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Cornell University Library 
 
 arV12187 
 
 Human submission / 
 
 3 1924 031 246 279 
 olin,anx 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031246279 
 
By MORRISON I. SWIFT. 
 
 The Monarch Billionaire 
 Imperialism and Liberty 
 Problems of the New Life 
 Our Right to Rob Robbers . 
 Grimple' s Mind 
 Vicarious Philanthrophy 
 Capitalists are the Cause of the 
 A Tramp in California 
 Education Under Millionaires 
 
 $i.oo 
 1.50 
 1. 00 
 
 ■25 
 
 ■25 
 
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 Unemployed .05 
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HUMAN 
 SUBMISSION. 
 
 PART SECOND. 
 
 BY 
 
 MORRISON iKsWIFT. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 THE LIBERTY PRESS 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 1905 
 
 Price, Twenty- Five Cents. 
 
COPYRtGHT, 1905, BY 
 MORRISON i. SWIFT. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The True Key op This Universe .... . . 3 
 
 II. Human Race Repression Through Submission . . 14 
 
 III. The Origin oe Submission ... 23 
 
 IV. Manufacturing the Slavish Instinct in Man ... 30 
 V. A Slave's One Doty is to Win Freedom at any Cost . 37 
 
 VI. Slaves Have no Human Duties to Masters 43 
 
 VII. Mankind's False Evolution . . .46 
 
 VIII. Modern Quasi-Slavery is Ancient Slavery Disguised 50 
 IX. The Inherited Slavishness of Americans . . ... 62 
 X. Blossoms of Servility —American Repose Under Rob- 
 bery .68 
 
 XI. All Laws Are Annulled by Starvation ... 74 
 
 XII. Higher Law Than Property: Shall the Poor Steal 
 
 From Principle ? .85 
 
 XIII. The Murder Laws of Property . . 89 
 
 XIV. Are We Verging on revolution? . . ... 94 
 
 INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 
 
 As yet there exists no satisfactory work on the theme of Human 
 Submission. Yet the part this principle has played in the affairs of man 
 is absolutely primary. It is the lost or undiscoved key to the philosophy 
 of human history, and when its importance is recognized all history will 
 have to be revised under its light. 
 
 Our philosophy of man and all our opinions of what is to be done 
 will likewise change. It is not intended to be implied in these pages 
 that non-resisters from principle are not brave men ; it is shown that in 
 practical results the doctrine ends where cowardice does. Part I, whose 
 title is Our Servile Religion, has not yet been published. The subject 
 of Part III is, The Confiscation of Wealth. 
 
HUMAN SUBMISSION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE TRUE KEY OF THIS UNIVERSE. 
 
 There is nothing that a religious philosopher keeps at 
 such a distance as the actual facts of life. But while these 
 philosophers go their way ignoring the actual and indeed 
 very ignorant of it, the people are going their way and leav- 
 ing philosophers to their little artificial world of old texts, 
 desks, and lecture rooms, and they are making up their own 
 minds about ' god ' and religion, a very different mind from 
 what the scholastic thinkers would like them to have. 
 Yet the main light on whatever god there may be is not 
 thrown by the nature of Being, of which the philosophers 
 are so competent to speak, nor by the nature of Conscious- 
 ness, but by the things happening to men every day in this 
 sphere of god's power and love. And knowing full 
 well the commiseration I shall inspire in philosophers 
 for thinking of these mere events and drawing de- 
 ductions from them, I lay them down as the First 
 Principles from which any theory of the universe must be 
 drawn. If we eliminate consciousness from the universe I 
 do not know of what consequence its existence is, and if 
 consciousness is the greatest thing, the way this universe 
 uses every conscious being is our test of the universe. 
 
 When these facts are presented to the philosopher he will 
 be contented by saying, "but suffering is not the only 
 postulate whence our moral nature starts ; it is also the 
 discipline through which it gains its true elevation." * But 
 
 *Martineau, A Study of Religion, ii, loo. 
 
4 Human Submission. 
 
 how will this strike the sufferer ? And men of fineness can 
 sharply realize the sufferer's point of view. Will they fol- 
 low the proclamation of another philosopher, who says: 
 "To the question, then, how evil consists with the good- 
 ness of God ? I answer flatly, it does not consist with the 
 goodness of God. Either there is no God, such as we 
 figure him, or there is no evil. Pain and suffering in 
 abundance, but no evil. For only that is really and abso- 
 lutely evil which is . . . evil in its issues, evil for evermore. 
 Nothing in God's universe answers to that condition." * 
 
 Only a philosopher, and a religious philosopher at that, 
 could make this assertion. Who knows anything about 
 good or evil for evermore ? Who is familiar with ' God's 
 universe ' beyond the immoral medley of it here ? Is there 
 then no evil? Let us try to conceive how men who are 
 neither philosophers nor proprietors of the planet would 
 answer this question. 
 
 I have already cited one fact of Being where two refined 
 women ended their lives through poverty ; this I should call 
 reality, and now let us continue the study of the universe . 
 and of reality on these lines. On the 11th of October, 
 1904, the press contained some curious information from 
 Cleveland, Ohio : 
 
 " After murdering his two children, John, aged three, and 
 Emma, aged four, Bohunil Schnepp, a Bohemian laborer, 
 aged forty-one, made an unsuccessful attempt on his own 
 life at the grave of his wife in Woodland Cemetery here. 
 He is now in a local hospital, where the doctors say he will 
 recover. Schnepp has vainly searched for weeks for 
 employment, and, becoming discouraged over the pros- 
 pect of not being able to provide a home for himself and his 
 
 *F. H. Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 243-245. Quoted by Martineau, 
 ii, 60. 
 
True Key of the Universe. 5 
 
 two motherless babies, he yesterday decided to blot out the 
 entire family. 
 
 " He took the two children into the basement of his board- 
 ing house, where, after tying handkerchiefs tightly over 
 their mouths so that they could make no outcry, he fired a 
 shot from an old revolver into each of their heads. The 
 bullets failing to kill instantly, he seized an old hammer 
 which was lying nearby and struck the children on the skull 
 behind the temple. The two bodies were then placed side by 
 side on the floor, while the frantic father went to the cemetery 
 where the body of his wife was buried. There, with the 
 pistol he had used on his babies, he fired a shot into his head., 
 
 " He was picked up unconscious and hurried to the hos- 
 pital, where examination revealed the fact that the bullet 
 had missed the brain and that he would recover. In the 
 meantime the bodies of his imfortunate victims had been 
 found, Emma being dead and John dying within half an 
 hour. Schnepp left a letter in which he stated that he 
 ' had nothing left to do ' but kill himself ; that he now 
 ' had a job in hell as a fireman ' and asked that he and the 
 children be buried in the same grave." 
 
 This phenomenon happened in a world whose God is 
 Love. In New York an old man starved to death : " Two 
 shoemakers, Michael and Jacob Buthren, both more than 
 70 years old, have been living in a rear tenement in Gates 
 Avenue, Brooklyn. To-day the police were notified by 
 neighbors that something was wrong with the old men. 
 They visited the house and found Michael dead and his 
 brother Jacob lying half conscious and barely alive by his 
 side. Both were victims of starvation. It is impossible to 
 say how long they had been without food, but it must have 
 been several days." * 
 
 *Dec. 17, '03. 
 
6 Human Submission. 
 
 A tailor in Philadelphia paid his debts and took poison, 
 writing, " The other world may be just as bad." " Max 
 Horn, a tailor, fearing that he would become blind and so 
 be thrown out of work committed suicide yesterday, at 920 
 South Street, by drinking carbolic acid. He had been 
 troubled with weak eyes for some time, and had been unable 
 to work at his trade. This note addressed to the man with 
 whom he lived, was found in the suicide's room : 
 
 " ' Friend Witkin — I leave you 30 cents for two suppers, 
 Sunday and Monday, that belongs to you. Excuse me, 
 friends, for the trouble, but I couldn't help myself. I hope 
 you will excuse me. I want you to sell all my clothes and 
 buy me new ones for the grave. I wish you good-by and 
 good luck from me. Yours truly, Horn. 
 
 " ' The world aint more for me. The other world may be 
 just as bad. Max Horn.' " * 
 
 Charles I^orsch, a Brooklyn sculptor, about 30 years old, 
 and married, in a fit of despondency committed suicide in 
 the woods of Valley Stream, L. I., by drinking carbolic 
 acid. A letter denying application for work was on his 
 person, t Another smashed a window and stole in order to 
 go to jail and get a home. "James Anderson, alias Camp- 
 bell, a slender, thinly clad man, about 40 years old, who 
 smashed a window of the store of C. De Young, at Front 
 Street and Girard Avenue, with a coupling pin done up in 
 cotton waste, on Sunday, and gathered up watch chains, 
 rings and other jewelry, valued at $50, but was overtaken 
 before he ran very far, was accused before Magistrate 
 Kochersperger, at the City Hall, yesterday, of also having 
 shattered a window of the store of W. Eisele, 2905 Frank- 
 ford Avenue, and stolen four watches. ' I plead guilty to 
 
 * Philadelphia Ledger, Jan. 14, 1903. 
 t Brooklyn Eagle, July 20, 1903. 
 
Trile Key of the Universe. 7 
 
 both charges,' said Anderson calmly, when the police said 
 they had found Eisele's watches in his pockets when they 
 caught him with the plunder from the other store. ' I was 
 cold and hungry and up against hard luck. I knew I would 
 be fed and kept warm in prison, so I smashed both 
 windows.' " * 
 
 " John Kenny, 40 years old, of 328 East Thirty-second 
 Street, who, on April 7th, robbed a woman and then shot 
 two men who interfered, was sentenced to State prison for 
 fifteen years by Judge Cowing yesterday. In an affidavit 
 which Kenny filed with the Court, he stated that at the time 
 he committed the robbery he had been two days without 
 food, and that the revolver with which he shot the two 
 men was intended to end his life if he did not find employ- 
 ment speedily." f 
 
 The clerk class is not spared : " After trudging through 
 the snow from one end of the city to the other in the vain 
 hope of securing employment, and with his wife and six 
 children without food and ordered to leave their home in 
 an tipper east side tenement house because of non-payment 
 of rent, John Corcoran, a clerk, to-day ended his life by 
 drinking carbolic acid. Corcoran lost his position three 
 weeks ago through illness, and during the period of idleness 
 his scanty savings disappeared. Yesterday he obtained work 
 with a gang of city snow shovelers, but he was too weak 
 from illness and was forced to quit after an hour's trial with 
 the shovel. Then the weary task of looking for employ- 
 ment was again resumed. Thoroughly discouraged, Cor- 
 coran returned to his home late last night to find his wife 
 and children without food and the notice of dispossession 
 on the door." On the following morning he drank the 
 poison. 
 
 * Philadelphia Ledger, Jan. 13, '03. 
 t N. Y. Times, April 29, '04. 
 
8 Human Submissio7t. 
 
 The records of many more such cases lie before me ; an 
 encyclopedia might easily be filled with their kind. These 
 few I cite as an interpretation of the universe. " We are 
 aware of the presence of God in His world," says a writer in 
 a recent English Review. " The Absolute is the richer for 
 every discord, and for all diversity which it embraces," says 
 F. H. Bradley {Appearance and Reality^ 204). He means 
 that these slain men make the universe richer, and that is 
 Philosophy. But while Professors Royce and Bradley and 
 a whole host of guileless thoroughfed thinkers are unveil- 
 ing Reality and the Absolute and explaining away evil and 
 pain, this is the condition of the only beings known to us 
 anywhere in the universe with a developed consciousness 
 of what the universe is. What these people experience is 
 Reality. It gives us an absolute phase of the universe. It 
 is the personal experience of those most qualified in all our 
 circle of knowledge to have experience, to tell us what is. 
 Now, what does thinking about the experience of these 
 persons come to compared with directly, personally feeling 
 it, as they feel it ? The philosophers are dealing in shades, 
 while those who live and feel know truth. And the mind 
 of mankind — not yet the mind of philosophers and of the 
 proprietary class — but of the great mass of the silently 
 thinking and feeling men, is coming to this view. They 
 are judging the universe as they have heretofore permitted 
 the heirophants of religion and learning to judge them. 
 
 By looking into the large end of a telescope real. life can 
 be put far off and made small. Until modern science 
 began its work the minutiae of the world, the mere actual- 
 ities and facts, the things that took place, were looked on 
 with supercilious contempt. But the soul and essence of 
 science was its determination to see these things just as 
 they are, and to exact the laws of the Real from them. But 
 
True Key of the Universe. 9 
 
 this work has not yet been done of human experience in 
 common life. It has been done of animals as far as possible 
 in their common life, but man has not yet been discovered 
 of importance enough to have it done for him. Instead of 
 this the beautiful vague immensities of Being, Essence, 
 God-Fatherhood, Sonship, Eternal Life, and the " for ever- 
 more," are erected out of consciousness into their place. 
 They are like moving pictures which simulate the real. 
 But all these are inventions, shadows, thought-clouds, 
 originating in our faculty for despising the near, the present, 
 the actual ; yes, and due to the proprietary estimate of the 
 common human being's worthlessness, for the philosopher 
 is not above the standards of his proprietors and his age. 
 
 And yet all progress of man has been the calling of him- 
 self in from the wilderness of fancy in which his mind 
 could aimlessly roam, to close and home and palpable rela- 
 tions. The highly intelligent eschew dreams and come to 
 that which is supreme actuality, humble things as they 
 are. And this Cleveland workingman, killing his children 
 and himself, is one of the elemental, stupendous facts of 
 this modern world and of this universe. It cannot be glozed 
 over or minimized away by all the treatises on God, and 
 Love, and Being, helplessly existing in their haughty 
 monumental vacuity. This is one of the simple irreducible 
 elements of this world's life after millions of years of divine 
 opportunity and twenty centuries of Christ. It is in the 
 moral world like atoms or sub-atoms in the physical, prim- 
 ary, indestructible. And what it blazons to man is the 
 impotence of religion in its very essence, and the imposture 
 of all philosophy which does not see in such events the 
 consummate factor of conscious experience. These facts 
 invincibly prove religion a nullity. Man will not give 
 religion two thousand centuries or twenty centuries more 
 
10 Unman Submission. 
 
 to try itself and waste human time ; its time is up, its pro- 
 bation is ended. Its own record ends it. Mankind has 
 not aeons and eternities to spare for trying out discredited 
 systems of life. 
 
 " The impassable truth shown is that not only the Chris- 
 tian motive but the religious motive at its largest, has not 
 been sufficient to change men and the world. They have 
 lent themselves to systems about what is behind life, sys- 
 tems of organized guesses, and the mere actual, that which 
 _is known and felt, they have despised. Behold the incal- 
 culable mind-energy that has gone into elucidating "God," 
 Being, Christ's relation to God, and God's relation to man ; 
 and after it all a Cleveland workingman has to kill his babies 
 and himself in the presence of and in spite of these majestic 
 essences ! Who that takes real things into account will 
 believe a word of these colossal lucubrations when he sees 
 what transpires in this moral universe of the Great Abso- 
 lute ? " What is man that thou art mindful of him ? " Why 
 the answer is, thou art not mindful of him. Thou permit- 
 test him to die like the weed, though with all the fiery 
 sorrow that a sentient being can feel. 
 
 Certainly this presentation will have no point nor com- 
 prehensibility to those who deal in Being, subsensible 
 Reality, and Theories of Knowledge. In their schemes 
 that poor Ohio man filled a benevolent place in the Eternal 
 Order and Moral Process, He was to find his highest self- 
 realization and therefore contentment and happiness in 
 killing his children, because the Divine Process could dis- 
 cover no food for them. Such is the immensity of Being 
 and the profundity of Universal I^ove that they needed his 
 heartbreak to fulfil the mighty concatenation of infinite 
 connections. 
 
 But all this to intelligences that come home from In- 
 
True Key of the Universe. 11 
 
 finity to what palpably Is, must be pure and sheer babble, 
 as meaningless as the mediaeval tournaments in Essence — 
 how many angels could gyrate on the needle's point. 
 However absurd it may be in the realm of Being and Be- 
 coming, Godhead and God made Flesh, to men of simple 
 and direct minds the murder and suicide of that man whom 
 all Religion could not provide with means to live in this 
 reekingly rich country, shows with finality the poverty and 
 impotency of the religious motive for human life. 
 
 Religion is like a sleep-walker to whom actual things 
 are blank. Let us offer its consolations to this Cleveland 
 toiler, to all those other Americans dead of want in the 
 bosom of riches : " And as creation was a moral act all its 
 motives and ends were in God, for only so could they be 
 worthy of Hirh. These motives and ends were those of 
 the supreme good. God willed being that He might will 
 beatitude. The willing was a sovereign act, but the 
 motives and ends made the 2lQ.\. paternaV * 
 
 Thus speaks religion, but in no higher note speaks Phi- 
 losophy. It turns its face away from the realities to battle 
 through long tomes with imaginary figments. " Applied 
 philosophy," its formulators tell us,t " is like practical 
 religion. It illumines life, but it gives no power to use the 
 arts of the medicine man." And how does it illumine? 
 " Religious faith involves no direct access to the special 
 counsels of God ; but it inspires the believer with assur- 
 ance that all things work together for good, and endows 
 him with readiness to serve in his station the God who is 
 All in all. Such religion is ... . the wisdom to find in all 
 things, however obscure, or fragmentary, the expressions, 
 however mysterious, of the Divine Love. The faith of the 
 
 *Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, p. 439. 
 t Josiah Royce, The World and ike Individual, ii, pp, 6-9. 
 
12 Human Submission. 
 
 devout .... makes them glad to suffer, and willing to wait ; 
 and sure that however far off God seems, he actually is 
 near." 
 
 This is a beautiful summary of that ignoble resignation 
 and acceptance which is all that religion can offer us against 
 the blows of nature. Coerce your mind and subdue your 
 insight, ignore realities and inwardly assert that the storms 
 of evil beating down man are mysterious expressions of 
 Divine Love. 
 
 And likewise philosophy: "The Theory of Being re- 
 quires us to view every fact of nature, and of man's life, 
 as a fragmentary glimpse of the Absolute life, as a revela- 
 tion, however mysterious and to us men now in detail 
 illegible, of the unity of the perfect Whole." " Philosophy 
 does not create men, but reflectively considers their life." 
 " We have to do primarily with human nature as it is." 
 
 The illuminations of. religion and of philosophy are 
 then identical, and the secret of both is Faith. Devoutly 
 believe that the universe is Divine Love and a Perfect 
 Whole. And now let us, as before we did with religion, 
 apply the doctrine of philosophy to facts. When the 
 obscure Cleveland workman, having vainly searched 
 through weeks for employment, took his two children into 
 the basement of his boarding house and tying handker- 
 chiefs over their mouths fired a shot from an old revolver 
 into each of their heads, and, failing to kill them, ham- 
 mered their skulls in beneath the temple, we had ' a frag- 
 mentary glimpse of the Absolute life,' ' a revelation of the 
 unity of the perfect Whole.' We had, I think, on the con- 
 trary a perfectly clear glimpse of what any one not besotted 
 by the concepts of philosophy would call Absolute Imper- 
 fection, and of a universe in which the attributes of hate 
 and hell were in cruel supremacy. And neither philosophy 
 
True Key of the Universe. 13 
 
 nor religion will much longer avail with intellectual char- 
 latanry and sophistries to restrain mankind from so reason- 
 ing and seeing. When it does so, a change in its princi- 
 ples of action like that of the passage from an old to a 
 new universe will transpire. 
 
 Ethics follows at the tail of philosophy and religion. 
 "The joys of a good conscience," says Wundt, "far ex- 
 celling all other sources of happiness, are so great that the 
 really moral man is entirely satisfied with the position 
 assigned him by Fate : he would not change places with 
 any one." * 
 
 Patiently bringing our facts to bear upon this quaint aca- 
 demic thinker's fiction, the working man who, crazed by 
 starving and seeing his boy and girl whom he could not 
 feed pining and dying before his eyes, with no commissera- 
 tion from God or man or moralist, crushed out their brains, 
 would have been ' entirely satisfied with the position 
 assigned him' by Fate,' nor would he have changed places 
 with anyone ; for up to the time when the frenzy seized 
 him he must surely have had a good conscience, since for 
 weeks he had zealously pursued the mocking phantasies 
 of employment and honest food. Thus the ethical writer 
 with the mysteries of his science can reduce the utmost 
 misery that a human being can know to a joy far excell- 
 ing all others ; he can make the most horrible fate con- 
 ceivable to man identical with his highest bliss. But he 
 does more : he demonstrates that ethics is an archaic exer- 
 cise of modern school-masters hundreds of years in arrears, 
 that its message to the present and to the future is dead. 
 
