David A. Andrade

“ It is only by these means, generally the result of necessity, that man has uplifted himself to the lofty position which he now occupies and it is only by continning to do so, that he will better his condition in the future. These troublous episodes in the history of mankind although so destructive in their time, are necessary for his welfare; they are the most useful lessons of History, for it is by example that we prosper, or, in other words, it is only by a knowledge of truth that mankind can benefit each other. ”

“ I find that the man is what his circumstances make him. That great reformer, Robert Owen, was right when he said that ‘the character is not made by but for the individual.’ If you put me in bad circumstances, you make me a bad man. If you enslave me, I learn in to rejoice in slavery. If you treat me brutally, you encourage brutality in my nature, and I act brutally to you. If in this land, which naturally belongs to all you who live upon it, you give me a special privilege to the ownership of this land, you make me a tyrant, and I cannot help but act like a tyrant ”

“ Let us now calmly watch Truth, which, like the rising sun, gently ascends from the horizon of superstition through which it has almost passed. Watching carefully, we note the gradual development of intellect in its attempts to unravel the mysteries of the stars. First a few shepherds mark the relative positions of the stars on the soft sands. Presently, more interest appears to be taken in a study, so sublime; and men give more thought to it. ”

“ But what of that. ‘Good men must not obey the laws too well,’ said Emerson, which of course means that good men must pay the penalty of their disobedience to those unjust laws. But what's the penalty after all? The worst they can do is take one's life. And what is the life of a proletariat? Only a life of drudgery, anxiety, poverty, and anguish; a life of death, for all life's noblest pleasure are denied us, and what we call our life is but one ceaseless round of toiling bondage to our fellows who whip and starve us to a welcome grave. ”

“ History, so called, gives an account of mankind in the collective sense; Biography gives an account of each man individually. Let us now turn our attention to the latter, and see what lessons of truth await us there, remembering that Biography requires the same careful study that History does. In all countries, and in all ages, we find lovers of mankind, eager to benefit their suffering brethren, and teaching such truths as their knowledge made them aware of. ”

“ Hypatia was dead!
Just as the gardener plucks the choicest flowers and leaves the others to bloom without them, so Nature takes from us Her choicest flowers and leaves us to mourn their loss. Our brightest hopes leave us just as success seems sure. Our friends forsake us just as we learn to love them. Our martyrs sacrifice their lives unto us; and then, when it is too late, we regret them, and build our prosperity on their misery.
Harry Holdfast and his friends had sacrificed themselves for humanity. ”

“ The ague-stricken peasant with no help except shrine-cure! How was it possible that the population could increase? Shall we, then, wonder that in the famine of 1030 human flesh was cooked and sold; or that, in that of 1258, fifteen thousand persons died of hunger in England? Shall we wonder that in some of the invasions of the plague the living could hardly bury the dead? ”

“ There they waited, like human vultures, thirsting for the blood of the unfortunate victims, waiting to gloat over the sight of a species destroying its kind, waiting to hear the last despairing words of the tortured, or to note the quivering muscles of the unfortunate victims of human brutality. There they were, like so many tigers—no, not like tigers, for tigers and other quadrupeds do not devour their own species: it is only man, brutal man, the boasted “lord of creation” who stoops to such base deeds as that—there they were, waiting anxiously to feast their brutal eyes on their actions. ”

“ There are still many who doubt these statements; but one thing is certain—although they may be wrong in some minor points, they are built upon the strong foundations of truth; and though a few useless ornaments may crumble away, the edifice itself still remains ready to be re-adorned with facts more substantial and incontrovertible; and though men may close their ears to the voice of reason, they do themselves more harm than good, and stifle those glorious faculties for research with which nature has so plentifully endowed them. ”

“ We must learn—and learn immediately—how to co-operate together so as to secure the products of our labor for ourselves, to peacefully acquire possession of the lands which legal robbery has despoiled us of, and to become independent of the speculative individual who under pretext of lending us the requisite machinery with which to work for our own benefit, dips his hand deep into our pockets, depriving us of nearly all we have produced, and makes us the wretched slave of his accursed gold. ”

