James Bronterre O'Brien

“ A poverty-stricken people can never be a free, a happy, a religious, or an educated people. No reform that will not give the people the means of acquiring property by honest industry—which will not enable them to be independent of wages-slavery—which will not enable them to live in houses of their own, and allow them free access to the soil of their country, is worth their serious attention.
We defy all the genius and statesmanship in the world to save a population from being the slaves of middle-class vampires so long as land is private property. ”

“ With such prodigious advantages in its favour, the age we live in ought to witness the extinction of every vestige of every description of slavery known to man. The transition from chattel-slavery to proletarianism and wages-slavery cost, as we shall see, rivers of human blood; and, nevertheless, man’s ignorance and barbarity have, as we have seen, made the change rather a curse than a blessing to the majority of his fellows. ”

“ When such universal ignorance and barbarity prevailed amongst the master-class—an ignorance and barbarity that virtually left civil liberty and equality without any solid guarantees whatever—it would be madness to expect that any revolution useful to humanity could have been effected by a still more ignorant slave-class. They would but have made confusion more confounded, and, by altogether suspending production, annihilated society itself amid scenes of indescribable carnage and cannibalism. At all events, the slaves knew better than to make any such attempt. ”

“ The second social revolution—the transition from proletarianism and wages-slavery to real and universal emancipation—may be effected without the loss of a single life, or the sacrifice of a shilling’s worth of his possessions to any man of any class. Such, at least, is the creed of us, National Reformers. To make that creed known and appreciated by submitting it to a full and impartial examination by the public, and thereby to enlist as many as we can of the good and wise of all classes in the cause of human redemption, is, we hardly need say, the main object of this inquiry. ”

“ At all events, there can be no doubt as to Aristotle’s meaning. Like Homer and Plato, he was a firm believer in the duality of human nature—that is to say, that slaves were born with one nature, and their masters with another. Indeed, Plato carried this creed so far, that he made slavery to consist in the moral and mental man himself, and not in the servility of his condition as a slave. A wise man, he contended, could not be made a slave of: the natural superiority of such a man would rise superior to any, or all, conditions that might be imposed upon him. ”

“ If setting fire to Rome, and reducing three-fourths of it to ashes, could have been made available for the destruction of the Christians, the aristocracy of that day would no more have scrupled at it than did Rostochin the burning of Moscow, Cavaignac the demolitions in Paris, or General Oudinot the bombardment of Rome. Aristocrats have never been aught but robbers since the birth of their order; and all history proves that they invariably become murderers, burners, devastators, and hirers of assassins the moment the people attempt to recover their own. ”

“ No slave-owner would tolerate a system which went to deny him a property in his fellow-man. No ruler, no magistrate, would spare innovators whose doctrine went to revolutionize the entire social system as then constituted. No nation as a notion, no people as a people, would, for an instant, endure a religion which went to deprive them of their gods—the accredited protectors of their liberties and laws. ”

“ It is this, that a nation, rich in real money, may be thrown into bankruptcy, and perhaps revolution, by adopting a false representative of value, through the privation of that gold which its legislature recognises as the sole legal tender. Let the gold go, what remains? Our land, retaining its fertility; our machinery, capable of continuing its work; our vessels, as seaworthy as before; our skilled industry, with its intelligence unimpaired; our unskilled labour, not a whit enfeebled in its natural productive powers. These are the elements of real money. ”

“ We desire to substitute in our country morality for egotism, probity for honour, principles for usages, duties for conventionalities, the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, contempt of vice for contempt of misfortune, manly pride for insolence, greatness of soul for vanity, love of glory for love of money, honesty for respectability, good people for good society, merit for intrigue, genius for wit, truth for display, the charms of happiness for the ennui of pleasure, the greatness of man for the littleness of the great ”

“ One is, that if we are not indebted to Christianity for the first or earliest repudiation of human slavery, we are indebted for it to the purest fraction of that people, and to the purest form of that religion, to whom and to which we owe Christianity itself; in other words, it is to believers in the God of the Jews and of the Christians, and not to the believers in any pagan gods or in no God, we are indebted for the first authoritative interference with the pretended right of man to hold his fellow-man in bondage. ”

