Some sleep. They have so much time that they take all manner of
expensive drugs to try what sleeping it off a different way is like!
Some sleep upon none too easy beds a few short hours, too few not to
waken more tired than ever, and resume the endless grind of waking
life. Some sleep bent over the books they are too tired to study, though
the mind clamors for food after the long day's physical toil. Some sleep
with hand upon the throttle of the engine, after twenty-six hours of
duty, and--crash!--they have sleep enough!
Some use their muscles: they use them to punch bags, and other
gentlemen's stomachs when their heads are full of wine. Some use them to
club other men and women, at $2.50 a day. Some exhaust them welding them
into iron, or weaving them into wool, for ten or eleven hours a day. And
some become atrophied sitting at desks till they are mere specters of
men and women.
Some love; and there is no end to the sensualities of their love,
because all normal expressions have lost their savor through excess.
Some love, and see their love tried and worn and threadbare, a skeleton
of love, because the practicality of life is always there to repress the
purely emotional. Some are stricken in health, so robbed of power to
feel, that they never love at all.
And some dream, think, create; and the world is filled with the glory of
their dreams. But who knows the glory of the dream that never was born,
lost and dead and buried away somewhere there under the roofs where the
exquisite brain was ruined by the heavy labor of life? And what of the
dream that turned to madness and destroyed the thing it loved the best?
These are the things that make criminals, the perverted forces of man,
turned aside by the institution of property, which is the giant social
mistake to-day. It is your law which keeps men from using the sources
and the means of wealth production unless they pay tribute to other men;
it is this, and nothing else, which is responsible for all the second
class of crimes and all those crimes of violence incidentally committed
while carrying out a robbery. Let me quote here a most sensible and
appropriate editorial which recently appeared in the Philadelphia _North
American_, in comment upon the proposition of some foolish preacher to
limit the right of reproduction to rich families:
"The earth was constructed, made habitable, and populated without the
advice of a commission of superior persons, and until they appeared and
began meddling with affairs, making laws and setting themselves up as
rulers, poverty and its evil consequences were unknown to humanity. When
social science finds a way to remove obstructions to the operation of
natural law and to the equitable distribution of the products of labor,
poverty will cease to be the condition of the masses of people, and
misery, CRIME and problems of population will disappear."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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