Occupier

“ The occupier for the time has very commonly been considered to have a right to retain his holding, while he fulfils the customary requirements; and has thus become, in a certain sense, a co-proprietor of the soil. ”

“ The accomplished, the well-born, and the good, may be driven from the homes of their ancestors, and reduced to beggary, because the dishonest occupiers will neither pay their engagements nor surrender their lands, and no one laments their fate. ”

“ Every town-gate and village taxing-house had its band of citizen-patriots, with their national muskets in a most explosive state of readiness, who stopped all comers and goers, cross-questioned them, inspected their papers, looked for their names in lists of their own, turned them back, or sent them on, or stopped them and laid them in hold, as their capricious judgment or fancy deemed best for the dawning Republic One and Indivisible, of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death. ”

“ In this rapid and original survey the true proportions of civic history in our national life are boldly drawn; and the burghers and shopkeepers of the towns, long neglected and despised, take their place in the distinguished ranks of those by whom our freedom has been won by their sturdy battle against oppression, leading the way in the growth and elevation of the English people, and carrying across the ages of tyranny the full tradition of liberty. ”

“ It was free from the slang of faction--the voice of a noble who had upheld the popular cause, who had pronounced that the rights of labour were as sacred as those of property, that the social happiness of the millions should be the statesman's first object. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They gave to labour a new dignity in social life and a new place in the national councils. From the towns came a perpetual protest against war and disorder; throughout the troubles of the fifteenth century, civil war, court intrigues, the tyranny of usurpers and the plots of the vanquished, local raids of private revenge or of land hunger, their influence was always thrown on the side of peace and quietness. ”

“ When the citizen simply does his duty in the place where he stands, the boss will be eliminated, in the nation, in the State, in the town, and we shall have, what by courtesy we say we have now, a government by the people. Then all the way down from the capital to the city ward, we shall have vital popular government, free action, discussion, agitation, life. ”

“ Why is the plough deserted, the tools of the mechanic laid aside, and all are seen rushing to gatherings of the people? What occasions those vast and unusual assemblages, which we behold in every state, and in almost every neighborhood? Why those conventions of the people, at a common centre, from all the extremities of this vast union, to consult together upon the sufferings of the community, and to deliberate on the means of deliverance? ”

“ The comfortable independence in which the townspeople of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had stoutly entrenched themselves, was the reward of a couple of centuries of persistent effort, in which they had steadily laboured at their double work of emancipation, freeing themselves on the one hand from the feudal yoke, and on the other from political servitude. ”

“ In the midst of this busy life—a life where the citizens themselves watched over their boundaries, defended their territory, kept peace in their borders, took charge of the common property, governed the spending of the town treasure, laboured with their own hands at all public works, ordered their own amusements, the mediæval burgher had his training. ”

“ Unable to make a living in the countryside they move to the city. Lacking city skills they work as casual labor or are unemployed. The city is divided between enterprisers, their subordinates, owners of country estates and members of the state bureaucracy on one side and vassals, servants, serfs, and slaves and the unemployed on the other. The rich and powerful become richer and more powerful. The poor and dependent grow in numbers--protest, demonstrate, riot, revolt.
This class struggle dominates public life in the urban centers of every civilization. ”

“ Imagine them to find the National capital occupied by eager crowds clamoring for the public offices as the hireling soldiery of past centuries may have clamored for the booty of a town taken by assault. ”

“ Is there an office from which any one set of men whatsoever are excluded? Is there one of any kind in this system but is as open to the poor as to the rich? to the inhabitant of the country, as well as to the inhabitant of the city? ”

“ Fair Sire, you are not the strongest; therefore, instead of ordering, request, pray, entreat, if necessary. To that end convoke a national assembly, States General, composed of prelates, seigneurs and bourgeois or townsmen, jointly deputed. In our days, fair Sire, we must reckon with the townsmen, that bourgeois class that has succeeded in emancipating itself. ”

“ 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? ”

“ They have seen the busy aspirants for office running from the field to the council hall, and from this back to the camp, seeking emolument and not service, and swarming like hungry flies around the body politic. ”

“ By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. ”

“ Again, since in everyday practice co-ordinating the literal maps of each civic surveys with even more concretely detailed plans as gardener and builder, I find less danger than may at first appear of ignoring the legitimate demands of the needed practical division of labour in the city's service. ”

“ If there be, let that town or district meet at once, and subscribe for instruments, music, and a teacher; let the members meet, and read, and discuss, and qualify themselves by union, study, and political information to act as citizens, whether their duty lead them to the public assembly, the hustings, or the hill-side. By acting thus, and not by listening for news about trials, the People have advanced from mouldering slaves into a threatening and united People; continuing to act thus, they will become a triumphant nation, spite of fortified barracks, Wellington, Peel, and England. ”

