Striation

“ For if thou chance to close thy eyes for ever, a victim to the maddened attack of the men-at-arms; -- by whatsoever doom thy breath be cut off, by sword or disease, by sea or soil, I forswear every wanton and corrupt flame, and vow myself to a death like thine; that they who were bound by one marriage-union may be embraced in one and the same punishment. ”

“ I felt that it was impossible for me to meet such a death, and so unmerited, with resolution or with resignation, and without a struggle—a desperate struggle—if not for liberty at least for revenge. It was better, a thousand times better, to die sword in hand, and be hewed to pieces, than to be hung like a pitiful marauder. ”

“ Strike against Jah! You are workers! Why do you work? To feed your children. Your children die. Strike, I say, strike while the iron is hot, the iron that has entered into your souls from the cruel tyranny of Jah! There is no other enemy. You have no other foe.... ”

“ It is this — it is this which justifies our profession! I, myself, when I see the eye of the accused gleaming with the flash of rage, I feel myself encouraged and elevated. It is no longer a trial, it is a combat ”

“ The strike tears off the mask of things,
To mass and class the issue brings.
Say what ye will, the strike is good:
It clears things long misunderstood:
It jolts the social mind awake:
It forces men a stand to take. ”

“ It seems to me that we are fighting a duel in the darkness. I cannot parry your blows, and I apparently strike you when I am trying to defend myself. With what do you reproach me, or what do you ask of me? If I am a man of my time and of my class, is it my fault? ”

“ There is no going on to represent this scene of rage and madness: it is manifest there would be no bounds nor any end. "If the beginning of strife is as when one letteth out water," what would it come to when allowed this free and unrestrained course? "As coals are to burning coals, or wood to fire," so would these "contentious men be to kindled strife." ”

“ A good double thrashing was the inevitable penalty, but all without avail; fighting went on without the slightest abatement, like natural storms; for no punishment less than death could quench the ancient inherited belligerence burning in our pagan blood. ”

“ This rest is won through the man's prior discipline in the toils of strife, in order that when the tumult of disturbance ceases, his mind, through the grace of contemplation, may be translated to gaze upon the face of truth. But since one attains to this rest only through labour and conflict, how can one reach it who has not gone down into the strife? ”

“ A foolish trick to make the rose more strangely gay
Is now a close-locked, mortal conflict of brain and blood—
A feud too old to settle or renounce.
I shall grow too tired to struggle, and the fight will end,
And they will enter in at last—
Nature and Time, long thwarted of their prey,
Those old grey two, more cruel for the lips that said them "Nay,"
For the bitterest foe is he who in the past
Has been repulsed when he would fain be friend. ”

“ Boasting and puffing up of self which are the result of anger or vainglory, are not the direct but the occasional cause of quarrels or strife, because, when a man resents another being preferred to him, his anger is aroused, and then his anger results in quarrel and strife. ”

“ So headlong rush'd along the hero's force.
The thirst of vengeance the assailants fires,
The madness of despair the Moors inspires;
Each lane, each street resounds the conflict's roar,
And every threshold reeks with tepid gore. ”

“ A strife approaches that will drench the land in blood—a strife which even I cannot avert. This secret marriage may destroy us both. Dear, dear Margaret! Like my father, a fatality pursues me, and those who could guide us both may be the innocent cause of undoing us all. ”

“ In reading aloud this citation, some little stress is instinctively laid on the two words "strike" and "hear," thereby assisting the ear to catch the plainly intended contrast. A few years since, the same saying was modified in sense by a change of emphasis. A trade strike was pending, when an illustrated paper, giving an imposing figure representing "Law," put beneath the figure the legend, "Strike, but hear me!" ”

“ Trembling with weakness and the overstrained exertion of my recent struggle, I rose and looked with stern exultation on this new conflict, at this new and unexpected ally, against whom the human brute fought apparently in vain, for with all his strength he failed to wrench or tear the dog's sharp fangs from his already lacerated throat. ”

“ It is as if they [85] could not, even for one evening, forget the struggle for existence, and as if they regarded a dinner or a dance as an engagement with the enemy; a brisk assault to carry by storm some place that has long stood a regular siege—a lively skirmish in which everything that comes to hand is a weapon for either attack or self-defence. ”

“ What came by the sword by the sword must be destroyed: and only through violence can violence come to an end. Nay, I will go further and confess, since here if anywhere we are candid, that it is the way of violence to which I feel called myself, and that I shall die as I have lived, an active revolutionary. ”

“ To find yourself facing a square of irate strikers is to feel yourself very thin, very colourless, and amazingly inexperienced. It is to wonder at the rudeness of their speech, the largeness of their mouths, and to speculate in a Christianly way as to just what screw is loose in their mental make-up. I know this to be the way of it, for once we had a strike in a mine which I, with a strutting but misguided assurance, imagined to be the property of our family. ”

“ Seek not elsewhere than in a profound transformation of the human mind the cause of the tranquillity of a strike in which we behold the placid confrontation of the workingman and the soldier. For all observers endowed with reason and sang-froid, to whatever party they belong, the spectacle is that of the toiling mass reconnoitring the ground and testing its strength. ”

“ Why should there be feud, ever feud, ever bloodshed, useful blood poured out by both sides? Why ever dream of a past that is no more, and can nevermore be? You vanquished, despoiled, dominated, exploited and tortured us fifteen centuries at a stretch! ”

“ Such counsels of force are in the court of passion, not of reason. Imagine such a conflict, imagine a victory, no matter by which side. Can the victors rejoice in the blood of brethren shed in a family brawl? ”

