The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest: The writings of philosophers, poets, novelists, social reformers, and others who have voiced the struggle against social injustice; selected from twenty-five languages; covering a period of five thousand years
General
The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest: The writings of philosophers, poets, novelists, social reformers, and others who have voiced the struggle against social injustice; selected from twenty-five languages; covering a period of five thousand years
Social justice; Social problems
and who feel much more deeply than they think. Indeed great
reforms are not accomplished by reasoning, but by feeling.
[Illustration: OUTBREAK
KÄTHE KOLLWITZ
(_Contemporary German etching; from the "Peasant-cycle"_)]
[Illustration: THE LIBERATRESS
THÉOPHILE ALEXANDRE STEINLEN
(_French illustrator, born 1859_)]
The First Issue of "The Liberator"
(_January 1, 1831_)
BY WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
(America's most ardent anti-slavery agitator, 1805-1879.
The following pronouncement marked the beginning of the
anti-slavery campaign)
I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but
is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as Truth,
and as uncompromising as Justice. On this subject I do not
wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No!
Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm;
tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the
ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe
from the fire into which it has fallen--but urge me not to use
moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest--I will
not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single
inch--and I will be heard. The apathy of the people is enough
to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the
resurrection of the dead.
Working and Taking
(_From the Lincoln-Douglas debates, 1858_)
BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN
That is the real issue that will continue in this country when
these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent.
It is the eternal struggle between these two principles, right
and wrong, throughout the world. They are the two principles
that have stood face to face from the beginning of time. The
one is the common right of humanity, the other the divine
right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it
develops itself. It is the same spirit that says "you toil and
work and earn bread and I'll eat it."
Address to President Lincoln
BY THE INTERNATIONAL WORKINGMEN'S ASSOCIATION
(_Drafted by Karl Marx_)
When an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders, for
the first time in the annals of the world, dared to inscribe
"Slavery" on the banner of armed revolt; when on the very spot
where hardly a century ago the idea of one great democratic
republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of
the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to
the European revolution of the eighteenth century, when on that
very spot the counter-revolution cynically proclaimed property
in man to be "the corner-stone of the new edifice"--then
the working classes of Europe understood at once that the
slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general
holy war of property against labor; and that for the men
of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past
conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the
other side of the Atlantic.
Boston Hymn
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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