Class hatred

“ The fiercest hatred will prevail amongst those who are most closely associated—for instance, between [58] handworkers and brainworkers, between leaders and followers; and this hate will be all the more inappeasable when it is open to every one to rise in the world, and none can cherish the excuse that he is the victim of a social system of overwhelming power. To-day this hatred is masked by the general class-hatred—hatred of the monopolists of culture, of position and of capital. ”

“ Class hatred is bad in just the same way, and without regard to the individual who, at a given time, substitutes loyalty to a class for loyalty to a nation, or substitutes hatred of men because they happen to come in a certain social category, for judgement awarded them according to their conduct. Remember always that the same measure of condemnation should be extended to the arrogance which would look down upon or crush any man because he is poor and to envy and hatred which would destroy a man because he is wealthy. ”

“ You are setting class against class; you are rousing ill-will and stirring up hatred and enmity; you are teaching men to be discontented with their position in life——”
“Yes, sir, I know I am, because they ought to be discontented with degradation, ignorance, and hopeless misery. There is no reason why it should continue and increase as it does. We want them to be disgusted and discontented with it. Would there ever have been any civilisation and culture in the world had men always been contented to remain exactly in the position in which they were born?” ”

“ If ever class hatred comes to play an important part in English life it will not be the fault of the aristocracy. I doubt whether any labourer would sacrifice his evening’s leisure to encourage a movement for the good of Lady Kingscourt. ”

“ But with the great modern evil—the separation of the classes—there comes so much of misunderstanding and of mistrust that the employer seems only too willing to believe any paid villain who tells him that his tired and worn laborers have murder in their hearts. The class struggle is a terrible fact; but the class hatred and the personal enmity that are growing among both masters and men in the United States are natural and inevitable results of this system of spies and informers. ”

“ Much arrant nonsense is vented concerning the 'class-hatred' stirred up by any criticism of the rich. One such instance as the running-down of Miss Cleary bears within it far more than the extremest demagoguery the potentialities of an unleashed hate. ”

“ This “dis-sympathy” will amount to something very much more like class hatred whenever the poor begin to open their eyes. It is a mistake to suppose that antagonism between classes is produced by the inflammatory speeches and writings of agitators. ”

“ There is no room in this country for class-hatred. It does not exist outside of the ranks of the Socialists. There is, in fact, more class-hatred shown by the rival factions in the Socialist movement in their squabbles with one another, than there is between employer and employe. Yet, by means of cunning misrepresentation and perversion of facts, all who come under the influence of Socialism—even the children in the Socialist Sunday schools—are made to take this wrong outlook upon life ”

“ And yet this industrial era had to bring its own hardships, and, unhappily, its own hatreds. The class hatred, as it is called—the animosity felt by the man who works with his hands against the class that has the money and works with its brains—arose directly out of the conditions which the steam-engine produced. To-day, when that industrial era has lasted more {191} than a hundred years, it is that hatred which makes our life so very difficult for us all, both for the classes above and for the classes below. ”

“ The uncompromising and terrible hatred of the trade-unionist for a scab is the hatred of a class for a traitor to that class,--while the hatred of a trade-unionist for the militia is the hatred of a class for a weapon wielded by the class with which it is fighting. No workman can be true to his class and at the same time be a member of the militia: this is the dictum of the labor leaders. ”

“ He lives charitably with all men and it puzzles him, as it puzzles me, to understand the growing doubt, the class prejudice—nay, class hatred the failure of trust and the increasing tension and uneasiness between employer and employed. ”

“ It was the hatred, carefully instilled, of the poor against the rich; it was the war breathed between class and class; it was that envy of all superiorities which loves to show itself by allowing virtue only to a blouse, and asserting; that a man must be a rogue if he belong to that rank of society in which, from the very gifts of education, from the necessary associations of circumstance, roguery is the last thing probable or natural. ”

“ Just as the two hundred and thirty-four spent their class hours, so the thousands of students who preceded them have spent theirs, and, if matters do not mend, so will those yet to come spend theirs, and be brutalized, while wounded dignity and youthful enthusiasm will be converted into hatred and sloth, like the waves that become polluted along one part of the shore and roll on one after another, each in succession depositing a larger sediment of filth. ”

“ This is a most healthy truth, which it is wise for all our people to learn. Any movement based on that class hatred which at times assumes the name of "class consciousness" is certain ultimately to fail, and if it temporarily succeeds, to do far-reaching damage. ”

“ We are, in fact, to-day repeating in our intercourse between races all the former evils of class distinction within the nation: personal hatred and abuse, mutual injustice, unequal taxation and rigid caste. Individual nations outgrew these fatal things by breaking down the horizontal barriers between classes. We are bringing them back by seeking to erect vertical barriers between races. Men were told that abolition of compulsory class distinction meant leveling down, degradation, disappearance of culture and genius and the triumph of the mob. ”

“ All alike conduct their propaganda by endeavoring to create or accentuate the class consciousness of manual workers who constitute the majority of human beings and whose condition, it is insisted, would be improved under a Socialistic regime. The violent wing promotes not merely class consciousness but class hatred. ”

“ Even then, this ground of union would have ceased with their victory, and on the morrow of the social revolution, the old national rivalries might have revived. There is no alchemy by which a universal harmony cart be produced out of hatred. Those who have been inspired to action by the doctrine of the class war will have acquired the habit of hatred, and will instinctively seek new enemies when the old ones have been vanquished. ”

“ Where there is such a spirit of caste, where the ruling class has a personal interest in fostering prejudice, where the masses are in such an inert condition, where ignorance so generally prevails, where there is so little ambition for improvement, where life is so hard and material in its tone, it is not strange to find much hatred and contempt. ”

