Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion — John Shaqi
Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket CompanionShaw, Bernard
Philosophy
Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion
Shaw, Bernard
English essays
Now please observe that these are not exceptional developments of our
admitted vices, deplored and prayed against by all good men. Not a word
has been said here of the excesses of our Neros, of whom we have the
full usual percentage. With the exception of the few military examples,
which are mentioned mainly to shew that the education and standing of a
gentleman, reinforced by the strongest conventions of honor, esprit de
corps, publicity and responsibility, afford no better guarantees of
conduct than the passions of a mob, the illustrations given above are
commonplaces taken from the daily practices of our best citizens,
vehemently defended in our newspapers and in our pulpits. The very
humanitarians who abhor them are stirred to murder by them: the dagger
of Brutus and Ravaillac is still active in the hands of Caserio and
Luccheni; and the pistol has come to its aid in the hands of Guiteau and
Czolgosz. Our remedies are still limited to endurance or assassination;
and the assassin is still judicially assassinated on the principle that
two blacks make a white. The only novelty is in our methods: through
the discovery of dynamite the overloaded musket of Hamilton of
Bothwellhaugh has been superseded by the bomb; but Ravachol's heart
burns just as Hamilton's did. The world will not bear thinking of to
those who know what it is, even with the largest discount for the
restraints of poverty on the poor and cowardice on the rich.
All that can be said for us is that people must and do live and let live
up to a certain point. Even the horse, with his docked tail and bitted
jaw, finds his slavery mitigated by the fact that a total disregard of
his need for food and rest would put his master to the expense of buying
a new horse every second day; for you cannot work a horse to death and
then pick up another one for nothing, as you can a laborer. But this
natural check on inconsiderate selfishness is itself checked, partly by
our shortsightedness, and partly by deliberate calculation; so that
beside the man who, to his own loss, will shorten his horse's life in
mere stinginess, we have the tramway company which discovers actuarially
that though a horse may live from 24 to 40 years, yet it pays better to
work him to death in 4 and then replace him by a fresh victim. And
human slavery, which has reached its worst recorded point within our own
time in the form of free wage labor, has encountered the same personal
and commercial limits to both its aggravation and its mitigation. Now
that the freedom of wage labor has produced a scarcity of it, as in
South Africa, the leading English newspaper and the leading English
weekly review have openly and without apology demanded a return to
compulsory labor: that is, to the methods by which, as we believe, the
Egyptians built the pyramids. We know now that the crusade against
chattel slavery in the XIX century succeeded solely because chattel
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