 11th November, 1887. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Moral Oration, 11th November, 1887, by Valterine DeClaire. Let me begin my address with a confession. I make it sorrowfully and with self-disgust, but in the presence of great sacrifice we learn humility. And if my comrades could give their lives for their belief, why, let me give my pride. Yet I would not give it, for personal utterance is of trifling importance. Were it not that I think at this particular season it will encourage those of our sympathizers in the recent outburst of savagery may have disheartened and perhaps lead some who are standing where I once stood to do as I did later. This is my confession. Fifteen years ago, last May, when the echoes of the Haymarket bomb rolled through the little Michigan village where I then lived, I, like the rest of the credulous and brutal, read one lying newspaper headline. Anarchists throw a bomb in a crowd in the Haymarket in Chicago and immediately cried out, they ought to be hung. This, though I had never believed in capital punishment for ordinary criminals, for that ignorant, outrageous, bloodthirsty sentence I shall never forgive myself, though I know the dead men would have forgiven me, though I know those who love them forgive me. But my own voice, as it sounded that night, will sound so in my ears till I die. A bitter reproach and shame. What had I done? Credited the first wild rumor of an event of which I knew nothing, and in my mind sent men to the gallows without asking one word of defense. In one wild, unbalanced moment threw away the sympathies of a lifetime and became an executioner at heart. And what I did that night, millions did. And what I said, millions said. I have only one word of extenuation for myself and all those people. Ignorance. I did not know what anarchism was. I had never seen it used to save in histories, and there it was always synonymous with social confusion and murder. I believed the newspapers. I thought these men had thrown that bomb unprovoked into a mass of men and women from a wicked delight in killing. And so thought all those millions of others. But out of those millions there were some few thousand, I am glad I was one of them, who did not let the matter rest there. I know not what resurrection of human decency first stirred within me after that. Whether it was an intellectual suspicion that maybe I did not know all the truth of the case and could not believe the newspapers. Or whether it was the old strong undercurrent of sympathy which often prompts the heart to go out to the accused without a reason. But this I do know that though I was no anarchist at the time of the execution it was long and long before that that I came to the conclusion that the accusation was false. The trial of farce and there was no warrant either in justice or in law for their conviction and that the hanging, if hanging there should be, would be the act of a society composed of people who had said what I said on that first night and who had kept their eyes and ears fast shut ever since, determined to see nothing and to know nothing but rage and vengeance. Till the very end I hoped that mercy might intervene, though justice did not. And from the hour I knew neither would nor ever could again I distrusted law and lawyers, judges and governors alike and my whole being cried out to know what it was these men had stood for and why they were hanged, seeing it was not proven they knew anything about the throwing of the bomb. Little by little here and there I came to know what they had stood for was a very high and noble ideal of human life and what they were hanged for was preaching it to the common people. The common people who were as ready to hang them in their ignorance as the court and the prosecutor were in their malice. Little by little I came to know that these were men who had a clearer vision of human right than most of their fellows and who being moved by deep social sympathies wished to share their vision with their fellows and so proclaimed it in the marketplace. Little by little I realized that the misery, the pathetic submission, the awful degradation of the workers which from the time I was old enough to begin to think had borne heavily upon my heart as they must bear upon all who have hearts to feel it all had smitten theirs more deeply still. So deeply that they knew no rest save in seeking a way out and that was more than I had ever had the sense to conceive. For me there had never been a hope there should be no more rich and poor but a vague idea that there might not be so rich and so poor if the working men by combining could exact a little better wages and make their hours a little shorter. It was the message of these men and their deaths swept their message far out into ears that would never have heard their living voices that all such little dreams are folly, that not in demanding little, not in striking for an hour less, not in mountain labor to bring forth mice can any lasting alleviation come but in demanding much all in a bold self assertion of the worker to toil any hours he finds sufficient not that another finds for him here is where the way out lies that message and the message of others whose works associated with theirs their death drew to my notice took me up as it were upon a mighty hill where from I saw the roofs of the workshops of the little world I saw the machines, the things that men had made to ease their burden the wonderful things the iron genie I saw them set their iron teeth in the living flesh of the men who made them I saw the maimed and crippled stumps of men go limping away into the night that engulfs the poor perhaps to be thrown up in the flotsam and jetsam of beggary for a time perhaps to suicide in some dim corner where the black surge throws its slime I saw the rose fire of the furnace shining on the blanched face of the man who tended it and I knew surely as I knew anything in life that never would a free man feed his blood to the fire like that I saw swart bodies all mangled and crushed born from the mouths of the mines to be stowed away in a grave hardly less narrow and dark than that in which the living form had crouched ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day and I knew that in order that I might be warm I and you and those others who never do any dirty work those men had slaved away in those black graves and been crushed to death at last I saw beside city streets great heaps of horrible colored earth and down at the bottom of the trench from which it was thrown so far down that nothing else was visible bright gleaming eyes like a wild animals hunted into its hole and I knew that free men never chose to labor there with pick and shovel and that foul sewage soaked earth in that narrow trench in that deadly sewer gas ten, eight, even six hours a day only slaves would do it I saw deep down in the hull of the ocean liner the men who shoveled the coal burned and seared like paper before the grate and I knew that the record of the beautiful monster and the pleasure of the ladies who laughed on the deck were paid for with these withered bodies and souls I saw the scavenger carts go up and down drawn by sad brutes driven by sadder ones for never a man a man in full possession of his selfhood would freely choose to spend all his days in the nauseating stench that forces him to swill alcohol to neutralize it and I saw in the lead works how men were poisoned and in the sugar refineries how they went insane and in the factories how they lost their decency and in the stores how they learned to lie and I knew it was slavery made them do all this I knew the anarchists were right the whole thing must be changed the whole thing was wrong the whole system of production and distribution the whole ideal of life and I questioned the government then they had taught me to question it what have you done? you the keepers of the declaration and the constitution what have you done about all this? what have you done to preserve the conditions of freedom to the people? lied, deceived, fooled, tricked, bought and sold and got gain you have sold away the land that you had no right to sell you have murdered the aboriginal people that you might seize the land in the name of the white race and then steal it away from them again to be again sold by a second and a third robber and that buying and selling of the land has driven the people off the healthy earth and away from the clean air into these rot heaps of humanity called cities where every filthy thing is done and filthy labor breeds filthy bodies and filthy souls our boys are decayed with vice before they come to manhood our girls ah, well might John Harvey write another begateth a daughter white and gold she looks into the meadowland water and the world knows her no more they have sought her field and fold but the city, the city hath bought her it hath sold her piecemeal to students, rats and reek of the graveyard mold you have done this thing gentlemen who engineer the government and not only have you caused this ruin to come upon others you yourselves are rotten with this debauchery you exist for the purpose of granting privileges to whoever can pay most for you and so limiting the freedom of men to employ themselves that they must sell themselves into this frightful slavery or become tramps, beggars, thieves, prostitutes and murderers and when you have done all this what then do you do to them, these creatures of your own making you who have set them the example in every villainy do you then relent remembering the words of the great religious teacher to whom most of you offer lip service on the officially religious day do you go to these poor broken wretched creatures and love them love them and help them to teach them to be better no you build prisons high and strong and there you beat and starve and hang by the working of your system human being so unutterably degraded that they are willing to kill whomsoever they are told to kill at too much monthly salary this is what the government is has always been the creator and defender of privilege the organization of oppression and revenge to hope that it could ever become anything else is the vainest of delusions they tell you that anarchy the dream of social order without government is a wild fancy the wildest dream that ever entered the heart of man is the dream that mankind can ever help itself through an appeal to law or to come to any order that will not result in slavery wherein there is any excuse for government it was for telling the people this that these five men were killed for telling the people that the only way to get out of their misery was first to learn what their rights upon this earth were freedom to use the land and all within it and all the tools of production and then to stand all together and take them themselves and not to appeal to the jugglers of the law abolish the law that is abolish privilege and crime will abolish itself they will tell you these men were hanged for advocating force what? these creatures who drill men in the science of killing who put guns and clubs in hands they train to shoot and strike who hail with delight the latest inventions and explosives who exult in the machine that can kill the most with the least expenditure of energy who declare a war of extermination upon people who do not want their civilization who ravish and burn and garret and guillotine and hang and electrocute they have the impertinence to talk about the unrighteousness of force true these men did advocate the right to resist invasion by force you will find scarcely one in a thousand who does not believe in that right the one will be either a real Christian or a non-resistant