Grebe

“ We have not forgotten the advice of the "Grand Master" of the Knights of Labor, that every workman after drinking smash his beer bottle. How much work it would give to labor! How many unemployed could at once be set to work! ”

“ Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers, or what we call Slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life. ”

“ Exactly! It is the ruling class who take the workers by the throat and choke them, so, into submission, into labor, poverty, bondage. What is the law? They make the law for us to obey. Do we ask for our own? ”

“ I hear an expression of dissent from the other side, but I say to honourable gentlemen, when they measure the labour of an Englishman against the labour of the foreigner, they measure a day's labour indeed with a day's labour, but they forget the relative quality of the labour. ”

“ When such phrases as 'the laboring class,' 'the labor problem,' 'the labor movement,' 'labor laws,' etc., are used, reference is made to the wage-earning class, whose rise to its present prominence dates from the industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. ”

“ The Great Problem of how to provide with suitable occupations those who, though perfectly willing to labor, were by unjust social conditions precluded from earning bread for themselves and those dependent on them, had reached the acute phase where the proverbial worm is said to turn—and it had turned with a vengeance! ”

“ In the great civilizations of antiquity there were great aggregations of labour which was not solely, though frequently it was predominantly, slave labour; and some of the features of manufacture and mining on a great scale arose, producing the same sort of evils and industrial maladies known and regulated in our own times. ”

“ Started strikes and bossed the strikers — damned employers, every one,
On the Column — off the Column — in the shanty — in the sun!
"Down with masters — up with wages! keep the 'pigtail' out of this!" ”

“ Moreover, I told you, gentlemen, while speaking of the nobles of the Middle Ages, that they held in social contempt all the activity and industry of the burgher class.
Precisely the same thing occurs to day. It is true that every kind of labour is now held in high honour, and if a rag picker or a nightman became a millionaire, he might be certain of being received with high honour into society. ”

“ Where the workers can all join the fight;
So now on the soap box boldly he stands,
A singing with all of his might:
CHORUS:
There are but two nationalities, a nation of Masters, and a nation of Slaves.
One active agitating worker in the industry, is worth a dozen in the jungle.
One Big Union, One Enemy—The Boss. ”

“ Yet this is scarcely prudent, friends, for a stone is a fair missile. What! will they live on in their princely palaces and offer to us, to the people, the bare right and privilege of labour? Labour! I tell you that God Himself has set His curse upon labour. ”

“ The men and women of those five generations were a poor, hard-working, sombre race,—rising early and working late,—laboriously earning their bread by the sweat of their brows. There were no labor reformers then. ”

“ The march of the workmen themselves was not without the semblance of order. But idle men on every corner joined them, vicious men, whose only occupation it was to prey upon society, fell into their ranks; hoodlums and hotheads, shouting their enthusiasm, went joyously along; the curious and sensation loving followed on behind in scores; even women and children [340] mingled with the crowd that was headed ominously toward the mills. ”

“ On our way we shall protest against civil wars, and shall welcome emancipation and the formation of the communes. Following the thousand details of the life of the people, we shall see the slave become serf, and the serf become peasant. ”

“ During the period of Church and King mobs, they had been taught to carry into effect the wishes of their employers by force, and they at length thought it time to set up for themselves in that trade which they had been taught by their masters and employers. ”

“ The wage slave, who must work or starve was serving a much more exacting and cruel master than the most heartless owner of chattel slaves ever could have been. In the great sphere of human servitude the tables had been completely turned. ”

“ Slavery, which reaches its highest development in civilization, introduced the first great division of an exploited and an exploiting class into society. This division continued during the whole period of civilization. Slavery is the first form of exploitation, characteristic of the antique world. Then followed feudalism in the middle ages, and wage labor in recent times. ”

“ One of the cardinal principles, we must remember, is that all the members of a gens stand on an equal footing. In keeping with this we have seen that all were trained as warriors; yet the great principle of the division of labor was at work. Some filled in their leisure during times of peace by acting as traders; others became proficient in some branch of work, such as feather work, or making gold and silver ornaments. ”

“ It is to them a new pleasure. Labor, in their minds, is indissolubly associated with servitude and the whip; and not to work, they have ever been taught to look upon as the badge and peculiar distinction of freedom. ”

“ The old feudal estimate was still strong in men’s minds, by which the most honourable of all callings was held to be domestic service; then, trade and handicraft; and, lowest and meanest of all, those occupations by which men were not fed, clothed, nor instructed, but merely amused. ”

“ As in early England the various stages of village industrial life, medieval town manufacture, and organization in craft gilds, and the beginnings of the mercantile system, were parallel with a greater or less prevalence of serfdom and even with the presence in part of slavery, so in other ages and civilizations the various methods of organization of labour are found to some extent together. ”

“ And the division of labour which required the carpenter and the shoemaker and the rest of the citizens to be doing each his own business, and not another's, was a shadow of justice, and for that reason it was of use? ”

“ The worker understood that so long as the employer could discharge him and fill his place with another, he was powerless. The combat between the workers and the masters of their bread has from the first been an unequal one. ”

“ Rising, as the rich trader habitually does in early times, from the non-privileged class, the relation between him and those under him is one from which there is excluded the idea of personal subjection. In proportion as the industrial activities become predominant, they make familiar a connection between employer and employed, which differs from the relation between master and slave, or lord and vassal, by not including allegiance. ”

