
Women are thinking at last, not in men’s terms, but in their own, and
that in a slave class is always dynamic.... Because it has vision where
the other has archaism, the “lower class” is become the higher class,
self-conscious and self-poised. Not only youth, but childhood, is rebel.
Art has become anarchic, and as mysteriously as Nature works everywhere,
so has she worked with the servant half of the human race, stirring it to
self-consciousness and action; helping to keep alive the tiny torch of
revolt.
Breshkovskaya
By Elsa Barker
(Contemporary American poet and novelist. Author “The Frozen Grail,” etc.
The following is said to be the strongest of her poems. It was written
during Breshkovskaya’s last exile, before the Russian revolution released
her.)
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, Breshkovskaya, 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 sandles 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.
The Revolutionist
By Catherine Breshkovskaya
(Born to luxury, but casting her lot, when only twenty-six, with the
group of revolutionists who dared hope that the Russian peasantry
might some day arise and rebel against the horrible oppression of the
government. Twice exiled to Siberia, escaping once after serving a
sentence of twenty-one years. Just before the overthrow of the czar
closely guarded in a Siberian prison cell, after a second attempt to
escape. Free once more, she has lived to see part of the realization of
her dreams, the overthrow of Imperialism.)
We put on peasant dress, to elude the police and break down the peasant’s
cringing distrust. I dressed in enormous bark shoes, coarse shirt and
drawers, and heavy cloak. I used acid on my face and hands; I worked
and ate with the peasants; I learned their speech; I travelled on foot,
forging passports. I lived ‘illegally!’
By night I did my organizing. You desire a picture? A low room with mud
floors and walls. Rafters just overhead, and still higher thatch. The
room was packed with men, women and children. Two big fellows sat up
on the high brick stove, with their dangling feet knocking occasional
applause. These people had been gathered by my host, a brave peasant whom
I picked out, and he in turn had chosen only those whom Siberia could
not terrify. I now recalled their floggings; I pointed to those who were
crippled for life; to women, whose husbands died under the lash; and
when asked if men were to be forever flogged, then they would cry out so
fiercely that the three or four cattle in the next room would bellow and
have to be quieted. Again I would ask what chances their babies had of
living, and in reply some peasant woman would tell how her baby had died
the winter before. Why? I asked. Because they had only the most wretched
strips of land. To be free and live, the people must own the land! From
my cloak I would bring a book of fables written to teach our principles
and stir the love of freedom. And then far into the night, the firelight
showed a circle of great, broad faces and dilated eyes, staring with all
the reverence every peasant has for that mysterious thing—a book.
These books, twice as effective as oral work, were printed in secrecy
at heavy expense. But many of us had libraries, jewels, costly gowns
and furs to sell; and new recruits kept adding to our fund. We had no
personal expenses....
In that year of 1874, over two thousand educated people traveled among
the peasants. Weary work, you say. Yes, when the peasants were slow and
dull and the spirit of freedom seemed an illusion. But when that spirit
grew real one felt far from weary....
We may die in exile, and our children may die in exile, and our
children’s children may die in exile, but something must come of it at
last.
The Old Comrade
By May Beals
(In “The Progressive Woman.”)
You have sowed for the world and man
The harvest you cannot reap.
You have won nor fame nor gold nor lands,
But your faith in man you keep.
You have stood for the right alone—
Faced odium, danger, death;
Poverty is your reward and pain,
That shall end with your dying breath.
I, beginning the path you trod,
Love you, so near the end;
Can I, too, conquer the trammeled clod,
Till the higher self ascend?
I know not: Many brave men fall
Ere they reach your brave life’s span.
Old friend, it is due in part to you,
That I keep my faith in man.
The Voice of Labor
By Inez Haynes Irwin
(From “The American Federation of Labor Convention”: An Impression. In
“The Masses.”)
The voice of labor is a roar, deep as though it came from a throat of
iron, penetrating as though it came through lips of silver. One day that
voice will silence all the great guns of the world.
Our New Aristocracy
By Gertrude Atherton
(From “The New Aristocracy,” in “The Cosmopolitan.”)
(See page 44)
Instead of laying away their sense of social supremacy in old rose and
lavendar, our new aristocracy of wealth is often haughty and frigid
in manner, and not only ostentatious in expenditure, but arrogantly
assertive of what it believes to be its superior rights ... frivolity,
selfishness and pride and the constant exercise of these qualities
hardens what, for convenience, we call the heart, and breeds indifference
for the feelings and rights of others. I have been interviewed by women
reporters in almost every country I have visited, and it is only in
America—in New York, to be exact—that they have spoken of their dread
of approaching fashionable or merely rich, women.... Those we have of
ancient lineage,—who have framed their family tree and proved their
seven generations, whose fortunes have kept pace with the times, and
who from the somewhat attenuated backbone of society, in New York, for
instance—are more objectionable in some respects, than the new-rich.
While they ought to know better, they are so uneasily conscious of their
position as real aristocrats in a country too large to give them a
universal recognition, that anxious pride has bleached their very blood,
attenuated their features, narrowed their lips, and practically deprived
them of any distinctive personalities, the best that can be said of them
is that they are not, with one notorious exception, vulgar in the common
use of the word.
By H. R. H.
(The Infanta Eulalia of Spain. In the “Century Magazine.”)
1864-1912
The glitter and magnificence of society can exist only against a
background of misery and starvation.
By Mary Wollstonecraft
(In “Vindication of the Rights of Women.”)
It is the pestiferous purple which renders the progress of civilization a
curse, and warps the understanding, till men of sensibility doubt whether
the expansion of the intellect produces a greater proportion of happiness
or misery.
By Mrs. John Martin
We have a civilization that is bloated at the top and bleeding at the
bottom, and there is decay in both.