 * Ethics (Tr.) iii, 89. 
 
14 Huma?! Submission. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 HUMAN RACE REPRESSION THROUGH SUBMISSIVENESS. 
 
 What is the cause of this uniform and dreary sterility in 
 three great fields? Philosophy and ethics, like religion, 
 are under dominion of the world's accepted structure. 
 They are all fettered to the despotism of man over man 
 which the first savage slave-catcher inaugurated. They 
 have accepted their fimdamental structure from the nature 
 of human society as it has been since long before reflection 
 began, and their thinking will be but idle relics when this 
 stage is transcended. 
 
 The philosophic method is to begin with human experi- 
 ence and to then eliminate or obscure whatever would 
 undermine the existence of a proprietary class. For in no 
 other way can the procedure of the universe be justified or 
 made to appear commonly humane. And as the mission of 
 philosophy is to justify the universe, it is compelled to 
 justify its iniquities and the nearer causes of those iniqui- 
 ties. Not only, then, is it indifferent and passive to the 
 overwhelming sum of human wrong, but it evolves systems 
 in which the greatest things of life are reduced to nothing 
 and the remote things made all, systems therefore totally 
 untrue. These three great streams. Religion, Philosophy 
 and Morals, joined and have flowed together to effect the 
 submission and abasement of man. And the ill they 
 wrought to the race in doing so has been infinite. Let us 
 briefly trace this evil through history to the present 
 moment. 
 
 The condition of man before slavery was essential equal- 
 ity. Out of the property and class differences which sla- 
 _yery introduced grew the monarchic tribe. Having'cxam- 
 ined most of those now existing in the different savage 
 races of the globe, Letourneau finds that " always and 
 
Race Repression Through Submissiveness. 15 
 
 everywhere, we see inequality of possessions coinciding 
 with crying abuses of force and prerogative ; everywhere 
 the disinherited or despoiled are at the mercy of the well- 
 to-do, who unscrupulously abuse their advantages. It is 
 only here and there that we find the greater humanity of 
 [earlier] ancient custom still protesting against this mass 
 of tyranny." * This was the parent soil of present nations^ 
 At a certain stage, in a wandering tribe of Jews, our 
 table of commandments crystallized. It was the formal 
 moral code of a small population differing in every aspect 
 from the great nations which subsequently throve. In this 
 miniature and energetic community tyranny and repression 
 were decisively limited, compared with their play in bulkier 
 states and those which came later. Greek philosophy and 
 the Hebrew religion plus this moral code, united in Chris- 
 tianity, which became the religion and the ethical law of 
 the Western world, with conditions stupendously changed. 
 Commandments perhaps excellent for the migratory clan or 
 modest little nation of Jews where the oppressor could be 
 held in some check, became in huge machine empires the 
 lethal" potion which killed the instinct for rights and love 
 of liberty in the best. ' Thou shalt not steal, neither shalt 
 thou covet,' are suitable precepts in a state of equality, but 
 in a social mechanism framed as Rome was for the spolia- 
 tion of the many, they are advices to the many to meanly 
 fall down and be pillaged. The masters of the empire 
 were a predatory ruling corporation organized to extract 
 and consume the honey of their subjects. There were 
 natural resisters of these predacious tyrants — they were 
 those highest minded men, who would be drawn to the ideal 
 and become Christians. But as soon as they did so the 
 false prescriptions of Christianity destroyed their zeal for a 
 
 *I<etourneau. Property ; Its Origin and Development, io6. 
 
16 Human Submission. 
 
 right and beatific world, substituting an empty metaphy- 
 sical righteousness and a heaven of fancy to run away 
 to. The world needed at that time a religion of uncom- 
 promising resistance to tyrants, whether they were political 
 or commercial, a religion, philosophy, and morality that 
 would permit the righteous to allow the despoilers of men 
 no peace or safety. Instead, they were put to sleep and to 
 death by the dogmas of fallacious righteousness. 
 
 Swift, in a passage of tremendous import,* depicting 
 spirits summoned up through necromancy from the dead, 
 signalizes his opinion of the type of men needed by the 
 world. "The governor, at my request, gave the sign for 
 Caesar and Brutus to advance towards us. I was struck 
 with a profound veneration at the sight of Brutus, and 
 could easily discover the most consummate virtue, the 
 greatest intrepidity and firmness of mind, the truest love of 
 his country, and general benevolence for mankind, in every 
 lineament of his countenance. I observed with much 
 pleasure, that these two persons were in good intelligetice 
 with each other ; and Csesar freely confessed to me, that 
 the greatest actions of his own life were not equal by many 
 degrees, to the glory of taking it away. I had the honor to 
 have much conversation with Brutus ; and was told that 
 his ancestor Junius, Socrates, Epaminondas, Cato the 
 younger, Sir Thomas More, and himself, were perpetually 
 together : a sextumvirate, to which all the ages of the 
 
 world cannot add a seventh I chiefly fed mine eyes 
 
 with beholding the destroyers of tyrants and usurpers, and 
 the restorers of liberty, to oppressed and injured nations." 
 Into this list Swift would certainly accept the colossal 
 modern figure of John Brown. 
 
 All of the other virtues are pale in comparison with this 
 
 * Gulliver'' s Travels: Voyage to Laputa, ch. vii. 
 
Race Repression Through Submissiveness. 17 
 
 of resistance to those who tyrannize in any form over men. 
 Real ethics has therefore not yet begun to be. We have 
 had children's ethics, children's religion, and children's phi- 
 osophy — but not those appertaining to men. And because 
 the servile religion and ethics blinded and unnerved the 
 natural lovers of justice, the conditions of human life bear 
 still a close resemblance to their original in the savage 
 tribe, as lyetourneau depicted it. What we find in the two 
 great Anglo-Saxon countries, England and America, is the 
 accomplished degradation of a huge segment of the popula- 
 tion and the advancing degradation oj still more. The 
 population is steadily rushing to cities. Booth found in 
 L/ondon thirty per cent, of the people below the poverty 
 line, and Rowntree, investigating the smaller city of York, 
 discovered about twenty-eight per cent, in that condition, 
 below the line of physical efficiency. And now, keeping in 
 mind Letourneau's exposition of monarchic tribes of sav- 
 ages : " everywhere the disinherited or despoiled are at the 
 mercy of the well-to-do, who unscrupulously abuse their 
 advantages," let us learn from Rowntree what a life on the 
 border of mere physical efiiciency is. 
 
 "A family living upon the scale allowed for in the esti- 
 mate must never spend a penny on railway fare or omnibus. 
 They must never purchase a halfpenny newspaper or spend 
 a penny to buy a ticket for a popular concert. They must 
 write no letters to absent children, for they cannot afford 
 to pay the postage. They must never contribute anything 
 to their church or chapel, or give any help to a neighbor 
 which costs them money. They cannot save, nor can they 
 join sick club or trade union, because they cannot pay the 
 necessary subscriptions. The children must have no pocket 
 money for dolls, marbles or sweets. The father must smoke 
 no tobacco and must drink no beer. The mother must 
 
18 Human Submission. 
 
 never buy any pretty clothes for herself or for her children. 
 Should a child fall ill, it must be attended by the parish 
 doctor ; should it die, it must be buried by the parish. If 
 any of these conditions are broken the extra expenditure 
 involved is met, and can only be met, by limiting the diet ; 
 ^r, in other words, by sacrificing physical efficiency.'''' * 
 
 Is such a life worth living? That this shocking, savage 
 •condition is due to a craven morality, a nursery philosophy, 
 .and a servile religion, mere facts will gradually convince. 
 It is due to their denial of facts and their studied perver- 
 sion of facts to suit their pre-established doctrines ; to that 
 false, pernicious and cowardly canon of non-resistance 
 which is the core of them all. 
 
 lyct us follow the facts on to their climax. Race dete- 
 rioration in Great Britian is at last acknowledged, when so 
 great a proportion of military applicants are rejected for 
 their inferior physique that the fighting power of the nation 
 is menaced. The decay of these citizens did not ruffle the 
 serenity of the proprietary classes while the mob con- 
 tinued to produce the required able-bodied men to serve as 
 destroyers and destroyed for the political and commercial 
 .schemes of this class. No love of man, no concern for 
 fellow-citizens dying of a degradation imposed by the pro- 
 prietors, moved these dominant rich : only when their 
 basest selfish interests were threatened did they stir ; it 
 then became patent that they were starving their slavish 
 .servitors beyond the point of their own vantage and they 
 were frightened. The British commission found the infant 
 mortality among the poor to be alarming. Now the British 
 poor are neither provided with employment nor paid enough 
 to enable them to live decently, much less to bring up 
 
 * See "Science and Poverty" by Champness, in the Westminster Re- 
 :-view, Oct., '04. 
 
Race Repression Through Submissiveness. 19 
 
 decent children, what is theirs being confiscated for the ex- 
 cessive consumption of the proprietary masters. But the 
 commission has no idea of mitigating the cause and chang- 
 ing the status of the poor, it proposes to make these de- 
 graded parents qxiasi-convicts, to force them to work out 
 penally a debt to the state in payment for the state's rearing 
 of their children in the manner which society prevents 
 them from doing voluntarily. " In the last resort," says 
 this absurd proprietary commission, " this might take the 
 form of labor colonies on the lines of the Salvation Army 
 Colony at Hadleigh, with powers, however, of compulsory 
 detention. The children of persons so treated might be 
 lodged temporarily in public nurseries or boarded out. 
 With a view to the enforcement of parental responsibility, 
 the object would be to make the parent a debtor to society 
 on account of the child, with the liability, in default of his 
 providing the cost of a suitable maintenance, of being 
 placed in a labor establishment under State supervision 
 until the debt is worked off." And this inevitable degen- 
 eration of the increasing mass of poor is taking place in 
 all Anglo-Saxon cities. 
 
 In England and America a rapid annual increase of in- 
 sanity is at length admitted, though naturally with exces- 
 sive reluctance ; for it is a damning indictment of our reli- 
 gious and moral civilization, striking where there is the 
 least possibility of evasion. The strain upon the wealth- 
 producers, creating riches not for their own evolution but 
 for the intemperate debauching luxury of the proprietors, 
 is the primary cause. The producer is unable to feed him- 
 self and family as he should ; in this abnormal under- 
 mining physico-mental state he takes to stimulants and 
 deadly vice. On their side, steeped in selfishness in every 
 department of their natures from their position as despoilers 
 
20 Human Submission. 
 
 of the producer, the proprietors steadily advance in deprav- 
 ing luxury and hideous brutalizing pleasure-worship. The 
 riches of the nation are consumed in degrading their pos- 
 sessors. Here then is the resulting law of modern society : 
 Popular degradation advances in direct ratio with the 
 seizure of general wealth by the Rich. The rich are there- 
 fore a centre of blood-poisoning which ultimately corrupts 
 and destroys the social body. The health of society lies in 
 amputating the rich. 
 
 The Russian masses lost their faith in the Czar when he 
 had them butchered on the way to appeal to him for help. 
 When it breaks upon the American mind that the rich are 
 the great centre of social poisoning, the last grain of faith 
 in their utility will depart, and they will be impeached and 
 their state abolished. In this will consist their amputa- 
 tion. These rich are fanatics in their belief that the 
 American people will never do anything to them, even 
 when they rend and expose each other they anticipate no 
 ^pular retribution. Nothing will do more to dissipate 
 the senseless glamour which protects them than the cer- 
 tainty that they buy and own American laws and law- 
 makers. Thomas Lawson, corrupt though he is by con- 
 fession, has done good work here. His character does not 
 impugn the truth of his story, an honest man could not 
 have entered the ring of rascals as he did, learning their 
 profligate villainies by sharing them ; but the thing is, his 
 explicit personal charges against the Massachusetts law- 
 makers and Boston's 'great' citizens like Henry M. 
 Whitney and his accomplices, could not be ventured unless 
 they were true. He deposes thus of the bribers and 
 bribed : " I do not hesitate to say, then : The Massachu- 
 setts I/Cgislature is bought and sold as are sausages and 
 fish at the markets and wharves. That the largest, wealthiest, 
 
Race Repression Through Submissiveness. 21 
 
 and most prominent corporations in New England, whose 
 affairs are conducted by our most representative citizens, 
 habitually corrupt the Massachusetts Legislature, and the 
 man of wealth among them who would enter protest 
 against the iniquity would be looked on as a ' Class Anar- 
 chist.' I will go farther and say that if in New England 
 a man of the type of Folk, of Missouri, can be found who 
 will give over six months to turning up the legislative and 
 Boston municipal sod of the past ten years, who does not 
 expose to the world a condition of rottenness more rotten 
 than was ever before exhibited in any community in the 
 civilized world, it will be because he has been suffocated 
 by the stench of what he exhumes." * 
 
 I am citing these facts not as novelties to surprise the 
 few who have not read of them, but to show their bearings 
 on the greatest problems that confront man. I wish to 
 show how the highest modern gentleman is the very image 
 of his olden antetype thousands over thousands of years 
 ago. H. M. Whitney is one of New England's most emin- 
 ent and influential gentlemen, standing in the front rank 
 of the American proprietary type. I doubt if a single one 
 of that magisterial troop would hesitate to do as he does. 
 And Lawson says Whitney was the star " fixer " of legis- 
 latures ; the most accomplished (Jr/^^r of them all. "What 
 were legislatures for, anyway, but to be ' fixed ' ? " leading 
 Boston gfentlemen of the highest culture and Christian 
 standing inquired of Lawson. 
 
 As between the monarchic tribal chief and American 
 chiefs like Whitney, the difference is purely in the length 
 of the intermediate chain between their acts and the visible 
 consequences. Civilization's greatest and characteristic I 
 invention is machinery for concealing the evil doer. Civil- 
 
 * Lawson's Magazine Article of Dec. '04. 
 
22 Human Submission. 
 
 ization is increasing complexity of robber straiegems. By 
 lengthening the intermediate chain it throws the injured 
 populace off of the scent. And the modern world is not 
 offended by a consciousness of the utmost savagery flourish- 
 ing in its midst ; what offends it is to have this savagery 
 spoken of. 
 
 With a people bred in a religion or philosophy of intelli- 
 gence, the succession of enormities and scandals I have 
 sketched — the crucial stupendous facts of modern man- 
 kind — would lead to an instant conflagation, wiping out 
 every trace of the wrong. The infamous men who are 
 corrupting American life and degrading the race, far worse 
 and more iniquitous than the Catilines of old, would be 
 assembled in penal colonies to expiate their crimes by use- 
 ful labor. The perpetrators of these acts, the legislators 
 and the eminent proprietors, whom Swift with his merciless 
 exactness would call "a knot of peddlers, pickpockets, 
 highwaymen and bullies," would be no longer endured at 
 large among men, again to plot their contamination. 
 
 But how is it under our Submissive religion and philoso- 
 phy ? The situation is treated with amusement and satire 
 by the proprietary press, and that is all so far as anything 
 can be publicly observed. The people, religiously subdued 
 to slavish instincts for ages, will, many of them, experience 
 some throbbings of molten rage, but they will think that 
 it is evil to feel so ; the religious inhibition checks every 
 impulse to eradicate primary wrongs, criminal righteous- 
 ness abolishes the play of their reason, and they do nothing. 
 
 But if intelligence cannot work openly and redeem, 
 a subterranean hatred slowly accumulates. It was this 
 which produced the French revolution. Submission again 
 achieved the saddle after that revolt, but we must not for- 
 get that submission is strong with aeons of instinct. Slowly 
 
Origin of Submission. 23 
 
 growing hate does in time most recklessly what intelligence 
 would do at once with healing skill. And we arrive at the 
 strange discovery, that under a submissive religion, a 
 religion of canting afifected love, all great and real progress 
 comes through hate. This is the measureless penalty we 
 pay for obedience to the corpse-like mandates of antiquity. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF SUBMISSION. 
 
 The full origin of submission, however, is what it con- 
 cerns us practically and particularly to know. For it long 
 antedates the later religions and explains why their foun- 
 ders so naively mistook submissiveness for virtue. These 
 religions came late and found and confirmed a state of 
 human wretchedness already institutionalized and trace- 
 able in weighty measure to this principle of submission. 
 Hence its origin will throw new light on all our surviving 
 institutions and morals. 
 
 Far back in the hazy beginnings of human society a 
 differentiation of men took place into warriors, and con- 
 ' trivers or producers. The warriors were the most brutal 
 and domineering and less gifted ; the contrivers and inven- 
 tors were they in whom superior qualities of brain were 
 starting. These new excellencies of mind were slight and 
 rudimentary, yet they were the beginnings of higher man. 
 Their possessors saw how life might be improved and pro- 
 ceeded to improve it, their interest being rather in work 
 and production than in war, enslaving and killing ; they 
 were the intellectuals of the time, the scientists, the invent- 
 ors, the creators, and among their discoveries was agricul- 
 ture. They thought and worked. Here the greatest of all 
 
24 Human Submission. 
 
 errors ever committed by mankind arose. These men, the 
 less violent, brutal, blood-thirsty, and selfish, relaxed their 
 self-protecting vigilance, and permitted a division of laborj 
 they gravitated to the higher and peaceful arts and gave 
 over the business of war to the baser, duller sort who inher- 
 ently thirsted for slaughter ; they let down their guard, — 
 and the result was that the truculent killing breed took 
 command, and they were subjugated. This sealed the 
 subjugation of brains to force for all time, making brain 
 the errand boy of brute force. Far from setting intellect 
 free to develop by differentiation and division of labor as 
 writers teach, it dealt the evolution of brain an irremedi- 
 able blow. For it raised Power over brain as its mentor, 
 and made the higher intellect a minion of Might. And 
 this degrading office intelligence has always meekly filled, 
 with dumb mean gratitude for even tolerance to exist. 
 
 The contrivers and producers, having permitted the func- 
 tion of self-protection to slip from them, could no longer 
 enforce their voice in public affairs, they lost respect and 
 their wisdom was ignored, they were relegated to the de- 
 spised condition of producing for and serving the others. 
 Now this put an extinction on the evolution of wisdom. 
 Who would give himself to creative and productive ideas 
 only to be rewarded for it by reduction to slavery ? Only 
 the less intelligent, those barely above the brutal warriors, 
 who were lacking in spirit. The higher intellects with 
 spirit would spurn a peaceful creative career plus slavery 
 and would join the warrior caste and fall in with the domi- 
 nant brutal crowd and become identical with them. The 
 productive, progressive ideas evolved would not be in any 
 manner those of the best, but of the third and fourth rate 
 intelligences, hardly capable of having ideas, and only 
 such would the brute warrior class allow ; the highest 
 
Origin of Submission. 25 
 
 minds would be sterilized, they would give up thoughts 
 of progress, but if any foolhardy one did attempt to run 
 counter to the brute majority he would meet with quick 
 suppression. 
 
 Such was the outcome of the division into warrior and 
 productive types. The growth of intellect was at once 
 checked and permanently stunted ; it was tied to the will 
 of the turbulent, bloody-minded and stupid — the destroyers ; 
 thenceonward they were the custodians of intellect and 
 decided what it might do ; the intelligence, the soul, the 
 dawning humanity, had to come on bended knee to these 
 self-appointed negaters and nuUifiers to plead permission to 
 improve man, with exceeding small hope of being heard. 
 Here was where that repression which later expanded into 
 an earth-girdling system sustained by dastardly armies and 
 linked by a thousand low laws saw first the light. Here is 
 the key to human history and its religion and philosophy. 
 