“ There may be self-tormenting and unhappily constituted natures who will hate their own dispositions and the destiny they have shaped for themselves—these aberrations will never cease so long as men are men—but there will be no more hatred of class for class, any more than there is in any voluntary association of artists or of athletes. ”

“ In many a modern cry for justice there rings a note of plebeian spite and envy. Involuntarily many a modern savant of middle-class or lower middle-class origin has attributed an unwarrantable importance to the atavistic emotions prevalent among those who have been long oppressed: hatred and rancour, spite and thirst for revenge. ”

“ The artful and blind hostility of philosophers towards the senses what an amount of mob and middle-class qualities lie in all this hatred! The crowd always believes that an abuse of which it feels the harmful results, constitutes an objection to the thing which happens to be abused: all insurrectionary movements against principles, whether in politics or agriculture, always follow a line of argument suggested by this ulterior motive: the abuse must be shown to be necessary to, and inherent in, the principle.. ”

“ Much of the hatred existing among mankind is the hatred of class against class-of classes against other classes, with whom they have little personal acquaintance, or little common expe­rience. The rich do not hate the rich, as a class ”

“ It is such things that stimulate class hatreds and deepen class divisions, and if the law of opinion does not interfere to check them they will one day bring down upon the society that encourages them a signal and well-merited retribution. ”

“ And so the mills of the gods wuz turnin’ slowly but surely, and slavery, and oppression, and class hatred, and personal spite, and bitterness, and social contempt, and ignorance wuz gettin’ ready to be ground out into the food whereby Vengeance and Horror should be sated. ”

“ Where is there so much dissension and bitterness as in family matters, where people try to act by sentiment and affection? The way to improve the relation of employer and employee is not to get sentiment into it, but to get sentiment out of it. We are told that253 classes are becoming more separated, and that the poor are learning to hate the rich, although there was a time when no class hatreds existed. ”

“ Some of these are doubtless good and sound; others are delusive; in every case a competent criticism is of the first necessity. In the upheaval of society which is going on, classes and groups are thrown against403 each other in such a way as to produce class hatreds and hostilities. ”

“ Whenever a fact of this sort presents itself, the case is grave. Suffering engenders wrath; and while the prosperous classes blind themselves or fall asleep, which is the same thing as shutting one’s eyes, the hatred of the unfortunate classes lights its torch at some aggrieved or ill-made spirit which dreams in a corner, and sets itself to the scrutiny of society. The scrutiny of hatred is a terrible thing. ”

“ A deep-rooted, bitter hate, sprung from long and systematic oppression, divided class from class by an intangible but impenetrable barrier; a hate that grew all the stronger, in that it had long been veiled by fear and lashed by supercilious scorn. ”

“ Therefore, the society had unconsciously sought to eliminate the reasons for struggle.
What bred the hatreds and jealousies among men? What caused one group to fight another?
Society had decided that intolerance and hatred were caused by inequality. The jealousy of the inferior toward his superior; the scorn of the superior toward his inferior. The Have-not envies the Have, and the Have looks down upon the Have-not. ”

“ It was more tolerable to submit to occasional injustice and cruelty which was shared by all classes of society around them than to be daily reminded that they formed a class apart—the proper objects of general contempt and aversion. ”

“ The hatred and contempt of all classes of society as necessarily attend him in his wanderings as his own shadow.... Equally repulsive to every grade of society, he stands isolated and alone, a solitary monument of the degradation of which human nature is capable. ”

“ The tidings of the far-off movement in their favour come to them on every wind that blows, calming their desperation, breathing hope into their souls; making the best of their masters thoughtful and sad, and the worst, desperate and cruel, though kept within bounds by fear.
The word 'hatred' is not too strong for the feeling of a large proportion of slave-holders towards particular slaves ”

“ I saw a man whose eyes had gone behind every scene, whose back had turned, he believed, on every illusion, tolerant of every frailty, amused at little hypocrisies and of those greater shams which an arrogant society imposes on the outsider and itself defies with impunity: steeped in this class cynicism, without realizing that in the strong nourishing forces of civilization this society is but the scum that rises to the surface and that in the old pot-au-feu below are the vital nourishments of the race. ”

“ A long-drawn call to hate, to hate whatever is not of our own race or class; and above all the banding together of the “noblest” profession as against the encroachments of mere civilians, of men whose hands are soiled with other stains than blood. ”

“ Harsh things are said too, no doubt, against all the great classes of the community; but these things so evidently come from a hostile class, and are so manifestly dictated by the passions and prepossessions of a hostile class, and not by right reason, that they make no serious impression on those at whom they are launched, but slide easily off their minds. ”

“ There are things in this world that it is right to hate, that we are the better for hating with all our hearts; and one of the things that I hate most, and with most reason, is the narrow class-spirit when it sets itself against the great interests of mankind. ”

“ We may not be of the same class, we may consider your class to be the enemy of ours, yet, still the claims of class have not killed in us all feelings of humanity.
We know well that under your bourgeois garb there beats the heart of a man, like our own. In the interest of your class itself, in the interest of the men and the women of your class—our brothers and sisters in humanity—we would have you pause before further exasperating by a vindictive verdict, our class, which is already sufficiently exasperated against you. ”

“ Sometimes their reason—at other times their prejudices or superstitions: often their social affections, not seldom their anti-social ones, their envy or jealousy, their arrogance or contemptuousness: but most commonly, their desires or fears for themselves—their legitimate or illegitimate self-interest. Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests, and its feelings of class superiority. ”