“ The harsh conduct of masters and the violation of work-house rules were the motive powers of each revolt: no higher motive seems, for a moment, to have actuated the revolters.
The conduct, too, of Eunus and Athenio, during their brief success, showed how thoroughly undemocratic, and even aristocratic, were their plans and objects. Instead of setting about the abolition of slavery and the establishment of equality, they began forthwith to ape the pomp and circumstance of their oppressors, and to deal with their followers as though they were little kings, and not fellow-slaves in rebellion. ”

“ If ever a slave-insurrection might have been expected to fly at nobler game, to strike at the very root of oppression, and to hoist the banner of universal freedom for all slaves, it was the insurrection of the gladiators under Spartacus, adverted to in our last, which was by far the most formidable of all the servile wars that occurred under the Republic. ”

“ We desire an order of things in which all the mean and cruel passions shall be chained down—all the beneficent and generous passions awakened by the laws; in which ambition shall consist in the desire of meriting glory, and serving our country; in which distinctions shall spring but from equality itself; in which the citizen shall be subject to the magistrate, the magistrate to the people, and the people to justice; in which the country shall ensure the prosperity of every individual, and in which each individual shall enjoy with pride the prosperity and glory of his country ”

“ Strange that what God designed to be man’s greatest blessing should be made man’s greatest curse by man’s own perversity! Yet so it is with almost every good thing designed or invented to perfect man in wisdom and civilization. It is so with science and machinery, it is so with money; it is so with public credit; it is so with mercantile enterprise; it is so with the institution of private property; and so, also, it has hitherto been with the divine institution of Christianity itself. ”

“ Why did not the slaves of the old pagan world take advantage of some popular insurrection, or of the overthrow of their rulers by some invader, to vindicate the rights of humanity in their own persons, by at once establishing a free government for all, and by abolishing slavery altogether? ”

“ Private obligations affected by Peel’s measures should be adjusted upon the same principle as the public debt. Not to do so is to rob one class to enrich another: to persevere in such a course is to invite convulsion. Law is intended to protect property for all; not to create property for any. To pervert it from this, its legitimate function, into an instrument of rapine for the injury and ruin of those it should shield is to arm the nation against the law. ”

“ It was at this peculiar crisis of human affairs that Christianity made its appearance in the world. Need we say the divine mission of its Author was to rescue humanity from the scourges we have been describing, to bind up its bleeding wounds, and to infuse into it a spirit the opposite of what had produced the appalling vices and evils so rife at the time of His advent? ”

“ Here, however, the perversity of man stepped in, to undo all that Christianity had done. The very emancipations it operated, and which it intended for the happiness of the emancipated, and to serve as the foundation of a new social edifice, in which all should enjoy equal rights and equal laws—these very emancipations were made a curse instead of a blessing to the emancipated, and to serve for the foundation of a worse system of slavery than any that was known under the Cæsars or the Pharaohs, or than any that existed in the Southern States of America or under any Oriental despotism. ”

“ There is not a member in either House of Parliament that does not know, as well as we know, that our land and money laws are at the bottom of all the distress in the country, and that the repeal of bad laws, and the enactment of good ones, are all that is wanted to make England a paradise. There is not a member in either House that does not know that all the slavery in the world, or that has ever been in the world, is, or has been, the work of landlords and money-lords ”

“ As this iniquitous class can grow rich only by grinding and cheating their fellow-creatures, that is, by robbery and oppression, they are, by the very nature of their pursuits and practices, irreconcilable enemies of society. It is their interest that the working-classes should be always at variance amongst themselves—always a prey to ignorance—given to mutual jealousy and mistrust—and filled with prejudices and superstitions, by which they may at all times have their passions inflamed against those who would unite, enlighten, and emancipate them from bondage. ”

“ Thousands and hundreds of thousands who had been free citizens were taken prisoners and sold as slaves during those horrid wars. To escape similar disasters, whole nations and races without number placed themselves under the protectorate of Rome, paid tribute to the imperial exchequer, and basely bartered their independence and the rights and liberties of their subjects to win the smiles or to court the pleasure of Augustus and his successors. Rome herself was a mass of incarnadined corruption. ”

“ Whatever wealth he might hoard or scrape together was at the mercy of his master; for as slaves were themselves but the property of their masters, whatever belonged to them belonged, by the same rule, to their owners. It is needless to argue in condemnation of such a system: it is self-condemned in the very fact that human nature recoils from such a state, and that it is only bearable by those who know no better, and only preferable to the sort of mockery of freedom to which it has given place. ”