The Little Review, October 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 7)Various
General
The Little Review, October 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 7)
Various
Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- Periodicals
I saw deep down in the hull of the ocean liner the men who
shoveled the coal--burned and seared like paper before the grate;
and I knew that "the record" of the beautiful monster, and the
pleasure of the ladies who laughed on the deck, were paid for
with those withered bodies and souls. I saw the scavenger carts
go up and down, drawn by sad brutes and driven by sadder ones;
for never a man, a man in full possession of his selfhood, would
freely choose to spend all his days in the nauseating stench that
forces him to swill alcohol to neutralize it. And I saw in the
lead works how men were poisoned, and in the sugar refineries how
they went insane; and in the factories how they lost their
decency; and in the stores how they learned to lie; and I knew it
was slavery made them do all this.
And against such slavery this young Amazon of the spirit (for at this
time, 1887, she was only twenty-one) declared a life-long warfare. In so
doing she separated herself from those who would otherwise have been her
natural allies and cut off those opportunities for worldly success which
must in the ordinary course of things have come to her.
Finding the cause of economic slavery not in capitalism, as do the
socialists, but in the government of man by man through which capitalism
is made possible, she was isolated still further from her
contemporaries. Hence the obscurity in which her life was passed. Hence
the fact that until her death in 1912 she lived quietly, teaching
English to the newly-arrived immigrant, scattering about her the
treasure of a richly-stored mind as freely as the south wind scatters
the perfume it has gathered from the garden in its path. If she had
lived nearer to the plane of the generally-accepted culture Voltairine
de Cleyre might have gained a recognized place among the foremost women
of her time.
As it was she gave us in her lectures, now for the first time offered to
the public, the most comprehensive exposition of philosophical anarchism
that has appeared since the days of Proudhon and Stirner.
LILIAN HILLER UDELL.
The Growth of Evolutionary Theory
_Evolution Old and New_, by Samuel Butler. [E. P. Dutton and
Company, New York.]
When _The Origin of Species_ was published the world grouped itself into
two main camps. By far the larger of these took the attitude that Darwin
was an impious propounder of disgusting and dangerous heresy. The
smaller group hailed him as the bringer in of a new era.
Samuel Butler allied himself with neither group, but took the attitude
of a constructive critic. In these pages he attacks contemporary
Darwinism--using the term in the narrow sense--on two grounds. That it
is not the novelty it is generally supposed to be, on the one hand, and
that the mechanism implied by its theory is not true, on the other hand,
are his main points.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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