The Labor enquirer., 1884-11-22
SATURDAY.

+ Il
daylight with smoke, to befoul rivers, OF
to degrade any spot Of earth with squalid
litter and brutal, wastefnl disorder
II The third necessity is leisure. You
4 will understand that in using that word
/ imply first, that all men must work for
some portion of the day, and secondly,
that they have positive right to claim
9 respite from that work the leisure
they have right to claim, must be
ample enough to allow them full rest Of
mind and body. "a man must have time
| for serious individual thought, for imas-
lination -for dreaming even-or the race
Of men will inevitably worsen. Even Of
J the honorable and fitting work of which
I have been speaking, which is whole
heaven assunder from the forced work
Of the Capitalistic system, a man must
not be asked to give more than his fair
share or men will become unequally de.
veloped, and there will still be rotten
4 place in society.
i Here, then, have given You the con-
Editions under which work worth doing,
and undegrading to do, can be done;
under no other conditions can it be done.
If the general work of the world is not
worth doing, and degrading to do, it is a
mockery to talk of civilization
| Well, then, can these conditions be
obtained under the present gospel Of Cap
ital, which has for its motto, "The devil
take the hindmost?"
Let us look at our claim again in other
words; +
| In properly ordered state of society
every man willing to work should be en-
sured-
First, honorable and fitting work.
Second, healthy and beautiful house.
Third, full leisure for rest of mind and
body.
! Now l don't suppose that anybody
here will deny that it would be desirable
that this claim should be satisfied but
what i want you all to think is that it is
necessary thati be satisfied; that unless
we try our utmost to satisfy it, we are
but parcel OF society founded on rob-
berry and injustice, condemned by the
laws of the universe to destroyitself by
Its own efforts to exist forever. Further
more, l want you to think that, as ON
the one hand, 1t Is possible to satisfy this
claim, So on the other hand, it is impos-
sble to satisfy it under the present pfu-
tocratic system, which will forbid us
even any serious attempt to satisfy it.
The beginnings of Social Revolution
must be the foundations of the rebuild
Ing of the Art of the people, that ls to
say, of the Pleasure of life.
To say ngly words again Do we not
know that the greater part of men in
civilized societies are dirty, ignorant
brut tal-or at best, anxious about the
next weeks subsistence-that they are,
III short, poor? And we know, when we
think of it, that this is unfair. \
1t is an old story of men who have be-
come rich by dishonest and tyrannical
means, spending, in terror of the future,
their i'll gotten gains literally and in
charity as tits called. Nor are such peo-
pie praised in the old tales tits thought
the devil gets them after all. An old
story but say 'De tie fabula'-of thee
is the story told thou art the mani
l say that we of the rich and well-to-
do classes are daily doing in~1ikewlse
unconsciously, or half consciously it may
be, we gather wealth by trading on the
hard necessity of our fellows and then
we give driblets of 1t away to those OF
them who in one way or other cry out
loudest to US. Our poor laws, our hospi-
tails, our charities, organized and unor-
ganized, are but tubs thrown to the
whale blackmail paid to lame-foot JUS
tice, that she may not hobble after US too
fast.
! When will the time come when hon
est and clear-seeingImen will grow sick
of ,all this chaos of waste, this robbing
of Peter to pay Paul. which is the essence
of Commercial WARP When shall we
band together to replace the system
whose motto is "The devil take the
hindmost," with system whose motto
shall be really and without qualification,
Zone for all and all for one."
Who knows but the time may be at
hand, but that we now living may see
the beginning of the end which shall
extinguish luxury and poverty When
the upper, middle and lower classes shall
have melted into one class, living con-
tentedly a simple and happy life.
That is long sentence to describe the
state of things which l am asking you to
help to bring about; the abolition OF
slavery is shorter one and means the
same thing. You may be tempted to
think the end not worth striving for, on
one hand, or on the other, to suppose.
each one of you, that it is so far ahead
that nothing serious can be done towards
it in our own time, and that you may as
we'll therefore sit quiet and do nothing
/ Let me remind you how, only the other
day, in the lifetime of the youngest Of
us, many thousand men of our own kin
dred gave their lives on the battlefield
to bring to happy ending a mere epi.