Page:An Appeal to the Young by Kropotkin.djvu/14

 beings pig together within a few square feet: where your mother, sick of life, aged by care rather than years, offers you dry bread and potatoes as your only food, washed down by a blackish fluid called, in irony tea; and to distract your thoughts you have ever the same never-ending question, "How shall I be able to pay the baker to-morrow, and the landlord the day after?"

What! must you drag on the same weary existence as your father and mother for thirty and forty years? Must you toil your life long to procure for others all the pleasures of well-being, of knowledge, of art, and keep for yourself only the eternal anxiety as to whether you can get a bit of bread? Will you forever give up all that makes life so beautiful to devote yourself to providing every luxury for a handful of idlers? Will you wear yourself out with toil and have in return only trouble, if not misery, when hard times—the fearful hard times—come upon you? Is this what you long for in life?

Perhaps you will give up. Seeing no way out of your condition whatever, maybe you say to yourself, "Whole generations have under gone the same lot, and I, who can alter nothing in the matter, I must submit also. Let us work on then and endeavour to live as well as we can!"

Very well. In that case life itself will take pains to enlighten you.

One day a crisis comes, one of those crises which are no longer mere passing phenomena, as they were formerly, but a crises which destroys a whole industry, which plunges thousands of workers into misery, which crushes whole families. You struggle against the calamity like the rest. But you will soon see how your wife, your child, your friend, little by little succumb to privations, fade away under your very eyes. For sheer want of food, for lack of care and medical assistance, they end their days on the pauper's stretcher, whilst the life of the rich flows on joyously midst the sunny streets of the great city, careless of those who starve and perish. You will then understand how utterly revolting is this society; you will then reflect upon the causes of this crisis, and your examinations will scrutinize to the depths this abomination which puts millions of human beings at the mercy of the brutal greed of a handful of useless triflers; then you will understand that Socialists are right when they say that our present society can be, that it must be organized from top to bottom.

To pass from general crises to your particular case. One day when your master tries by a new reduction of wages to squeeze out of you a few more pence in order to increaze his fortune still further you will protest: but he will haughtily answer, "Go and eat grass, if you will not work at the price I offer." Then you will understand that your master not only tries to shear you like a sheep, but that he looks upon you as an inferior kind of animal altogether; that not content with holding you in his relentless grip by means of the wage system, he is further anxious to make you a slave in every respect. Then you will either bow down before him, you will give up the feeling of human dignity, and you will end by suffering every possible humiliation. Or the blood will rush to your head, you shudder at the hideous slope on which you are slipping down, you will retort, and, turned out workless on the street, you will understand how right socialists are when they say "Revolt! rise against this economic slavery!" Then you will come