Jack London

“ Of them that are oppressed and have no comforter! Of the disinherited of life, for whom there is no respite and no deliverance, to whom the world is a prison, a dungeon of torture, a tomb! With the voice of the little child who toils tonight in a Southern cotton-mill, staggering with exhaustion, numb with agony, and knowing no hope but the grave! Of the mother who sews by candle-light in her tenement garret, weary and weeping, smitten with the mortal hunger of her babes! Of the man who lies upon a bed of rags, wrestling in his last sickness and leaving his loved ones to perish! ”

“ Cry of the People By John G. Neihardt
(Western poet and novelist, born 1881)
Tremble before your chattels,
Lords of the scheme of things!
Fighters of all earth’s battles,
Ours is the might of kings!
Guided by seers and sages,
The world’s heart-beat for a drum,
Snapping the chains of ages,
Out of the night we come!
Lend us no ear that pities!
Offer no almoner’s hand!
Alms for the builders of cities!
When will you understand?
Down with your pride of birth
And your golden gods of trade!
A man is worth to his mother, Earth,
All that a man has made!
We are the workers and makers! ”

“ Come with me and I will show you where men and women work from morning till night, from week to week, from year to year, at the full stretch of their powers, in dim and fetid dens, and yet are poor—aye, destitute—have for their wages a crust of bread and rags. I will show you where men work in dirt and heat, using the strength of brutes, for a dozen hours a day, and sleep at night in styes, until brain and muscle are exhausted, and fresh slaves are yoked to the golden car of commerce, and the broken drudges filter through the poor-house or the prison to a felon’s or a pauper’s grave! ”

“ Naked to the four winds of heaven and all the rains of the world, they had stood there for countless ages in all their sinister strength, undefied and unconquered, until man, with puny hands and little tools of labor, came to break the spirit of their ancient mightiness.
And we, the men who braved this task, were outcasts of the world. A blind fate, a vast merciless mechanism, cut and shaped the fabric of our existence. We were men despised when we were most useful, rejected when we were not needed, and forgotten when our troubles weighed upon us heavily. ”

“ There are derelict churches in the Strand, and dingy, blatant taverns, and strident signs and hoardings; and there are slums hard by.
There are thieves in the Strand, and prowling vagrants, and gaunt hawkers, and touts, and gamblers, and loitering failures, with tragic eyes and wilted garments; and prostitutes plying for hire.
And east and west, and north and south of the Strand, there is London. Is there a man amongst all London’s millions brave enough to tell the naked truth about the vice and crime, the misery and meanness, the hypocrisies and shames of the great, rich, heathen city? ”

“ Dirty the ditch, in the depths of it he chooses a spot to die,
Foaming with nicotine-tainted lips, holding his aching breast,
Dropping down like a cow that slips, smitten with rinderpest;
Drivelling yet of the work and wet, swearing as sinners swear,
Raving the rule of the gambling school, mixing it up with a prayer.
He lived like a brute as the navvies live, and went as the cattle go,
No one to sorrow and no one to shrive, for heaven ordained it so—
He handed his check to the shadow in black, and went to the misty lands,
Never a mortal to close his eyes or a woman to cross his hands. ”

“ If your heart really beats in unison with that of humanity, if like a true poet you have an ear for Life, then, gazing out upon this sea of sorrow whose tide sweeps up around you, face to face with these people dying of hunger, in the presence of these corpses piled up in the mines, and these mutilated bodies lying in heaps on the barricades, looking on these long lines of exiles who are going to bury themselves in the snows of Siberia and in the marshes of tropical islands ”

“ And you, all of you—not you alone, Boss, but all of you: ward leaders; State leaders; all the national political bosses—you all betray them. You receive from them their votes, so faithfully given, and you transform them into office-holders whom you teach or corrupt and compel to obey you. So you reorganize the city government. You, not the Mayor, are the head of it; you, not the council, are its legislature; you, not the heads of departments, are the administrators of the property and the powers of the people of your city; the common, helpless, friendless people. ”

“ Alas, while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated!, Alas, was this too a Breath of God; bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!—That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy, were it to happen more than twenty times in the minute, as by some computations it does. The miserable fraction of Science which our united Mankind, in a wide universe of Nescience, has acquired, why is not this, with all diligence, imparted to all? ”

“ Poor Poverty! how agonizing must thy hunger be where others swell in scornful superfluity! And when some one casts with indifferent hand a crust into thy lap, how bitter must the tears be wherewith thou moistenest it! Thou poisonest thyself with thine own tears. Well art thou in the right when thou alliest thyself to Vice and Crime. Outlawed criminals often bear more humanity in their hearts than those cold, blameless citizens of virtue, in whose white hearts the power of evil is quenched; but also the power of good. ”