anarchist it will not be a believer in the state no no it was not for advocating forcible resistance on principle but for advocating forcible resistance to their tyrannies and for advocating the society which would forever make an end of riches and poverty of governors and governed the spirit of revenge which is always stupid accomplished its brutal act had it lifted its eyes from its work it might have seen in the background of the scaffold that bleak November morning the dawn light of anarchy whiten across the world so it came first a gleam of hope to the proletaire a summons to rise and shake off his material bondage but steadily steadily the light has grown as year by year the scientist the literary genius the artist and the moral teacher have brought it to the tribute of their best work their unpaid work the work they did for love today it means not only material emancipation too it comes as the summing up of all those lines of thought an action which for 300 years have been making towards freedom it means fullness of being the free life and I say it boldly not withstanding the recent outburst of condemnation not withstanding the cry of lynch, burn, shoot, imprison, deport and the scarlet letter A to be branded low down upon the forehead and the latest excuse for that fond aesthetic decoration the button that for 2000 years no idea has so stirred the world as this none which had such living power to break down barriers of race and degree to attract prince and proletaire, poet and mechanic quaker and revolutionist no other ideal but the free life is strong enough to touch the man whose infinite pity and understanding goes alike to the hypocrite priest and the victim of Siberian whips the loving rebel who stepped from his title and his wealth to labor with all the laboring earth the sweet strong singer who sang no master high or low the lover who does not measure his love nor reckon on return the self-centered one who will not rule but also will not ruled be the philosopher who chanted the overman the devoted woman of the people A and these two these rebellious flashes from the vast cloud hung ominous obscurity of the anonymous these souls whom governmental and capitalistic brutality has whipped and goaded and stung to blind rage and bitterness these mad young lions of revolt these winkle reads who offer their hearts to the spears End of moral oration 11th November 1887 Recording by Rhonda Federman Part 1 of Crime and Punishment This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org This reading by Karl Manchester 2009 Crime and Punishment by Voltaireine DeClaire Men are of three sorts The turnbacks, the Russia heads and the indifference The first and second are comparatively few in number The really conscientious conservative eternally looking backward for his models and trying hard to preserve that which is is almost as scarce an article as the genuine radical who is eternally attacking that which is and looking forward to some indistinct but glowing vision of purified social life between them lies the vast nitrogenous body of the indifference who go through life with no large thoughts or intense feelings of any kind the best that can be said of them being that they serve to dilute the two fierce activities of the other two into the callous ears of those indifference nevertheless the opposing voices of conservative and radical are continually shouting and for years for centuries the conservative wins the day not because he really touches the consciences of the indifferent so much though in a measure he does that as because his way causes his hearer the least mental trouble it is easier for this lazy inert mentality to nod its head and approve the continuance of things as they are than to listen to proposals for change to consider, to question, to make an innovating decision these require activity, application and nothing is so foreign to the hibernating social conscience of your ordinary individual I say social conscience because I by no means wish to say that these are conscienceless people they have for active use sufficient conscience to go through their daily parts in life and they think that is all that is required of the lives of others of the effects of their attitude in cursing the existence of thousands whom they do not know they have no conception they sleep and they hear the voices of those who cry aloud about these things dimly as in dreams and they do not wish to awaken nevertheless at the end of the centuries they always awaken it is the radical who always wins at last at the end of the centuries institutions are reviewed by this aroused social conscience and revised sometimes are utterly rooted out thus it is with the institutions of crime and punishment the conservative holds that these things have been decided from all time that crime is a thing in itself with no other cause than the viciousness of man that punishment was decreed from Mount Sinai or whatever holy mountain happens to be believed in in his country that society is best served by strictness and severity of judgment and punishment and he wishes only to make his indifferent brothers keep us of other men's consciences along these lines he would have all men be hunters of men that crime may be tracked down and struck down the radical says all false all false and wrong crime has not been decided from all time crime like everything else has had its evolution according to place time and circumstance quote the demons of our sires become the saints that we adore end quote and the saints the saints and the heroes of our fathers are criminals according to our codes Abraham David Solomon could any respectable member of society admit that he had done the things they did crime is not a thing in itself not a plant without roots not a something proceeding from nothing the only true way to deal with it is to seek its causes as earnestly as painstakingly as the astronomer seeks the causes of the perturbations in the orbit of the planet he is observing sure that there must be one or many somewhere and punishment too must be studied the holy mountain theory is a failure punishment is a failure and it is a failure not because men do not hunt down and strike enough but because they hunt down and strike at all because in the chase of those who do ill they do ill themselves they brutalize their own characters and so much the more so because they are convinced that this time the brutal act is done in accord with conscience the murderous deed of the criminal was against conscience the torture or murder of the criminal by the official is with conscience thus the conscience is diseased and perverted and a new class of imbruted men created we have punished and punished for untold thousands of years and we have not gotten rid of crime we have not diminished it let us consider then the indifferentist shrugs his shoulders and remarks to the conservative what have I to do with it I will hunt nobody and I will save nobody let everyone take care of himself I pay my taxes, let the judges and the lawyers take care of the criminals and as for you Mr. Radical you weary me your talk is too heroic you want to play Atlas and carry the heavens on your shoulders well do it if you like but don't imagine I am going to act the stupid Hercules and transfer your burden to my shoulders rave away until you are tired but let me alone I will not let you alone I am no Atlas I am no more than a fly but I will annoy you I will buzz in your ears I will not let you sleep you must think about this that is about the heightened power of my voice or of any individual voice in the present state of the question I do not deceive myself I do not imagine that the question of crime and punishment will be settled till long, long after the memory of me shall be as completely swallowed up by time as last year's snow is swallowed up by the sea two thousand years ago a man whose soul revolted at punishment cried out judge not that ye be not judged and yet men and women who have taken his name upon their lips as holy have for all those two thousand years gone on judging as if their belief in what he said was only lip belief and they do it today and judges sit upon benches and send men to their death even judges who do not themselves believe in capital punishment and prosecutors exhaust their eloquence and their tricks to get men convicted and women and men bear witness against sinners and they all meet in church and pray forgivers are trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us do they mean anything at all by it? and I know that just as the voice of Jesus was not heard and is not heard save here and there just as the voice of Tolstoy is not heard save here and there and others great and small are lost in the great Echolus desert of indifferentism having produced little perceptible effect so my voice also will be lost and barely a slight ripple of thought be propagated over that dry and fruitless expanse even that the next wind of trial will straighten and leave as unimprinted sand nevertheless by the continued and unintermitting action of forces infinitesimal compared with the human voice the greatest effects are at length accomplished a wavelength of light is but the fifty thousandth part of an inch yet by the continuous action of waves like these have been produced all the creations of light the entire world of sight out of masses irresponsive dark colourless and no doubt that in time this cold and irresponsive mass of indifference will feel and stir and realise the force of the great sympathies which will change the attitude of the human mind as a whole towards crime and punishment and erase both from the world not by lawyers and not by judges shall the final cause of the criminal be tried but lawyer and judge and criminal together shall be told by the social conscience depart in peace a great ethical teacher once wrote words like unto these I have within me the capacity for every crime few reading them believe that he meant what he said most take it as a sententious utterance of one who in an abandonment of generosity wished to say something large and levelling but I think he meant exactly what he said I think that with all his purity Emerson had within him the turbid stream of passion and desire for all his hard cut granite features he knew the instincts of the weakling and the slave and for all the sweetness the tenderness and the nobility of his nature he had the tiger and the jackal in his soul I think that within every bit of human flesh and spirit that has ever crossed the enigma bridge of life from the prehistoric racial mourning until now all crime and all virtue were germinal out of one great soul stuff are we sprung you and I and all of us and if in you the virtue has grown and not the vice do not therefore conclude that you are essentially different from him whom you have helped to put in stripes and behind bars your balance may be more even you may be mixed in smaller proportions altogether or the outside temptation has not come upon you I am no disciple of that school whose doctrine is summed up in the teaching that man's will is nothing his material surroundings all I do not accept that popular socialism which would make saints out of sinners only by filling their stomachs I am no apologist for characterlessness and no petitioner for universal moral weakness I believe in the individual I believe that the purpose of life in so far as we can give it a purpose and it has non-save what we give it is the assertion and the development of strong self-centered personality it is therefore that no religion which offers vicarious atonement for the misdoer and no philosophy which rests on the cornerstone of irresponsibility makes any appeal