Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/826

 be, wherever a man is fighting for right, for justice, for truth, there is your brother; wherever a man suffers through the oppression of error, of injustice, of tyranny, there is your brother. Free men and slaves, YOU ARE ALL BROTHERS.

From Revolution to Revolution

(See page 730)

We have talked much of the brotherhood to come; but brotherhood has always been the fact of our life, long before it became a modern and insipid sentiment. Only we have been brothers in slavery and torment, brothers in ignorance and its perdition, brothers in disease and war and want, brothers in prostitution and hypocrisy. What happens to one of us sooner or later happens to all; we have always been unescapably involved in a common destiny. We are brothers in the soil from which we spring; brothers in earthquakes, floods and famines; brothers in la grippe, cholera, small-*pox and priestcraft. It is to the interests of the whole of mankind to stamp out the disease that may be starting tonight in some wretched Siberian hamlet; to rescue the children of Egypt and India from the British cotton mills; to escape the craze and blight of some new superstition springing up in Africa or India or Boston. The tuberculosis of the East Side sweatshops is infecting the whole of the city of New York, and spreading therefrom to the Pacific and back across the Atlantic. The world constantly tends to the level of the downmost man in it;