 The two movements creative of submission went side 
 by side and united their effects. The captured slaves 
 accepted their servitude and consented to produce, sup- 
 porting the warriors their owners ; this ratified their sub- 
 missiveness and its evolution in their posterity, entailing 
 on both all the cumulative consequences. On the other 
 hand, the intelligent peacefully-inclined drifted away from 
 warlike activity, accepted production as their status, and 
 the warriors as their rulers ; essential slavery became also 
 their lot ; for where they differed from the captured slave 
 in privilege or immunit)'^, they were in no sense free men, 
 equal to these power-wielding warriors, but were servile 
 both in station and mind. The conquering caste ruled 
 them. Their freedom was the price they paid for seeking 
 intelligent improvement of human ways. They who pre- 
 ferred peace and industry to war were enslaved or enserfed. 
 
26 Human Submission. 
 
 What was their mistake ! Submission to this state. We 
 may call it their crime against man. It was a crime 
 against all good and hope anywhere. The intelligent 
 should have preserved their warlike capacity to protect 
 themselves against the brutes of their race and faithfully 
 exercised it. They should have compelled the warrior 
 type to do their half of the productive work or die. They 
 should have forced the truculent to support themselves., and 
 thus prevented an exclusive warrior caste, the progenitors 
 of all tyranny and tyrants. All would have partaken in 
 war when necessary. This would have changed the brutal 
 into a peaceful type. Allowance to war and enslave ad 
 libitum, continually evolved a keener brutality. What we 
 have missed in our reading of nature and antiquity is, that 
 perfect brutality awaited the advent of man. The accepted 
 theory is that brutality lessened in man, the truth is it 
 began its real evolution in man. And it did so because the 
 better type yielded. The better sunk into pusillanimous 
 torpor, they established an heredity of good cowards. It 
 is absurd to say that the more intelligent could not have 
 held their own against the brutes if they had adhered to 
 the practice of arms in co-ordination with industry : the 
 fact of their superior brains would have certified success. 
 They would then have held brutality down and begun its 
 extirpation. As it was there were none to resist the man- 
 brutes, they absolutely had their way and used the whole 
 world to rampage in. In this perfect environment for it, 
 brutality started on a limitless evolvement. The increas- 
 ing brain of man was brutality's new propulsion and man's 
 strengthening faculties steadily widened its field. This 
 was inevitable because the conquering caste controlled 
 evolution and their brute instincts would direct its course. 
 The evolution theory which assumes on the whole the 
 
Origin of Submission. 27 
 
 constant advance of man is very far wrong. The progress 
 of man's brain for countless ages was almost nothing but 
 the exercise of brutalities unknown to ' lower ' creation and 
 depending 07i semi-man's greater brain power. All these 
 exercises became strtictural in man's brain and are there 
 yet explaining man's far deeper than brute baseness. They 
 explain man's inability to see the infamy of the resultant 
 structure of human life as we accept it, and his callousness 
 to its horrors when he does see. It is because human evo- 
 lution did not go right, but switched to the wrong almost 
 in the very outstart. 
 
 Faithful evolutionists surmise that this differentiation 
 into warrior caste and peaceable dependent supporters of 
 them tended to purify the race of its blood-thirsty stock \ 
 they refer to it as far the most potent cause of the advance 
 of peace-loving industry. For they say wars naturally 
 attracted the turbulent and bloody-minded and killed them 
 off, so gradually cleansing mankind of their tribe ; which 
 they call another beneficent instance of natural selection. 
 The reasoning is mainly fallacious. Before being killed 
 masses of this type left ofifspring as bloodily bent as them- 
 selves. To the progeny of wedlock must be added the sol- 
 diers' illegitimates springing up in the track of their wars. 
 The law of the warrior is license ; which also is part parent 
 of the dictum, civilzation is syphilization. 
 
 But war and the rule of the conquering caste were the 
 apotheosis of the war trade and the war kind of society \ 
 which having established themselves put men through their 
 brutal mould, nurturing their ferocity and extinguishing 
 their higher traits, shaping them for tyranny, rapacity, 
 cruelty and butchery ; so that while some were being- 
 destroyed, a constant stream developed by the brutal social 
 ideal more than replenished their sort. And those who 
 
28 Human Submission. 
 
 by the war-structure of human communities were thus 
 degraded would otherwise have evolved in the direction of 
 peace, industry, invention and intelligence. The same 
 process is exhibited by all the western nations to-day in 
 commercializing their children. Commercial rapacity is 
 the dominant law of civilized materialized mankind, man- 
 kind life-killing and idealless, and numberless youths 
 capable of nobility and worthy work in the world are in- 
 cessantly sucked down into the commercial vortex where 
 they smother their souls in the prevailing baseness. The 
 military ideal continues its domination and corruption even 
 in these latest times, ever feeding the war type with new 
 material and countervailing any tendency there is in selec- 
 tive forces to purify the race of blood-thirstiness by killing 
 the blood-thirsty out. 
 
 In modern times moreover there is not even the shadow 
 of selection operating to kill the blood-thirsty out. With 
 the great standing armies in which all able-bodied citizens 
 must serve, a war simply destroys men at random, striking 
 every type. The civil war in the United States decisively 
 lowered the quality of the American race. The plurality 
 of the survivors emerged more or less debased and brutal- 
 ized by their experiences ; many who might have grown in 
 personality spent their strength in the conflict and remained 
 stationary the rest of their lives ; and cohorts of the best 
 and least war-loving were killed. Taking the nation as a 
 whole, its quality very decidedly sunk. And we have the 
 most glaring proof that it did. The baser sort shrewdly 
 seized the occasion to speculate on the nation's misery and 
 batten on its needs ; they did not offer to fight and they 
 were not weeded out by natural selection ; they took gov- 
 ernment contracts and otherwise trafficked and peddled to 
 grow rich. When the struggle was over they had a 
 
Origin of Submission. 29 
 
 deteriorated population to cope with ; many of the more 
 spirited and intelligent were dead and still more were cor- 
 rupted ; and the commercial plotters found the weakened 
 nation soft prey. The events of the past forty years indi- 
 cate how soft : a handful of absolutely selfish unscrupulous 
 creatures absolutely control and mostly own the wealth and 
 productive industries of the States ; they have quietly taken 
 the property away from the rest. And a veritable army 
 of Americans, many of them no doubt descendants of civil 
 war soldiers, are living in actual semi-starvation, while 
 other large masses are being intellectually and morally 
 starved by care and poverty. The terrific words of Tiberius 
 Gracchus to the plucked Romans might well be embla- 
 zoned before these truly expatriated sons of the American 
 Commonwealth. 
 
 "The wild beasts of Italy," he said, "have their dens to 
 retire to, but the brave men who spill their blood in her 
 cause have nothing left but air and light. Without homes, 
 without settled habitations, they wander from place to place 
 with their wives and children ; and their generals do but 
 mock them when at the head of their armies they exhort 
 their men to fight for their sepulchres and the gods of their 
 hearths, for among such numbers there is perhaps not one 
 Roman who has an altar that has belonged to his ancestors 
 or a sepulchre in which their ashes rest. The private 
 soldiers fight and die to advance the wealth ajid luxury of 
 the great., and they are called masters of the world without 
 having a sod to call their own." 
 
 It is memorable that the Roman proprietors did not dis-1 
 -gorge,that through the action of submission the labor-loving 
 and best were totally expropriated and servilized, that the 
 worst survived and ruled the empire in rottenness, and that 
 finally the whole structure crumbled from this cause. Be- 
 
30 Human Submission. 
 
 hind the cause of extortion and expropriation which is 
 often enough designated, was the real cause, submission. 
 The Roman people, far outnumbering the proprietary 
 extorters, were under the spell of an idea which verily has 
 been the prime and original curse of the human race — 
 Submission. Through it the best have been prevented from 
 survimng ; it has maintained the survival and perpetuation 
 of the worse. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 MANUFACTURING THE SLAVISH INSTINCT IN MAN. 
 
 Man's mind having been cast through interminable time 
 in the slavish submissive mould, it is a well-nigh miracu- 
 lous feat for him to step out of his mental rigidity and see 
 what his past and present slavishness is. But if he can 
 contemplate a picture of himself in the animal world, a 
 feeling of realization and even shame may invade him. He 
 will find this picture in Darwin's Origin of Species under 
 " Slave-making Instinct ; " and it shows not only the meet 
 and sure fruits of pusillanimous submission, but the saving 
 potency of a spirited resistance. 
 
 This remarkable instinct, says Darwin, was first dis- 
 covered in the Formica rufescens by Pierre Huber. " This 
 ant is absolutely dependent upon its slaves ; without their 
 aid, the species would certainly become extinct in a single 
 year. The males and fertile females do no work of any 
 kind, and the workers or sterile females, though most 
 energetic and courageous in capturing slaves, do no other 
 work. They are incapable of making their own nests, or 
 feeding their own larvse. "When the old nest is found 
 inconvenient, and they have to migrate, it is the slaves 
 which determine the migration, and actually carry their 
 masters in their jaws. So utterly helpless are the masters, 
 
Manufacturing the Slavish Instinct. 31 
 
 that when Huber shut up thirty of them without a slave, 
 but with plenty of the food which they like best, and with 
 their own larvae and pupse to stimulate them to work, they 
 did nothing; they could not even feed themselves, and 
 many perished of hunger. Huber then introduced a single 
 slave (F. fusca), and she instantly set to work, fed and saved 
 the survivors ; made some cells and tended the larvse, and 
 put all to rights." " What can be more extraordinary," 
 Darwin asks, " than these well-ascertained facts ? If we 
 had not known of any other slave-making ant, it would 
 have been hopeless to speculate how so wonderful an 
 instinct could have been perfected." 
 
 What is far more wonderful is the exact parallel of human 
 slavish instincts. Man is supposed to be a higher being 
 with power to reflect, but the very superiority of his mind 
 employs itself to cause him to outslave the ant. The case 
 at its simplest is the conduct of the black slave in our war. 
 While the North was engaging his masters in the field he 
 had but to rise collectively and walk away to freedom. 
 All the colored population could have migrated to the 
 North, instantly extirpating the root of slavery. Instead 
 they remained and cared for the families of those who were 
 fighting to keep them in slavery, raising food also for their 
 masters' armies. Had they not done so their owners would 
 have been in the position of Ruber's thirty ants, they could 
 not have fed themselves and their families and fought, the 
 war must have ceased and slavery died. But the slaves, 
 like F. fusca, ' set to work, fed and tended the fighters and 
 their offspring,' and as far as they could 'put all to rights.' 
 Is not this more astonishing by many wide degrees than 
 the similar performance of the lowly narrow-brained ants ? 
 With armies contending to free him the African's instinct 
 for slavery remained as impregnable as the little colored 
 insects.' 
 
32 Human Submission. 
 
 But we need not draw our lesson from the African, for 
 here in the United States at this hour the sons of the men 
 who had freedom are exhibiting a more astounding example 
 of the structural deposit of the aeons of slavishness in us. 
 A mere handful of lawless men, with the utmost sangfroid^ 
 take possession of the nation's wealth, expropriating its 
 owners ; they are void of title, physical, moral, or spiritual, 
 to do so ; it is a work of dastardly fraud and dishonor, 
 bribery and crime, from its inception to its completion; 
 and yet, like the African minion in the cotton field, seventy- 
 seven million whites submissively watch the process move 
 to its grand and deadly consummation. 
 
 Scientifically speaking, these civilized whites, the Ethio- 
 pians, and the Formica fusca (ants) are on the same level 
 of intelligence and courage. And perhaps no modern fact 
 is more illuminating than this. The minds of all three 
 types, separated apparently though they are, work help- 
 lessly in the one iron groove ; the highest equally with the 
 lowest wanting elasticity to spring out of it. The ants in 
 fact are higher than the American white man. For we 
 have no evidence either from Huber or Darwin that the 
 slave-making ant starves its slave property, whereas in the 
 United States and Europe millions of the expropriated and 
 merely verbally free are being starved by their masters. 
 Superficially considered it would seem that the ants are 
 more willingly degraded than their human confreres, since 
 the owners cannot even feed themselves, and perish 
 with hunger if the bounty of their slaves is withdrawn. 
 But in human society, likewise, there are many members 
 of the proprietary leisure class who would die incontinently 
 if they were thrown out of their privileges and compelled 
 to struggle for their livelihood. Everything has to be done 
 for them by their servile providers almost to feeding them. 
 
Manufacturing the Slavish Instinct. 33 
 
 to preserve their valueless lives. Darwin's words are very 
 apt for these : " This [humaii ] ant is absolutely dependent 
 on its slaves ; without their aid the species would certainly 
 become extinct in a single year." 
 
 And this is the point. So deeply built into man is the 
 submissive slavery instinct that he cannot conceive how he 
 could possibly stop draining his life to care for masters and 
 mistresses who are utterly helpless, who are powerless to 
 coerce him, who would become as a species instantaneously 
 extinct if he desisted from his stupid self-imposed preserva- 
 tion of them. Like the ant, he manufactures his masters. 
 Taking everything into consideration this is the most stu- 
 pendous paradox in the animal kingdom. And he does 
 this from intellectual weakness, the fact that he does it 
 showing that his thought power in the highest field is no 
 farther evolved than the ant's. 
 
 The entire proprietary class are dependent upon their 
 supporters for the life of their species. They could not 
 exist as proprietors ' a single year ' without the sense of 
 obligation to work for and keep them alive which the great 
 servile horde feels. The life of the servile crowd is there- 
 fore expended in erecting masters and keeping them in 
 their place. Cessation from the service of support is alone 
 necessary to give the servile their liberty, but this irrational 
 sense of obligation drives them blindly to their posts, and 
 it is no other than that reasonless slave instinct which 
 hurried the solitary ant to feed and preserve its owners. 
 The sense of obligation is here seen to grow as readily 
 about a depraving instinct as with an ennobling one. And 
 this at once demolishes the value of the feeling of obliga- 
 tion. It may as readily be an impulse radically defiant of 
 man's good as kindly to it. The sense of duty may be 
 man's greatest injury ; it not only may, but is and has been 
 
34 Human Submission. 
 
 so to the full extent of its operation through time to hold 
 liim in slavery or submissive subjugation. 
 
 It is one of the prodigies of a strange branch of thought 
 that Kant used our sense of duty to prove man free. The 
 sense of duty has held the immenser portion of human beings 
 through all time in groveling yokeage to other human beings, 
 whose right to hold them has been nil, and whose power 
 to do so is mainly this sense of obligation in the dutiful; 
 but to a great philosopher the fact of this enslaving sense 
 is proof that man is a free agent. The essence of the proof 
 is that man is a free agent because he has a sense of obliga- 
 tion which keeps him a slave. An instinct which holds 
 man in the extremes of degradation establishes philoso- 
 phically that this is a moral universe ruled by a moral god 1 
 Curiously too for the moral character of the god which this 
 proves, the master's divine sense has been his sense of 
 duty to keep his co-mortals in the bonds of despicable 
 degradation. 
 
 In man it may require several generations to manufacture 
 the moral sense to wear the yoke, or one generation may 
 suffice. But where a long series of generations has wrought, 
 each hammering man's brain to practise and believe iu 
 servility, he is naturally certain with all the impetus of his 
 nature's architecture that every sanction in the universe 
 justifies and glorifies and commands his slavishness. Then 
 we have morality as it has been for many centuries, we 
 have philosophy, we have religion, and we even have 
 science in its only semi-emancipation, backing this thread- 
 bare ancient trinity. 
 
 The ant's pupae are captured and the new-born are 
 trained as slaves from birth ; they have no memory of free- 
 dom to stimulate them to freedom. Neither have the 
 -children of most men any memory of true freedom in their 
 
Manufacturing the Slavish Instinct. 35 
 
 ancestral line. But man has a larger brain than the ant and 
 the human atmosphere is not without floating ideas of the 
 equal rights of all men. Therefore man's sense of servility 
 is much stronger and baser than the ant's. Still the con- 
 science of the ant is sufficiently strong, as another species 
 watched by Darwin corroborates. " The slaves are black 
 and not above half the size of their red masters, so that the 
 contrast in their appearance is great. When the nest is 
 slightly disturbed, the slaves occasionally come out, and 
 like their masters are much agitated and defend the nest : 
 when the nest is much disturbed, and the larvae and pupae 
 are exposed, the slaves work energetically together with 
 their masters in carrying them away to a place of safety. 
 Hence it is clear, that the slaves feel quite at home." An 
 ant philosopher of the slave-holding tribe following this 
 touching domestic drama, and propably much emotionally 
 moved, would doubtless record that the slave ants had no 
 desire or capacity for freedom and were much better off as 
 slaves. So record human slave-makers. 
 
 In the cited case conscience prevents the slave from run- 
 ning away when he gets a chance. Indeed it is likely that 
 his conscience is so vivid that he never thinks of running 
 away. He is worried by his master's troubles and lends a 
 hand to set him right — so that his own servitude may be 
 resumed. How small a stretch of fancy is required to be- 
 lieve that a Christianity like ours has been delivered to the 
 ants ! 
 
 I said that the ants not only reproduce human servility 
 in a wonderful way, but that they shame man by teaching 
 him how superfluous his ^ons of slavishness have been. 
 If he had gone to the humble ant to learn he might have 
 been perpetually free though all the sorry ages and never 
 have suffered and smothered beneath their sordid pall. 
 
36 Human Submission. 
 
 One day Darwin's ' attention was struck by about a score 
 of the slave-makers haunting a spot, and evidently not in 
 search of food.' They attacked a community of the slave- 
 species (F. fusca) and were repulsed. Darwin ' then dug up 
 a small parcel of the pupae of F. fusca from another nest, 
 and put them down on a bare spot near the place of com- 
 bat ; they were eagerly seized and carried off by the tyrants.' 
 And now comes the revelation of the saving principles we 
 are seeking : " At the same time I laid on the same place 
 a small parcel of the pupae of another species, F. flava^ 
 with a few of these little yellow ants still clinging to the 
 fragments of their nest. This species is sometimes, though 
 rarely., made into slaves, as has been described by Mr. 
 Smith. Although so small a species., it is very courageous., 
 and I have seen it ferociously attack other ants. In one 
 instance I found to my surprise an independent community 
 of F. flava under a stone beneath a nest of the slave-making 
 F. sanguinea ; and when I had accidently disturbed both 
 nests, the little ants attacked their big neighbors with sur- 
 prising courage. Now I was curious to ascertain whether 
 F. sanguinea could distinguish the pupae of F. fusca, which 
 they habitually made into slaves, from those of the little 
 and furious F. flava, which they rarely capture ; and it was 
 evident that they did at once distinguish them ; for we have 
 seen that they eagerly and instantly seized the pupae of F. 
 fusca, whereas they were much terrified when they came 
 across the pupcB., or even the earth from the nest., of F. flava., 
 and quickly ran away ; but in about a quarter of an hour, 
 shortly after all the little yellow ants had crawled away., 
 they took heart and carried ofi" the pupae." * 
 
 It is the courageous fury of these little beasts against 
 their intending enslavers that saves them. Nothing else 
 
 * Origin of Species, p. 218. 
 
A Slave's One Duty is Freedom. 37 
 
 could have the faintest influence on ruthless might ; but 
 heroic fury, the fiery will not be slaves, protects their free- 
 dom. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 A SLAVE'S ONE DUTY IS TO WIN FREEDOM 
 AT ANY COST. 
 
 And this fury to be free is the highest and first quality, 
 both for animals and man. For there is absolutely no 
 other soil in which true virtues can grow. The virtues 
 that bud in any form of servitude are spurious. Nor is 
 chance and fortunate freedom that priceless soil of virtue, 
 it is the will aud furious courage to preserve freedom at 
 any price and in face of all invasion, which is its sure and 
 only soil. Every virtue grown in servility contains the 
 ingredients of servility. A servile thing is not a man but 
 only the false mimicry of one ; he can do nothing and be 
 nothing as a real man would. He has committed the irre- 
 trievable character fault of suffering himself to be wrenched 
 out of manhood into slavehood, whereafter he conforms no 
 longer to the high free true laws of his soul but moulds 
 his being to his false state and to the compelling will of 
 abasers. 
 