“ Bid Labour claim her treasures from the earth.
On GILES, and such as Giles, the labour falls,
To strew the frequent load where hunger calls.
On driving gales sharp hail indignant flies,
And sleet, more irksome still, assails his eyes ”

“ All the manifestations of the modern labor movement had appeared, in germ at least, by the time the mid-century was reached: unions, labor leaders, strikes, a labor press, a labor political program, and a labor political party. ”

“ The Labor Problem is with us quite as acutely as it was with the Romans when long ago the plebeians left the city and camped on the hillsides, leaving the patricians to do their own manual toil. Whether the employer gives too little or the employee asks too much in any given struggle, the demon of greed plays his part again. ”

“ Slaves were not only employed in the usual domestic offices and in the labours of the field, but also as factors or agents for their masters in the management of business, and as mechanics, artisans, and in every branch of industry. ”

“ Far behind his class come the rank and file of commonplace drudges, who work in a rut and submit to being led like sheep. They may be clerks, domestic servants, trade union operatives, pensioners, or small investors. They form the large, undistinguished, but useful mass of humanity. ”

“ Here, both the labourer and his hire rise in the scale of political consideration; here more hands are called for than can be procured; and the peasant, stimulated to exertions by the reward it reaps for him, enjoys the fruits of his industry, and acquires a relish for the comforts and conveniences of life. ”

“ There are thousands of factory operatives, day laborers, domestic servants, mechanics, sewing women, clerks, apprentices, and such like, whose cry for justice against oppression goes up to heaven by day and by night. ”

“ The ideas of the power of Labour which are suggested by the phenomenon of the [177] strike are, as I shall by and by show more fully, curiously fallacious. ◆2 Men can strike—that is to say, cease to labour—only when they have some store on which to live when they are idle; and such a store is nothing but so much Capital. ”

“ Never before did labor do these things. After the Great Plague in England, labor, finding itself in demand and innocently obeying the economic law, asked higher wages. But the masters set a maximum wage, restrained workingmen from moving about from place to place, refused to tolerate idlers, and by most barbarous legal methods punished those who disobeyed. But labor is accorded greater respect today. ”

“ Man or woman, girl or boy, labourer, mechanic, clerk, house-servant, whoever you may be, whose wages are not the worth of your work,—no, nor a fraction of it—whose wages are the minimum which you and those like you, pressed by the desire for life in the dreadful struggle of "Competition," will consent to take from your Employers who, thanks to it, are able thus to rob you ”

“ Here those problems connected with the labours of a working class, hitherto insoluble above ground, and above ground conducing to such bitterness between classes, were solved by a process the simplest,—a distinct and separate working class was dispensed with altogether. ”

“ It is constantly denied, especially by reformers and revolutionists, that the labor class has won anything by the developments of modern civilization. It appears that the basis for this assertion is the fact that there were peasant, labor, and pauper classes centuries ago and that there are such still. ”

“ Our next division represents those who do work of a kind—‘mental’ work if you like to call it so—work that benefits themselves and harms other people. Employers—or rather Exploiters of Labour; Thieves, Swindlers, Pickpockets; profit seeking share-holders; burglars; Bishops; Financiers; Capitalists, and those persons humorously called ‘Ministers’ of religion. ”

“ This class owns the machinery of society, in great measure,—the ships, factories, shops, water-privileges, houses, and the like. This brings into their employment large masses of working men, with no capital but muscles or skill. The law leaves the employed at the employer's mercy. ”

“ Why, of one who being too lazy to get his Bread by Labour, or too voluptuous to content himself with the Produce of that Labour, declares War against the Properties, and often against the Persons of his Fellow Subjects ”

“ Her peasants were hard working men and even harder working women. But the better classes maintained a supreme contempt for any form of labour, outside of employment in the army or navy or the civil service. ”

“ And the second reason is that, while in the days of serfdom only one class were slave-owners, all classes, except the most numerous one—consisting of peasants who have too little land: labourers and working men—are slave-owners now. ”

“ If, taking to its pity the miseries, the continually increasing troubles, of the still resigned workmen, repressing a rivalry injurious to all, and, addressing itself finally to the imminent question of the organisation of labour, it gave itself the salutary lesson of the association of capital and labour ”

“ We do affirm that the actions of this pitiable class of men (the labourers) , as a commentary on the treatment experienced by them at the hands of the upper and middling classes; the gentlemen, clergy (who ought to teach and instruct them) , and the farmers who ought to pay and feed them, are disgraceful to the British name. ”

“ The slaves become serfs. And gradually the whole of the lower orders are merged in this servile class. Ancient slaves, members of subjected communities, helpless persons who seek the protection of a powerful chief, all become the subjects and dependents of the ruling nobles. Such was the social system of the early Middle Ages, that in the course of time was entirely overturned through the progress of manufactures and commerce and the gradual appropriation of the whole of the land47. [441] ”

“ If you think yourself immune to such queries, make study of the ever-tightening grip of the proletariat on the use that has been made of them. Start with the French Revolution and come on down to glean the why of it that workers mean to be served, as well as serving, in the future. ”