“ I am your neighbor, and you are mine. Why are we coarse and untaught? Because we produce our own bread, and yours too! Have we any time to study and educate ourselves? You have stolen our brains as well as our bread by trickery and violence.
How blind thou art, O wise man; thou that readest the scriptures, and seest not the way in which thou mightest free thyself, and the flock committed to thee, from the burden of sin! Thy blindness is like unto that of Balaam, who, astride his ass, saw not the angel of God armed with a sword of fire standing in the way before him. ”

“ If in the depths of pestilential workshops and factories the slavery of ancient times subsisted in the wage-earning system, if men still died of want on their pallets like broken-down beasts of burden, it was nevertheless a fact that once already, on a memorable day of tempest, Liberty sprang forth from the vat to wing her flight throughout the world. And why in her turn should not Justice spring from it, proceeding from those troubled elements, freeing herself from all dross, ascending with dazzling splendor and regenerating the nations? ”

“ For one who sees and thinks life in terms of shares and coupons, it is certainly overdrawn. But for one who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood and womanhood, it cannot be overdrawn. Such hordes of beastly wretchedness and inarticulate misery are no compensation for a millionaire brewer who lives in a West End palace, sates himself with the sensuous delights of London’s golden theatres, hobnobs with lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by the king. ”

“ A pervading sense of love, increasing, wholesome, purifying, became the perfume and the sacred flame of daily life. Love, general and universal, had its birth in youth; then it passed on and became mother love, father love, filial love; it spread to relations, to neighbors, to fellow-citizens, to all men upon earth, and as its waves swept on and became stronger, it seemed to become a great sea of love, bathing the shores of the whole earth. Charity—that is, love of one’s neighbors—was like the fresh air which fills the lungs of all who breathe it ”

“ Today the sacrifice of life incidental to quick success rarely calls for the actual spilling of blood. How decent are the pale slayings of the quack, the adulterator, and the purveyor of polluted water, compared with the red slayings of the vulgar bandit or assassin! Even if there is blood-letting, the long-range, tentacular nature of modern homicide eliminates all personal collision. What an abyss between the knife-play of brawlers and the law-defying neglect to fence dangerous machinery in a mill, or to furnish cars with safety couplers! ”

“ These common sights of the common streets, John, are very terrible to me. To a man of a nervous temperament, at once thoughtful and imaginative, those sights must be terrible. The prostitute under the lamps, the baby beggar in the gutter, the broken pauper in his livery of shame, the weary worker stifling in his filthy slums, the wage slave toiling at his task, the sweater’s victim “sewing at once, with a double thread, a shroud as well as a shirt,” these are dreadful, ghastly, shameful facts which long since seared themselves upon my heart. ”

“ People dare not love for fear of Snobs. People pine away lonely under the tyranny of Snobs. Honest kindly hearts dry up and die. Gallant generous lads, blooming with hearty youth, swell into bloated old bachelorhood, and burst and tumble over. Tender girls wither into shrunken decay, and perish solitary, from whom Snobbishness has cut off the common claim to happiness and affection with which Nature endowed us all. My heart grows sad as I see the blundering tyrant’s handiwork. As I behold it I swell with cheap rage, and glow with fury against the Snob. ”

“ Do you intend to be the sole inhabitants of the earth? Why do you drive out the fellow sharers of nature, and claim it all for yourselves? The earth was made for all, rich and poor, in common. Why do you rich claim it as your exclusive right? The soil was given to the rich and poor in common—wherefore, oh, ye rich, do you unjustly claim it for yourselves alone? Nature gave all things in common for the use of all; usurpation created private rights. Property hath no rights. The earth is the Lord’s, and we are his offspring. The pagans hold earth as property. ”

“ What is the law of nature? Is it to know that my security and that of my family, all my amusements and pleasures, are purchased at the expense of misery, deprivation, and suffering to thousands of human beings—by the terror of the gallows; by the misfortune of thousands stifling within prison walls; by the fears inspired by millions of soldiers and guardians of civilization, torn from their homes and besotted by discipline, to protect our pleasures with loaded revolvers against the possible interference of the famishing! ”

“ He seated himself in an arm-chair and gazed at the child with the grave and persuasive eyes of a leader of men. “You will be a good Socialist, eh, little Antoine? You will love men; you will not separate your life from that of others, like a Robinson Crusoe of egoism. Vive la revolution!”
“Vive la revolution!” cried the child.
“Behold the future!” said François Rougemont, rocking the little one upon his knees. “It will see the shining of the great dawn, the dawn of a humanity as different from our own as ours is different from the humanity of the pyramids. ”