“ There were scores of other audacious enemies who gazed critically at the patches on his knees and the hole in the toe of his boot, but in all that army of foes he knew to the marrow in his childish bones that this one particular boy was to be his one particular enemy. ”

“ He seemed to have aged a trifle since the strike began, but his wiry well-knit body was as erect as ever, and in his eye was that stern look of command before which, at one time or another, every man in his employ had quailed. ”

“ One, who has drawn back in the attitude of striking, looks as if he could fell an ox with a single blow of his powerful arm. The other is a more lithe and agile figure, and there is a quick fire in his countenance which might overbalance the massive strength of his opponent. ”

“ He was, in fact, suddenly subjected to many experiences which were hard to account for, the principal one being a misty wonder as to why an opponent so insignificant to the eye could be so explosive in his movements, so devastating in his fore-shortened arm-strokes. ”

“ May the roar of Faction, thirsting for evil, never in this place be heard, nor the dust that drinks the dark blood of fellow-citizens bring to the State, from passion for revenge, the doom of retaliation. ”

“ With all the force of his being, so to speak, visible, with clenched fists, with the veins on his forehead swollen, with his stern face convulsed by a superhuman effort of will, he demanded that access of feebleness in which all resistance crumbles. ”

“ The struggle, which, when some great principle of politics or morals is the subject of the strife, ennobles in our eyes the unflinching combatants, only degrades when the violence and the rancour result from the soreness of wounded vanity, or the malice of blighted anticipation. ”

“ There'd ought to be some way of getting at the truth of things, in this land, short of fighting. A strike means loss to masters and to men; and many a strike, it's found later, need never have taken place at all. ”

“ The origin of the late tumult is to be traced not to rapacity or disaffection, feelings which have driven many armies into civil strife, much less to any shrinking from, or fear of danger. It was your excessive affection for me that roused you to act with more zeal than discretion. For even honourable motives of action, unless directed by judgment, are followed by disastrous results. ”

“ We may believe there are no Battling Burrows, striking the helpless with brutal whip—but do we not ourselves use the whip of unkind words and deeds? So, perhaps, Battling may even carry a message of warning. ”

“ Here fiercer rage her fiercer rancour pours.
Your crime was vengeance on the faithless sires,
But here ambition with foul lust conspires.
'Twas rage of love, O Scylla, urged the knife
That robb'd thy father of his fated life;
Here grosser rage the mother's breast inflames,
And at her guiltless son the vengeance aims;
But aims in vain; her slaughter'd forces yield,
And the brave youth rides victor o'er the field.
No more his subjects lift the thirsty sword,
And the glad realm proclaims the youthful lord. ”

“ A brutal, frantic struggle then took place; women and children were trampled to death, and men were disabled by kicks and blows from their rivals, while a perfect Babel of yells and curses from the injured and injuring rent the air. ”

“ He lay pressed hard against his adversary, his body adjusting itself to its one pure purpose of choking the other man, resisting exactly at the right moment, with exactly the right amount of strength, the struggles of the other, silent, intent, unchanging, gradually pressing its knuckles deeper, feeling the struggles of the other body become wilder and more frenzied. ”

“ One army of men, having been prepared, was ordered to strike—and struck. Other smaller armies of men, with no preparation, were ordered to strike to express sympathy—and struck. Other armies still were ordered to strike because it was the fashion—and struck. ”

“ There would have been plausibility in this argument when the world was still in the age of violence; when life was full of physical conflict, and every man had to redress his injuries, or those of others, by the sword or by the strength of his arm. ”

“ What pause from this weary toiling, what end to this endless strife?
The day bringeth naught but labor, and death follows hard upon life;
Ever I see the false one triumphing over the true,
The foul outbalance the fair, the many oppressed by the few.
Answer me, mortal master, after the battle is fought,
Six feet of earth for a couch, mayhap a stone, then—what? ”

“ Or are we entitled to wreak that vengeance upon her which we could not at first execute, because the engine which we had prepared to crush her has recoiled with the greatest violence upon ourselves? It has been said that we less easily forgive the injuries we do or meditate against others, than those we receive from them. ”

“ The one wants great crashing battles that shall force the foe to cry, ‘Hold, enough!’—‘Fight him on sight, and without regard to odds.’ The other says, ‘We haven’t got many men, and when they’re gone, we have no more. ”

“ If the conscience of any of my readers should tell him that, by his unruly temper, he is marring the peace of his family, oh! let him not neglect the evil as a small one, but, like the poor old sailor in my story, resolutely struggle against it. For an angry man stirreth up strife, and a furious man aboundeth in transgression.
There is sin in commencing strife ”

“ I would have you fight, not only with that spirit with which you are wont to encounter other enemies, but with a certain indignation and resentment, as if you saw your slaves suddenly taking up arms against you. ”

“ Unfit art thou, O my gentle one, to do battle with the wickedness of wicked men, and with the cunning arts of the adversary. Verily thou wilt be led as a lamb to the slaughter. Hast thou fathomed the depth of the pit of destruction? ”

“ The reader may have seen, in a country where personal violence is severely punished, two men shaking their fists in each other’s faces, each trying to provoke the other to strike the first blow; and no fight after all. ”

“ According to your habits of thought, you find quarrel in a straw, or peace and serenity in turmoil. According to your habits of thought you may become a strife-breeder or a peacemaker. "A wrathful man stirreth up strife: but he that is slow to anger appeaseth anger." ”

“ Against a threatening cosmos! crucified,
Hang naked and alone in careless scorn,
Though all the slaves of power sweep in rage
Against him; for unto his riven side
He summons champions from another bourne. ”