Cannibals all! or, Slaves without mastersFitzhugh, George
General
Cannibals all! or, Slaves without masters
Fitzhugh, George
Slave labor; Slavery -- Justification; Slavery -- United States; Working class
It is not necessary to recapitulate the horrors I have witnessed in the
regions of poverty. It is said that the eras of pestilence and famine
are passed, but so will not those say who have visited the dwellings of
the operatives of our great manufacturing towns, when the markets are
glutted, and the mills and manufactories are closed. Pestilence still
rages fiercely as ever, in the form of typhus, engendered by want. In
the mission I have called myself to, I have stood upon the mud floor,
over the corpse of the mother and the new-born child--both the victims
of want. I have seen a man (God's image) stretched on straw, wrapped
only in a mat, resign his breath, from starvation, in the prime of age.
I have entered, on a sultry summer's night, a small house, situate on
the banks of a common sewer, wherein one hundred and twenty-seven human
beings, of both sexes and all ages, were indiscriminately crowded. I
have been in the pestilential hovels of our great manufacturing cities,
where life was corrupted in every possible mode, from the malaria of the
sewer to the poison of the gin-bottle. I have been in sheds of the
peasant, worse than the hovel of the Russian, where eight squalid,
dirty, boorish creatures were to be kept alive by eight shillings per
week, irregularly paid. I have seen the humanities of life desecrated in
every way. I have seen the father snatch the bread from his child, and
the mother offer the gin-bottle for the breast. I have seen, too,
generous sacrifices and tender considerations, to which the boasted
chivalries of Sydney and Edward were childish ostentation. I have found
wrong so exalted, and right so debased--I have seen and known of so much
misery, that the faith in good has shivered within me.
For a time, when I urged these things in the circles of the comfortable,
I received many various replies. By some it was said that it was the lot
of humanity--that it had always been so, and, therefore, always must.
That to enlarge on the evil was only to create discontent, and so injure
"the better classes." It was in vain I urged to these reasoners that for
hundreds, and, perhaps, thousands of years, creatures little better than
Calibans infested the morasses and forests of Europe. That civilization
had an onward progress, and that the history of the world proved the one
great truth--that man is the creature of circumstances. By some, the
evils were denied: by some few, deplored. By all, the discussion was
avoided; though the destruction that menaced the Roman empire from the
invasion of the barbarian world was never so imminent, nor could the
consequence be so dreadful, as that which the wealthy, and civilization
itself, would sustain from the insurrection of outraged poverty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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