No! My reasons for not giving that advice are two. First, if I were
giving advice at all, I would say: "My friends, that bread belongs to
you. It is you who toiled and sweat in the sun to sow and reap the
wheat; it is you who stood by the thresher, and breathed the
chaff-filled atmosphere in the mills, while it was ground to flour; it
is you who went into the eternal night of the mine and risked drowning,
fire damp, explosion, and cave-in, to get the fuel for the fire that
baked it; it is you who stood in the hell-like heat, and struck the
blows that forged the iron for the ovens wherein it is baked; it is you
who stand all night in the terrible cellar shops, and tend the machines
that knead the flour into dough; it is you, you, you, farmer, miner,
mechanic, who make the bread; but you haven't the power to take it. At
every transformation wrought by toil, some one who didn't toil has taken
part from you; and now he has it all, and you haven't the power to take
it back! You are told you have the power because you have the numbers.
Never make so silly a blunder as to suppose that power resides in
numbers. One good, level-headed policeman with a club, is worth ten
excited, unarmed men; one detachment of well-drilled militia has a power
equal to that of the greatest mob that could be raised in New York City.
Do you know I admire compact, concentrated power. Let me give you an
illustration. Out in a little town in Illinois there is a certain
capitalist, and if ever a human creature sweat and ground the grist of
gold from the muscle of man, it is he. Well, once upon a time, his
workmen, (not his slaves, his workmen,) were on strike; and fifteen
hundred muscular Polacks armed with stones, brick-bats, red-hot pokers,
and other such crude weapons as a mob generally collects, went up to his
house for the purpose of smashing the windows, and so forth; possibly to
do as those people in Italy did the other day with the sheriff who
attempted to collect the milk tax. He alone, one man, met them on the
steps of his porch, and for two mortal hours, by threats, promises,
cajoleries held those fifteen hundred Poles at bay. And finally they
went away, without smashing a pane of glass or harming a hair of his
head. Now that was power; and you can't help but admire it, no matter if
it was your enemy who displayed it; and you must admit that so long as
numbers can be overcome by such relative quantity, power does not reside
in numbers. Therefore, if I were giving advice, I would not say, "take
bread," but take counsel with yourselves how to get the power to take
bread.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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