to me I believe that immeasurable mischief has been wrought by the ceaseless repetition for the last two thousand years of the formula not through any merit of mine shall I enter heaven but through the sacrifice of Christ not through the sacrifice of Christ nor any other sacrifice shall anyone attain strength save in so far as he takes the spirit and the purpose of the sacrifice into his own life and lives it nor do I see anything as the result of the teaching of the helpless victims of external circumstance and under the same conditions will act precisely alike than a lot of spineless, nervous, bloodless crawlers in the tracks of stronger men too desirous of ease to be honest too weak to be successful rascals let this be put as strongly as it can now that nothing I shall say hereafter may be interpreted as a gospel of shifting and shirking but the difference between us the anarchists who preach self-government and none else and moralists who in times past and present have asked for individual responsibility is this that while they have always framed creeds and codes for the purpose of holding others to account we draw the line upon ourselves set the standard as high as you will live to it as near as you can and if you fail try yourself judge yourself condemn yourself if you choose teach and persuade your neighbour if you can consider and compare his conduct if you please speak your mind if you desire but if he fails to reach your standard or his own try him not judge him not condemn him not he lies beyond your sphere you cannot know the temptation nor the inward battle nor the weight of the circumstances upon him you do not know how long he fought before he failed therefore you cannot be just let him alone this is the ethical concept at which we have arrived not by revelation from any superior power not through the reading of any inspired book not by special illumination of our inner consciousness but by the study of the results of social experiment in the past as presented in the works of historians, psychologists criminologists, sociologists and legalists very likely so manyists sound a little oppressive and there may be those to whom they may even have a savor of pedantry it sounds much simpler and less ostentatious to say thus saith the Lord or the good book says but in the meet and marrow these last are the real presumptions these easygoing claims of familiarity with the will and intent of omnipotence it may sound more pedantic to you to say I have studied the accumulated wisdom of man and drawn certain deductions therefrom than to say I had a talk with God this morning and he said thus and so but to me the first statement is infinitely more modest moreover there is some chance of it being true while the other is highly imaginative fiction this is not to impugn the honesty of those who inherit this survival of an earlier mental state of the race and who accept it as they accept their appetites or anything else they find themselves born with nor is it to belittle those past efforts of active and ardent souls who claimed direct divine inspiration as the source of their doctrines all religions have been, in their general outlines the intuitive graspings of the race at truths which it had not yet sufficient knowledge to demonstrate rude and imperfect statements of ideas which were yet but germinal but which even then mankind had urgent need to conceive and upon which it afterwards spent the efforts of generations of lives to correct and perfect thus the very ethical concept of which I have been speaking as peculiarly anarchistic was preached as a religious doctrine by the 15th century Tolstoy Peter Chilkeke and in the 16th century the fanatical sect of the Anabaptists shook Germany from centre to circumference by a doctrine which included the declaration that quote, pleadings in courts of law, oaths, capital punishment and all absolute power were incompatible with the Christian faith end quote it was an imperfect illumination of the intellect such only as was possible in those less enlightened days but an illumination that defines certain noble conceptions of justice they appealed to all they had the Bible, the inner light the best that they knew to justify their faith we to whom a wider day is given who can appeal not to one book but to thousands who have the light of science which is free to all that can command the leisure and the will to know shining white and open on these great questions dim and obscure in the days of Peter Chilkeke we should be the last to cast a sneer at them for their heroic struggle with tyranny and cruelty though today the man who would claim their claims on their grounds would justly be rated Atavist or charlatan nothing or next to nothing did the Anabaptists know of history for genuine history, history which records the growth of a whole people which traces the evolution of its mind as seen in its works of peace its literature, its art, its constructions is the creation of our own age only within the last 75 years has the purpose of history come to have so much depth as this before that it was a mere register of dramatic situations with no particular connection a chronicle of the deeds of prominent persons a list of intrigues, scandals, murders big and little and the great people, the actual builders and preservers of the race the immense patient silent mass who painfully filled up all the waste places these destroyers made almost ignored and no man sought to discover the relations of even the recorded acts to any general causes no man conceived the notion of discovering what is political and moral growth or political and moral suicide that they did not do so is because writers of history who are themselves incarnations of their own time spirit could not get beyond the unscientific attitude of man born of ignorance and fostered by the Christian religion that man is something entirely different from the rest of organised life that he is a free moral agent good if he pleases and bad if he pleases that is, according as he accepts or rejects the will of God that every act is isolated having no antecedent morally but the will of its doer nor until modern science had found its way past prisons exilements, stakes, scaffolds and tortures to the demonstration that man is no free will freak thrust by an omnipotent joker upon the world of cause and sequence to play havoc therein but just a poor differentiated bit of protoplasm as much subject to the general processes of matter and mind as his ancient progenitor in the depths of the Silurian sea not until then was it possible for any real conception of the scope of history to begin not until then was it said quote, the actions of men are the effects of large and general causes humanity as a whole has a regularity of movement as fixed as the movement of the tides and given certain physical and social environments certain developments may be predicted with the certainty of a mathematical calculation end quote thus crime which for so many ages men have gone on punishing more or less light heartedly so far from having its final cause in individual depravity bears a steady and invariable relation to the production and distribution of staple food supplies a thing over which society itself at times can have no control as on the occasion of great natural disturbances and in general does not yet know how to manage wisely how much less then the individual this regularity of the recurrence of crime was pointed out long before the greatest statisticians of Europe who indeed did not go so far as to question why it was so nor to compare these regularities with other regularities but upon whom the constant repetition of certain figures in the statistics of murder, suicide, assault etc. made a profound impression it was left to the new historians the great pioneer among whom was H.T. Buckle in England to make the comparisons in the statistics and show that individual crimes as well as virtues are always calculable from general material conditions this is the basis from which we argue and it is a basis established by the comparative history of civilizations in no other way could it have been really established it might have been guessed at and indeed was but only when the figures are before us figures obtained quote by millions of observations extending over different grades of civilization with different laws, different opinions, different habits different morals, end quote, I am quoting Buckle only then are we able to say surely that the human mind proceeds with the regularity of operation overweighing all the creeds and codes ever invented and that if we would begin to understand the problem of the treatment of crime we must go to something far larger than the moral reformation of the criminal no prayers, no legal enactments will ever rid society of crime if they would there have been prayers enough and preachments enough and laws enough and prisons enough to have done it long ago but pray that the attraction of gravitation shall cease will it cease? enact that water shall freeze at a hundred degrees heat will it freeze? and no more will men be sane and honest and just when they are compelled to live in an insane dishonest and unjust society when the natural operation of the very elements of their being is ward upon by statutes and institutions which must produce outbursts destructive both to themselves and to others a way back in 1835 Kettle the French statistician wrote quote experience demonstrates in fact by every possible evidence this opinion which may seem paradoxical at first that it is society which prepares the crime and that the guilty one is but the instrument which executes it end quote every crime therefore is a charge against society which can only be rightly replied to when society can sense to look into its own errors and rectify the wrong it has done this is one of the results which must in the end flow from the labours of the real historians one of the reasons why history was worth writing at all now the next point in the problem is the criminal himself admitting what cannot be impeached that there is cause and sequence in the action of man admitting the pressure of general causes upon all alike what is the reason that one man is a criminal and another not from the days of the Roman jurist consults until now the legalists themselves have made a distinction between crimes against the law of nature and crimes merely against the law of society from the modern scientific standpoint no such distinction can be maintained nature knows nothing about crime and nothing ever was a crime until the social conscience made it so neither is it easy when one reads their law books even accepting their viewpoint to understand why certain crimes were cataloged as against the law of nature and certain others as of the more artificial character but I presume what were in general classed as crimes against nature were acts of violence committed against persons aside from these we have a vast an almost indeterminable number of offenses big and little which are in the main attacks upon the institution of property concerning which some very different things have to be said than concerning the first as to these first there is no doubt that these are real crimes by which I mean simply antisocial acts any action which violates the life or liberty of any individual is an antisocial act whether done by one person, by two or by a whole nation and the greatest crime that ever was perpetrated a crime besides which all individual atrocities diminished to nothing is war and the greatest, the least excusable of murderers are those who order it and those who execute it nevertheless the chiefest of murderers the government its own hands