The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 11: AntepenultimataBierce, Ambrose
General
The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 11: Antepenultimata
Bierce, Ambrose
American essays; American literature
“Our ultimate purpose is effacement of the distinction between employer
and employee, which is but a modification of that between master and
slave.
“We purpose that the laborer shall be chief owner of all the property
and profits of the enterprise in which he is engaged, and have through
his union a controlling voice in all its affairs.
“We purpose overthrowing the system under which a man can grow richer
by working with his head than with his hands, and preventing the man
who works with neither from having anything at all.
“In the attainment of these ends any means is to be judged, as to its
fitness for our use, with sole regard to its efficacy. We shall punish
the innocent for the sins of the guilty. We shall destroy property and
life under such circumstances and to such an extent as may seem to us
expedient. Falsehood, treachery, arson, assassination, all these we
look upon as legitimate if effective.
“The rules of ‘civilized warfare’ we shall not observe, but shall put
prisoners to death or torture them, as we please.
“We do not recognize a non-union man’s right to labor, nor to live. The
right to strike includes the right to strike _him_.”
Doubtless all that (and the half is not told) sounds to the unobservant
like a harsh exaggeration, an imaginative travesty of the principles
of labor organizations. It is not a travesty; it has no element of
exaggeration. Not in the last twenty-five years has a great strike or
lockout occurred in this country without supplying facts, notorious
and undisputed, upon which some of these confessions of faith are
founded. The war is practically a servile insurrection, and servile
insurrections are to-day what they ever were: the most cruel and
ferocious of all manifestations of human hate. Emancipation is rough
work; when he who would be free, himself strikes the blow, he does
not consider too curiously with what he strikes it nor upon whom it
falls. It will profit you to understand, my fine gentlemen with the
soft hands, the character of that which is confronting you. You are not
threatened with a bombardment of roses.
Let us look into the other camp, where General Hardhead is so engrossed
with his own greatness and power as not clearly to hear the shots on
his picket line. Suppose we hypnotize him and make him open his “shut
soul” to our searching. He will say something like this:
“In the first place, I claim the right to own and enclose for my own
use or disuse as much of the earth’s surface as I am desirous and able
to procure. I and my kind have made laws confirming us in the occupancy
of the entire habitable and arable area as fast as we can get it. To
the objection that this must eventually, here, as it has actually done
elsewhere, deprive the rest of you of places upon which legally to be
born, and exclude you, after surreptitious birth as trespassers, from
all chance to procure directly the fruits of the earth, I reply that
you can be born at sea and eat fish.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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