Sind

“ I am not prepared to state how far a fish diet may affect the intellect of the Sindian, but I certainly remarked the prolific nature of the food in the number of children on the banks of the Indus. Manners, &c. Costume. The greatest fault which an European would find with the people of Sinde is their filthy habits. They always wear dark-coloured garments from religious motives; but the ablutions of the Prophet are little attended to. People must be in easy circumstances, I believe, or cease to feel want before they adopt habits of cleanliness. ”

“ But, like "a Hindu caste," each class kept strictly to themselves. But when all is said and done, the most remarkable development of society during the nineteenth century has been in connection with the People. So far they had played no part in the government of the country, which was still wholly in the hands of the wealthy and powerful, while they, the workers—those who toiled with their hands, who gave their lives, courage, patience, skill, endurance, obedience; who suffered and died, striving not ignobly—had no share, nor was it possible for them to rise in the social scale. ”

“ Strike!"
"We're no longer slaves!" cried the speaker. "We're men--and we'll live as men! We'll work as men--or we'll not work at all! We'll no longer be a herd of cattle, that they can drive about as they please! We'll organise, we'll stand together--shoulder to shoulder! Either we'll win together, or we'll starve and die together! And not a man of us will yield, not a man of us will turn traitor! Is there anybody here who'll scab on his fellows?"
There was a howl, which might have come from a pack of wolves. Let the man who would scab on his fellows show his dirty face in that crowd! ”

“ We therefore recognize a great difference between slave, son, and subject, words which may be severally thus defined: slave, one who is held to obey the commands of a master, these commands having reference only to the advantage of the party commanding; a son does what is advantageous to himself on the command of his parent; a subject, lastly, does what is useful to the community, and therefore to himself, by obeying the commands of the supreme power in the state. ”

“ When he kills his enemies in battle, he builds a fire and roasts their flesh and eats them; and those whom he captures alive, he binds fast and takes with him, to be sacrificed to his voodoo gods. But as he comes to more settled ways of living, and as the tribe grows larger, it occurs to the chiefs in battle that the captives would be glad to give their labor in return for their lives, and that it would be convenient to have some people to do the hard and dirty work. So gradually there comes to be a class at the bottom of society, and another class at the top. ”

“ The voice of power, wrought out of suffering—of resolution, crushed out of weakness—of joy and courage, born in the bottomless pit of anguish and despair! The voice of Labor, despised and outraged; a mighty giant, lying prostrate—mountainous, colossal, but blinded, bound, and ignorant of his strength. And now a dream of resistance haunts him, hope battling with fear; until suddenly he stirs, and a fetter snaps—and a thrill shoots through him, to the farthest ends of his huge body, and in a flash the dream becomes an act! ”

“ On every street corner, in every meeting-room, in every spot where the workers gathered at the noon hour, you would hear such arguments; and you would find men listening to them—men who perhaps had never listened to such arguments before. They would nod, and their faces would become grim—yes, the people up on top must be a rotten lot! Here in America, supposed to be a land of liberty and all that—here they were just the same, they were crowding to the trough to drink the blood that was poured out in Europe. ”

“ And so all over the world two classes were forming, with an unbridged chasm between them—the capitalist class, with its enormous fortunes, and the proletariat, bound into slavery by unseen chains. The latter were a thousand to one in numbers, but they were ignorant and helpless, and they would remain at the mercy of their exploiters until they were organized—until they had become "class-conscious." ”

“ The peasant workman in the power of the Kulak peasant, the Jewish seamstress in the power of the Jew who owns the “sweatshop,” the Negro workman under the Negro boss or foreman! To be in the power of a master is bad, but to be in the power of a slave is so much worse! ”

“ Therefore I am not to be silenced by poverty and sickness, not by hatred and obloquy, by threats and ridicule—not by prison and persecution, if they should come—not by any power that is upon the earth or above the earth, that was, or is, or ever can be created. ”

“ The course of events, then, taking the words in their widest sense, is what has given to the Prätigäu its ten thousand peasant proprietors, and it is what has extinguished the class amongst ourselves. If the course of events affecting each of us had been interchanged their condition might have been witnessed in this country, and our condition might have been theirs. Whether it be possible in these days, in the face of emigration, of high wages, of settled estates, of the demoralization of the agricultural labourer, and of a poor law, to recover the lost class may well be doubted. ”

“ You would begin talking to some poor devil who had worked in one shop for the last thirty years, and had never been able to save a penny; who left home every morning at six o'clock, to go and tend a machine, and come back at night too tired to take his clothes off; who had never had a week's vacation in his life, had never traveled, never had an adventure, never learned anything, never hoped anything—and when you started to tell him about Socialism he would sniff and say, "I'm not interested in that—I'm an individualist!" ”

“ Every right-minded master contemplates the physique of his servants with emotions of pride and pleasure. Their looks reflect his character. A gang of half-starved, meanly-clad, overworked slaves, with no heart to laugh or sing, and even without that attachment for their owners which the ox and the ass have for theirs, is a disgusting spectacle, and as revolting to every feeling of humanity as it is in violation of every principle of economy. ”

“ Then as the pain of the burn intensified, he shrieked: "Never, never have I seen so mad and wicked a boy as this: of a surety field labour in my own country were better than such slavery: it is cruel work coming to a place like this! ”

“ The language of such an agency appears to be fully developed among the northern tribes. Spirit-ridden they certainly are; and the mental slavery in which they live, under the fear of an invisible agency of evil spirits, is, we apprehend, greater even than the bondage of the body. The whole mind is bowed down under these intellectual fetters which circumscribe its volitions, and bind it as effectually as with the hooks of steel which pierce a whirling Hindoo’s flesh. ”

