The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays: 1909Bierce, Ambrose
Philosophy
The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays: 1909
Bierce, Ambrose
Essays
What! you unappeasable rich, coining the sweat and blood of your workmen
into drachmas, understanding the law of supply and demand as mandatory
and justifying your cruel greed by the senseless dictum that "business
is business;" you lazy workman, railing at the capitalist by
whose desertion, when you have frightened away his capital, you
starve--rioting and shedding blood and torturing and poisoning by way
of answer to exaction and by way of exaction; you foul anarchists,
applauding with indelicate palms when one of your coward kind hurls a
bomb amongst powerless and helpless women and children; you imbecile
politicians with a plague of remedial legislation for the irremediable;
you writers and thinkers unread in history, with as many "solutions to
the labor problem" as there are dunces among you who can not coherently
define it--do you really think yourself wiser than Jesus of Nazareth? Do
you seriously suppose yourselves competent to amend his plan for dealing
with all the evils besetting states and souls? Have you the effrontery
to believe that those who spurn his Golden Rule you can bind to
obedience of an act entitled an act to amend an act? Bah! you fatigue
the spirit. Go get ye to your scoundrel lockouts, your villain strikes,
your blacklisting, your boycotting, your speech-ing, marching and
maundering; but if ye do not to others as ye would that they do to you
it shall occur, and that right soon, that ye be drowned in your own
blood and your pickpocket civilization quenched as a star that falls
into the sea.
THE GAME OF POLITICS
I.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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