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
These two men talked. They were not fools, they were merely
old. And, naturally, their guts a-reek with pavement offal,
they talked of bloody revolution. They talked as anarchists,
fanatics, and madmen would talk. And who shall blame them?
In spite of my three good meals that day, and the snug bed I
could occupy if I wished, and my social philosophy, and my
evolutionary belief in the slow development and metamorphosis
of things--in spite of all this, I say, I felt impelled to talk
rot with them or hold my tongue. Poor fools! Not of their sort
are revolutions bred. And when they are dead and dust, which
will be shortly, other fools will talk bloody revolution as
they gather offal from the spittle-drenched sidewalk along Mile
End Road to Poplar Workhouse.
BY HORACE GREELEY.
(American editor, 1811-1872; prominent abolitionist)
Morality and religion are but words to him who fishes in
gutters for the means of sustaining life, and crouches behind
barrels in the street for shelter from the cutting blasts of a
winter night.
The Hunt for the Job
(_From "Pay Envelopes"_)
BY JAMES OPPENHEIM
(See page 45)
The Hunt began early next morning--the Hunt for the Job. The
hunter, however, is really the hunted. Now and then he bares
his skin to the unthinking blows of the world, and runs off to
hide himself in the crowd. You may see him bobbing along the
turbulent man-currents of Broadway, a tide-tossed derelict in
the thousand-foot shadows of the sky-scrapers. The mob about
him is lusty with purpose, each unit making his appointed
place, the morning rush to work bearing the stenographer to
her machine, the broker to his ticker, the ironworker to his
sky-dangling beam. In the mighty machine of the city each
has his place, each is provided for, each gets the glow of
sharing in the world's work. The morning rush, splashed at
street crossings with the gold of the Eastern sun, is rippled
with fresh eyes and busy lips. They are all in the machine.
But our young man crouching in a corner of the crowded car
is not of these; slinking down Broadway he is aware that the
machine has thrown him out and he cannot get in. He is an exile
in the midst of his own people. The sense of loneliness and
inferiority eats the heart out of the breast; the good of life
is gone; the blackness soaks across the city and into his home,
his love, his soul.
Some go bitter and are for throwing bombs; some despair and
are for wiping themselves away; some--the rank and file--are
for fighting to the last ditch. Peter pendulated between all
three of these moods. In ordinary times he would have been
all fight; in these hard times, drenched with the broadcast
hopelessness of men, he knew he was foredoomed to defeat. Only
a miracle could save him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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