Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems
Awake, ye noble Workers, warriors in the one true war: all this
must be remedied. It is you who are already half-alive, whom I
will welcome into life; whom I will conjure in God's name to
shake off your enchanted sleep, and live wholly! Cease to count
scalps, gold-purses; not in these lies your or our salvation.
Even these, if you count only these, will not long be left. Let
bucaniering be put far from you; alter, speedily abrogate all
laws of the bucaniers, if you would gain any victory that shall
endure. Let God's justice, let pity, nobleness and manly valour,
with more gold-purses or with fewer, testify themselves in this
your brief Life-transit to all the Eternities, the Gods and
Silences. It is to you I call; for ye are not dead, ye are
already half-alive: there is in you a sleepless dauntless
energy, the prime-matter of all nobleness in man. Honour to you
in your kind. It is to you I call: ye know at least this, That
the mandate of God to His creature man is: Work! The future
Epic of the World rests not with those that are near dead, but
with those that are alive, and those that are coming into life.
Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in
confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness!
They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and
supply-and-demand principle: they will not; nor ought they, nor
can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them.
To order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for
noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be
sane and ever saner. Not as a bewildered bewildering mob; but
as a firm regimented mass, with real captains over them, will
these men march any more. All human interests, combined human
endeavours, and social growths in this world, have, at a certain
stage of their development, required organising: and Work, the
grandest of human interests, does now require it.
God knows, the task will be hard: but no noble task was ever
easy. This task will wear away your lives, and the lives of your
sons and grandsons: but for what purpose, if not for tasks like
this, were lives given to men? Ye shall cease to count your
thousand-pound scalps, the noble of you shall cease! Nay the
very scalps, as I say, will not long be left if you count only
these. Ye shall cease wholly to be barbarous vulturous Chactaws,
and become noble European Nineteenth-Century Men. Ye shall know
that Mammon, in never such gigs and flunky 'respectabilities,' is
not the alone God; that of himself he is but a Devil, and even
a Brute-god.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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