The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery: How it came into the world and how it shall be made to go outO'Brien, James Bronterre
History
The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery: How it came into the world and how it shall be made to go out
O'Brien, James Bronterre
Labor; Labor movement; Slavery; Social problems; Working class
All slavery in all countries called civilised is the work of
landlords and profitmongers. These two classes, which have no right
to form an integral portion of society at all, have everywhere made
themselves masters of society, and are everywhere in a state of
permanent conspiracy against the rest of the community, allowing no
man to hold his proper rank or position in the world unless he makes
common cause with them in keeping the poor and the labouring class
in ignorance, poverty, and slavery. There is no age nor country in
which they have not shown themselves murderers or assassins the moment
any large section of the public began to see through their system of
self-licensed rapine. They have invariably either murdered the leaders
and teachers of the creed which menaced their usurpations, or else
got up sham wars with neighbouring States (the belligerents being
co-conspirators), under colour of which they procured the intervention
of foreign arms in aid of their own, to crush the new creed and its
abettors before they had time to take root. No one nation on earth has,
up to the present time, been permitted to _learn_, much less establish,
honest laws on Land, Credit, Currency, and Exchange, so as to secure
its permanent freedom and happiness, owing to malignant combinations
of these two classes, which seem to exist for no other purpose than to
keep the human race in eternal chains and misery.
Robespierre is the only legislator and statesman known to history who
sought a radical reformation of society for the millions, through just
fundamental laws on property, with analogous institutions to reach and
purify every department of the State, so that the poorest man in France
might get rich through his own industry if he chose to work, and have
the whole armed power of society to guarantee to him the exclusive
ownership and enjoyment of his earnings and accumulations. But at the
same time he left to the rich all they had, depriving them only of the
power of future robbery. To this end were directed articles 6, 7, 8,
9, 10, 11, and 12 of his “Declaration of Rights:”--“Art. 6. Property
is the right which each citizen has to enjoy and to dispose of, at his
pleasure, the portion of fortune or wealth that is guaranteed to him
by the law. Art. 7. The right of property is limited, like all other
rights, by the obligation to respect the rights of others. Art. 8. It
can prejudice neither the safety, nor the liberty, nor the existence,
nor the property of our fellow-citizens. Art. 9. All traffic that
violates this principle is essentially illicit and immoral. Art. 10.
Society is under obligation to provide subsistence for all its members,
either by procuring employment for them or by ensuring the means of
existence to those who are incapable of labour. Art. 11. The relief
indispensable to those who are in want of necessaries is a debt due by
the possessors of superfluities. It belongs to the law to determine
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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