red with the blood of hundreds of thousands assumes to correct the individual offender enacting miles of laws to define the varying degrees of his offence and punishment and putting beautiful building stone to very hideous purposes for the sake of caging and tormenting him there too we do get a fig from a thistle sometimes out of this noisome thing the prison has sprung the study of criminology it is very new there is considerable painstaking nonsense about it but the main results are interesting and should be known by all who wish to form an intelligent conception of what a criminal is and how he should be treated these men who are cool and quiet and who move among criminals and study them as Darwin did his plants and animals tell us that these prisoners are reducible to three types the born criminal the criminaloid and the accidental criminal I am inclined to doubt a great deal that is said about the born criminal Professor Lombrozo gives us very exhaustive reports of the measurements of their skulls and their ears and their noses and their thumbs and their toes etc but I suspect that if a good many respectable decent never did a wrong thing in their lives people were to go up for measurement malformed ears and disproportionately long thumbs would be equally found among them if they took the precaution to represent themselves as criminals first still however few in number and they really are very few there are some born criminals people who through some malformation or deficiency or excess of certain portions of the brain are constantly impelled to violent deeds well there are some born idiots and some born cripples do you punish them for their idiocy or for their unfortunate physical condition on the contrary you pity them you realise that life is a long infliction to them and your best and tenderest sympathies go out to them why not to the other equally a helpless victim of an evil inheritance granting for the moment that you have the right to punish the mentally responsible surely you will not claim the right mentally irresponsible even the Lord does not hold the insane man guilty and the born criminal is irresponsible he is a sick man sick with the most pitiable chronic disease his treatment is for the medical world to decide and the best of them not for the prosecutor, the judge and the warden it is true that many criminologists including Professor Lombroso himself are of opinion that the best thing to do with the born criminal is to kill him at once since he can only be a curse to himself and others very heroic treatment we may inquire is he to be exterminated at birth because of certain physical indications of his criminality such neo-spartanism would scarcely commend itself to any modern society moreover the diagnosis might be wrong even though we had perpetual and incorruptible commission of the learned to sit in inquiry upon every pink-skinned little suspect three days old what then is he to be let go as he is now until he does some violent deed and then be judged more hardly because of his natural defect either proposition seems not only heartless and wicked but what the respectable world is often more afraid of being than either ludicrous if one is really a born criminal he will manifest criminal tendencies in early life and being so recognized should be cared for according to the most humane methods of treating the mentally afflicted the second or criminal-eyed class is the most numerous of the three these are criminals first because being endowed with strong desires and unequal reasoning powers they cannot maintain the uneven battle against a society wherein the majority of individuals must all the time deny their natural appetites if they are to remain unstained with crime they are in short the ordinary man who it must be admitted has a great deal of paste in him plus an excess of wants of one sort or another but generally physical society outside of prisons is full of these criminal-oids who sometimes have in place of the power of genuine moral resistance a sneaking cunning by which they manage to steer a shady course between the crime and the punishment it is true these people are not pleasant subjects to contemplate but then through that very stage of development the whole human race has had to pass in its progress from the beast to the man the stage I mean of over-plus of appetite opposed by weak moral resistance and if now some it is not certain that their number is very great have reversed the proportion it is only because they are the fortunate inheritors of the results of thousands of years of struggle and failure struggle and failure but struggle again it is precisely these criminal-oids who are most sinned against by society for they are the people who need to have the right of doing things made easy and who when they act criminally need the most encouragement to help the feeble and humiliated moral sense to rise again to try again the third class the accidental or occasional criminals are perfectly normal well-balanced people who through tremendous stress of outward circumstance and possibly some untoward mental disturbance arising from those very notions of the conduct of life which form part of their moral being suddenly commit an act of violence which is at utter variance with their whole former existence such as for instance the murder of a seducer by the father of the injured girl or of a wife's paramour by her husband if I believed in severity at all I should say that these were the criminals upon whom society should look with most severity because they are the ones who have the most mental responsibility but that also is nonsense for such an individual has within him a severer judge a more pitiless jailer than any court or prison his conscience and his memory leave him to these or no in mercy take him away from these whenever you can he will suffer enough and there is no fear of his action being repeated now all these people are with us and it is desirable that something be done to help the case what does society do or rather what does government do with them remember we are speaking now only of crimes of violence it hangs, it electrocutes it exiles, it imprisons why? for punishment and why punishment? not says Blackstone by way of atonement or expiation for the crime committed for that must be left to the just determination of the supreme being but as a precaution against future offences of the same kind this is supposed to be affected in three ways either by reforming him or getting rid of him altogether or by deterring others by making an example of him end of part one part two of crime and punishment this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org this reading by Carl Manchester 2009 let us see how these precautions work exile which is still practiced by some governments and imprisonment are according to the theory of law for the purpose of reforming the criminal that he may no longer be a menace to society logic would say that anyone who wished to obliterate cruelty from the character of another must himself show no cruelty one who would teach regard for the rights of others must himself be regardful yet the story of exile and prison is the story of the lash, the iron the chain and every torture that the fiendish ingenuity of the non-criminal class can devise by way of teaching criminals to be good to teach men to be good they are kept in airless cells made to sleep on narrow planks to look at the sky through iron grates to eat food that revolts their palates and destroys their stomachs battered and broken down in body and soul and this is what they call reforming men not very many years ago the Philadelphia dailies told us and while we cannot believe all of what they say and are bound to believe that such cases yet the bear facts were true that Judge Gordon ordered an investigation into the workings of the eastern penitentiary officials and it was found that an insane man had been put into a cell with two sane ones and when he cried in his insane way and the other two asked that he be put elsewhere the warden gave them a strap to whip him with and they tied him in some way his legs were burned when he moved all scarred with the burns he was brought into the court and the other men frankly told what they had done and why they had done it this is the way they reform men do you think that people come out of a place like that better with more respect for society with more regard for the rights of their fellow men I don't think that people come out of there with their hearts full of bitterness much harder than when they went in that this is often the case is admitted by those who themselves believe in punishment and practice it for the fact is that out of the criminaloid class there develops the habitual criminal the man who is perpetually getting in prison no sooner is he out than he does something else and gets in again the brand that at first scorched him has succeeded in scarring he no longer feels the ignominy he is a jailbird and he gets to have a cynical pride in his own degradation every man's hand is against him and his hand is against every man's such are the reforming effects of punishment yet there was a time when he too might have been touched had the right word been spoken it is for society to find and speak that word this for prison and exile hanging electrocution these of course are not for the purpose of reforming the criminal these are to deter others from doing as he did and the supposition is that the severe of the punishment the greater the deterrent effect in commenting upon this principle Blackstone says we may observe that punishments of unreasonable severity have less effect in preventing crimes commending the manners of a people than such as a more merciful in general end quote he further quotes Montesquieu quote for the excessive severity of laws hinders their execution when the punishment surpasses all measure the public will frequently out of humanity prefer impunity to it end quote again Blackstone it is a melancholy truth that among the variety of actions daily liable to commit no less than 160 have been declared by active parliament to be felonies worthy of instant death so dreadful a list instead of diminishing increases the number of offenders end quote Robert Ingersoll speaking on crimes against criminals before the New York Bar Association a lawyer addressing lawyers treating of this same period of which Blackstone writes says quote there is something in injustice in cruelty which tends to defeat itself there never were so many traitors in England as when the traitor was drawn and quartered when he was tortured in every possible way when his limbs torn and bleeding were given to the fury of mobs or exhibited pierced by pikes or hung in chains the frightful punishments produced intense hatred of the government and traitors increased until they became powerful enough to decide what treason was and who the traitors were and to inflict the same torments on others end quote the fact that Blackstone was right and Ingersoll was right in saying that severity of punishment increases crime is silently admitted in the abrogation of those severities by acts of parliament and acts of congress it is also shown by the fact that there are no more murders proportionately in states where the death penalty does not exist than in those where it does severity is therefore admitted by the state itself to have no deterrent influence on the intending criminal and to take the matter out of the province of the state we have only to instance the horrible atrocities perpetrated by white mobs upon negroes charged with outrage nothing more fiendishly cruel can be imagined yet these outrages multiply it would seem then that