 And slaves are in no sense those alone who are bodily 
 owned, but all those who yield to a condition of things 
 where others deprive them of their own and limit their 
 rightful good. All who permit themselves to accept the 
 servilage of modern times, inherited from original craven 
 submission and the primeval slave-catcher, who like the 
 slave ant support others without an equal return, these are 
 slaves, these may have all the virtues of the Christian, 
 Stoic and Buddhistic calendars, but not a single virtue of 
 them all is real, every one of them has a coarse alloy, is 
 
SS Human Submission. 
 
 mimic and counterfeit. Because a real man cannot be 
 grafted onto the stalk of a slave. His thoughts will be fed 
 by the slave's blood and crossed with the slave's thoughts. 
 And because it was and is unnecessary for him to be a 
 slave. 
 
 The ants taught him that ; little and furious F. flava, 
 who taught their would-be masters so piercing a lesson by 
 the ferocity of their resistance that the tyrants became the 
 cowards and cravens and ran away quivering from even the 
 earth their noble adversaries had walked on. There is no 
 other such tremendous lesson in the animal or human 
 world. This ant is high above man, not only in the 
 splendor and glory of moral bravery but in the majesty of 
 his intelligence, with which mankind has nothing to com- 
 pare. He never ceases to see ; his very constitution abhors 
 the evolving depravity of slavery which man has softly 
 accorded himself to like wax. The accommodation of 
 man to his enslavement after the fact, I shall show to be 
 his highest wrongdoing. 
 
 Doctors of divinity and morals in the ant kingdom you 
 may be sure would be on the slave-maker's side, and would 
 reason to the slave class as follows : ' You are now cap- 
 tured and that alters the moral situation entirely. You had 
 a right before capture to resist to the death, but now you 
 have no more right to resist ; you must conform yourselves 
 to the laws of your master and your slave condition and do 
 your duty in it. " Servants be in subjection to your mas- 
 ters with all fear ; not only to the good and gentle, but 
 also to the froward. For this is acceptable, if for conscience 
 toward God a man endureth griefs, suffering wrongfully." ' 
 This is what the doctors of ant divinity would say. And 
 if the slaves asked who made the laws of our condition, the 
 doctors would reply, God. 
 
A Slave's One Duty is Freedom. 39 
 
 But the god that made these laws we know was the mas- 
 ter's diabolic greed. It was transposed into theology by 
 the ant theologians, and into law by the ant lawyers and 
 legislators, and into philosophy and science by the ant 
 philosophers and scientists, all of them slave-holders or 
 younger sons of slave-holders, or at least paid to think out 
 of their bounty ; and the essence of the divinity, the law, 
 the philosophy and the science was the master's insatiable 
 greed. 
 
 There was no reason why the ant slave should have made 
 a truce with the master's greed after capture. If he cravenly 
 did so that truce was not binding on the slave ant's sons or 
 sons' sons. And we as men with our larger minds can 
 easily see this. Nor could this cowardly truce be binding 
 on the thousandth generation of slave ants. Nor could the 
 status or habit of slavery build up an obligation of any 
 kind on the slave or his descendants. The status and 
 habit of the master keeping them slaves was a perpetual 
 repetition of the first act of enslaving them. There never 
 was in all slave-ant history a time when the slave owed a 
 solitary duty to his master. Not love, not fealty, not faith, 
 not one moral law. But he always owed himself the duty 
 of breaking the yoke and of killing his masters to do it if 
 he had to. For he eternally owed himself freedom, and to 
 teach his masters that slavery could not be. Looking 
 down into the deep abyss of ant inferiority we can perceive 
 at a glance that this is true of the ants. 
 
 What is the difference between ants and men? Why, 
 that it is all infinitely truer of men because of their superior 
 possibility, because of the greatness and sacredness of every 
 individual, his imprescriptible right and duty to be the 
 whole that a man can. And whoever says that a slave can 
 be all that a man can must be the son or the salaried singer 
 of a slave-owner. 
 
40 Human Submission. 
 
 But now suppose a series of benevolent transitions in 
 which the master ants found that they could get more out 
 of their slaves with less care to themselves by some trans- 
 formation of slavery, while still extorting their support from 
 the slave-descendants and still despising them as an inferior 
 creation and holding them in servile dependence. The 
 formic doctors of divinity, science and commerce would 
 now be proving to the modified slaves that they were free 
 and that all the blessings of life were resident in them 
 because they were no longer in the bodily bondage of their 
 progenitors. They would be proving that the modified 
 slaves owed loving submission to present extortion because 
 the masters had found it necessary and profitable to discon- 
 tinue certain brutalities connected with past extortion. 
 The argument runs, If the ant masters cease to whip and 
 to bind their modified slaves to service in a given place, the 
 gratitude of the slave can only show itself properly by his 
 continuance to serve under enduring extortion in some 
 place. Formerly he was whipped or killed and could not 
 choose his place, now he is not whipped and can choose his 
 place, and the doctors of insect divinity and science inform 
 him with scorn that if he isn't willing to support his old mas- 
 ters' children in such blessed freedom as this he does not 
 deserve to live at all. And in truth, with insect shrewd- 
 ness almost comparable to man's, the masters see that he 
 does not live if he will not work out his gratitude on these 
 terms, for he gets no work and starves. 
 
 Such then is ant civilization and it makes human blood 
 boil to think of the injustice. But it especially rufiles our 
 sense of right that the insect doctors of religion and science 
 should trick the slave descendants with such flimsy non- 
 sense as their maudlin arguments, which we blame even a 
 dull ant for imbibing. And we see instantly that the duty 
 
A Slave's One Duty is Freedom. 41 
 
 of the slave-descendant to the master-descendant is the 
 same as that of his captured ancestors — to be fi-ee., to break 
 the transformed yoke. Obligation to work for him on 
 quasi-slave terms he has not ; if the qualified ant-master 
 demands this service he is merely reasserting the original 
 owner's ' right,' installed by murder and force in the primi- 
 tive insect forest. 
 
 And now turning from ants to men to see if there is any- 
 thing to alter the deduction, we recognize that there is not. 
 A person who consents to be servile to another breaks the 
 highest law of the universe within our ken. That law is 
 expansion with the greatest celerity iipon the highest lines of 
 intelligence. A slave's or quasi-slave's expansion is curbed 
 by the iron walls of denial and impossibility which crush 
 him down ; the very best expansion he can make is a dis- 
 tortion and sham. Let a man first give his supreme atten- 
 tion to making himself and all men free, and he will then 
 begin to know the virtues of higher nature. 
 
 The enslaved should have been perpetually irreconcilable. 
 Unceasing war against their enslavers should have been 
 the law of their being. Force and death were the instru- 
 ments of enslavement, as they were always in final analysis 
 the naked sustainers of it. These were the weapons and 
 only weapons for the slaves to have fought back with ; 
 for the duty to get free always continued as stern and abso- 
 lute as the duty not to be taken, and these weapons alone 
 were potent there. It was the slaves' and their posterity's 
 to have established the certitude that slaves could not be 
 kept with safety to the lives of the masters. Would slavery 
 and qualified slavery ever have become fixed human insti- 
 tutions if the slaves had bided their time and destroyed 
 their masters upon the first opportunity of freedom ? Never, 
 and the race would have been a high and free race ages 
 
42 Human Submission. 
 
 gone if they had possessed the courage so to behave. And 
 they would have been treating the masters strictly as the 
 masters had treated them or their forefathers, merely turn- 
 ing the tables, not however to establish slavery, but to 
 abolish slavery and win their inalienable right. 
 
 For this law of action should have descended to the pos- 
 terity of slaves as long as enslavement was tried. For time 
 did not annul the fact that slaves were slaves, stunted and 
 defiled, and time should not have cooled their noble fury 
 to regain their manhood in any later generation, even if it 
 needed the extermination of the entire slave-owning tribe. 
 Extermination was the abiding function of the masters. 
 They exterminated the slave's life if he firmly claimed his 
 valid right to self-possession ; they extirpated his higher 
 faculties unceasingly ; which authorized the slaves to ex- 
 terminate them under any circumstances to reach liberty 
 and wipe out the damning institution. No lapse of time 
 lessened this duty a jot. 
 
 Nor could any relation which grew between man and 
 master, nor any affection, nor any morals, lessen it. Brutus 
 was a friend of Caesar but he killed him as a tyrant, and 
 Swift rightly says this far outranked in greatness all of 
 Caesar's deeds. And what did the affection of the master 
 for the slave amount to if the master would not grant his 
 slave the one condition for becoming a man — freedom? 
 The relation, the affection, the code, were fraudulent. 
 There was just one test of the master's honest good will — 
 did he set the subjugated free, and abrogate the state of 
 repression ? And if not, he was but murdering every day 
 the slave's faculties and reasserting the original assassina- 
 tion of life which founded the enslavement. 
 
 Finally, no scheme of obligations, morals, laws or rela- 
 tions which evolved out of this criminal situation and has 
 
No Human Duties to Masters. 43 
 
 overcast modern times, resting upon and assuming servilage 
 in any form, is binding upon the servile. If they accept 
 these unwarranted bonds of servility and perform their 
 sham 'duties.' they repeat the original crime of slavery 
 against themselves, they drive a nail to preserve the pesti- 
 lent edifice, they exercise the worst of all wrongs against 
 the whole society of men. For they estop that career of 
 universal human freedom in which all men's faculties will 
 have full expansion, which for the first time will justify 
 the existence in the world of human life. The liberation 
 will set masters free too, for so long as there is a slave or a 
 quasi-slave, the master is another kind of slave. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 SI,AVES HAVE NO HUMAN DUTIES TO MASTERS. 
 
 We are seeking principles to explain the sorry mesh of 
 human life and to disenthrall us. Every hoary reverend 
 idea will have to be placed in the category of doubt. We 
 must calmly think of the ancient sanctities and see whether 
 there was any sanctity in them. The idea that human 
 slavery in any form was either good or necessary is untrue. 
 It was an evil in all its workings, without mitigation. 
 There was no moment in its career when its existence was 
 justified. It was the father of the false moral code that 
 the subjugated owes duties to the subjugator, which code 
 stripped of meaningless amenities is that murder and rapine 
 establish moral obligations. Force and death were always 
 the pillars of slavery, and these imparted no moral obliga- 
 tion to the enslaved. It is the primal law that a man has 
 a right to fight force and death by force and death ; nay, 
 unless the world is to be given over to the rule of the beast 
 contingent of mankind he must do so. 
 
44 Human Submission. 
 
 The law above all laws is man's obligation to be free. 
 His right to freedom is inalienable. He could not accept 
 slavery and be moral. He criminally sinned against the 
 highest law when he bowed his neck and yielded to a 
 human yoke : his children down to the last generation of 
 slaves sinned equally in inheriting the yoke. So that his 
 obligation always was to fight his enslaver with force and 
 death. And the reason for this was not an abstract right 
 of freedom, but that none could reach his fulfilment as a 
 slave, and the good of men one and all demanded that 
 each should reach his fulfilment. Here is the far-shining 
 fact, all-penetrating, all-determining. Not that a man had 
 a right to fail of his possibility through cowardly slavery 
 or indolence, but that such an one was an evil-doer, despi- 
 cable, apostatizing from the man estate, renegade to that 
 call in him from the deep somewhere to the best. One 
 hard stony trail alone led up to the bright altitudes of his 
 best — Liberty. Every slave that ever passed his life in 
 slavery was a millstone on the neck of mankind, every 
 villein and serf was the same, every quasi-slave is the 
 same. They were all by their recreant compliances drag- 
 ging the human race in a wrong and depraving course of 
 development. Slaves and serfs and quasi-slaves were all in 
 a team with the masters and quasi-masters carrying man- 
 kind through black regions of corruption away from its 
 glorious goal. 
 
 This is the grand indictment against slaves and quasi- 
 slaves for which there is not one breath of extenuation. 
 ' They would have killed us if we had resisted ? ' You had 
 better have died. You lived and continued to breed cow- 
 ards. If some of you had died you would have lighted up 
 the spirit of revolt in all and swiftly annihilated master- 
 ship. More of you died vilely as it was than need have 
 
No Human Duties to Masters. 45 
 
 died honorably to free you. You died on the battlefield 
 fighting for your masters when not an atom of good from 
 the fighting was to come to you. Why did you not, slaves 
 and serviles or both sides, turn in and fight your masters 
 together ? You died of plagues sown because the conditions 
 of slavery are pestilential. You starved, as now in the 
 twentieth century quasi-slave descendants of yours are 
 starving because you were beguiled. You worked in 
 pointed places for your masters, with grim death at your 
 elbow knocking one by one of you into the grave — and was 
 not this killing you? did you escape death by running 
 away from death ? You entailed it on a thousand genera- 
 tions because you dared not strike your tyrants to the dust 
 and be free. You assisted in the spoiling of all the race of 
 men through these thousand generations by your caitiff 
 subserviency. A master's life was not worth more than one 
 of your's, not as much. One grand upblazing, or an 
 unquenchable guerilla warfare against them, would have 
 terminated slavery as an institution, and saved all those 
 slavery-slain in the thousand generations of its dragging 
 continuance. Your crime was that you left your masters 
 peace by night or day and nursed the evil on through 
 squalid ages, forbidding human progress. 
 
 Slavery lasted because you built in your lives the instinct 
 of cowardice and ever transmitted it stronger. Thousands 
 of years ago the race might have been measurelessly beyond 
 its status of to-day, if you had broken forth for its liberation. 
 Would this have been nothing? It would have been 
 the greatest thing within man's sphere. Every person who 
 has lived his pitiful fragmentary lot in the interval, would 
 have lived as man is expected to live ten thousand years 
 hence. It was your timorous truckling reverence for a 
 master's morality which prevented that ; the masters made 
 and patented a morality to clap upon you. 
 
46 Human Submission. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 mankind's false evolution. 
 
 We are concerned to know the chief ill imparted to man 
 by this institution as it bears upon moderns, and it is the 
 slavish instinct. Slavery as physical possession is dead, but 
 slavery as moral possession was never more alive, and this 
 is possession of the exertions. If you can own a man's ideas 
 far enough to own his efforts his vital substance is yours ^ let 
 him call his body whose he will, even his own. Such is 
 the pass of the slaves' descendants, the modified slaves of 
 the modern world. 
 
 And the thing is done through the slavish instinct, struc- 
 tured into the brain of most of mankind through those 
 ancestral seons of submissiveness. Having taken the wrong 
 road the race departed ever further from its proper goal, and 
 its nature developed a steady divergence from the right 
 nature. A man was evolved who will have to be unevol- 
 ved, torn down, before high progress can be even com- 
 menced. The fabric of this built-up type is shoddied 
 through with the slavish instinct, the slavish conception of 
 things. The majority of men cannot think in terms of 
 freedom any more than a dog can think in poetry or mathe- 
 matics ; it is beyond their present mental conformation. 
 They conceive that man was pre-organized from eternity 
 upon a servile model, so bottomless in them are the springs 
 of servility. Yet that vicious constitution was not in man 
 originally, because men had to learn to be slaves. Their 
 animal ancestors were not slaves, nor were the earliest men, 
 therefore the slavish instinct did not yet exist. Man has 
 the sole shame of having added this infamous instinct to 
 the human stock. 'But this could not have happened 
 unless it was good for the race,' some evolutionists will 
 say ; ' only a beneficial instinct could have survived and 
 
Mankind^s False Evolution. 47 
 
 expanded by natural selection as this has.' Let us see. 
 Hobhouse * alludes to ' the numerous cases ' in which 
 wasps " tolerate, or even feed parasites, which live upon 
 the food which they store up for their own grubs." 
 Is not this identical with the instinctive actions of 
 the whole human servile type, who share the good 
 they create for their children with a parasitic " class 
 which depends on their doing so for its very life? The 
 conservation of a most abnormal and injurious instinct is 
 therefore seen in the lower animal world. " But," contin- 
 ues Hobhouse, " we may quote one even stronger case from 
 among ants, whose power of adaptive modification far 
 exceeds that of any other insect. Every one knows the 
 tender care which ants bestow upon their larvae. Yet 
 they freely tolerate in their nest the lyomechusa beetle, 
 the larva of which eats their cherished young. It is as 
 though we bred and tended cattle which habitually de- 
 voured our children." But does not the servile human 
 type, in dividing its children's food with the parasite class, 
 often robbing its children of needed nourishment in order 
 that the parasites may be filled, feed and tend a species 
 which in result literally consumes its children ? 
 
 Nor, says the writer quoted, are the ants wholly blind 
 and instinctive in what they are doing. For they " not 
 merely tolerate the lyomechusa, but actively tend its larvae, 
 on the same methods by which they nurse their own. 
 Now, it happens the nursing suited to an ant larva is fatal 
 to a lyomechusa larva, and in course of time the ants 
 appear to find this out and modify their whole system of 
 nursing " so as to preserve the hostile larvae. It need not 
 be observed that our human servile type likewise nurses 
 and rears the offspring of its parasites, who, when they are 
 
 *I<. T. Hobhouse, Mind in Evolution, p. 74. 
 
48 Human Submission. 
 
 grown, will feed upon its children as it is itself being fed 
 upon by the mature parasites. The human method of 
 nursing and rearing does not have to be modified for this 
 end, for parasite and servile tender are of the same stock. 
 This purely scientific comparison gives man the best pos- 
 sible clue to his nature. A harmful and debasing instinct 
 may gain lodgment, it may survive and ramify, expanding 
 its defilement to almost any limit short of destroying the 
 race. It may presumptively pass that limit, when the 
 species dies on account of it and the instinct in that living 
 vehicle becomes extinct. This is the cause of the decline 
 and extinction of peoples as will be shown in the sequel. 
 
 At present we must take further testimony from the 
 animal world on the stability of useless and hurtful in- 
 stincts and forms. A specimen of the useless formation is 
 the soldier caste in ants, described by Morgan.* "In the 
 true ants there are, besides the workers and the queen and 
 the males, the soldier caste. These have large thick heads 
 and large strong jaws. On the Darwinian theory it is 
 assumed that this caste must have an important role to 
 play, for otherwise their presence as a distinct group of 
 forms cannot be accounted for ; but I do not believe it is 
 necessary to find an excuse for their existence in their sup- 
 posed utility. From the point of view of the mutation 
 theory, their real value may be very small, but so long as 
 their actual presence is not entirely fatal to the community 
 they may be endured. 
 
 " In regard to these forms. Sharp writes : ' The soldiers 
 are not alike in any two species of Termitidse, so far as 
 we know, and it seems impossible to ascribe the differences 
 that exist between the soldiers of different species of Ter- 
 mitidse to special adaptations for the work they have to 
 
 * Evolution and Adaptation, p. 350. 
 
Mankind's False Evolution. 49 
 
 perform.'* 'On the whole, it would be more correct to 
 say that the soldiers are very dissimilar in spite of their 
 having to perform similar work, than to state that they are 
 dissimilar in conformity with the different tasks they carry 
 on.' The soldiers have the same instincts as the workers, 
 and do the same kinds of things to a certain extent. ' The 
 soldiers are not such effective combatants as the workers 
 are.'' Statements such as these indicate very strongly that 
 the origin of this caste can have very little to do with its 
 importance as a specialized part of the community.'''' 
 
 It is apparent that this martial caste is a positive drain 
 on the society, for the workers are better fighters, and the 
 soldiers if workers would therefore not only be stronger 
 protectors but would be productive also. On the whole 
 then this caste must be accepted as a vicious formation 
 produced and harbored by nature in the family of ants to 
 its detriment. 
 
 An instinct indubitably pernicious to its bearers is noted 
 by the same author, in the behavior of some animals to a 
 to a distressed mate.f " ' Herbivorous animals at such 
 times will trample and gore the distressed one to death. 
 In the case of wolves and other savage-tempered carnivor- 
 ous species the distressed fellow is frequently torn to 
 pieces and devoured on the spot.' " — (Hudson.) Of the 
 herbivora " Hudson points out that it is not so much the 
 weak and sickly members of the herd that are attacked in 
 this way, as those that are injured, and concludes, ' the in- 
 stinct is not only useless but actually detrimental ' . . . . 
 ' In turning against a distressed fellow they oppose them- 
 selves to the law of being.' For they do not, like the 
 wolves, eat their injured companion, deriving sustenance, 
 
 * The Cambridge Natural History, Vol. v. 1895. Quoted by Morgan, 
 t Morgan, 411, 412. 
 
so Human Submission. 
 
 but aimlessly destroy one who might live, — a species of 
 self-destruction. 
 
