Social unrest

“ In the meantime social and economic conditions with the great masses of the people are very far from what they should be.
Unrest and confusion are strongly in evidence. On the whole, there is far less suffering and destitution than ever before. Oppression and abominations meet with quick and powerful protest from all classes, when exposed, and at least temporary relief is quick to follow. 169
The blame is confined to no one class, rich or poor. The equitable distribution of wealth, resources, and opportunity that have developed beyond all precedent during the last half century, requires time. ”

“ Some natures in such a plight, and those by no means the least social or the least sensitive, will become violent, and will even feel that their violence is social and not anti-social, that in striking when and how they can, they are striking, not for themselves, but for human nature, outraged and despoiled in their persons and in those of their fellow sufferers. ”

“ Beneficent, I say, because the class struggle must be understood not in the contemptible sense of a Saturnalia of fist-fights and outrages, of malevolence and personal violence, but must be worthily conceived as a great social drama. With all my heart I hope that this conflict may be settled, for the progress of civilization, without bloody convulsions, but historical destiny has decreed the conflict, and it is not given to us or to others to avert or postpone it. ”

“ Should this mediator fail to appear, the human masses, disarrayed and unbalanced, will almost inevitably break forth into excesses. The common people will welter in bloody chaos, while the parties of traditional order will fly to bloody reaction. Class wars, racial wars, wars between the nations of yesterday, wars between the nations which have just been formed, blind social convulsions, with no further aim than the gratification of the hatreds, the envies, the crazy dreams of an hour of life looking forward to no morrow.... ”

“ No agitators, no clubs, no epidemical errors, ever were, or will be, fatal to social order in any nation. Nothing but the guilt of the upper classes, wanton, accumulated, reckless, and merciless, ever overthrows them Of such guilt they have now much to answer for—let them look to it in time. ”

“ Their eyes were opened to the wrong of hunger, poverty, unemployment, of woman and child labor, and of all the miseries that press heavily upon human souls. And in their revolt they saw kings, judges, police officials, legislators, captains of industry, who were said to be directly responsible for these social ills. It was not society or a system or even a class that was to blame; it was McKinley, or Carnot, or Frick. And those whom some worshiped as heroes, these men loathed as tyrants.
The powerful have thought to deprive the poor of souls. ”

“ Gentlemen, in a few minutes you are to deal your blow, but in receiving your verdict I shall have at least the satisfaction of having wounded the existing society, that cursed society in which one may see a single man spending, uselessly, enough to feed thousands of families; an infamous society which permits a few individuals to monopolize all the social wealth, while there are hundreds of thousands of unfortunates who have not even the bread that is not refused to dogs, and while entire families are committing suicide for want of the necessities of life.... ”

“ The strife for wealth and desperation of want kept in quenchless blaze a hell of greed and envy, fear, lust, hate, revenge, and every foul passion of the pit. To keep this general frenzy in some restraint, so that the entire social system should not resolve itself into a general massacre, required an army of soldiers, police, judges, and jailers, and endless law-making to settle the quarrels. ”

“ Say that I would isolate humanity, reduce society to its elemental state, make men savage! It is not true. But rather than see this devastating, cankering, enslaving system you call social order go on, rather than help to keep alive the accursed institutions of Authority, I would help to reduce every fabric in the social structure to its native element. ”

“ I conclude, gentlemen, by saying that a society in which one sees such social inequalities as we see all about us, in which we see every day suicides caused by poverty, prostitution flaring at every street corner,—a society whose principal monuments are barracks and prisons,—such a society must be transformed as soon as possible, on pain of being eliminated, and that speedily, from the human race. ”

“ Such, for example, are the progress of ``statism,'' the diminution of the power of the bourgeoisie, the increasing activity of financiers, the conflict of the classes, the vanishing of the old social constraints, and the degradation of morality.
All these effects are displayed in a general insubordination and anarchy. The son revolts against the father, the employee against his patron, the soldier against his officers. Discontent, hatred, and envy reign throughout.
A social movement which continues is necessarily like a machine in movement which accelerates its motion. ”

“ Yet when we turn to the anarchists for our [120] answer, they tell us "that the accumulated forces in our social and economic life, culminating in a political act of violence, are similar to the terrors of the atmosphere, manifested in storm and lightning. To thoroughly appreciate the truth of this view, one must feel intensely the indignity of our social wrongs; one's very being must throb with the pain, the sorrow, the despair millions of people are daily made to endure. ”

“ Yet let me offer as yet another explanation of civic evils, this more general one—distinguished from the preceding by including them all and more—that not only is our "Town" in itself imperfect, but the other three elements we have been characterising as school, cloister and city, are yet more imperfect, since disordered, decayed, or undeveloped anew. It is because of each and all of these imperfect realisations of our civic life, that the evils of life sink down, or flame out, into these complex eruptions of social evils with which our human aggregations are as yet cursed. ”

“ You doubtless know the history of our great Revolution,—the causes that led to, the consequences that immediately sprang from it,—the terrible anarchy, the utter confiscation of wealth, and, worse still, the social disorganization that invaded every family, however humble or however exalted, setting wives against their husbands, children against their parents, and making brothers sworn enemies to one another. It was in vain for any man once engaged in the struggle to draw back ”

“ He who sees in the struggle something artificial, produced by bad men, may perhaps attribute to the creator of the disturbance bad motives for this knavery, for this frivolous and malicious upsetting of social rest. ”

