Page:Emma Goldman - The Social Significance of the Modern Drama - 1914.djvu/61

 them. That was the garden of paradise; and there stood many angry angels with flaming swords protecting it; but for all that I and other boys found the way to the tree of life - now you despise me. . . . I thought if it is true that the thief on the cross could enter heaven and dwell among the angels it was strange that a pauper child on God's earth could not go into the castle park and play with the Countess' daughter. . . . What I wanted-I don't know. You were unattainable, but through the vision of you I was made to realize how hopeless it was to rise above the conditions of my birth.

What rich food for thought in the above for all of us, and for the jeans, the people who do not know what they want, yet feel the cruelty of a world that keeps the pauper's child out of the castle of his dreams, away from joy and play and beauty! The injustice and the bitterness of it all, that places the stigma of birth as an impassable obstacle, a fatal imperative excluding one from the table of life, with the result of producing such terrible effects on the Julies and the Jeans. The one unnerved, made helpless and useless by affluence, ease and idleness; the other enslaved and bound by service and dependence. Even when Jean wants to, he cannot rise above his condition. When Julie asks him to embrace her, to love her, he replies:

I can't as long as we are in this house. . . . There is the Count, your father. . . . I need only to see his