 It is established then that a pernicious instinct may gain 
 a foothold and maintain itself in the animal world. That 
 baneful instincts may live and thrive and grow in man, 
 sending their filaments through every tissue of his life, 
 without destroying the race, is a sound inference from this 
 fact. Independently of such support we know, however, 
 that man is saturated with a series of proclivities which 
 cause him every degree of harm short of race annihilation. 
 It is not the place to examine these individually, our pres- 
 ent interest being in the central catastrophe of submission 
 and its product the slavish instinct. That man went rad- 
 ically wrong very early, and has ever since evolved upon a 
 wrong track, is nothing new in nature, having as showrt 
 strict precedent in the animal world. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 MODERN QUASI-SIvAVERY IS ANCIENT SLAVERY DISGUISED. 
 
 In what ways does this servile structure of man display 
 and prove itself ? We can trace servility and its conse- 
 quences through every important human relation. It shows 
 itself conspicuously in the organized working classes of 
 England and America. Prior to the extension of the Brit- 
 ish franchise in 1884 it was confidently expected that ' the 
 working class would vote together as a class in working 
 class interest,' but Mr. Spender, writing recently on that 
 subject, * points out ' that the working classes have never 
 voted as a mass and are to-day farther from doing so than 
 ■ever. The enfranchised workingman shows a marked 
 
 * In the Fortnightly Review, Sept. '04. 
 
QuasirSlavery is Chattel Slavery Disguised. 51 
 
 preference for propertied representatives? " Direct repre- 
 sentatives of labor are still but a handful, and the difficulty 
 of increasing their number is, in the main, a difficulty of 
 inducing the working-class to accept them and support 
 them." Among the working classes, he says, the diversi- 
 ties of temperament, the indifferences, the preoccupation 
 with bread-getting and saving, the amusements, the social 
 distinctions, the deference paid to power and wealth, are 
 substantially the same as among the classes. " The social 
 distinctions of the East End are even more intricate and 
 complicated than those of the West End, and have the 
 same reactions upon private opinion." Under no conceiv- 
 able circumstances could this state be predicated of free 
 minds ; it is the fruit of the English workingmen's slave 
 instincts and the light and feeble characters cultured by 
 these instincts. Trifling matters of any sort, and prepos- 
 terous social distinctions among themselves, suggestive for 
 example of a social hierarchy on an emigrant ship or in a 
 poorhouse (which no doubt maintains) divert them from the 
 problem of their freedom and emancipation from the para- 
 site class. Yet they are goaded to action by every possible 
 sting. Wallace f reminds us that in London " a woman, 
 trouser-making, can earn one shilling (25 cents) a day if 
 she works seventeen hours at it ; " that " a woman with a 
 sick husband and a little child to look after, works at shirt- 
 finishing, at %d a dozen, and can earn barely Qd. (12 cents) 
 a day ; " that " another maintains herself and a blind hus- 
 band by making match boxes at 2^ ^. (4^ cents) a gross, 
 and has to pay a girl \d. a gross to help her." " Here is a 
 mother who has pawned her four children's clothes, not for 
 drink, but for coals and food. She obtained only one shil- , 
 ling (25 cents,) and bought seven pounds of coals and a loaf 
 
 t Alfred Russell Wallace : The Wonderful Century, 351-1. 
 
52 Human Submission. 
 
 of bread ! . . . And the fifteen years that have passed, not- 
 withstanding the ' Royal Commission,' leaves it all just as 
 bad as before." Wallace wrote this in '98, so it is up to 
 date. He quotes Arthur Sherwell, who has found that in 
 the Ivondon district north of Soho ' more than 100,000 per- 
 sons are living below " the margin of poverty." ' Probably 
 even these people are keenly attentive to their social dis- 
 tinctions. 
 
 Surely this condition of life in the working class would 
 be a maddening incentive to action in any beings whose 
 minds were not dungeoned in a slave's instinct. The 
 English working classes endure it placidly, at least so 
 placidly that having the ballot and being a large majority 
 of the electorate, 'they are farther from the massed vote of 
 the masses than ever ; ' ' they strongly prefer propertied 
 representatives? It would require a very constructive intel- 
 lect to call their condition quasi-^isM^r^ instead of absolute 
 slavery, and yet they cling to it voluntarily when the use 
 of a strip of paper would end it ! 
 
 How do intelligent Englishmen view this thing ? Listen 
 to Huxley's view of it. Writing in '88 * with all the force 
 and eloquent indignation of an irresponsible agitator, he 
 said that la mis^re is a large and increasing fact in all the 
 great centres of industry. " It is a condition," said he, " in 
 which food, warmth, and clothing, which are necessary for 
 the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their 
 normal state, cannot be obtained ; in which men, women 
 and children are forced to crowd into dens where decency 
 is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of healthful 
 existence are impossible of attainment ; in which the pleas- 
 ures within reach are reduced to brutality and drunkenness ; 
 in which the pains accummulate at compound interest in 
 
 * Nineteenth Century, February i888. 
 
Quas>Slavery is Chattel Slavery Disguised. 53 
 
 the shape of starvation^ diseases^ stunted development., and 
 moral degradation : in which t/ze prospect of even steady 
 and honest industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with 
 hunger., rounded by a pauper' s grave. . . I take it to be a 
 mere plain truth that throughout industrial Europe there 
 is not a single manufacturing city which is free from a large 
 mass of people whose condition is exactly that described, 
 and from a still greater mass who, living just on the edge 
 of the social swamp, are liable to be precipitated into it." 
 
 Without fear of contradiction I advance the law that 
 The evolution from positive to quasi slavery has been a pro- 
 gressive evolution of brutality. The evolved form of cruelty 
 has changed, its essence has become sharper and more de- 
 structive. We have a high class, the spendthrift class, 
 which consciously imposes these conditions on its support- 
 ers ; it wills these conditions ; a life on earth (strictly adher- 
 ing to Huxley's description), hardly better than the wretch- 
 edness of hell ; and this is the requital it bestows upon its 
 qualified slaves for feeding, clothing, housing and garnish- 
 ing it in an order of luxury which makes the splendors of 
 the ancient world vulgar and cheap. At no time in the 
 earth's history was brutality more refined, unerring, inten- 
 tional, and universal. It is now gloved brutality, gloved 
 in religion, political necessity, and law ; and these gloves 
 like the rubber ones of surgeons in operations protect the 
 social operators and render them immune. If they openly 
 inflicted the horrors upon mankind which they do inflict 
 behind the skilful shield of religion and law, even man- 
 kind as it is, besotted by the instinct of submission, would 
 rise and destroy the machinery of infliction. The specific 
 achievement of the evolution from slavery to quasi-slavery 
 is the perfection of these safety gloves for the quasi-mas- 
 ters. Proceeding through an intricate apparatus of secular 
 
54 Human Submission. 
 
 laws and theologico-moral justifications, all of them con- 
 structed to safeguard the master in his work of vivisecting 
 his human brothers, brutality is more universal, more abso- 
 lute, more deadly than it ever was before. Resentment 
 and revolution are quelled in the people by extinguishing 
 their sight and destroying their scent by the distinctive 
 agencies of quasi-slavery ; the modern slave is made to 
 imagine that he is free ; but it is solely the strength of 
 the slave instinct in him which enable these threadbare 
 agencies to work. 
 
 Following the British working classes another step, they 
 have incentive of another kind than class starvation and 
 stunted bodies and souls to move them. Superfluous Eng- 
 lish riches flare before their eyes, riches of their own crea- 
 tion. The increased profits of the City of London, from 
 1880 to 1890 were $153,776,415.* "There are sitting in 
 the House of Lords," says Wallace, " sixty peers who hold 
 possession of land producing a rental of over ;^50,000 
 ($250,000) a year each. The sum total of these sixty 
 rentals is ;^5,405,900," over twenty-seven million dollars. 
 This sum is taken by sixty men, and it is taken out of the 
 well-being of England. Ultimately the producers pay it, 
 those whose bodies are starved and whose brains and souls 
 are stunted and who are in luck if they do not fill a 
 pauper's grave. 
 
 I am conducting a scientific inquiry, and the purpose of 
 this citation is, with its help to measure and weigh more 
 accurately the bulk of the surviving slavish instinct in 
 British workingmen's brains ; for I consider this and the 
 bulk of the same instinct in still other classes, the most 
 impressive question of modern civilization. This slavish 
 instinct is the secret of human society, institutions, and 
 
 * The City Press, quoted by Wallace. 
 
Quasi-Slavery is Chattel Slavery Disguised. 55 
 
 character as they are. If its strength and processes are 
 analyzed science may for the first time be able to propound 
 intelligent methods for the succor of humanity. 
 
 A mathematical formula cannot yet be given for the 
 strength of the slavish instinct in the British working 
 classes, but a relative formula can. It is stronger than 
 self-respect in the British workingman, stronger than family 
 attraction, than love of parents, love of wife, or love of 
 children. These are the objects personally dearest to the 
 normal animal ; he will fight for them while he has a drop 
 of blood, even weak and shrinking creatures becoming ter- 
 rible when their young are assailed. But the British work- 
 ingman has inverted the instinct. He is abject when his 
 wife and children are attacked by his " superiors," he does 
 nothing to defend them ; but he will fight savagely for 
 these superiors and their children^ just as an animal will 
 ^ght fi?r its own offspring. Thus he has turned nature 
 awry and become a species of monster. If some working- 
 men in the throes of despair act naturally and defend their 
 own children against the inroads of superiors, other work- 
 ingmen, whose children are likewise on the edge of the pit 
 of starvation, attack and destroy them. They suppress the 
 levolters to deprive their own children of the chance of 
 escaping this cruel-jawed pit. 
 
 It therefore appears that the entire British working class 
 are perverts, for they act in defiance of certain of nature's 
 most fundamental instincts and the highest laws of self- 
 preservation. It is a curious thing that ants trained to 
 slavery will behave with the same perversion, fighting 
 with their masters against their own tribe and blood. The 
 workingman is in the grip of a still deeper instinct which 
 holds him like iron, not only stopping the machinery of his 
 intelligence but inhibiting if not consuming his natural 
 human emotions. 
 
56 Human Submission. 
 
 Astounding as this phenomenon is it is partially explic- 
 able. The period of absolute slavery was many ages long, 
 and during that time the slave's emotions and his family 
 were entirely subordinate to the master's will. He was 
 separated and sold away from his wife and children when 
 it pleased the master, and his women were subject to the 
 master's passions ; and scores of centuries of these de- 
 humanizing abuses destroyed the primacy of his affection 
 for his own flesh and blood and substituted a cringing 
 terror of attachment for his owner in its place — a psychic 
 condition like that of the dog toward its owner, who has 
 learned to suffer the extinction of its progeny and loyally 
 lick the agent hand. 
 
 Another phase of wbrking-class perversion is the unhin- 
 dered appropriation of their daughters to minister to the 
 passions of their "superiors." Workingmen witness this 
 quietly, quite without a cry, it is so much a part of the 
 fixed, religious order of their state. An upper-class Brit- 
 isher could no more get along without his brothel, filled 
 from the daughters of his supporting workers, than he 
 could do without his chapel. Each ministers to a necessary 
 class of his emotions ; and the religion he hears in the latter 
 teaches those at the dreg end of the social line the sacred 
 beauty of humble gladness in the station to which God 
 has called them. 
 
 The repose of the working class under the upas shadow 
 of this bestial function of their girls, surprises only those 
 who do not reflect that this has been always one of the 
 foremost uses of the women of slaves, so that contentment 
 with the system is nearly equal in strength to the larger 
 instinct of which it is a branch. The process is conducted 
 so naturally that it cannot be opposed without impugning 
 Providence as revealed in the laws and economies of mod- 
 
Quasi-Slavery is Chattel Slavery Disguised. 57 
 
 ern society. Virtue will yield at a certain pressure of 
 starvation ; the higher class applies the pressure to the 
 lower until the virtue of enough of its daughters relaxes to 
 equal the supply to the demand. Since this is a purely 
 economic process no one is to blame for it anywhere, ex- 
 cept the girls. The moralist flings them the consolation 
 that their error was in not dying, but this is merely a 
 formal tribute to virtue, for no moralist expects them to 
 die and thus ruthlessly limit the order sent down by the 
 higher society for their bodies. The working-class as a 
 whole impassively accepts the duty of contributing its 
 female flesh and soul to sate the passions of the caste which 
 owns it. 
 
 If we turn to the British middle class the scars of their 
 servitude are no less indelible. Their servility of character 
 is one of the notable phenomena of Europe. They observe 
 the state of the working-class for the most part without 
 concern ; the condition of the majority of themselves is 
 precarious and sordid ; others of them are masters whom I 
 have described, causers of that terrible working-class 
 wretchedness, bordering, as Huxlej'^ said, the swamp of 
 starvation ; and all who are not masters and causers of this 
 indescribable miskre, aspire to be such with a burning 
 agony. It is a frequent manifestation of the corrupt and 
 truly slavish temper that its owner has no conception of 
 happiness apart from rising to the oppression of others as he 
 is being oppressed. With a pitifully few bright exceptions 
 the supreme ideal of these middle class people is to force 
 their way into the group of quasi-owners of the working 
 class, to become also their tyrants and destroyers. They 
 are profoundly ashamed to be middle class, and rightly so, 
 for it is a position of universal contempt, a more invidious 
 rank than the working man's who is somewhat respected 
 
58 Human Submission. 
 
 because on rare and phenomenal occasions he riots. The 
 British middle half-and-half class never riots, the slavish 
 instinct works in them the peaceable fruits of groveling 
 imitation of the higher caste which cordially and bound- 
 lessly despises them and knows of their presence in Eng- 
 land only as supplementers of the working mass in supply- 
 ing their support. This despicable class is without a 
 country and without a mission in the world. It sees, or 
 shoxild see, how unsound and foul the state of human life 
 is ; it suffers shamelessly itself from that state ; it is com- 
 petent to change it ; but with its main force it keeps that 
 state just as it is. It is in build and character a repetition 
 of the working class. 
 
 And why ? Because the masonry of the slavish instinct 
 of its ancestors who were likewise slaves fills and dominates 
 its mind. Submission is its main capacity ; it answers 
 blindly to the mandatory cowardice in its forefathers' lives, 
 who were the dregs of almost geologic ages and whose chil- 
 dren are among the dregs of this. The inherited baseness 
 of this class is its devotion to the system of quasi-slavery 
 from its greedy desire to become the quasi-master ; and no 
 mire is too noisome for it to inhabit for this end. And 
 what are its chances? Wallace states that in England 
 " the annual produce of labor from which the whole expen- ■ 
 diture of the people necessarily comes, is estimated at 1,350 
 millions sterling (6,750 million dollars); and this amount is 
 so unequally divided that one million persons among the 
 wealthy receive more than twice as much income as the 
 twenty-six million constituting the manual labor class." * 
 Subtracting those of the British middlings who figure in 
 this owning million persons, what is the reward of the rest 
 for their obedience to the servile deposit from antiquity in 
 
 * The Wonderful Century, 343. 
 
Quasi-Slavery is Chattel Slavery Disguised. 59 
 
 their nature ? Insult galling if suave from above, and a 
 hard, cramping, deadening life for the most of them. 
 
 The law of the middle class is that it will endure equal 
 outrage and worse contempt than the working class. It is 
 more servile, for whereas a fraction of the working class 
 combine, the middle class is lacking in this courage. An 
 average member of this class is even lower economically 
 than an average mechanic because to hold his caste and 
 position he is forced to spend more for dress and appear- 
 ance than the mechanic. He submits to all this without 
 complaint because his dearly-purchased genteel clothes con- 
 fer a resemblance to his envied superiors. The great 
 majority of this docile branch of English society are mer- 
 cilessly bled by the wealthy. 
 
 Our study is how much the slavery crystallized in their 
 natures will cause them to bear, how base they will con- 
 sent to be. We find that with the bulk of them resident 
 close upon the abyss of pauperism and starvation, and all 
 of them wheedled non-entities in their own land, despised 
 by its aristocrats (their supported wards), they simply 
 stand pat and suffer. Everyone knows that the British 
 trading class is not considered fit for association with a 
 'gentleman'; Ruskin bitterly bemoaned it, saying, "I 
 believe one of the worst symptoms of modern society to be, 
 its notion of great inferiority, and ungentlemanliness, as 
 necessarily belonging to the character of a tradesman ; " 
 but the tradesman has a tough-skinned mind, he doesn't 
 resent, he gulps the indignity respectfully as his national 
 portion. At one time he got a great deal worse (he thinks), 
 kicks and cufEs, stripes and sword-thrusts, which he still 
 has an organic memory of, and mere contempt he gratefully 
 can't feel. 
 But it is not so well known that truckling to the puerile 
 
60 Human Submission. 
 
 rank and riches of empty social superiors is a characteristic 
 of the highest British intellects, the men of science. Yet 
 Galton avers of English scientific societies that ' as Britons 
 are not unfrequently servile to rank, some of these societies 
 seek a purely ornamental patron,' some mere titled person.* 
 The same spirit of servility pervades scientific men in some 
 of the colonies. The Rumford medal of the Royal Society 
 of Great Britian was recently conferred upon a member of 
 -the McGill University (Montreal) faculty for notable scien- 
 tific achievement, and a banquet was given in his honor by 
 the University at the Windsor hotel. Principal Peterson, 
 as toastmaster, proposed " The King," " The Queen and 
 Royal Family," and " His Excellency the Governor- 
 General." In his remarks the Principal said 'that he 
 wanted to remind all present that the future King of Eng- 
 land was a graduate of McGill, and that at the last con- 
 vocation of London University, at which Dr. Peterson was 
 present, he found that the Princess of Wales wore the cap 
 presented to her by McGill when she visited that institu- 
 tution as Duchess of York two or three years ago.' The 
 instinct descending from the forerathers of Professor Peter- 
 son, who were slaves and villeins, prevented him from see- 
 ing how such puerile allusions in men of otherwise com- 
 petent brains bear up the British strain of canting servility 
 from generation to generation. 
 
 Canada pays its titled Governor-General $50,000 a year, 
 and its working head, the Premier, $8,000. The former 
 dwells in a state-furnished palace at Ottawa and his salary 
 is remuneration for his social services. He imports the 
 air of snobbery, rank and aristocracy from the mother 
 country, the air of the master class, which always carries 
 with it the counter fact of popular servility ; and in her 
 
 * Natural Inheritance, p. 23. 
 
Quasi^Slavery is Chattel Slavery Disguised. 61 
 
 titled governor-general Canada purchases from Europe a 
 bracing consignment of its mother's caste. In the current 
 Cornhill Magazine a writer observes, " The European at- 
 mosphere distinguishes Ottawa from other Canadian cities 
 in a certain feeling of caste not distinguishable elsewhere, 
 except in military circles in Quebec and Halifax. The 
 Ottawa girl, however poor, may be her own maid of all 
 work at home but must not seek employment in a shop or 
 office if wishing to hold her own amongst those partaking 
 in the hospitalities of Rideau Hall." 
 
 Those who usefully work and whose efforts contribute 
 to support the governor-general's ornamental society func- 
 tions are not admitted to them, making the tradesman and 
 shop-girl from England feel quite at home in the new 
 world. 
 
 Early in the Eighteenth century Montesquieu spent two 
 years in England and gave his estimate of the people. 
 " An ordinary Englishman must have a good dinner, a 
 woman, and comfort. So long as he has the means of get- 
 ting these, he is contented ; if these means fail him, he 
 either commits suicide or turns thief. All classes are cor- 
 rupt. Honour and virtue are held in small esteem. There 
 is no religion in England. If one speaks of religion, every 
 one laughs." These are the proximate ancestors of Eng- 
 lishmen and Americans of the present day. A great deal 
 that is blind becomes clear by studying ancestry. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE INHERITED SI^AVISHNESS OF AMERICANS. 
 