“ It has taught him, in the first place, that a thing is not necessarily true because someone has said it is so. Further, that the truth cannot be arrived at without labour—that it is man's duty to try and find the truth; and when found, not to hoard it to himself as a miser does his gold, but to give it to the world for the benefit of humanity, so that his knowledge may be a foundation for other minds to build their knowledge upon. The force of our remarks are amply exemplified in the case of the question as to the fixity of the earth. What have been the consequences of these grand discoveries? ”

“ The great Shakespeare has said, ‘Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in't, bear it, that the opposer may beware of thee,’ and I feel that we are now in such a quarrel; long have we feared to enter it—for centuries have we and our forefathers groaned beneath injustice and oppression, but we can wait no longer; the blight of capital is fast crushing us out of existence, our wives and children are dying in front of us because we cannot, we dare not win the bread with which to sustain their lives. ”

“ Our present governments are rotten—rotten to the core; we need hope for nothing from them. But can we hope for anything from those co-operative ‘castles in the air’ that our individualistic friend, Holdfast, is recommending us? No; they're the panacea of the capitalist, a bone that the bourgeoisie throws out of his mansion window to keep the starving dog of labor quiet. If it were not an insult, I would almost think that Holdfast is in the hands of the capitalists, and is employed by them to draw co-operation as a red herring across our trail to take us off the scent. ”

“ In this stage of its history it plunged man into a state of ignorance and superstition; the weakest of mankind were played upon by the more enlightened and avaricious, merely for the sake of pecuniary gain and generally as a system of earning a livelihood. Knowledge was hindered and superstition reigned. Men did not trouble about the affairs of life, beyond obtaining their daily bread, and asking their future lot of a set of men almost as ignorant and superstitious as themselves. ”

“ Then you hate me, because I am your master; and I hate you because you are my slave. We pretend to love each other to win each other's favors, but in our hearts we love each one himself and eye the other with suspicion and mistrust. So it is throughout all society. All true morality is forbidden by the very laws under which we are associated. The landlord, despite his higher sentiments of love and justice, must rack the rents from starving toilers lest he become a toiler and wear out his life's blood for others. ”

“ Now, how many of you can raise ten shillings to go towards freeing yourselves? You none seem to think you can, and yet you squander that every week over your rent. How many of you could afford to put a pound into the next Melbourne Cup, six months before it is run, if you knew it would win you a thousand pounds? (“Plenty of us.”) Certainly you could. You have but to realize the necessity of a thing, and you soon find a way of doing it. Now you all know that many attempts have been made, by communists, co-operators and others, to find a better way of living in society than we are now doing. ”

“ But we know that all experiments in communism have sooner or later failed; and we have to learn the reason of its failure. Communism did good when it secured the common use of natural wealth not produced by the efforts of human labor; but it did harm when it secured the common use of artificial wealth produced by the efforts of human labor. That is the rock on which communism has always foundered and which its unfortunate wrecked crews have forsaken, preferring to struggle in the maelstrom of capitalism. ”

“ After that you can pay a small sum every week, say a shilling, until you have paid up some five or ten pounds each. Now that isn't much to pay to secure your emancipation, is it? You'd think nothing of paying a hundred pounds through a building society for a house and land, and a poor one at that. And yet that small ten pounds will gain you not only a house and land free of all liabilities, but it will find you capital to work it, and sufficient food and clothing for you to carry on with until you become absolutely independent. ”

“ It is you, deprived of all political or other privileged powers—you, with nothing but a precarious starvation wage—who are to create from yourselves both the power and the wealth necessary for your emancipation. Now you know that every time you work under the present system, you give your employer nearly the whole of your product, simply because he is your employer. That great philosopher, Adam Smith, tells you that the natural wages of labor are the whole product of labor ”

“ True co-operation precludes dividends, profits, or interest. True co-operation is that form of laboring where each works with the other for mutual benefit, but not for mutual plunder; where each gets the full equivalent of what he produces; and where each sells his surplus product for its real worth—that if to say, that he sells it for just what it costs him in labor, receiving in exchange the equivalent in what it cost another in labor for his commodity. ”