the notion of making a horrible example of the misdoer is a complete failure as a specific example of this Ingersoll in the same lecture instance that quote a few years before a man was hanged in Alexandria, Virginia one who witnessed the execution on that very day murdered a peddler in the smithsonian grounds at washington he was tried and executed and one who witnessed his hanging went home and on the same day murdered his wife end quote evidently the brute is rather aroused than terrified by scenes of execution what then? if extreme punishments do not deter and if what are considered mild punishments do not reform is any measure of punishments conceivable or attainable which will better our case before answering this question let us consider the class of crimes which so far has not been dwelt upon but which nevertheless comprises probably nine-tenths of all offences committed these are all the various forms of stealing robbery, burglary, theft, embezzlement forgery, counter-fitting and the thousand and one ramifications and offshoots of the act of taking what the law defines as another's it is impossible to consider crimes of violence apart from these because the vast percentage of murders and assaults committed by the criminaloid class are simply incidental to the commission of the so-called lesser crime a man often murders in order to escape with his booty though murder was no part of his original intention why now have we such a continually increasing percentage of stealing? will you persistently hide your heads in the sand and say it is because men grow worse as they grow wiser that individual wickedness is the result of all our marvellous labours to compass sea and land and make the earth yield up her wealth to us dare you say that? it is not so the reason men steal is because their rights are stolen from them before they are born a human being comes into the world he wants to eat he wants to breathe he wants to sleep he wants to use his muscles his brain he wants to love to dream to create these wants constitute him the whole man he can no more help expressing these activities than water can help running downhill if the freedom to do any of these things is denied him then by so much he is a crippled creature and his energy will force itself into some abnormal channel or be killed altogether now I do not mean that he has a natural right to do these things inscribed on any law book of nature nature knows nothing of rights she knows power only and a Laos has as much natural right as a man to the extent of its power what I do mean to say is that man in common with many other animals has found that by associative life he conquers the rest of nature and that this society is slowly being perfected and that this perfectionment consists in realising that the solidarity and safety of the whole arises from the freedom of the parts that such freedom constitutes man's social right and that any institution which interferes with this right will be destructive of the association will breed criminals will work its own ruin this is the word of the sociologist of the greatest of them Herbert Spencer now do we see that all men eat eat well you know we do not some have so much that they are sickened with the extravagance of dishes and know not where next to turn for a new palatal sensation they cannot even waste their wealth some and they are mostly the hardest workers eat poorly and fast for their work allows them no time to enjoy even what they have some I have seen them myself in the streets of New York this winter and the look of their wolfish eyes was not pleasant to see stand in long lines waiting for midnight and the plate of soup dealt out by some great newspaper office stretching out whole blocks of them as other men wait on the first night of some famous star at the theatre some die because they cannot eat at all pray tell me what these last have to lose by becoming thieves and why shall they not become thieves and is the action of the man who takes the necessities which have been denied to him really criminal is he morally worse than the man who crawls in a cellar and dies of starvation I think not he is only a little more assertive cardinal Manning said quote a starving man has a natural right to his neighbour's bread end quote the anarchist says quote a hungry man has a social right to bread end quote and there have been whole societies and races among whom that right was never questioned and whatever were the mistakes of those societies whereby they perished this was not a mistake and we shall do well to take so much wisdom from the dead and gone the simple ethics of the stomach which with all our achievement we cannot despise or despising shall perish as our reward but you will say and say truly to begin by taking loaves means to end by taking everything and murdering too very often and in that you draw the indictment against your own system if there is no alternative between starving and stealing and for thousands there is none then there is no alternative between societies murdering its members or the members disintegrating society let society consider its own mistakes then let it answer itself for all these people it has robbed and killed let it cease its own crimes first to return to the faculties of man all would breathe and some do breathe they breathe the air of the mountains of the seas of the lakes even the atmosphere in the gambling dens of Monte Carlo for a change some packed thickly together in closed rooms where men must sweat and faint to save tobacco breathe the noisome reek that rises from the spittle of their consumptive neighbours some mostly babies lie on the cellar doors along Bainbridge Street on summer nights and bathe their lungs in that putrid air where a thousand lungs have breathed before and grow up pale and decayed looking as the rotting vegetables whose exaltations they draw in some far down underground meet the choke damp and do not breathe at all do you expect healthy morals out of these poisoned bodies? some sleep they have so much time that they take all manner of expensive drugs to try what sleeping it off a different way is like some sleep upon none too easy beds a few short hours too few not to waken more tired than ever and resume the endless grind of waking life some sleep bent over the books they are too tired to study though the mind clamours for food after the long days physical toil some sleep with hand upon the throttle of the engine after twenty six hours of duty and crash they have sleep enough some use their muscles they use them to punch bags and other gentlemen's stomachs when their heads are full of wine some use them to club other men and women at two dollars fifty a day some exhaust them welding them into iron or weaving them into wool for ten or eleven hours a day and some become atrophied sitting at desks till they are mere spectres of men and women some love and there is no end to the sensualities of their love because all normal expressions have lost their saver through excess some love and see their love tried and worn and threadbare a skeleton of love because the practicality of life is always there to repress the purely emotional some are stricken in health so robbed of power to feel that they never love at all and some dream think create and the world is filled with the glory of their dreams but who knows the glory of the dream that never was born lost and dead and buried away somewhere there under the roofs where the exquisite brain was ruined by the heavy labour of life and what of the dream that turned to madness and destroyed the thing it loved the best these are the things that make criminals the perverted forces of man turned aside by the institution of property which is the giant social mistake today it is your law which keeps men from using the sources and the means of wealth production unless they pay tribute to other men it is this and nothing else which is responsible for all the second class of crimes and all those of violence incidentally committed while carrying out a robbery let me quote here a most sensible and appropriate editorial which recently appeared in the Philadelphia North American in comment upon the proposition of some foolish preacher to limit the right of reproduction to rich families quote the earth was constructed, made habitable and populated without the advice of a commission of superior persons and until they appeared and began meddling with affairs making laws and setting themselves up as rulers poverty and its evil consequences were unknown to humanity when social science finds a way to remove obstructions to the operation of natural law and to the equitable distribution of the products of labour poverty will cease to be the condition of the masses of people and misery, crime and problems of population will disappear end quote and they will never disappear until it does all hunting down of men, all punishments are but so many ineffective efforts to sweep back the tide with a broom the tide will fling you, broom and all against the idle walls that you have built to fence it in tear down those walls or the sea will tear them down for you have you ever watched it coming in, the sea? when the wind comes roaring out of the mist and a great bellowing thunders up from the water have you watched the white lions chasing each other towards the walls and leaping up with foaming anger as they strike and turn and chase each other along the black bars of their cage in rage to devour each other and tear back and leap in again have you ever wondered in the midst of it all which particular drops of water would strike the wall if one could know all the factors one might calculate even that but who can know them all? of one thing only we are sure some must strike it they are the criminals those drops of water pitching against that silly wall and broken just why it was these particular ones we cannot know but some had to go we cannot curse them you have cursed them enough let the people free there is a class of crimes of violence which arises from another set of causes than economic slavery acts which the result of an antiquated moral notion of the true relations of men and women these are the nemesis of the institution of property in love if everyone would learn that the limit of his right to demand a certain course of conduct in sex relations is himself that the relation of his beloved ones to others is not a matter for him to regulate any more than the relations of those whom he does not love if the freedom of each is unquestioned and whatever moral rigors are exacted and exacted of one's self only if this principle is accepted and followed crimes of jealousy will cease religions and governments uphold this institution and constantly tend to create the spirit of ownership with all its horrible consequences ah you will say perhaps it is true perhaps when this better social condition is evolved and this freer social spirit we shall be rid of crime at least nine tenths of it but meanwhile must we not punish to protect ourselves the protection it does not protect the violent man does not communicate his intention when he executes it or attempts its execution more often than otherwise it is some unofficial person who catches or stops him if he is a born criminal or in other words an insane man he should I reiterate be treated as a sick person not punished not made to suffer if he is one of the accidental criminals his act will not be repeated his punishment will always be with him if he is of the middle class your punishment will not reform him it will only harden him and it will not deter others as for thieves the great thief is within the law or he buys it and as for the small one see what you do