 All this tremendous bent to slavishness the American 
 inherits from British ancestors, but it should seem that for 
 all this deeply grained instinct, the inward swell of free- 
 
62 Human Submission. 
 
 dom would be something vital and irresistible in him. 
 And yet if we expect this we are totally deceived. There 
 is no process in the whole world, no scientific discovery, no 
 conquest, no commercial, industrial, or political event, of 
 such portentous significance to the world's life as the action 
 of the American people in surrendering their property and 
 freedom to the Rich. They are but obeying the universal 
 law of popular servility it is true, they are but reacting to 
 that stern slave instinct carved in their fibre by ten thous- 
 and slave generations, to whose iron mandates they bend 
 as unconsciously as the brute does to its good or evil orders 
 from Nature, and yet this dissolution of American hopes 
 and extinction of its promise, is not without the greatest 
 pathos of all the catastrophes of mankind. 
 
 The difference between America and England is this : 
 the people of America have had the greatest freedom and 
 opportunity on a large scale that any civilized country ever 
 knew, whereas the common people of the United Kingdom 
 never had liberty, they never won it, and never tried to 
 win it ; as preceding facts have shown. The American 
 renunciation of liberty is therefore the abandonment of a 
 unique supreme position, a social Gibraltar, which has 
 been the envy and wonder of mankind. It is an evacua- 
 tion and retreat, it is the self-restoration of a people to 
 quasi-slavery after through a lucky dozing of the gods they 
 had escaped it, a rehabilitation and triumph of that indom- 
 itable will to be slaves which has cursed man as a sover- 
 eign instinct through immeasurable spans of time. Am I 
 exaggerating ? are Americans still free ? are they holding 
 fast that which they had ? I think only our new master 
 class will say that we are still free, with their tongues in 
 their cheeks and their hands on our throats, and they cer- 
 tainly are holding fast to that which we had. I will show 
 
Inherited Slavishness of Americans. 63 
 
 how like the eternally subjugated servile English our 
 classes are. 
 
 We, too, have trade unions, and our laboring class is a 
 preponderant part of the people ; it could save itself from 
 the mire of poverty in which it creeps and it could stem 
 the tide of ebbing liberties and give the dying body of our 
 freedom invulnerable life. But like its confreres abroad to 
 do this skilfully and with saving speed, it would have to 
 act in politics as a unit ; and here is its everlasting shame 
 and reproach. It will not, and some of its guides and in- 
 terpreters tell us it can not, while still others say it should 
 not. This is because it is a class of quasi-slaves, generated 
 by quasi-slaves. For what logic, or manhood, or intelli- 
 gence can there be in the following behavior : to elect 
 their propertied masters to office and then send up com- 
 mittees beseeching these masters for a little labor legisla- 
 tion, when they might have elected their own men to make 
 the laws they want ? Only minds strangled by a great 
 superstition or relentless instinct could perpetuate this 
 pitiful puerility if anything were at stake, and now every- 
 thing is at stake. The workingman of not many years ago 
 thought he was as good as his neighbor, but he is now the 
 unregarded atom of a toiling caste which drags its train of 
 misery across the sphere. He is now the humble social 
 dog or ass. He threw away what he had, because in the 
 slavery of his soul he prefers capitalists to make his laws 
 for him. 
 
 Eleven years ago the American Federation of Labor 
 became the scene of struggle for united labor action in 
 politics. After ten years of agitation, ten years of Trust 
 growth and spoliation of all American classes, ten years of 
 expansion of the liberty-throttling party machines for 
 which the working men voted in truckling nerveless 
 
64 Human Submission. 
 
 herds, the Labor Federation meeting in Boston in 190S 
 rejected united political action for labor by 299 delegates 
 representing 1,128,200 members, against 65 delegates stand- 
 ing for 214,700 members * — nearly five against one. They 
 decided annually to put their employers in ofi&ce and to go 
 on their knees meanly begging favors in the legislative 
 anterooms, of these employers, only to be scornfully refused. 
 
 The Federation Constitution says : " Party politics, 
 whether they be Democratic, Republican, Socialistic, Popu- 
 listic, Prohibition, or any other, shall have no place in the 
 conventions of the American Federation of Labor," And 
 Mr. Macarthur speaks for the Federation majority, the five to 
 one, when he pleads that it is the undeniable policy of wisdom 
 ' to exclude from the affairs of trade unionism all matters 
 upon which men are more inclined to divide than to unite,' 
 This is but proclaiming that American workingmen choose 
 to exist as a captive under-caste, that their loyalty to them- 
 selves, to their children, and to the human race is weak and 
 flabby compared with their will to support the hard caste 
 above, which is their constant undoing. 
 
 And this labor writer continues impressively, " The fun- 
 damental error upon which political action is based consists 
 in crediting government with the power to solve the prob- 
 lems that now affect the relations between employer and 
 
 employee The solemn lesson of history, to-day and 
 
 every day of our lives, is that the workers must depend 
 upon themselves for the improvement of the conditions of 
 labor. Their power inheres in labor, not in the ballot ; it 
 is the power to produce, and, in the last analysis, the power 
 to stop production. To conserve and concentrate that 
 power is the first and last duty of trade-unionism, , . , You 
 
 *W. Macarthur, in "The Annals of the American Academy of Politi- 
 cal etc., Science." Sept. '04. 
 
Inherited Slavishness of Americans. 65 
 
 cannot solve the labor problem by the ballot, nor by the 
 bullet." 
 
 Why now does a sincere friend of labor counsel this weak 
 recession from the front fighting line, this bald surrender 
 and desertion of the heavy guns? He sees that the 
 employing caste uses politics as an industrial torpedo to 
 frustrate labor and exploit the nation. The political bu- 
 reaux of the Trusts are one of their foremost departments ; 
 politics with the trusts is a branch of industry., is one of 
 their hugely fruitful engines of ' production ; ' the Rich 
 own politics, and use it not nobly, patriotically, humanly, 
 honestly, but evilly and abominably, to give a lawful aspect 
 to their mad greed to confiscate all that the people have. 
 Now the labor leader says. We must not interfere with them 
 in this, their especial greed-field, yor^(?/«Vzcj is not business I 
 To labor and to strike and to beg crumbs of the million- 
 aires and their secretaries whom we elect to Congress are 
 our functions. That is, to fawn upon and flunkey to law- 
 makers elected by themselves instead of commanding them., 
 is their ignoble function. 
 
 Who can wonder that the sorry American working caste 
 is despised when it offers this imbecility in anxious excul- 
 pation of its cowardice ? It does use politics, but instead of 
 for its life for its suicide. It elects the millionaires and their 
 political heelers, and empowers these to make the laws of 
 labor, industry, and commerce and undo its strikes. If it is 
 not going into politics the labor class should renounce its 
 vote and stay at home election days. That would be 
 honest to its pretence. It would then leave to its superiors 
 the act of electing its masters and enemies to the ofiice of 
 its executioner, whereas with insane vacant huzzas it now 
 hustles to the polls and fights frenziedly, laborer against 
 laborer, to elect its own industrial slayers. Either politic 
 
66 Human Submission. 
 
 cal batch of executioners will execute it, with only the 
 •difEerence that the party of the executing part will be called 
 Republican or Democratic according to the fortunes of this 
 mock and wheedling war. But, so firm in the working 
 man's constitution is caste, that it is a terribly vital matter 
 to him whether he is executed Republicanly or Democratic- 
 ally. 
 
 He goes to the ballot in two herds, thereby nullifying 
 ■himself, and places the Rich invariably in power : and 
 these rich statesmen and their understudies the senators 
 etcetera then appoint the high judges, also capitalist under- 
 studies, to pass on the laws in labor disputes. And this 
 also to opiated organized labor has nothing to do with 
 .trade-unionism, being in quite another field, pure politics. 
 But it gets around to pure labor before very long and in a 
 manner which makes labor's bones crack. At the last con- 
 vention of organized labor in San Francisco (1904) its 
 president declared : " The open-shop cant and hypocrisy 
 aim at organized labor with the full knowledge that it, and 
 it alone, stands between the toilers with those dependent 
 upon them and the greed and avarice that would force 
 down the conditions of labor to a bare subsistence, lengthen 
 the hours of daily toil, and make the home wretched and 
 desolate.'''' 
 
 These are very strong words and are undoubtedly fully 
 believed by their author and the 2,000,000 organized 
 laborers. But all these men at the base of their hearts 
 love the capitalist and worship his power more than they 
 hate the desolation of their homes. For they elect rich 
 men's judges (or the rich men who appoint them) who rule 
 as the Appellate Court of Brooklyn has just done, that the 
 closed shop is illegal, being contrary to public policy. 
 .L^abor in the last analysis instals these capitalist judges, 
 
Inherited Slavishness of Americans. 67 
 
 directly electing them or their political creators, by its 
 policy of ' keeping politics and labor apart.' So that when 
 organized labor announces its opposition to the desolate 
 home we seem to see demonstrated one of two things : 
 either that American organized labor is organized stupidity, 
 or that its out-speakings about the desolate home are idle 
 ' cant' 
 
 But we are not tracing out this dense imperviousness of 
 American labor merely to expose it, but for the much more 
 serious purpose of revealing its cause. The American 
 laborer is the immediate descendant of slaves and quasi- 
 slaves and the entire architecture of his mind is impera- 
 tively slavish ; he does not love a desolate home for its own 
 sake, but it is his option because his mind is of hereditary 
 enslaving clay. He has to elect the desolate home in obe- 
 dience to the slavish set of his mentality. There is poli- 
 tics, a weapon which would surely deliver him from the 
 desolate home and all black menace of it, but eight hun- 
 dred years of quasi-slavery in his begetters, and perhaps 
 eight hundred thousand years of previous positive slavery, 
 compel him to shun that saving instrument like a whip of 
 fire. The American laboring class is a mixup from civil- 
 ized European countries where all men who are produc- 
 tively useful are ipso facto pitiable wretches without the 
 substance of free intellect in them. They are submitters 
 by divine right. Now a few years or a century or two are 
 not going to obliterate that primordially upbuilded slavish 
 constitution, and that is the reason our toiling population 
 prefer to continue servile and base and be-robbed. 
 
68 Human Submission. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 BLOSSOMS OF SERVILITY — AMERICAN REPOSE UNDER 
 ROBBERY. 
 
 So it is with our middle class, with identical cause. If, 
 now that everything American is merged in financial greed, 
 there can be said to have been an American Idea, it was 
 the repudiation of social classes from our system of life. 
 Yet social classes now reign full-blown and the middle 
 class has accepted a menial lower place. It waits upon 
 the footsteps of the rich and serves its whims ; it pays the 
 tolls and tributes ordered by the rich unresistingly ; it has 
 submissively stepped down to its lowly place and is culti- 
 vating the suitable thoughts and feeling of servile 
 inferiority. 
 
 And the reason ? Having lost its wealth to the rich it 
 now accords every species of mastership to the rich — indus- 
 trial, political, social, intellectual. In a war conducted 
 without conscience or honor by the commercial tyrants, 
 the people were shorn of their property and social status, 
 and the routed people now accede to their conquerors the 
 right to be their social, political and financial lords. This , 
 never could have been if the middle class of the country 
 had ever possessed free minds. They once entertained a 
 few ill-digested fancies about freedom, but the deeper com- 
 position of their instincts and intellects was even then as 
 servile as the worshipful mental medley of the British 
 shopkeeper. This alone will explain why they allowed a 
 handful of commercial adventurers and buccaneers to 
 throttle, gag and bind them and to walk off masters of 
 America and its wealth. The narrative of this highway 
 assault may be given in many ways, but I think a view of 
 the bony framework of the Trusts, which these buccaneers 
 have built up out of the people's wealth, presents most 
 
American Repose Under Robbery. 69 
 
 accurately and vividly and lividly America's degradation. 
 This outline is condensed from Moody's resumd of Trusts,* 
 and Mr. Moody is a devout champion of their ways. 
 
 There are (1) Industrial Trusts, (2) Franchise Trusts, 
 and (3) Railroad Trusts. Their number (mentioning only 
 the important ones) is in all 445, distributed as follows : 
 Leading Industrial Trusts . . . .318 
 " Franchise " .... Ill 
 
 " Railroad " .... 16 
 
 Total "445 
 
 /. — Industrial Trusts. 
 
 Of the 318 Industrial Trusts 7 are altogether greatest. 
 They are the Copper, Smelting, Sugar, Tobacco, Merchant 
 Marine, Standard Oil, and Steel. They have absorbed or 
 control 1,528 formerly independent plants ; their total 
 capitalization is ;g2,662,752,100. 
 
 But 298 lesser industrial trusts have acquired or control 
 numerically more plants, viz., a total of 3,426 ; and their 
 total capitalization is $4,055,039,433. 
 
 And besides these there are 13 important industrial trusts 
 in process of reorganization, representing 334 acquired or 
 controlled plants, and a capital of $528,551,000. 
 
 The total number of industrial plants engulfed by these 
 318 Industrial Trusts is therefore 5,288 ; 
 
 Their total capitalization .... $7,246,342,553. 
 //. — Franchise Trusts. 
 
 The 111 leading Franchise Trusts are composed of two 
 groups : (1) the important Telephone and Telegraph 
 Trusts, numbering 8 ; (2) the important Gas, Electric 
 Light, and Street Railway, consolidations, in number 103. 
 
 The former (8 Trusts) have absorbed or control 136 
 plants ; their total capitalization being $629,700,500. 
 
 '' Moody on Trusts. 
 
70 Human Submission. 
 
 The latter (103 Trusts) have embraced 1,200 plants, and 
 
 are capitalized at $3,105,756,571. 
 
 The 111 Franchise Trusts have then adopted into their 
 
 family 1,336 plants ; 
 
 Their whole capitalization is . . . $3,735,456,071. 
 
 ///. — Steam. Railroad Trusts. 
 There are 6 Great Steam Railway Groups : The Van- 
 
 derbilt, Pennsylvania, Morgan, Gould-Rockefeller, Harri- 
 
 man-Kuhn-Loeb, and Moore. Their component plants are 
 
 about 700 railroads which formerly stood on their own feet ; 
 
 their united capitalization is $9,017,086,906. 
 
 There are 10 Allied Independent Steam Railway Groups, 
 
 which have consolidated about 250 roads, and their total 
 
 capital is $380,277,000. 
 
 These 16 Railroad Trusts have therefore assimilated 
 
 1,040 separate railway lines and systems ; 
 
 Their whole capitalization is . . . $9,397,363,907. 
 
 Mileage of Railway Trusts. 
 The mileage of these Groups in 1903 was : 
 
 Vanderbilt 21,888 miles. 
 
 Pennsylvania 19,300 
 
 Morgan 47,206 
 
 Gould-Rockefeller 28,157 
 
 Harriman-Kuhn-Loeb 22,943 
 
 Moore 25,092 
 
 Total 164,586 
 
 In 1897 these groups had but 61,833 miles. 
 In 6 years only their increase has been 102,753, chiefly 
 by absorption. 
 
 Total Railway Mileage. 
 
 There are in all about 204,000 miles of steam railway in 
 the country, of which the 6 Big Groups have all but about 
 40,000 miles. 
 
American Repose Under Robbery. 71 
 
 Of this 40,000 the 10 smaller systems control over 13,000 
 miles. 
 
 Less than 27,000 miles are left, dispersed in much 
 smaller railroad systems, and not really vital or paying. 
 When it becomes worth while they will be engorged by 
 the large. 
 
 Of the more than 177,000 miles of vital railway mileage 
 of the nation, the 6 Great Groups control 95 per cent. 
 These Groups are all linked together within, forming really 
 one colossal Railroad Trust. 
 
 The financiers at the head of and entirely dominating 
 this Railway Trust are — J. P. Morgan, J. D. and Wm. 
 Rockefeller, W. K. and F. W. Vanderbilt, Geo. J. Gould, 
 Harriman, A. J. Cassatt, Jas. J. Hill, Kdwin Hawley, H. 
 H. Rogers, August Belmont, Thos. F. Ryan, W. H. and 
 J. H. Moore. 
 
 The most important of these men — Rockefeller, Morgan, 
 Harriman, Gould, and Vanderbilt, ' are interested in and 
 more or less dominate all the groups^ thus binding the 
 whole, and this whole is practically dominated by Rocke- 
 feller and Morgan. 
 
 The reader may now search out for himself how the 
 same few men with a few others ' are interested in and 
 more or less dominate ' the other great trusts mentioned — 
 the Industrial, and the Franchise Trusts, and how imperial 
 the power of two individuals, Rockefeller and Morgan, is 
 in most of them also. 
 
 After musing upon which until he has measurably 
 digested its force, let him peruse the grand totals. 
 
 The 445 Trusts of the three kinds have absorbed 8,664 
 independent plants or systems ; their combined capitaliza- 
 tion is $20,379,162,511. 
 This whole vast bulk of capital is controlled by a minia- 
 
72 Human Submission. 
 
 ture group of individuals over whom two, Rockefeller and 
 Morgan, predominate. It was all created by the people of 
 the nation and should be owned by them, but the mass of 
 it has passed from them to the Group of Huge Rich, count- 
 ing altogether numerically a petty handful compared with 
 the nation's citizens. And this process of absorption is 
 advancing with velocity, and will advance until everything 
 the people have is absorbed and owned by the Small Rich 
 Group. These rich have a financial process which uner- 
 ringly draws to them like a magnet all wealth ; the pro- 
 cess and its ramifications are known to everybody of mod- 
 erate intelligence in the country ; they see their riches, the 
 people's riches, being taken from them as if by an inva- 
 sion of foreign brigjands ; they see the whole centre of 
 gravity of life changed, scores of thousands who were pros- 
 perous and self -sustained, made dependent, every vestage of 
 equality and equal opportunity obliterated and the entire- 
 people reduced to a degrading vassalage to the lawless 
 invaders. 
 
 And they submit. 
 
 They submit because their ancestors were slaves and 
 hinds and because their minds are crowded with slavish 
 superstitions and fictions. We are from, those English 
 laboring and middle classes whose last spark of manly fire 
 seems to have gone out with the slaughter of Wat Tyler's 
 insurgents five hundred and twenty-five years ago. Sub- 
 mission then became absolute in the Anglo-Teutonic char- 
 acter, if it could be more craven than it was, and nothing 
 has shaken it. 
 
 Some of these British quasi-slaves came to a new country 
 and proclaimed liberty, about which they knew less than 
 babes, and of which no true ingredient was in them ; they 
 brought the word liberty, but they brought the structured 
 
American Repose Under Robbery. 73 
 
 instinct of slavery, guiding the course of their feelings and 
 thoughts as granite peaks determine the windings of rivu- 
 lets. For a time Nature's wanton prodigality in the New 
 World suspended the relations governing the residue of 
 civilized men, and because nature was lavish the new 
 Americans thought they were free, they even thought they 
 loved freedom and imagined that the slavish nature of 
 man was in this hemisphere forever extinct. But the 
 slavish instinct was still supreme. Each man set about 
 appropriating all of nature's bounties that he could, just as 
 he had seen the masters in all lands do, and those who 
 lagged in the battle of appropriation did as slaves have 
 ever done — submitted, and let things go whither the new 
 appropriators and masters willed. Success in appropria- 
 ting, they imagined as slaves always do, gave plenary 
 rights over the expropriated. The beaten in the rivalry of 
 getting lie down and let the beaters run things and 
 and run over them. Now slaves had to do this, and 
 jnodern people out of their subconscious slave reminis- 
 cences think they have to do it. They do not have to. The 
 sharp goad of the slave-maker's Force created an irrepress- 
 ible habit. Why should men with a swelled power for 
 getting run society and human life ? It is fit doctrine only 
 for a mad-house or a slave world. 
 
 Yet this is the philosophy of the present abrogation of 
 all popular rights on this continent. The American people 
 are but a segment of the ancient mass of servile plasm, 
 and nature's special gifts being exhausted, they bend their 
 spines to servitude just as meekly as the populace of every 
 nation that ever existed, save one, has done. They do so 
 in their abject piety to the Great Ancient Mistake — Sub- 
 mission. 
 
 We recall an ancient allocution. Blessed are the meek 
 
74 Human Submission. 
 
 for they shall inherit the earth. Was ever a word more 
 false ? Every fibre and particle of it is untrue ? The law 
 of life is, The meek shall not inherit the earth. The earth 
 shall be taken away from them because of their cowardice. 
 They shall die out and their race shall die out, for the 
 spoilers will bereave them of nourishment and life. They 
 shall not have wherewith to persist, and their type shall be 
 known no more. And the robbers shall inherit the earth. 
 It is a pity this was not comprehended before the robbers 
 had already inherited so much of the earth. But it is 
 never too late to retrieve, and there is a way. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 hXX, I^AWS ARE ANNULLED BY STARVATION. 
 
