“Friends! I have ventured to take the place of our friend, Moses,
here--no ill-will to him--for with respect to the question before us,
whether we elect Beaumont or Max, I care, I confess, little. I'm rather
an Anti-Jew myself (hissing and cheers), but it strikes me that the Jews
are the least of our trouble. To a man who said to me that the cause of
all our evil days is the inability of England to feed these few million
Jews I'd answer: “I don't know how you can be so silly!” Why, the whole
human race, friends, can find room on the Isle of Wight--the earth
laughs at the insignificant drawings upon her made by the small infantry
called Man. Then, why do we suffer, friends? We _do_ suffer, I suppose?
I was once at Paris, and at a place called 'the Morgue' I saw exposed
young men with wounded temples, and girls with dead mouths twisted, and
innocent old women drowned; and there must be a biggish cry, you know,
rising each night from the universal earth, accusing some hoary fault in
the way men live together! What is the fault? If you ask _me_, I answer
that I am only a common smith: _I_ don't know: but I know this about the
fault, that it is something simple, commonplace, yet deep-seated, or we
should all see it; but it is hidden from us by its very ordinariness,
like the sun which men seldom look at. It _must_ be so. And shall we
never find the time to think of it? Or will never some grand man, mighty
as a garrison, owning eyes that know the glances of Truth, arise to see
for us? Friends! but, lacking him, what shall we do to be saved?--for
truly this 'civilization' of ours is a blood-washed civilization,
friends, a reddish Juggernaut, you know, whose wheels cease not: so we
should be prying into it, provided we be not now too hide-bound: for
that's the trouble--that our thoughts grow to revolve in stodgy grooves
of use-and-wont, and shun to soar beyond. Look at our Parliament--a
hurdy-gurdy turning out, age after age, a sing-song of pigmy
regulations, accompanied for grum kettledrum by a musketry of suicides,
and for pibroch by a European bleating of little children. We are still
a million miles from civilization! For what is a civilized society? It
can only be one in which the people are proud and happy! The people of
Africa are happy, not proud; not civilized; the people of England have
a certain pride, not a millionth part as superb as it might be, but are
far from happy: far from civilized. The fact is, Man has never begun to
live, but still sleeps a deep sleep. Well! let us do our best, we here!
I have here a paper offering a prize to the man of us who will go to the
root of our troubles, and my idea in usurping the place of our friend,
Mr. Max, was to ask you to form an association with me to enter that
competition. There is no reason why our association should not be large
as the nation, nor why it should not spread to France and Turkey. For
the thing presses, and to-morrow more of the slaughtered dead will be
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account