to protect yourself against him you create a class of persons who are sworn to the service of the club and the revolver a set of spies a set whose business is to deal constantly with these unhappy beings who in rare instances are softened thereby but in the majority of cases become hardened to their work as butchers to the use of the knife a set whose business it is to serve sell and lock and key and lastly the lowest infamy of all the hangman does anyone want to shake his hand the hand that kills for pay now against all these persons individually there is nothing to be said they may probably be very humane well-intentioned persons when they start in but the end of all this is embrutement one of our dailies recently observed that quote men in charge of prisons have but too often been men who ought themselves to have been prisoners end quote the anarchist does not agree with that he would have no prisons at all but I am quite sure that if the editor himself were put in the prison keeper's place he too would turn hard and the opportunities of the official criminal are much greater than those of the unofficial one lawyer and governmentalist as he was Ingersoll said quote it is safe to say that governments have committed far more crimes than they have prevented end quote then why create a second class of parasites worse than the first why not put up with the original one moreover you have another thing to consider than the simple problem of a wrong inflicted upon a guilty man how many times has it happened that the innocent man has been convicted I remember an instance of a man convicted of murder in Michigan he had served 27 years in Jackson Penitentiary for Michigan is not a hang state when the real murderer dying confessed and the state pardoned that innocent man because it was the quickest legal way to let him out I hope he has been able to pardon the state not very long ago a man was hanged here in the city he had killed his superintendent some doctors said he was insane the government expert said he was not they said he was faking insanity when he proclaimed himself Jesus Christ and he was hanged afterwards the doctors found two cysts in his brain the state of Pennsylvania had killed a sick man and as long as punishments exist these mistakes will occur if you accept the principle at all you must accept with it the blood guilt of innocent man not only this but you must accept also the responsibility for all the misery which results to others whose lives are bound up with that of the convict for even he is loved by someone much loved perhaps it is a foolish thing to turn adrift a house full of children to become criminals in turn perhaps in order to frighten some indefinite future offender by making an example of their father or mother yet how many times has it not happened and this is speaking only from the practical selfish side of the matter there is another one from which I would rather appeal to you and from which I think you would after all prefer to be appealed too ask yourselves each of you whether you are quite sure that you have feeling enough understanding enough and have you suffered enough to be able to weigh and measure out another man's life or liberty no matter what he has done and if you have not yourself are you able to delegate to any judge the power which you have not the great Russian novelist Dostoevsky in his psychological study of the same subject traces the sufferings of a man who had committed a shocking murder his whole body and brain are a continual prey to torture he gives himself up seeking relief in confession he goes to prison for in barbarous Russia they have not the barbarity of capital punishment for murderers and less political ones but he finds no relief he remains for a year bitter resentful a prey to all miserable feelings but at last he is touched by love the silent unobtrusive all conquering love of one who knew it all and forgave it all and the regeneration of his soul began the criminal slew says Tolstoy are you better than when you slay he took another's liberty and is it the right way therefore for you to take his violence is no answer to violence quote have goodwill to all that lives letting unkindness die and greed and wrath so that your lives be made as soft airs passing by end quote so said Lord Buddha the light of Asia and another said quote you have heard that it hath been said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth but I say unto you resist not him that is evil end quote yet the vengeance that the great psychologist saw was futile the violence that the greatest living religious teacher and the greatest dead ones advised no man to reek that violence is done daily and hourly by every little-hearted prosecutor who prosecutes at so much a day by every petty judge who buys his way into office with common politicians tricks and deals in men's lives and liberties as a trader deals in pins by every neat-sold and cheap-sold member of the Unco Guide whose respectable bargain counter-maxims of morality have as much effect to stem the great floods and storms that shake the human will as the waving of a lady's kid-glove against the tempest those who have not suffered cannot understand how to punish those who have understanding will not I said at the beginning and I say again I believe that in every one of us all things are germinal in judge and prosecutor and prison-keeper too and even in those small moral souls who cut out one undeviating pattern for all men to fit even in them there are the germs of passion and crime and sympathy and forgiveness and some-day things will stir in them and accuse them and awaken them this awakening will come when suddenly one day there breaks upon them with realising force the sense of the unison of life the irrevocable relationship of the saint to the sinner the judge to the criminal that all personalities are intertwined and rushing upon doom together once in my life it was given to me to see the outward manifestation of this unison it was in 1897 we stood upon the base of the Nelson Monument in Trafalgar Square below were ten thousand people packed together with upturned faces they had gathered to hear and see men and women whose hands and limbs were scarred all over with the red hot irons of the tortures in the fortress of Montjuic for the crime of an unknown person these twenty-eight men and women together with four hundred others had been cast into that terrible den and tortured with the infamies of the inquisition to make them reveal that of which they knew nothing after a year of such suffering as makes the decent human heart sick only to contemplate with nothing proven against them some even without trial they were suddenly released with orders to leave the country within twenty-four hours they were then in Trafalgar Square and to the credit of Old England be it said Harlot, and mother of Harlots though she is for there was not another country among the great nations of the earth to which those twenty-eight innocent people could go for they were paupers impoverished by that cruel state of Spain in the terrible battle for their freedom they would not have been admitted to free America when Francesco Garner speaking in a language which most of them did not understand lifted his poor scarred hands the faces of those ten thousand people moved together like the leaves of a forest in the wind they waved to and fro they rose and fell the visible moved in the breath of the invisible it was the revelation of the action of the unconscious the fatalistic unity of man sometimes even now as I look upon you it is as if the bodies that I see were as transparent bubbles where through the red blood boils and flows a turbulent stream churning and tossing and leaping and behind us and our generation far far back endlessly backwards where all the bubbles are broken and not a ripple remains the silent pouring of the great red river the unfathomable river through the unbroken forest and the untilled plain backwards through the forgotten world of savagery and animal life back somewhere to its dark sources in deep sea and old night the rushing river of blood no fancy real tangible blood the blood that hurries in your veins while I speak bearing with it the curses and blessings of the past river rolled through what desolate wastes has it not spread its ooze through what desperate passages has it been forced what strength, what invincible strength is in that hot stream you are just the bubble on its crest where will the current fling you ere you die and what moment will the fierce impurities born from its somber and to neighbourous past up in you shall you then cry out for punishment if they are hurled up in another if flung against the merciless rocks of the channel while you swim easily in the midstream they fall back and hurt other bubbles can you not feel that quote men are the heartbeats of man the plumes that leather his wings stormworn since being began with the wind and the thunder of things things are cruel and blind their strength detains and deforms and the wearying wings of the mind still beat up the stream of their storms still as one swimming upstream they strike out blind in the blast in thunder of vision and dream and lightning of future and past we are baffled and caught in the current and bruised upon edges of shoals weeds or as reeds in the torrent of things are the wind shaken souls spirit by spirit goes under a foam bell's bubble of breath that blows and opens a sunder and blurs not the mirror of death end quote is it not enough that things are cruel and blind must we also be cruel and blind when the whole thing amounts to so little at the most we can bitter it more and crush and stifle what must soon be crushed and stifled anyhow can we not knowing what remnants of things dead and drowned are floating through us haunting our brains with spectres of old deeds and scenes of violence can we not learn to pardon our brother to whom the spectres are more real upon whom greater stress was laid can we not recalling all the evil things that we have done or left undone only because some scarcely perceptible weight struck down the balance or because some kindly word came to us in the midst of our bitterness and showed that not all was hateful in the world can we not understand him for whom the balance was not struck down the kind word unspoken believe me forgiveness is better than wrath better for the wrongdoer who will be touched and regenerated by it and better for you and you are wrong if you think it is hard it is easy far easier than to hate it may sound like a paradox but the greater the injury the easier the pardon let us have done with this savage idea of punishment which is without wisdom let us work for the freedom of man from the oppressions which make criminals and for the enlightened treatment of all the sick and though we may never see the fruit of it we may rest assured that the great tide of thought is setting our way and that quote while the tired wave vainly breaking seems here no painful inch to gain far back through creeks and inlets making comes silent flooding in the main end quote end of crime and punishment in defence of Emma Goldman this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org in defence of Emma Goldman by Volta Rain declare a starving man has a natural right to his neighbor's bread cardinal manning I have no idea of petitioning for rights whatever the rights of the people are they have a right to them and none have a right to either withhold or grant them pains rights of man ask for work if they do not give you work ask for bread if they do not give you work or bread then take bread Emma Goldman the light is pleasant is it not my friends to look into