 And now let us summon a picture which proves my say- 
 ing thatTman has carried the evolution of Bratality far be- 
 yond its simple origins in the kingdom of beasts, that man 
 is the conscious depository of cruelty at its highest power, 
 that he chooses cruelty with wide-open knowing eyes be- 
 fore he will yield one item of his fierce and brutal luxury. 
 The question is a scientific one. We are looking not for 
 the food of hysterics but for crystal facts through which to 
 penetrate the innermost nature of this universe and its 
 "god." And the amazing facts we here register confirm 
 not only the mad brutality of the rich, but equally the 
 marvelous sottish slavishness of the victim poor. Here is 
 the dark inferno of the Anglo-Saxon heart, seen from its 
 deeds : 
 
 " There are 25,000 starving men, women and children in 
 Tottenham, London, an outer suburb of the metropolis, 
 and so far nothiiig has been done by the general public to 
 relieve the distress. The crisis will assume appalling pro- 
 
All Laws Are Annulled by Starvation. 75 
 
 portions if outside aid be not at once supplied. Terrible, 
 indeed, is the lot of the little children of the workless men 
 in Tottenham. Milk — the. prime food of the child is 
 almost unknown, except in tinned form and in microscopic 
 quantity. In Tottenham the children of the, unemployed 
 have to go without milk. Young men and women who 
 are not householders, are seeking in vain for work. Every 
 man, woman and child of these many thousands is in des- 
 perate need of practical human sympathy, and if this does 
 not come, and come speedily, disease and destitution will 
 claim — as they have already claimed — numberless victims. 
 A band of hungry men, driven by want to their wits' end, 
 yesterday attacked and raided a baker's cart. They wanted 
 bread for their wives and little ones, and to silence the 
 piteous cries at home they defied the terrors of the law. 
 
 " ' We have not been able even to fringe the need of the 
 starving population,' said the Vicar of St. Johns, the poor- 
 est parish amid many poor parishes." And the Vicar con- 
 tinued as follows : " I saw thousands of men yesterday, 
 whose wan, white faces bore the stamp of despair, and 
 whose eager, wild, burning eyes spoke eloquently of hun-. 
 ger's terrible delirium. 
 
 " ' How can I see my wife grow paler day by day ? ' asked 
 a laborer, whose once burly frame had been attenuated by 
 want, ' and hear my children ask for food, only to be denied 
 it ? Can you wonder if I — a man who never wronged his 
 neighbor in his life — should snatch a loaf, even if I have to 
 go to gaol for it ? ' 
 
 " The men — with few exceptions honest men of highest 
 character — complain loudly and bitterly. There is no 
 work for them. They are not dissolute thriftless, unworthy. 
 They suffer undeservedly. 
 
 " ' My little ones are so good,' said a mother whom I saw 
 
76 Human Submission. 
 
 yesterday. ' They know dad is out of work, and they 
 never fret or whine. This morning they went out break- 
 fastless to play, and came back at dinner time. "Have 
 you got any food, mother? " asked the eldest. I shook my 
 head. I could not trust myself to speak. " All right, 
 mother," said the child, stifling a sob of disappointment, 
 and together they trooped out into the streets again.' 
 
 " One case I came across was that of a painter, whose 
 wife was lying upon the floor suffering from erysipelas. 
 He was her sole nurse, and their four children occupied the 
 same room. He had been out of work for six months, and 
 the home had gone. 
 
 " ' There is no hope,' said the doctor who is attending a 
 mother of five children, a sufferer from bronchitis. ' Under . 
 ordinary conditions she might have been saved, but she is 
 starving.' Yet the husband is an able-bodied, capable man, 
 who has tramped weary miles each day in futile search for 
 work." * 
 
 In bright America, the world's hope, it takes this form : 
 *In a prison cell of Philadelphia, Bernard Breckley, a 
 veteran in the army of the unemployed, bemoans his fail- 
 ure to sacrifice his life to save his wife from starving. His 
 wish to commit suicide was suggested by the knowledge 
 that his faithful life partner would get $130, the insurance 
 on his life. Breckley was found on Thursday hanging 
 by a strap to a fence surrounding Hunting Park. A park 
 guard cut him down. " My wife was hungry and there 
 was no other way," said Breckley, when arraigned in a 
 police court. I have tramped the streets half a year look- 
 ing for work. Everywhere it was the same. There was 
 nothing I could do to earn an honest penny. I worked 
 last year in a stone yard, but in the summer I fell and 
 
 ♦London Cor. Philadelphia Ledger, Jan. 9, '05. 
 
All Laws are Annulled by Starvation. 77 
 
 broke a rib. My wife takes in washing, but the money- 
 she earns is not enough for both of us. If I had died as I 
 wanted to, she would have got the insurance on my life." ' 
 A7td this : ' Exhausted from long tramping through the 
 streets of New York, emaciated from lack of food and ex- 
 posure and clad only in thin clothing, Michael Reddy, 
 twenty-four years old, of Peekskill, fell unconscious in a 
 snowdrift yesterday. Two young men saw him and carried 
 him to Bellevue hospital.' And this: 'To keep her baby 
 girl of three and a half years well and happy Mora Malone 
 has been slowly starving herself to death. When found by 
 Patrolman Neville, of the East Twenty-second Street Sta- 
 tion, New York, the woman was so weak from lack of food 
 that she was half insane. She cradled the little one in her 
 arms.' And there is no end of them. Of such is the king- 
 dom of property-ruled earth, and yet we respect property ! 
 The dying unemployed are a perpetual institution of 
 I^ondon, New York, Philadelphia, Boston and every great 
 Christian city of the globe. When we look at the children 
 of these workless sufferers, however, science would say that 
 society must be composed of fiends to cause and maintain 
 such a situation. In the Johanna Street Schools, Lambeth, 
 London, 90 per cent, are unable to attend to their lessons on 
 account of their physical condition. ' Ninety per cent, of the 
 boys are anemic' In the London schools altogether, 122,000 
 children were found to be ' decidly underfed,' that is, 16 per 
 cent, of all the London children. The investigator de- 
 scribed the food of the children in an area near the Houses 
 of Parliament : " Their breakfasts are nominally bread 
 and tea, and the dinner nothing but what a copper can pur- 
 chase at the local fried-fish shops, where the most inferior 
 kinds of fish are fried in reeking cotton-seed oil, and this 
 often supplemented by rotten fruit collected beneath cost- 
 
78 Human Submission. 
 
 er's barrows." Dr. Eickholz, medical inspector of all Kng- 
 lish special schools, thoroughly equipped to speak, is 
 authority for these statements. * The name of John Devil 
 would be more appropriate than John Bull for a country of 
 such atrocities. For England is dying-fat with riches 
 which her spendthrift rich burn in the gorgeous flame of 
 their luxury. The United States repeats and excels this 
 lurid state of shame, for we are richer. 
 
 These facts are a scientific elucidation of the nature of 
 ' god,' if there is one. For he made man, and he made him 
 with a nature that would evolve into this frenzy of cruelty. 
 The intelligent are not, however, to be angry with these 
 pitiable products of god, the rich and cruel of heart. They 
 are only to feel toward them a terrible implacable indigna- 
 tion that shall abolish them. Unpurchased science, look- 
 ing calmly at facts, sees that the fact there are rich is the 
 cause of this myriad-fanged suffering of the poor. Abolish 
 the rich and you will abolish the suffering. The abolition 
 of the rich is the next law of the universe to be executed. 
 If not a law of the universe, if god is still on the side of 
 the spoilers, it is the adamant law of men of brains, march- 
 ing through the black fires of the universe and dead gods 
 to triumph. 
 
 Long ago Machiavelli laid down an eternal principle re- 
 garding these rich sappers of the human race. " These 
 commonwealths," he said, "wherein uncorrupted and 
 genuinely political conduct still survives, will not suffer 
 any man to live in the fashion of a gentleman ; they are 
 great sticklers for full equality, and vehement enemies of 
 all such lords and gentlemen as their country contains ; 
 when by any chance such like persons fall into their hands 
 they put them to death. By way of making the term 
 
 * See Physical Deterioration in England, by Burke : Tlie Porutn, Jan.- 
 March, '05. 
 
All Laws are Annulled by Starvation. 79 
 
 gentleman quite explicit, let me specify that those are 
 called gentlemen who live in idleness and all abundance on 
 their own resources, taking thought neither of cultivating 
 their land nor of any other laborious means of livelihood. 
 Men like these are baneful in every commonwealth, but 
 those of them are most baneful who, besides their general 
 points of vantage just recited, are masters in strong castles, 
 and have subjects obeying them .... Men of this stamp 
 are utterly at odds with every frame of civil existence?''^ 
 
 The men who live on others., were those at whom this 
 thinker laid the sharp knife of his intelligence. Always 
 and forever, whether they are masters of strong castles or 
 of strong laws made or bought by themselves, men of this 
 stamp are utterly at odds with every frame of human ex- 
 istence. They are captains of the Evolution of Brutality ; 
 they are the cause of other souls' unutterable anguish, the 
 lords of that sky-staining inhumanity which pauperizes, 
 debauches, tortures and starves the millions of poor. 
 
 But they are by no means to be killed ; they are to be 
 saved and transformed and loved by the iron will of the in- 
 telligent. Killing belonged to Machiavelli's time. Aboli- 
 tion is the divine process of our age : we simply terminate 
 the fact of their possession of riches and thereby kill their 
 poison. This is the law of a science that is no respecter 
 of persons. Heretofore, O Rich Man, you have bought 
 your science as you bought your cheese. But before the 
 bar of an unpurchasable science you though rich as god, 
 are no more important than the least of those weeping 
 millions whom you break on the wheel. Yet with every 
 stroke of mutilation you deal them you forge a brutaler 
 curse on all mankind. 
 
 * From Machiavelli's Discourses— quoted by Dyer, Machiavelli and the 
 Modem State, pp. 136-7. 
 
80 Human Submission. 
 
 Now when society starves men their every duty to society 
 is annulled. Society makes them outlaws. It withdraws 
 its protection from them and constitutes itself their enemy 
 and murderer. A man has duties to society only so long 
 as it performs its obligations to him. When it withholds 
 the means of life from him, it became the minister of his 
 death. Property is an institution of society and its laws are 
 binding only upon those within the social pale : for any 
 whom society has outlawed forth into the night of want its 
 laws are naught. Primal self-preservation becomes then 
 the only valid law of these. Their duty is to live, and 
 they must get the means to live where and how they can. 
 By the inalienable right of existence they may and shall 
 take their support when and how they can. Mankind has 
 repudiated them, they are thereby enfranchised from its 
 waste-paper enactments. 
 
 This is the incarnate truth of the situation. It applies 
 to every one of those starved sons of England, dedicated to 
 death by England's pious rich. It applies to every man of 
 ten million Americans likewise appointed to pauperism 
 and death by our insane seizers of our wealth. Food is 
 theirs by eternal right wherever they can take it., so are 
 clothing, fuel and shelter. These people cannot steal, 
 stealing being an accident of that human organization from 
 which they have been expelled. It is their duty to pre- 
 serve their lives and their little ones' lives ; therefore it is 
 their duty to take what food they can reach and ennoble 
 their cliaracters by doing so. 
 
 They may be jailed for it. That will be good. Why 
 should not these whole ten million American paupers and 
 semi-paupers go to jail? In jail men are fed ; while they 
 are " good " they are starved. So it is a high crime to be 
 good in Christendom, and men are penalized for it. In 
 
All Laws are Annulled by Starvation. 81 
 
 jail those who have robbed them of the right to live would 
 have to support them. Since the comparatively poor pay 
 comparatively all the taxes, the rich cunningly swearing 
 theirs off, the burden of sustaining these ten million would 
 fall on the sixty-nine million comparatively poor of this 
 nation. Adding this burden to the huge cruel weight of 
 tribute already loaded upon them by the one million rich, 
 would at last excite them to perception of their slavish 
 state and its blasting retribution. 
 
 Thus the Starved can not only save themselves but they 
 can deliver this Rich-ridden nation. They can make the 
 first winning attack on that structural instinctive slavish- 
 ness of the human mind which this book has exhibited. 
 And happily they can do it without harming any one — 
 merely by appropriating a biscuit or a cut of meat when- 
 ever their last prison term expires. This is a fair and hon- 
 orable species of non-resistant resistance, justified and com- 
 manded by the fundamental laws of Being. Gunpowder 
 ruptured feudalism, this potent action of the modern 
 Starved would inaugurate the downfall of quasi-slavery. 
 Neither the armor of the knights nor the stone walls of 
 their castles could resist bullets — so neither could stony 
 hearts nor the armor of religion resist the moral canonnade 
 of ten million starved outlaws swarming American jails 
 for bread and home. The act would drive even a working 
 man to ballot for the life of his babes and human salvation. 
 
 Toward the end of the Eighteenth century their lived 
 in England a very enlightened man named Woodward, 
 Bishop of Cloyn, who punctured the scandalous hypocrisy 
 of his time (in which it was the forerunner of ours) in a 
 remarkable manner. ' If,' said he, ' the poor man's rich 
 neighbors are not bound, in justice, to provide for him a 
 competent maintenance,' "by what right did they take 
 
82 Human Submission. 
 
 ■upon themselves to enact certain laws (for the rich com- 
 pose the legislative body in every civilized country), which 
 compelled that man to become a member of their society ; 
 which precluded him from any share in the land where he 
 was born, any use of its sponta!neous fruits, or any 
 dominion over the beasts of the field, on pain of stripes, 
 imprisonment, or death? How can they justify their ex- 
 clusive property in the common heritage of mankind, un- 
 less they consent, in return, to provide for the subsistence 
 of the Poor, who were excluded from those common rights 
 by the laws of the Rich, to which they were never 
 parties ? " * 
 
 It shows an extraordinary mind to have perceived even 
 as much as this a hundred and twenty or thirty years ago ; 
 modern society has not caught up with it yet. But the 
 truth goes a great deal farther. Society can not pay its 
 debt to a man by maintaining him after pauperising him, ; 
 he has a right not to be pauperized. This right is impre- 
 scripible, he cannot part with it. Paupers are creations of 
 society, wholly unnecessary ; every pauper or semi-pauper 
 thus created is an outrage on common decency and 
 humanity ; his existence testifies that some are playing 
 swine in the community, robbing him of his opportunities 
 and rights. 
 
 Now our rich are playing this part of swine. They are 
 the cause of the terrible and revolutionary pauperism and 
 starvation. They take food out of the mouths of the dying 
 masses to turn it into blazing viands, raiment and jewels. 
 " The collective contents of the jewel cases of the fashion- 
 able set in New York society approximates closely to $170,- 
 000,000," says the Rev. C. W. Nichols, a recent authority 
 
 * Quoted by F. M. Kden, State of the Poor in England, io66 to 1796, 
 Vol. i, 414. 
 
All Laws are Annulled by Starvation. 83 
 
 on the new American Peerage. Mrs. Astor, Mrs Vander- 
 bilt, Mrs. Oliver Belmont, Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt, Jr., and 
 some others, have each a million invested in gems, and you 
 can easily compute how many of the servile masses this 
 giddy waste robs and starves. Mrs. Ogden Goelet has a 
 dog collar with a soltaire black pearl in the centre, worth 
 $200,000. Dogs are valued by the rich. '" If a woman 
 aspires to regal effects in evening dress, besides her dia- 
 mond tiara, a corsage piece of diamonds valued at, say, 
 $75,000, is requisite," avers the Reverend Nichols. 
 
 Think of that, ye toiling bloodless starvers in the slums 
 who never see a full meal and die like flies to give your 
 Rich these criminal luxuries ! They are your rich, for you 
 and all of us are the mine of flesh and blood they tap and 
 drain for this death-stained wealth. Ah these women, the 
 women of our rich, consuming thus while deep down in 
 horrible decay other human beings, women too, are living 
 in hell, dying slowly in transcendent agony of want ! And 
 the rest of us look on glassily passive while these crimes 
 are done ! " It is asserted that the annual bill of clothes of 
 Mrs. Potter Palmer of Chicago, runs as high as $10,000," 
 which would support only twenty families. 
 
 But let us cheer ourselves with golden visions of the rich 
 man's garb. Senator W. A. Clark who helps to make the 
 poor man's laws because the poor men want a rich man for 
 their legislator, disports a sable topcoat worth $2,000. 
 The wardrobe of a male member of the ultra-smart set must 
 contain : "A fur-lined topcoat for the opera ; an Inver- 
 ness, fur-lined, without the fur showing ; a Chesterfield, in 
 black or dark gray, or a Newmarket, to be worn over dress 
 clothes ordinarily ; a long loose sack overcoat, silk faced, 
 for spring or early autumn ; a double-breasted Newmarket ; 
 a single-breasted Prince Henry coat, a Strand coat, which 
 
84 Htiman Submission. 
 
 is single-breasted, with tails ; rain and steamer coats, yacht- 
 ing suits, a double-breasted ulster made of homespun, golf 
 costumes and a short covert coat for between seasons." A 
 man who would be of this family of American Waste-Lords, 
 must spend from $1,000 to |3,000 annually on his clothes 
 alone. From the chemistry of our working-men's blood it 
 comes, but it comes. There is Clarence H. Mackay. " For 
 dinning at home at one's country seat in summer, nothing 
 is cooler, more novel or half so chic as a light Tuxedo suit 
 of white silk basket weave, plain twilled silk or white 
 duck. Mr. Mackay, it is stated, has a fuli dozen of such 
 outfits." " Wealth," says our author — and we do not need 
 his authority for it — " forms the principal ingredient enter- 
 ing into the composition of this big social trust, whose sub- 
 jective aim is pleasure, and whose objective one is to make 
 a fine art of social life." 
 
 Now this revolting luxury while millions fade and die of 
 sheer elementary need is the rotten fruit of Brutality on the 
 social tree. Not one word in mitigation of it can be said. 
 Cause : Abandoned waste by the Rich of wealth produced 
 by the Poor ; — Effect : Ten million Ametican Paupers and 
 Semi-Paupers, a third of whom are slowly starving to death. 
 In this scientific research the measure of abject submission 
 in the cells and fibres of the human brain is our primary 
 quest, but we come upon by-products of high significance, 
 of which the organized and increasing flint-heartedness of 
 the rich, the supported rich, is one. Mastership burns out 
 sympathy, intelligence, love and heart. In permitting 
 masters to grow, society creates monsters. The rich are 
 universally masters of the rest ; if the rest allow them to 
 exist they are responsible for the evolution of monsters and 
 the whole sequence of human ruin they bring. 
 
Shall the Poor Steal? 85 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 HIGHER LAW THAN PROPERTY — SHALL THE POOR 
 STEAL FROM PRINCIPLE? 
 
 Science must not only analyze forces and facts but must 
 indicate remedies. Going back of the usual affectations 
 about man to facts of life and hmuan nature which have 
 been slighted from their very universality, we have unfolded 
 man as he is — not free and intelligent but loaded down 
 with a tremendous handicap. There is but one sentiment 
 that can be felt for this friendless waif in the illegible cos- 
 mos, torn and deceived by Nature and himself, — pity, in- 
 finite pity. Vainly believing himself free and intelligent, 
 it is his character to deify and follow the promptings 
 of his nature without delving into its real composition; 
 what he follows thinking it freedom and intelligence is 
 this monstrous perverted instinct which clasps him like a 
 serpent-fish in its malign arms. 
 
