“No, I don’t shed any crocodile tears over the Negro slavery of the
South. It was a mild form of servitude, in which the Negro had plenty
to eat and wear, never suffered from cold, slept soundly and reared his
children in droves with never a thought for the morrow.
“Then mothers and babes were sometimes, though not often, separated by
an executor’s or sheriff’s sale. Now, we know better than to allow babes
to be born. Then, a babe was a valuable asset and received the utmost
care. Now, we have baby farms which we fertilise with their bones. I
know of one old hag in this city who has killed over two thousand babes.
“What chance has your girl or mine to marry and build a home? Not one in
a hundred will ever feel the breath of a babe at her breast.
“No!” he closed in thunder tones. “I ’ll fight the encroachment of the
Negro on our life with every power of body and soul!”
A hundred men leaped to their feet at once, shouting and gesticulating.
The chairman recognised a tall dark man with a Russian face, but who
spoke perfect English.
“I, gentlemen, am an anarchist in principle, and differ slightly in
the process by which I come to the same conclusion as my friend who
has taken his seat. I grieve at the necessity before the workingmen
of returning to slavery. All we can hope now for a century or two
centuries, is socialism. Socialism is simply a system of slavery--that
is, enforced labour in which a Bureaucracy is master. We must enter
again a condition of involuntary servitude for the guarantee by the
State of food and clothes, shelter and children.
“It is no time to weep over slavery. The one thing we demand now is the
nationalisation of industries under the control of State Bureaux which
will enforce labour from every citizen according to his capacity, for
the simple guarantee of what the negro slave received, the satisfaction
of the two elemental passions, hunger and love.”
Again a clamour broke out that drowned the speaker’s voice. A Socialist
and an Anarchist clinched in a fight, and for five minutes pandemonium
reigned, but at the end of it Harris was tying on the sidewalk with a
gash in his head, and Halliday was bending over him.
When Harris had recovered from his wound, Halliday took him on a round
of visits to big mills in a populous manufacturing city across in New
Jersey.
“These mills are all owned by Simon Legree,” he informed Harris, “and
the unions have been crushed out of them by methods of which he is past
master. I don’t know, but it may be possible to get you in there.”
They tried a half dozen mills in vain, and at last they met a foreman
who knew Halliday who consented to hear his plea.
“You are fooling away your time and this man’s time, Halliday,” he told
him in a friendly way. “I’d cut my right arm off sooner than take a
negro in these mills and precipitate a strike.”
“But would a strike occur with no union organisation?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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