each other's faces to see the hands that clasp our own to read the eyes that search our thoughts to know what manner of lips give utterance to our pleasant greetings it is good to be able to wink defiance at the night the cold unseeing night how weird, how gruesome how chilly it would be if I stood here in blackness a shadow addressing shadows in a house of blindness yet each would know that he is not alone yet might we stretch hands and touch each other and feel the warmth of human presence near yet might a sympathetic voice wring through the darkness quickening the dragging moments the lonely prisoners in the cells of black walls island have neither light nor sound the short day hurries across the sky the short day still more shortened in the gloomy walls the long chill night creeps up so early weaving its somber curtain before the imprisoned dies and through the curtain comes no sympathizing voice beyond the curtain lies the prison silence beyond that the cheerless uncommunicating land and still beyond the icy fretting river black and menacing ready to drown a wall of night a wall of stone a wall of water thus has the great state of New York answered Emma Goldman thus have the classes reply to the masses thus do the rich respond to the poor thus does the institution of property give its ultimatum to hunger give us work said Emma Goldman if you do not give us work then give us bread either work or bread then we shall take bread it wasn't a very wise remark to make to the state of New York that is, well then its watchdogs the police but I fear me much that the apostles of liberty the forerunners of revolt have never been very wise there is a record of a seditious person who once upon a time went about with a few despised followers in Palestine taking corn out of other peoples corn fields on the Sabbath day too that same person when he wished to ride into Jerusalem told his disciples to go forward to where they would find a young cult tied to unloose him and to bring him to him and if anyone interfered or said anything to them were to say my master hath need of it that same person said give to him that asketh of thee and from him that takeeth away thy goods ask them not back again that same person once stood before the hungry multitudes of Galilee and taught them saying the scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat and therefore whatever they bid you to observe that observe and do but do not ye after their works for they say and do not for they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be born and lay them on men's shoulders but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers but all their works they do to be seen of men they make broad their phylacteries and enlarge the borders of their garments and love the uppermost rooms at feasts and the chief seats in the synagogues and greetings in the markets and to be called of men rabbi rabbi and turning to the scribes and the Pharisees he continued wo unto you scribes and Pharisees hypocrites for ye devour widows houses and for a presence make long prayers therefore shall ye receive the greater damnation wo unto you scribes and Pharisees hypocrites for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin and have omitted the weightier matters of the law judgment and mercy and faith these are ye to have done and not left the other undone ye blind guides that strain edinette and swallow a camel wo unto you scribes and Pharisees hypocrites for ye may clean the outside of the cup and plaster but within they are full of extortion and excess wo unto you scribes and Pharisees hypocrites for ye are like unto widowed sepulchers which indeed appear beautiful outward but within are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness even so ye outwardly appear righteous unto men but within ye are full of hypocrisy and inequity wo unto you scribes and Pharisees hypocrites because ye build the tombs of the prophets and garnish the sepulchers of the righteous and say if we had been in the days of our fathers we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets fill ye up with the measure of your fathers ye serpents ye generations of vipers how can ye escape the damnation of hell yes these are the words of the outlaw who is alleged to form the foundation stone of modern civilization to the authorities of his day hypocrites, extortionists doers of iniquity robbers of the poor blood partakers serpents vipers fit for hell it wasn't a very wise speech from beginning to end as he knew it when he stood before Pilate to receive his sentence when he bore his heavy crucifix up calvary when nailed upon it stretched in agony he cried my god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me no it wasn't wise but it was very grand this grand foolish person this beggar tramp this thief who justified the action of hunger this man who set the right of property beneath his foot this individual who defied the state do you know why he was so feared and hated and punished? because as it is said in the record the common people heard him gladly and the accusation before Pontius Pilate was we found this fellow perverting the whole nation he stirreth up the people teaching throughout all jewelry ah, the dreaded common people when cardinal Manning wrote necessity knows no law and a starving man has a natural right to his neighbor's bread who thought of arresting cardinal Manning? his was a carefully written article in the fortnightly review who read it not the people who needed bread without food in their stomachs they had no fifty cents to spend for a magazine it was not the voice of the people themselves asserting rights no one for instance imagined that cardinal Manning put himself at the head of ten thousand hungry men to loot the bakeries of London it was a piece of ethical hair splitting to be discussed in after dinner speeches by the wine muddled gentlemen who think themselves most competent to consider such subjects when their dress coats are spoiled by the vomit of gluttony and drunkenness but when Emma Goldman stood in Union Square and said if they do not give you work or bread then take bread the common people heard her gladly and as of old the wandering carpenter of Nazareth addressed his own class teaching throughout all jewelry stirring up the people against the authorities so the dressmaker of New York addressing the unemployed working people of New York was the menace of the depths of society crying in its own tongue the authorities heard and were afraid therefore the triple wall it is the old old story when Thomas Payne one hundred years ago published the first part of the rights of man the part in which he discusses principles only the addition was a high priced one reaching comparatively few readers it created only a literary furor when the second part appeared the part in which he treats of the application of principles in which he declares that men should not petition rights but take them it came out in a cheap form so that one hundred thousand copies were sold in a few weeks that brought down the prosecution of the government it had reached the people that might act and prosecution followed prosecution and the court of attorney Bay was full of the best men of England thus were the limitations of speech and press declared and thus will they ever be declared so long as there are antagonistic interests in human society understand me clearly I believe that the term constitutional right of free speech is a meaningless phrase for this reason the constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence and particularly the latter where in their day progressive expressions of progressive ideals but they are throughout characterized by the metaphysical philosophy which dominated the thought of the last century they speak of inherent rights inalienable rights natural rights etc they declare that men are equal because of a supposed mysterious wetness existing somehow apart from matter I do not say this to disparage those grand men who dared to put themselves against the authorities of the monarchy and to conceive a better ideal of society one which they certainly thought would secure equal rights to men because I realize fully that no one can live very far in advance of the time spirit and I am positive in my own mind that unless some cataclysm destroys the human race before the end of the 20th century the experience of the next 100 years will explode many of our own theories but the experience of this age has proven that metaphysical quantities do not exist apart from materials and hence humanity cannot be made equal by declarations on paper unless the material conditions for equality exist it is worse than mockery to pronounce men equal and unless there is equality and by equality I mean equal chances for everyone to make the most of himself unless I say these equal chances exist freedom, either of thought, speech or action is equally a mockery I once read that 1 million angels could dance at the same time on the point of a needle possibly 1 million angels might be able to get a decent night's lodging by virtue of their constitutional rights one single tramp couldn't and whenever the tongues of the non-possessing class threaten the possessors whenever the disinherited menace the privilege that moment you will find that the Constitution isn't made for you therefore I think anarchists make a mistake when they contend for their constitutional rights as a prominent lawyer Mr. Thomas Earl White of Philadelphia himself an anarchist said to me not long since what are you going to do about it go into the courts and fight for your legal rights anarchists haven't got any well says the governmentalist you can't consistently claim any you don't believe in constitutions and laws exactly so and if anyone will right my constitutional wrongs I will willingly make him a present of my constitutional rights at the same time I am perfectly sure no one will ever make this exchange nor will any help ever come to the wronged class from the outside salvation on a vicarious plan isn't worth despising redress of wrongs will not come by petitioning the powers that be he has rights who dare maintain them the Lord helps them who help themselves and when one is able to help himself I don't think he is apt to trouble the Lord much for his assistance as long as the working people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work so long they will not get it so long as they tramp the streets whose stones they lay whose filth they clean whose sewers they dig yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them move on as long as they go from factory to factory begging for the opportunity to be a slave receiving the insults of bosses and foremen getting the old no the old shake of the head in these factories they built whose machines they rot so long as they consent to herd like cattle in the cities driven year after year more and more off the mortgaged land the land they cleared fertilized cultivated rendered of value so long as they stand shivering gazing through plate glass windows at overcoats which they made but cannot buy starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves be it God or priest or politician or employer or charitable society to remedy matters so long deliverance will be delayed when they conceive the possibility of a complete international federation of labor whose constituent group shall take possession of land, mine, factories all the instruments of production issue their own certificates of exchange and in short, conduct their own industry without regulative interference from lawmakers or employers then we may hope for the only help which counts for ought self-help the only condition which