David A. Andrade

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They trusted to bad conditions to create good human beings. They tolerated the institutions of human slavery, and hoped, poor fools, for the day when the slave should be noble and the slave-master kind. They believed that the human race was wicked, that it gloried in its wickedness, and that all the vices and crimes it committed were but the natural manifestations of its totally depraved nature. ”

“ All at once, the mayor of the city appeared, armed with a sheet of paper which turned out to be the Riot Act, and he appeared to read from it, although no one, not even himself, could hear a word of it, and no sooner had he done than a general rush was made by the police and a number of civilians upon the occupants of the lorry. Men were fighting each other indiscriminately. Women and children were screaming and fainting, and the horses plunging about wildly and trampling many many poor wretches to death. ”

“ What a world of wasted efforts might have been spared had humanity but learned these lessons that nature is everywhere teaching him! Generations after generations have passed away, while poets, philosophers, and preachers were calling on the people to live good lives in harmony with each other; but the efforts of all those generations have been spent in vain. Had those noble minds but united their efforts in finding out the social conditions that generate morality, and then worked together to establish those conditions, in a few months or years they could have achieved them ”

“ 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. ”

“ This prolific increase of nature, which used to be the principle agency by which you were impoverished because it did not belong to you, becomes the means by which you all get wealthy now that it does belong to you. You soon have realized so much by the sale of your growing surplus product that you can easily buy more land than you need; you can send your remaining members in larger batches to colonize, and can buy them costlier and more efficient machinery. ”

“ If you cut that thread, you take those human lives. Hence you must be discreet, you must be certain, you must be true in your convictions, and courageous in your verdict. Society now reposes its confidence for security in yourselves. If those men are guilty of the ferocious deeds assigned to them, it looks to you to preserve it from the ravages of them and others like them, by deciding the one small word that shall launch them into eternity. ”

“ That is to say, every individual has the right to certain land only because he is using it; he is only entitled to the exact area that he is using; and he has only a claim upon it while he is using it. The instant he ceases to use any part of it, he ceases to have any right to posses that part. That is the only just system of holding and working land. It is the natural land law that existed before the world was ever cursed with statute law; and it is the law which will live and be recognised in society when all our statute laws are forgotten. ”

“ Men and women were frantically rushing at each other like starving wild beasts; the armed butchers of the law shooting down all who failed to assist them; truncheons of police breaking every available skull; troopers' horses trampling down anyone, and lances and swords spilling blood like a bursted reservoir; buildings were flaming and consuming their inmates; while in all directions explosives were flying, hurling master and slave together to destruction. ”

“ All the great masses outside of that monopoly thus become the unwilling slaves to the few favored monopolists. Of course they want to live; but to do so they must work. They can't work in the air so they turn to the land. But instantly the landlord catches them and tells them it is his land, and if they want to use it they must give him a part of their product from that land for the privilege of using it. Of course, they can't do without it; so they give him what he asks. That is the first step in the plunder of the workers, and we call it rent. ”

“ And there's another thing these pioneers can do when they get fairly started—they can commence making their own money. I don't mean lending gold out to others and robbing the borrowers of more than they borrowed; that’s called making money, but it isn't anything of the kind: it's only a polite way of legally thieving money. I mean they can commence making labor money, not plutocrats' money—money that represents product created by labor, not money that represents the mines that the usurpers have stolen from the laborers by their wicked schemes of law and disorder. ”

“ Gentlemen of the jury—It is now your solemn duty, after considering the evidence and hearing the instructions I have given you, to decide whether the prisoners are guilty or guiltless of the charges laid against them. The charge is the worst that can possibly be laid against any human being, for it is that of violently and maliciously depriving another human being of that, which is dearer than all else to him, his life. ”

“ They thought the individual character was superior to the conditions environing it—that the human will was free, and therefore responsible for the individual's wicked actions (although inconsistently giving it small credit for his good actions) —that man's nature was bad, bad, irretrievably bad, and therefore that his fellows should treat him with the brutality inherent in their own brutal natures and so richly deserved by the brutal nature of himself. But, friends, I find this is a lie, a fiendish falsehood, a slander on humanity. ”

“ The martyrs words might echo outside the walls, and perchance that echo might never die, but might herald in the victim's retribution. So the authorities had decided that the victims, like the martyrs of Chicago should be gagged before being murdered. A few stifled cries were all that was heard; and seventeen more human beings had suffered the utmost penalty of man's brutality. The spectators were delighted. Law was triumphant. It's power was vindicated. Its institutions were assured. And its foes were crushed like worms beneath its feet! ”

“ The labor party who after many years of untiring struggle had got a very numerous representation in the legislature, were powerless to tear down the strong vested interests arrayed against them as they had hoped to do, and were as ignorant of the ultimate causes of the terrible depression which was threatening to break up society as they were divided in opinion as to the wisest expedients to tide over the present difficulties; as to a radical and permanent cure, they did not dare to entertain the thought of it.
The streets of Melbourne were thronged with men in vain search of employment ”

“ You can't expect to have people taken out of the city, and possessing all the greedy vices of city life—you can't expect to have these people acting justly towards each other, and only taking a fair share of the land. ”