“ But in all my life I never doubted that some day the working-people will cross over to the promised land. They'll no longer be slaves, and what they make won't be wasted by idlers. And take it from one who knows, Mary—for a workingman or woman not to have that faith, is to have lost the reason for living. ”

“ But little by little, as the tribe grows in numbers, and in power and intelligence, as it comes to capture slaves in battle, and to unite with other tribes, there comes to be an hereditary chieftain and a group of his leading supporters, his courtiers and henchmen. When the society has evolved into the stage which we call barbarism, there is a permanent superior caste; there are hereditary priests, who have in their keeping the favor of the gods; and there is a subject population of slaves. ”

“ Society has evolved from savagery to barbarism, from barbarism to feudalism, from feudalism to individualism, and with every change the relations of individuals to each other have been modified, the form of the struggle has altered, and the situation of those individuals who have not been successful is somewhat improved. ”

“ So we labour, driven by the whip of necessity, an army of slaves. If we do not our work, the whip descends upon us; only the pain we feel in our stomach instead of on our back. And because of that, we call ourselves free men. ”

“ In any given industrial difficulty, there is and must be a vision for every man, a vision either borrowed for him or made for him by some one else, or a vision he has made for himself, that fits in just where he is. In the last analysis our industrial success is going to lie in the sense of Here, and Me, and Now, raised to the nth power, in what might be called a kind of larger syndicalism. ”

“ What becomes of the greater number, whose charms are not such as to gain the favour of their master? What shall we say of this majority, exposed as they are to the oppression and cruelty of a tyrannical master, and constantly employed in the hardest labour? ”

“ Each day was the same as the one just past; hard work in the field, poor food in the kitchen, a hay bed at night, and the impatience of the “Boss” manifesting itself in personal violence against those of us who were the weaker among his slaves. ”

“ The association with the lower classes which did not entice to battle for the morsel of power, but themselves involuntarily every day and hour reminded those of the upper class of their dearly earned position, would diminish the stimulus and quiet those desirous of power by the thought that there already existed passed by periods. ”

“ Trade Unionism, Socialism, Syndicalism, Bolshevism, Sinn Fein, Indian Nationalism, and their analogues in every part of the globe are outward and visible signs of its sinister activity. That there are social grievances and even evils at the root of this unrest is not denied, but they are as artificial as the unrest itself. ”

“ But they have been blinded by their foolish pride; that pride, which has nothing of mind belonging to it, and which, accompanied with a consciousness of a want of any natural superiority over the labouring classes, seeks to indulge itself in a species of vindictive exercise of power. There has come into the heads of these people, I cannot very well tell how, a notion that it is proper to consider the labouring classes as a distinct caste. ”

“ There was once a man who owned much land, and upon it he built great factories, and many thousand men toiled for him, and he grew fat upon the product of their labor, and his heart was high. And it came to pass that his workers rebelled; and he hired others, and they shot down the workers, so that the rest returned to their labor. And the master said: The world is mine, and none can oppose me. But one day there arose among the workers a man who laughed. ”

“ Communities such as we find in Siam, where every subject is a slave of the king, are those in which the inferior calls himself dust under the feet of the superior, while ascribing to the superior transcendent powers, and where the forms of address, even between equals, avoid naming the person addressed. ”

“ I want now to point out some analogies which show how revolutionary syndicalism is the greatest educative force that contemporary society has at its disposal for the preparation of the system of production, which the workmen will adopt, in a society organised in accordance with the new conceptions. ”

“ I wonder as you gallop gaily along the way, throwing rocks in gypsy-like abandon at the starched and frilled little children of privilege—I wonder whether you will give your readers just one glimpse of the tragedies that are the lives of the men hired by the system to do the work you condemn. ”

“ It set up in places of authority men whose views were agreeable to it—who believed in the beneficence of its rule and the permanence of its system; who would pour out ridicule and contempt upon those who suggested that any other system might be conceivable. And so the class-war was waged, not merely in the world of industry and politics, but also, in the intellectual world. ”

“ It is the class-struggle which is developing the self-consciousness, the will-power and the moral character of the workingmen and is creating forms of organization proper to them. In a word, it is the class-struggle which is forging the material and moral means of emancipation for the workingmen and putting these weapons into their hands. ”

“ He knew that in too many cases men had in the past made their position a sinecure in the Labor Movement and he condemned their action. The Movement must be served and not lived on. Not personal betterment, but the betterment of the whole lot. ”

“ You are breaking away from the conventions and bondage of society. The cords snap as you step out. You will be emancipated from the clock. You are shaking off the incubus of duty. Responsibility, duty’s daughter, goes with her. You shrug your shoulders to make sure that they are going. Conscience means now to go where you please ”

“ A mode of humble address, when the inferior presumes to state something contrary to what the superior maintains or desires; and as human life in India was, in olden times, not only precarious, but considered as insignificant, the oriental slave acts prudently by begging his life before he presumes to be candid. ”

“ In the world's oldest centres of culture ten or twenty millions of wage-slaves have been hurled together—and then the Socialist or Anarchist or Syndicalist or Industrial Unionist would describe in detail the bloody and bestial operations which these ten or twenty millions of men were performing. ”

“ For a number of years the conflict had, so to speak, been preparing itself, and the workers had made ready for it, had longed for it, had sought to precipitate it, in order to determine once for all whether they were destined always to be slaves and to stand still, or whether there was a future for them. ”