“ But where it is not the expression of the collective will, where it is imposed by arms or more mysterious terrors on the part of a class or classes with interests opposed to the general interests of the community, and to that extent an anti-social force, then the shock and the terror reach their height, the whole sympathy of society goes out toward the victim, and he is surrounded with a halo of more than common radiance. ”

“ One night they are discussing the present social order, and what is wrong with it; they are dealing with bad housing, employment, low wages, the cleavage between the rich and the poor, industrial oppression, and social injustice. ”

“ They served only one purpose—every malign influence and reactionary element took the acts of these misguided prodigies as a pretext to fasten upon the people still more firmly both social and political injustice. ”

“ The crowding together of men in camps and quarters—want upon one side, and excess on the other, occasioned contagious distempers, which were more fatal than even the sword. In this long and general confusion, all the bonds of social life were broken up;—respect for the rights of their fellow men, the fear of the laws, purity of morals, honour, and religion, were laid aside, where might ruled supreme with iron sceptre. Under the shelter of anarchy and impunity, every vice flourished, and men became as wild as the country. ”

“ Ah! the want that shivers with the bitter cold—therein lies the excess of social injustice, the most terrible of schools, where the poor learn to realise their sufferings, where they are roused to indignation, and swear to make those sufferings cease, even if in doing so they annihilate all olden society! ”

“ Social classes, just like individuals, have their excesses which amaze us. Swept to madness, angry up to cruelty, they abandon themselves to the passion of the moment, without restraint or limit. They seem to satisfy a burning rage. The remote viewers doubt these facts. Let them cast their eyes around them, and judge accordingly. We too, in old Europe, have, by fits, some impulses of greed that threaten to bring everything down. We no longer say divide, but corrupt, in order to conquer. ”

“ But the discomforts and disorders of our present planless system do tend steadily to the development of this crude socialistic spirit in the mass of the proletariat; merely vindictive attacks upon property, sabotage, and the general strike are the logical and inevitable consequences of an uncontrolled concentration of property in a few hands, and such things must and will go on, the deep undertow in the deliquescence of the Normal Social Life, until a new justice, a new scheme of compensations and satisfactions is attained, or the Normal Social Life re-emerges. ”

“ In neutral countries where, as in belligerent countries, a handful of people had become immoderately and immorally rich, and where the masses were crying out from hunger, misery, exhaustion, as well as their imperious need for order and justice, everywhere it was the same painful outcry of sufferings,—an outcry mixed with imprecation and revolt which grew louder, as a final warning to those fools who continued their mad course towards the abyss and exterminated, in their insatiable greed of gain, millions and millions of people without end. ”

“ He raises the cry of the miserable and the despised, and in a masterly arraignment of commercialism, protests against social conditions, against the grinding of the faces of the poor and weak, and the self-pollution of the rich and strong, in their mad lust for place and power. ”

“ This will be done by the armed nation itself, as simply and as readily as any crowd of civilized people, even in modern Society, parts a pair of combatants or does not allow a woman to be outraged. And, secondly, we know that the fundamental social cause of excesses which violate the rules of social life, is the exploitation of the masses, their want and their poverty. ”

“ This people forms the majority, but a majority which never caused a revolution. Living in laborious silence, it is ignored by the historians.
The second category, which plays a capital part in all national disturbances, consists of a subversive social residue dominated by a criminal mentality. Degenerates of alcoholism and poverty, thieves, beggars, destitute ``casuals,'' indifferent workers without employment—these constitute the dangerous bulk of the armies of insurrection. ”

“ In this mood he totally disregards the laws of society and seizes every opportunity that presents itself to prey upon it and he thus becomes an anti-social being. Through all ages up to the present, society has at the cost of much effort and suffering been progressing, stage by stage, towards a higher order. ”

“ A community set apart, set sharply against the rest in every clashing interest, social and industrial; foreign in language, in faith, and in tradition; repaying dislike with distrust; expanding under the new relief from oppression in the unpopular qualities of greed and contentiousness fostered by ages of tyranny unresistingly borne. ”

“ So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or [29] moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements. And to assert as a mitigation of the evil that those who thus suffer are the weaker members of the community, morally or physically, is to add insult to misfortune. Is weakness a justification of suffering? ”

“ It is true that the lessening of violence by closing the dram shops, of incest by preventing overcrowding, of prostitution by instituting working girls' clubs, of illegitimacy by making marriage easy, of rioting by keeping people "on the move," of bribery by isolating the voter, is identical with the results reached by the modes of social control proper. ”

“ A more decisive argument is afforded by a consideration of the universal connexion of ferocity of manners, and a contempt of social ties, with the contempt of human life. Governments which derive their institutions from the existence of circumstances of barbarism and violence, with some rare exceptions perhaps, are bloody in proportion as they are despotic, and form the manners of their subjects to a sympathy with their own spirit. ”

“ This dark, swelling, muttering mass along the social horizon, gathering strength with education, and ambitious to rise, will grow increasingly restless and sullen under repression, until at length conscious, through numbers, of superior power, it will assert that power destructively, and, bursting forth like an angry, furious cloud, avenge, in tumult and disorder, the social law broken against it. ”

“ And last, though not least, to this end, too, is directed the effort to purge society of social evils, such as drinking and litigiousness, and of the sin of untouchability which condemns a vast proportion of the population to a position worse than that of lower animals. ”

“ Anything which serves to impress ordinary minds with a sense of social equilibrium—to give them an object lesson in the substitution of leadership for anarchy—must be of immense value. Here was a community falling into wreck, cut loose from the orderly system of things, old duties and obligations forgotten, only hungry rights insisted upon. ”