“ But, now, for the first time, his supporters dwindled into a faction of shopkeepers and housekeepers—a little selfish crew, who were anxious to enjoy liberty themselves, and who were elated at the thoughts of becoming a sort of privileged class, above and distinct from the great body of the people. ”

“ Standing in your presence, I can see in your gleaming eyes and in your glowing faces the vanguard; I can hear the tramp, I can feel the thrill of the social revolution. The working class are waking up. ”

“ What then must be the sufferings of those persons, who are to be the objects of this division and strife? See the heirs of a departed slaveholder, disputing as to the rightful possession of human beings, many of them their old nurses, and their playmates in their younger days! The scene which took place at the division of my master’s human property, baffles all description. ”

“ In a society where all towns alike depended upon some lord of the manor who owned the soil and exercised feudal rights over his tenants, that which mainly determined for each community the measure of independence it should win, and the price which its people should pay for liberty, was the form of lordship to which it was subject. ”

“ None are so deeply interested to resist the present rebellion as the working people. Let them beware of prejudices, working division and hostility among themselves. The most notable feature of a disturbance in your city last summer was the hanging of some working people by other working people. It should never be so. The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds. Nor should this lead to a war upon property, or the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor; ”

“ The duties imposed on each man in regard to the particular society of which he is a member, are called civil duties. He, himself, in regard to this society, is what is called a citizen; finally, the society itself, considered as one and the same person, of which the citizens are the members, is what is called the State or the city. ”

“ Nothing but the allurements of the capital, which is favored by the residence of the king, and by being the seat of government and of all the courts of justice, can prevail over their passion for their rural villas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The base and cowardly will sneer and sneak to the rear, but the brave and true, though hell itself gape, will do battle with all the blood in their veins, and write their names in living letters on the shining scroll of Labor’s Emancipation. ”

“ Of late it has rather been the cue of the leaders of the agitation to promote, or seem to promote, a coalition between the labourer and the dissatisfied tenant, thereby giving the movement a more colourable pretence in the eyes of the public. ”

“ The rapacity which instigated these descriptions of men had little check, while they saw themselves upheld even by some governors of provinces. In this grade, which ought ever to be the protectors of the rights of the people, there were some who were total strangers to all ideas of equity, freedom, or urbanity. ”

“ The gentry must be rewarded for their adhesion, and enabled to maintain their pre-eminence, by handing over to them the patronage, not in part or in fractions, but wholly and solely. Every civil appointment must be filled up by them,—the Church, the law, the revenue, the police, must all be theirs. ”

“ Those, on the other hand, who were urging the House to a yet sterner vigilance in protecting the worker—even the grown man—from his own helplessness and need, who believed that law spells freedom, and that the experience of half a century was wholly on their side—these friends of a strong cause were also at their best, on their mettle. ”

“ On our way home from the council chamber I ventured to suggest to R. that most of the wealth of this world was in the hands of men who organized, or directed labor or work, and but a small pittance in the possession of those who actually performed the labor. ”

“ The bourgeois and other townsmen, better organized, better able to realize their power, above all more enlightened than the serfs of the fields, had revolted in many cities against their lay or ecclesiastical seigneurs, and, by dint of daring, of energy and stubbornness, had, at the price of their own blood, regained their freedom and secured the abolition of the degrading and shameful rights that the feudal families had been long enjoying. ”

“ That is what is called class-consciousness, in the light of which may be seen the class struggle in startling vividness.
The class-conscious worker recognizes the necessity of organization, economic and political, and of using every weapon at his command—the strike, the boycott, the ballot and every other—to achieve his emancipation. ”

“ When men found a way of earning a livelihood without depending for it on the good will of the class that owned the land, the landowner lost much of his importance, and it began to pass to the possessors of moveable wealth. The townspeople not only made themselves free from the control of prelates and barons, but endeavoured to obtain for their own class and interest the command of the State. ”

“ That force finds a certain form of activity of itself, according to the stage of its development. There have been slaves first everywhere, then metayers; and we have the half-crop system, rent, and day laborers. ”

“ The Council of Workmen's Delegates has issued an appeal to the proletariat, which contains the following striking passage: We shall defend our liberty to the utmost against all attacks within and without. ”

“ The population had increased to some two thousand men during my absence: two thousand men working and living in order and peace, with no police or officials of any kind within two hundred miles — a state of affairs of which we may justly be proud. ”

“ From the nature and purpose of civil institutions, all the lands within the limits, which any particular party has circumscribed around itself, are assumed by that society, and subject to their allotment; this may be done by themselves assembled collectively, or by their legislature, to whom they may have delegated sovereign authority; and, if they are alloted in neither of these ways, each individual of the society may appropriate to himself such lands as he finds vacant, and occupancy gives him title. ”

“ And even not they only, but everything:—the bricks, and the carpenters, and the trees, and the master of the house—with you, everything is equal to everything else. But is that possible? The peasant must work, you must teach, and the Governor must watch, to see if everybody does what is necessary. ”