 For this reason the methods of human progress adopted 
 fail. Because of the immanence of slavishness in us, the 
 methods of ostensible progress are slavish and illusory, 
 assuming the Tightness and lastingness of the servile warp 
 and woof of human things. Progress therefore builds rot- 
 tenly on rotten foundations. The methods in vogue to 
 bring man out of his night do not and can not succeed 
 and they must be rejected. They employ the instinct 
 which they should destroy. If man is locked in a prim- 
 eval instinct which stupefies his faculties and strangles his 
 will, the first necessity is to free him from that instinct. 
 All use of his faculties ere it's breakage is under its laws 
 and service. Conceive a man in chains so that he can 
 barely move, we do not tell him to do thus and so for his 
 own good, dragging the chains after him ; we strike off th&- 
 chains, restoring his power. Mankind is precisely as if 
 
86 Human Submission. 
 
 chained. And the true helpers of mankind are those who 
 burst these irons, while those who teach man to exert his 
 faculties as they are and " accomplish something," merely 
 instruct him in the art of staying slavish and evermore 
 abortive. Both intelligence and freedom lie before man to 
 achieve, they will be won through destruction of the servile 
 instinct, and on this problem all human brain-power should 
 Jje concentrated. By success here man's creative strength 
 in all fields will be multiplied immeasurable fold. 
 
 And the method is Resistance. Just as it should have 
 been at all times since the first savage succumbed to a 
 master, so it must be now if freedom and intelligence are 
 ever to be attributes of man : he must resist implacably, 
 furiously and unceasingly, until the lives of masters are 
 miserable beyond endurance and they fling o£E their vest- 
 ments of power. To-day the m.an who enriches himself out 
 of others is the master ; they who are supported by others 
 are the masters ; such as have wealth while others have 
 want are the masters : and to these the remaining millions 
 owe not duty, affection or fealty. The single duty owea 
 is their abolition as masters. I^et this be remembered — 
 while a master holds quasi-slaves, he truly admits no obli- 
 gation to them : therefore they have none to him. 
 
 Happily the time has passed when, in a country like 
 this, life need be destroyed for quasi-slaves to become free ; 
 but the time has not passed when extraordinary methods 
 of resistance are requisite. The quasi-slave must revise 
 his ideas of morals. He is organically robbed and rifled 
 by his masters, who, haters and hypocrites, preach to him 
 that it is a sin to turn and steal of them. It is not a sin. 
 Nay, he is sanctioned in assuming their tactics ; it is right- 
 eous and just for him to 'steal ' of them by the laws of 
 self-preservation and freedom, till they ah^MXt robbing him. 
 
Shall the Poor Steal? 87 
 
 This is only acceptance of the law of high financiers by 
 their victims. If any canting strickler for dead moral for- 
 mulas is aghast at this counsel of new duty, let him show 
 that the method of the highway financiers is not robbery. 
 They and the rich at large have opened financial war on 
 the people, by flagrant extortionate swindle they are en- 
 riching themselves, shall their prey submit in terror of the 
 phrase that it is a crime to meet commercial thugs with 
 thugs' weapons ? The rich have abolished the law against 
 stealing by making stealing their vital principle, enacting 
 the new commandment — 'Thou shalt steal, if thou art 
 rich. ' Let the poor enlarge the code to be — ' Thou shalt 
 steal if thou art poor, to fight the rich on an equal plane.' 
 If the people embrace this law as a principle^ there wiH 
 be wholesale consternation, and the slow-witted crowd who 
 feelinglessly witness their fellows starved, plundered and 
 maimed will promptly grow excited at ' what the world is 
 coming to.' That is whither we want to bring them. 
 Nothing ordinary like social starvation-murder of a few 
 million poor, or general confiscation of the people's wealth 
 by the rich, or anointment of the last and greatest com- 
 mandment, ' Thou shalt steal,' by the stealers, moves the 
 sensibilities of the torpid nation at all ; iand yet if the 
 slavish instinct is to be surgeoned out of it and the race 
 saved to great things it must be stirred. 
 
 Stealing then must be taken into the poor man's creed 
 as a stepping stone to race-liberation from quasi-slavery and 
 non-intelligence. Let the poor man who is perchance still 
 religious not fear for the salvation of his soul from this new 
 germing of his virtue. He will be a patriot, bringing on 
 the downfall of a wealth system which causes myriads of 
 souls to enter hell before they die ; and if there be an eter-^ 
 nal reward, stealing to eradicate the hell from this life will 
 strengthen his title to the heavenly heritage. 
 
88 Human Submission. 
 
 The defeating weakness of quasi-slaves today who yearn 
 for liberty is their over-reliance on mass movement. The 
 individual is the greatest dynamic centre there is. Every- 
 one who expels the slavish instinct from himself and be- 
 comes a personal revolter, will radiate freedom, intelligence 
 and revolt in wide circles about him. Individuals can in- 
 troduce needed unique forms of resistance, and mass move- 
 ments will follow and take them up. The organized 
 forces that should pioneer progress are themselves bowed 
 and servile. What more so than Education which obsequi- 
 ously accepts and promulgates the false " right " of the 
 rich to rob the poor, and is therefore a pillar of quasi- 
 slavery ? So of Politics ; it would be a great force for 
 liberty if men were free-minded ; they could speedily work 
 the social revolution through it and erect the free frame of 
 life, in which the slavery instinct would die; but who 
 needs say that there is nothing more servile than a political 
 party ; that every member truckles to chiefs and bosses ; 
 that the rich own the parties and their slavish members ; 
 and that the party system offers a dazzling field for trick- 
 sters in the coat of love for the people to betray the people 
 to the rich ? If we were free and intelligent we should 
 have the Swiss direct legislation, with which the people 
 would crush party machines and vote their laws as citizen 
 sovereigns, without the intervention of peddling senates 
 and congresses, — but we liave not direct legislation. And 
 quasi-slavery reigns on, and the rich are succeeding in their 
 confiscating revolution. 
 
 So that every individual must become a personal resister 
 in his own way, obstructing this false life and blocking its 
 machinery by all devices. He must try its laws by the 
 light of higher law, the law that quasi-slavery must riot be 
 allowed to live. Purchased Proprietary law is not the 
 
The Murder Laws of Property. 89 
 
 highest law. Above that stands Intelligence. If they con- 
 flict, Intelligence is king, and proprietary law contemptible. 
 All along the line they now conflict, and the truth that 
 beams above their collision is that proprietary law is not 
 law. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE MUBLDBR laws of PROPERTY. 
 
 The discrimination to be learned is between Property-Iyaws 
 and Human-I^aws. I am not creating the diflterence, it exists, 
 we must teach down-beaten man to see it. Property-laws 
 have but one purpose, they are to fill the pockets of the 
 rich. They do not recognize the existence of feeling, suf- 
 fering, justice, duty, love, or human beings ; they know 
 only that Property is The Absolute and that they have 
 made God its Chief Policeman. They have established 
 that the poor must cheerfully die for Holy Property, 
 and if they cannot do it cheerfully then wofully and 
 coercedly. Before the judgment seat of Property the 
 Human Race is valued at nothing ; it w, merely to manu- 
 facture Property for these Rich. This wide-winged uni- 
 verse emerged out of its nebulous night to generate the 
 transitory phantoms called poor men, to produce property 
 for the glorious bifurcated grandeurs called Rich Men. 
 All this travail of time and space and suffering has been to 
 conceive and cast forth from the inscrutable womb — Rich 
 Men ! As far back as all-extended sameness, when the 
 system of eternal Forces came together, wooed and con- 
 ceived the fashioning of sun and stars and this little 
 world and air and man, their high most heavenly object 
 was to ultimately bring forth countless cringing serving 
 things on trembling legs to sacrifice their momentary span 
 of being for some great things on proud legs whose 
 
90 Human Siibmission. 
 
 appointed way in the tremulous orb was to consume all 
 substance and men. For this huge aim this spacious 
 strenuous amplitude of Nature has groaned and strained 
 and run its course ! 
 
 You have but to look at this cruelly conditioned world 
 which the rich possess to know this truth. It shames the 
 sickly Cosmos that it is so, it shames all creatures living in 
 the world. But it is so. The world can be scientifically 
 parted into mere human slag or toil-stuff, and Rich Men. 
 The former were projected out of the knownless void to be 
 the tenders o/the rich. How noble a production of these 
 thrice-infinite birth throes of laborious Mother Being ! In 
 the mind of Whatever planned the cosmic apparatus this 
 use of the human creature must have clearly organically 
 lain — for had it not so been, would the fact have come to 
 pass ? To this mean end all creation has ignominiously 
 pined and spent itself ! 
 
 Thus to be the apple of the universal-eye and have all 
 being spent for them, these rich must have unmeasured 
 value in themselves, or be surpassingly dear to the earth 
 and its firmament acre. And what is the quality of their 
 preciousness to the universe-builder ? Infinite lust of self 
 and infinite desolating greed are their essence. Read how 
 they prance before admiring god while inch by inch mil- 
 lions of his worthless motes anguish their lives out in want. 
 The other night the high society of one of our cities regaled 
 itself with a masked ball. The occasion of its principal 
 transports was pigs. "A drove of little pink pigs, with 
 carefully curled tails, was turned loose. Screams of the 
 ladies mingled with the squeals of the pigs. After the ears 
 of the women had become somewhat accustomed to the 
 porkers, the little animals were petted by perfumed jeweled 
 fingers. ' Well I could kiss a pig,' was the remark of a 
 
The Murder Laws of Property. 91 
 
 handsomely gowned West End society dame, and she 
 suited the action to the word. The pigs romped about 
 everywhere, tripping up dancers when they were not in the 
 arms of some young woman. Society went wild over them. 
 The pigs were not the only novelty, however. Six big 
 Indians danced in single file about the room emitting shrill 
 war-whoops." 
 
 Infinite self-lust and desolating greed are the essence of the 
 rich of this world. Therefore these qualities are those most 
 precious to the universe-essence, for all the powers in the 
 realm of the known conspire to make the beings who 
 possess them the climax of creation. Has not the Builder 
 or the Forces fashioned all other men so meanly that they 
 shall squander and pollute their lives serving the vehicles 
 of these abhorrent attributes ? Was the Builder or the 
 Force so feeble that he could not instal Beauty, Justice, and 
 Intelligence in his star-spanned sphere ? It seems inferable 
 of him to say that he has made what he wanted ! Such is 
 the world from the pedestal of Property, whose laws have 
 ever been and are still Absolute. 
 
 They are many of them Murder I^aws. Here I trench 
 on a morass of unperception as wide as civilization, where 
 Christian man can see no farther than his eyelids. He 
 divines that if a man strikes another to death with a 
 weapon he is a murderer ; but he cannot discern that if 
 he forces another into an environment which kills him he 
 is no less a Cain. And yet he is, and the day will come 
 when the man who would do it will be hunted out of human 
 society as most infamous. 
 
 Now the riches of rich men rest on such murders. Dis- 
 cover what the twentieth century may, this will be its 
 greatest discovery. Murder with the club of Environ- 
 ment — what is it ? A few nights ago Dr. Horace Carn- 
 
92 Human Submission. 
 
 cross lectured upon tuberculosis before the Upholstery 
 Weavers' Union at Kensington Avenue, Philadelphia. 
 
 " Owing to the long hours and close confinement," said 
 he, "the disease has ample opportunity to spread. The 
 nature of your work requires that you toil in rooms closed 
 to all outside air, and this usually means without ventila- 
 tion. If the factory owners would go to the slight expense 
 necessary to supply you with better ventilation the high 
 death rate would soon decrease. The dust incident to the 
 manufacture of the goods in the upholstery trade also ren- 
 ders you susceptible to the disease and with better ventila- 
 tion, fresh air and proper care when tuberculosis has 
 actually developed the number of deaths from this cause 
 can be greatly diminished.'''' Here is definite, visible, unde- 
 niable, absolute murder. But it is from behind the tree of 
 environment, and therefore the perpetrators are not chased 
 and captured and punished. 
 
 Look at the tenement hells of ill-health in which the 
 rich force the poor to live ! That is murder. It is around 
 the tree of environment and therefore the rich are not 
 chased. Reflect on those slain daily on the railroads, 
 solely for the profligately cruel greed of the rich : the 
 bludgeon used is Business Profit, and it is not recognized 
 as murder merely to murder men for profit. But it is 
 murder in the first degree. Their slaughter is diabolical 
 assassination. The killed were 9,840 in 1903, and 76,553 
 were injured. , This is most atrocious murder in the first 
 degree, without extenuating circumstance. The rich mag- 
 nate managers and owners are the murderers. They are 
 not chased by the vengeful people because they kill with 
 a long club, long enough to reach their victims from their 
 ofiices, and Law's sepulchre eye cannot see to the far end 
 of the club, because the law's owners, these Rich, hold the 
 
The Murder Laws of Property. 93 
 
 near end of it. And the duty-dulled multitude think it 
 righteousness to surrender their lives to Railroad Property 
 if this venal law commands it. The dupability of mortal 
 man was never more luridly illumined ! The Trusts, 
 which have confiscated the necessaries of life and will de- 
 liver them to the needy at highwaymen's prices only, are 
 murderers as nakedly as if they shot their victims dead. 
 Years ago millions of the American people reached a stage 
 where they could not pay a cent more for life's necessa- 
 ries without starting down the black incline of want and 
 death. Yet since then trust after trust has advanced the 
 cost of indispensable articles of life, giving these millions 
 of citizens a debonair kick downward to the grave. These 
 corsair monopolists are not chased like mad dogs dripping 
 with the blood and life of millions (as they are), because 
 the Bible of Business holds it to be lawful to tear the heart 
 from fellow men for profit. But those who do it are 
 assassins. 
 
 So it is amply plain what the murder laws of property are, 
 and no man should respect or obey them. They are crimi- 
 nal incitements to murder. They make the road smooth to 
 murder without retribution. Against them stands the in- 
 vulnerable majesty of The Human. Ifs Law abrogates 
 every murder law. • The Parliament of the Human legis- 
 lates that all men shall live in their best degree ; that the 
 Right of Evolution is the supreme right. Criminal Legis- 
 latures, held in the palm of opulent hands, have ever 
 vapored and fulminated against Man ; the Day of Man has 
 arrived, and it ordains death to Property Despotism. How 
 incredible it is that when a certain puissant handful of our 
 predecessors, rebelling grandly against the slavery instinct 
 of the race, killed kings and expelled nobles from the new 
 system of this continent, we, their feeble successors, should 
 
94 Human Submission. 
 
 set up Property as the new Lord's Anointed and re-establish 
 a despotism no softer, juster, or holier than the infamies 
 they conquered ! And as men owe no allegiance to tyrant . 
 kings or other murderous usurpers, neither do we owe duty 
 to tyrannous murderous Property ; nor can the ill laws of 
 a thousand congresses fasten the spectre of such obligation 
 on us. That intrepid defender of the right to kill iniqui- 
 tous kings, John Milton, called such laws " gibberish laws," 
 of which the bulk of modern statutes defending the deadly 
 onsets of the Rich on Mankind are composed. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 ARE WE VERGING ON REVOLUTION? 
 Having sought to exhibit lucidly the havoc of the 
 slavish instinct in man's affairs, a final word upon its bear- 
 ing on violent revolutions is needed. These great up- 
 heavals are caused by obstructions to righteousness. In 
 the United States a gilded Plutocracy accomplishes a re- 
 pression not different in kind from that achieved by a 
 Military Autocracy in Russia. There is no freedom of 
 press in Russia because the owners of Government will not 
 have it ; in the United States there is none because the 
 Rich own the press and restrict it. The people of the 
 States are in consequence unheard ; their deeper senti- 
 ments are excluded from public prints. They have no 
 way of reaching that small body of opinion which is heard 
 and wrongly passes for Public Opinion, though only Pro- 
 prietary opinion. 
 
 Hence the real mind of the nation is suppressed and un- 
 known, while the press does but nauseatingly reiterate the 
 self-sufficient judgments of proprietors. Through this rigid 
 exclusion a revolutionary feeling might develop to almost 
 
Are We Verging on Revolution? 95 
 
 any pitch without discovery by the proprietary class or 
 press. The rich might drive on heedlessly into the very 
 jaws of revolution unwarned by their employed writers, 
 who, absorbed in saying what the rich require, could inter- 
 pret no popular signs. 
 
 America in other ways resembles Russia. The alliance 
 of the law-making powers with the wealthy constitutes an 
 Autocratic Bureau Class like the Czar's. The American 
 people are not in it. This insane exclusion of the actual 
 American people from their own property and their own 
 governance, has had the effect of binding them in what in 
 their eyes is a fast and treacherous Gordian knot. Having 
 been so betrayed by the two honored institutions of govern- 
 ment and business, they no longer trust these institu- 
 tions to get them out of the slough. Knowing they have 
 been shamelessly duped, and hotly indignant at their 
 dupers, they are also bitterly incensed against the institu- 
 tions that have so well served the tricksters entrapping 
 them. Hence their revolutionary loss of faith in peaceable 
 means of rescue. In Russia the people know they cannot 
 be free without a violent overthrow of institutions, while 
 here through the seizure and abuse of institutions by the 
 rich and their political clerks, the same conviction has 
 gone incredibly far. 
 
 There is good ground for saying that the nation is tread- 
 ing a thin crust over fires certain to be far more furious 
 if they break than that eruption which purged France 
 a century ago. We have suffered a degree of insolence 
 from the rich well-suited to feudal tyranny before the 
 French Revolution and borne it feudally. Submission 
 caused this dangerous procrastination, and if a violent 
 revolution follows will have been its cause. Resentment of 
 first and slight encroachments is what defends from 
 revolutions. 
 
96 Human Submission. 
 
 Notwithstanding our heinous fault and mad delay a 
 great path is still open to us. Think for a moment. You 
 are slaves not to a great army but to your ideas. The 
 power of the rich is nothing but your belief that you should 
 obey them. Cease believing this, break the idols of your 
 mind, and the masters will instantly sink into pigmies. The 
 fabric of property must be shattered that life may be rebuilt, 
 and you will shatter it when you destroy the fictions of 
 your brain. Make your minds new and pliant, and then ask 
 yourselves what holiness there can be in a system of prop- 
 erty descending from the slave-making savages of far 
 antiquity. The property system is saturated with its 
 origins ; if everything slavish must go, the property system 
 must be swept away with it. Property rights are developed 
 slave-catcher's rights. Repudiating the slave-catcher, we 
 repudiate property rights. Since the slave-making struc- 
 ture of human life has always rested on murder, force and 
 fraud and is invalid, the property system, whose basis is 
 the slave and quasi-slave structure, rests likewise on mur- 
 der, force and fraud and is equally invalid. The property 
 system is without moral foundation. Its legal foundation 
 is that builded by the enslavers after robbing others of 
 freedom and property, as a ' gibberish ' sanction for their 
 crimes. Every day that the property system lasts the 
 original crime is repeated and ratified. 
 
 And this is why we are threatened with a French revo- 
 lution. It is because the people know that they have a 
 war with the Property Kings which grows from the nature 
 of the property system and will only end with that system's 
 abolishment. If the rich would heed this sorry days might 
 be saved, but they are sordid profit-grabbers, ignorant of 
 the movements of life, creeping in the bowels of finance, 
 wrapped in the mummied cerements of self. 
 
Are We Verging on Revolution? 97 
 
 But the people should heed it and accept consciously the 
 war against the property system which is in progress un- 
 consciously. They are whipped in every skirmish because 
 they do not recognize their aim. If they are tossed a sop 
 like government control of railway rates, they fancy they 
 have won a battle. But how much better off are the 
 people in foreign countries where rates are supervised ? 
 And how near are those countries to solving the first pro- 
 blem of the race — Property versus Man ? 
 
 If the people will think, they will see that the first step 
 to freedom must be a revolution in their own heads. They 
 must define their aim and bring themselves to be satisfied 
 with no peace terms which do not throw off all the tyranny 
 of the past. This means that the rich must go, and the 
 property system must go ; then human slavishness in every 
 form will follow, and the deadly servile instinct will atrophy 
 out of the brain. < 
 
 As soon as this aggressive course is conceived, it will be 
 seen how foolish it would be to use so huge a weapon as 
 violent revolution on such puny adversaries as our masters 
 and their literary and political domestics. The people need 
 but sweep the rubbish of false opinions on property and its 
 rights and sacredness out of their minds, and the opposition 
 of the Tsars of wealth will crumble before them like egg- 
 shells. 
 
 The people are now under the ether of Property. Those 
 who would ensure us against a French Revolution should 
 destroy respect for the property system in the popular mind, 
 that the people may be liberated from their trance to depose 
 the invading Huns of Wealth before they so intrench them- 
 selves that they can only be excised by furious revolution. I