“I am speaking to you, the working-men, the proletariat, the downtrodden
slaves of the plutocracy, the creators in darkness of the wealth that
the idlers enjoy in dazzling halls of brightness. I do not address the
bourgeoisie rotting in sloth and apathy. They are the parasites of the
rich. They sweat the workers in order to pander to the vices of the
rich. They despise the poor and grovel before the rich. They shrink from
touching the poor man's hand, but they offer their bodies slavishly to
the kick of the rich man's foot. It is not in their hands, but in yours,
brother toilers and brother sufferers, that lies the glorious work
of the great social revolution whose sun just rising is tipping the
mountain-tops with its radiant promise of an immortal day. It is
against them and not with them that you have to struggle. In that day
of Armageddon you will find all tailordom, all grocerdom, all
apothecarydom, all attorneydom arrayed in serried ranks around the
accursed standards of plutocracy, of aristocracy, of bureaucracy. Beware
of them. Have naught to do with them on peril of your salvation. The
great social revolution will come not from above, but from below, from
the depths. _De profundis clamavi!_ “From the depths have I cried, O
Lord!”
He paused, wiped his forehead, cleared his throat, and went on in
the same strain, indifferent to ribald interjections and the Sunday
apathy of his casual audience. The mere size of the crowd he was
addressing seemed to satisfy him. The number was above the average. A
few working-men in the inner ring drank in the wild utterances with
pathetic thirst. The majority listened, half amused, half attracted by
the personality of the speaker. A great many were captivated by the
sonority of the words, the unfaltering roll of the sentences, the vague
associations and impressions called up by the successive images. It is
astonishing what little account our sociological writers take of the
elementary nature of the minds of the masses; how easily they are
amused; how readily they are imposed upon; how little they are capable
of analytical thought; at the same time, how intellectually vain they
are, which is their undoing. The ineptitudes of the music hall which
make the judicious grieve--the satirical presentment, for instance, of
the modern fop, which does not contain one single salient characteristic
of the type, which is the blatant convention of fifty years back--are
greeted with roars of unintelligent laughter. Books are written, vulgar,
fallacious, with a specious semblance of philosophical profundity, and
sell by the hundred thousand. The masses read them without thought,
without even common intelligence. It is too great an intellectual effort
to grasp the ideas so disingenuously presented; but the readers can
understand just enough to perceive vaguely that they are in touch with
the deeper questions of philosophy, and through sheer vanity delude