can guarantee free speech and no paper guarantee needed but meanwhile, while we are waiting for there is yet much grist of the middle class around between the upper and nether mill wheels of economic evolution while we await the formation of the International Labor Trust while we watch for the day when there are enough people with nothing in their stomachs and desperation in their heads to go about the work of expropriation what shall those do who are starving now that is the question which Emma Goldman had to face and she answered it by saying ask and if you do not receive take take bread I do not give you that advice not because I do not think that bread belongs to you not because I do not think that you would be morally right in taking it not that I am not more shocked and horrified and embittered by the report of one human being starving in the heart of plenty than by all the Pittsburgh's and Chicago's and Homestead's and Tennessee's and Corda Aline's and Buffalo's and Barcelona's and Paris's not that I do not think one little bit of sensitive human flesh is worth all the property rights in New York City not that I think the world will ever be saved by the sheeps of virtue of going patiently to the shambles not that I do not believe the expropriation possessing class is inevitable and that the expropriation will begin by just such acts Emma Goldman advised these the taking possession of wealth already produced not that I think you owe any consideration to the conspirators of Wall Street or those who profit by their operations as such nor ever will till they are reduced to the level of human beings having equal chances with you to earn their share of social wealth and no more not that I would have you forget the consideration they have shown to you that they have advised lead for strikers strict nine for tramps bread and water is good enough for working people not that I cannot hear yet in my ears the words of one who said to me of the Studebaker wagon works strikers if I had my way I'd mow them down with Gatlin guns not that I would have you forget the electric wire of Fort Frick nor the Pinkerton's nor the militia nor the prosecutions for murder and treason not that I would have you forget the fourth of May when your constitutional right of free speech was vindicated nor the 11th of November when it was assassinated not that I would have you forget the single dinner at Delmonico's which Ward McAllister tells us cost ten thousand dollars would I have you forget that the wine in the glasses was your children's blood it must be a rare drink children blood I have read of the wonderful sparkle on costly champagne I have never seen it if I did I think it would look to me like mother tears over the little white wasted forms of dead babies dead because there was no milk in their breasts yes yes I want you to remember that these rich are blood drinkers terrors of human flesh gnaws of human bones yes if I had the power I would burn your wrongs upon your hearts and characters that should glow like live coals in the night I have not a tongue of fire as Emma Goldman has I cannot stir the people I must speak in my own cold calculated way perhaps that is the reason I am let to speak at all but if I had the power my will is good enough you know how Shakespeare's Mark Anthony addressed the populace of Rome I am no orator as Brutus is but as you know me all a plain blunt man that loved my friend and that they know full well that gave me public leave to speak of him for I have neither wit nor words nor worth action nor utterance nor the power of speech to stir man's blood I only speak right on I tell you that which you yourselves do know show your sweet Caesar's wounds poor poor dumb mouths and bid them speak for me but where I Brutus and Brutus Anthony there were an Anthony would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue in every wound of Caesar's that should move the stones of Rome to rise and mutiny if therefore I do not give you the advice which Emma Goldman gave let not the authority suppose it is because I have any more respect for their constitution and their law than she has or that I regard them as having any rights in the matter no my reasons for not giving that advice are two first if I were giving advice at all I would say my friends that bread belongs to you it is you who toiled and sweat in the sun to sow and reap the weeds it is you who stood by the thresher and breathed the chafed filled atmosphere in the mills while it was ground to flower it is you who went into the eternal night of the mine and risked drowning fire damp explosion and cave in to get the fuel for the fire that baked it it is you who stood in the hell like heat struck the blows that forged the iron for the ovens wearing it is baked it is you who stand all night in the terrible cellar shops and tend the machines that need the flowering to dough it is you you you farmer miner mechanic who make the bread but you haven't the power to take it at every transformation wrought by Toil someone who didn't Toil has taken part from you he has it all and you haven't the power to take it back you are told you are the power because you have the numbers never make so silly a blunder as to suppose that power resides in numbers one good level headed policeman with a club is worth ten excited unarmed men one detachment of well-drilled militia has a power equal to that of the greatest mob that could be raised in New York City do you know I admire a compact concentrated power let me give you an illustration out in a little town in Illinois there is a certain capitalist and if ever a human creature sweat and ground the grist of gold from the muscle of man it is he well once upon a time his workmen not his slaves his workmen were on strike and fifteen hundred muscular pollocks armed with stones brick bats red hot pokers and other such crude weapons as a mob generally collects went up to his house for the purpose of smashing the windows and so forth possibly to do as those people in Italy did the other day with the sheriff who attempted to collect the milk tax he alone one man met them on the steps of his porch and for two mortal hours by threats promises cajolaries held those fifteen hundred poles at bay and finally they went away without smashing a pane of glass or harming a hair of his head now that was power and you can't help but admire it no matter if it was your enemy who displayed it and you must admit that so long as numbers can be overcome by such relative quantity power does not reside in numbers therefore if I were giving advice I would not say take bread but take counsel with yourselves flow to get the power to take bread there is no doubt that power is latently in you there is little doubt it can be developed there is no doubt the authorities know this and fear it and are ready to exert as much force as is necessary to repress any signs of its development and this is the explanation of Emma Goldman's imprisonment the authorities do not fear you as you are they only fear what you may become the dangerous thing was the voice crying in the wilderness for telling the power for which was to come after it you should have seen how they feared it in Philadelphia they got out a whole platoon of police and detectives and executed a military maneuver to catch the little woman who had been running around under their noses for three days and when she walked up to them why then they surrounded and captured her and guarded the city hall where they kept her overnight and put a detective in the next cell to make notes why so much fear did they shrink from the stab of the dressmaker's needle or did they dread some stronger weapon ah, the accusation before the New York Pontius pilot was she stirreth up the people and Pilate sentenced her to the full limit of the law because he said you are more than ordinarily intelligent why is intelligence dealt thus hardly with because it is the beginning of power strive then for power my second reason for not repeating Emma Goldman's words is that I as an anarchist have no right to advise another to do anything involving a risk to himself nor would I give a fill up for an action done by the advice of someone else unless it is accompanied by a well argued well settled conviction on the part of the person acting that it really is the best thing to do anarchism to me means not only the denial of authority not only a new economy but a revision of the principles of morality it means the development of the individual as well as the assertion of the individual it means self-responsibility and not leader worship I say it is your business to decide whether you will starve and freeze in the sight of food and clothing outside of jail or commit some overt act against the institution of property and take your place beside Timmerman and Goldman and in saying this I mean to cast no reflection whatever upon Miss Goldman for doing otherwise she and I hold many differing views on both economy and morals and that she is honest in hers has proven better than I have proven mine Miss Goldman is a communist I am an individualist she wishes to destroy the right of property I wish to assert it I make my war upon privilege and authority whereby the right of property the true right in that which is proper to the individual is annihilated she believes that cooperation would entirely supplant competition I hold the competition in one form or another will always exist in that it is highly desirable it should but whether she or I be right or both of us be wrong of one thing I am sure the spirit which animates Emma Goldman is the only one which will emancipate the slave from his slavery the tyrant from his tyranny the spirit which is willing to dare and suffer that which dwells in the frail body in the prison room tonight is not the New York dressmaker alone transport yourselves there in thought a moment looks steadily into those fair blue eyes upon the sun-brown hair the seashell face the restless hands the woman's figure looks steadily till these fade from sight as things will fade when gazed long upon looks steadily till in place of the person the individual of time and place you see that which transcends time and place and flits from house to house of life mocking at death swineburn in his magnificence before a crucifix says with iron for thy linen bands an unclean cloth for winding sheets they bind the people's nail pierced hands they hide the people's nail pierced feet and what man or what angel known shall roll back the sepulchral stone perhaps in the presence of this untrammeled spirit we shall feel that something has rolled back the sepulchral stone and up from the cold wind of the grave is born the breath that animated Anaxagoras, Socrates, Christ, Hepatia, John Huss, Bruno, Robert Emmett, John Brown, Sophia Barovskaya, Parsons, Fisher, Engels, Spies, Ling, Berkman, Payas and all those known and unknown who have died by tree and axe and faggot or dragged out forgotten lies and dungeons derided, hated, tortured by men perhaps we shall know ourselves face to face with that which leaps from the throat of the strangled when the rope chokes which smokes up from the blood of the murdered when the axe falls that which has been forever hunted fettered, imprisoned, exiled, executed and never conquered lo from its many incarnations it comes forth again the immortal race Christ of the ages the gloomy walls are glorified thereby the prisoner is transfigured and we say reverently we say O sacred head, O desecrate O labor wounded feet in hands O blood poured forth in pledge to fate of nameless lives in diver's lands O slain and spent and sacrificed people the gray grown speechless Christ and of in defense of Emma Goldman