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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 — John Shaqi

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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

Some years ago a certain writer, much esteemed for his graceful
style of saying silly things, informed us that the poor remain
poor because they show no efficient desire to be anything else.
Is that true? Are only the idle poor? Come with me and I will
show you where men and women work from morning till night,
from week to week, from year to year, at the full stretch of
their powers, in dim and fetid dens, and yet are poor--aye,
destitute--have for their wages a crust of bread and rags.
I will show you where men work in dirt and heat, using the
strength of brutes, for a dozen hours a day, and sleep at
night in styes, until brain and muscle are exhausted, and
fresh slaves are yoked to the golden car of commerce, and the
broken drudges filter through the poor-house or the prison to
a felon's or a pauper's grave! I will show you how men and
women thus work and suffer and faint and die, generation after
generation; and I will show you how the longer and the harder
these wretches toil the worse their lot becomes; and I will
show you the graves, and find witnesses to the histories of
brave and noble and industrious poor men whose lives were lives
of toil, _and_ poverty, and whose deaths were tragedies.

And all these things are due to sin--but it is to the sin of
the smug hypocrites who grow rich upon the robbery and the ruin
of their fellow-creatures.


Work and Pray

BY GEORG HERWEGH

(German poet, 1817-1875; took part in the attempt at revolution
in Baden in 1848)

    Pray and work! proclaims the world;
    Briefly pray, for Time is gold.
    On the door there knocketh dread--
    Briefly pray, for Time is bread.

    And ye plow and plant to grow.
    And ye rivet and ye sow.
    And ye hammer and ye spin--
    Say, my people, what ye win.

    Weave at loom both day and night,
    Mine the coal to mountain height;
    Fill right full the harvest horn--
    Full to brim with wine and corn.

    Yet where is thy meal prepared?
    Yet where is thy rest-hour shared?
    Yet where is thy warm hearth-fire?
    Where is thy sharp sword of ire?


Conventional Lies of Our Civilization

BY MAX NORDAU

(A Hungarian Jewish physician, born 1849, whose work,
"Degeneration," won an international audience)

The modern day laborer is more wretched than the slave of
former times, for he is fed by no master nor any one else, and
if his position is one of more liberty than the slave, it is
principally the liberty of dying of hunger. He is by no means
so well off as the outlaw of the Middle Ages, for he has none
of the gay independence of the free-lance. He seldom rebels
against society, and has neither means nor opportunity to take
by violence or treachery what is denied him by the existing
conditions of life. The rich is thus richer, the poor poorer
than ever before since the beginnings of history.


The Failure of Civilization

BY FREDERIC HARRISON

(English essayist and philosopher, born 1831; President of the
Positivist Society)

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.

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

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