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
mouth, since their weapons stop our blows of the teeth. I went
away like them. They lowered their heads and thought. For my
part I cried out, I turned about and cried, 'You be hanged!'"
[A] _Tout cela criait comme une grimace, comme une serrure,
comme une clé._
"Ah, now, indeed! I didn't expect anything like that," said
Pierre Bousset. "One raises children to make gentle-folk of
them, so that they will work a little less than you. Now then,
in God's name! go and demand a place of those for whom you have
lost your own!"
The Duty of Civil Disobedience
BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU
(The New England essayist, 1817-1862, author of "Walden," went to
prison because he refused to pay taxes to a government which returned
fugitive slaves to the South. It is narrated that Emerson came to
him and asked, "Henry, what are you doing in here?" "Waldo," was the
answer, "what are you doing out of here?")
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place
for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the
only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and
less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and
locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already
put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the
fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the
Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them;
on that separate but more free and honorable ground, where
the State places those who are not _with_ her but _against_
her--the only house in a slave State in which a free man can
abide with honor.
If any think that their influence would be lost there, and
their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they
would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know
by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more
eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has
experienced a little in his own person.
[Illustration: THE SURPRISE
ILYÁ EFÍMOVITCH REPIN
(_Russian painter, born 1844_)]
[Illustration: THE END
KÄTHE KOLLWITZ
(_Contemporary German etching; from the "Weaver-cycle"_)]
Address to the Jury
BY ARTURO M. GIOVANNITTI
(Italian student and clergyman, born 1884, who left the Church for the
labor movement. During the strike at Lawrence, Mass., he was arrested
upon a charge of "constructive murder." He spoke in his own defense at
Salem Court House, November 23, 1912)
MR. FOREMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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