If, beyond these, there are those here to-night who have ever forced
sexual servitude from a wife, those who have prostituted themselves in
the name of Virtue, those who have brought diseased, immoral or
unwelcome children to the light, without the means of provision for
them, and yet will go from this hall and say, "Moses Harman is an
unclean man--a man rewarded by just punishment," then to _you_ I say,
and may the words ring deep within your ears UNTIL YOU DIE: Go on! Drive
your sheep to the shambles! Crush that old, sick, crippled man beneath
your Juggernaut! In the name of Virtue, Purity and Morality, do it! In
the name of God, Home, and Heaven, do it! In the name of the Nazarene
who preached the golden rule, do it! In the name of Justice, Principle,
and Honor, do it! In the name of Bravery and Magnanimity put yourself on
the side of the robber in the government halls, the murderer in the
political convention, the libertine in public places, the whole brute
force of the police, the constabulary, the court, and the penitentiary,
to persecute one poor old man who stood alone against your licensed
crime! Do it. And if Moses Harman dies within your "Kansas Hell," be
satisfied _when you have murdered him_! Kill him! And you hasten the day
when the Future shall bury you ten thousand fathoms deep beneath its
curses. Kill him! And the stripes upon his prison clothes shall lash you
like the knout! Kill him! And the insane shall glitter hate at you with
their wild eyes, the unborn babes shall cry their blood upon you, and
the graves that you have filled in the name of Marriage, shall yield
food for a race that will pillory you, until the memory of your atrocity
has become a nameless ghost, flitting with the shades of Torquemada,
Calvin and Jehovah over the horizon of the World!
Would you smile to see him dead? Would you say, "We are rid of this
obscenist"? Fools! The corpse would laugh at you from its cold eyelids!
The motionless lips would mock, and the solemn hands, the pulseless,
folded hands, in their quietness would write the last indictment, which
neither Time nor you can efface. Kill him! And you write his glory and
your shame! Moses Harman in his felon stripes stands far above you now,
and Moses Harman _dead_ will live on, immortal in the race he died to
free! Kill him!
Literature the Mirror of Man
Perhaps I had better say the Mirror-reflection,--the reflection of all
that he has been and is, the hinting fore-flashing of something of what
he may become. In so considering it, let it be understood that I speak
of no particular form of literature, but the entire body of a people's
expressed thought, preserved either traditionally, in writing, or in
print.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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