Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/144

 out of the juries, out of the magistracy, out of the church, out of the public press, out of all the public boards—in a word, out of every department of the State, and left them without a single legislator, magistrate, administrator, common-councilman, vestryman, or public organ of any kind to represent or protect their interests. But it is not simply of what are called their organic or political rights that these tyrants have despoiled the working classes; they have also robbed them of all proprietary and occupancy rights in the soil, combining for that purpose with the landlords and the tenant-farmers, to whom the sight of an agricultural labourer putting a spade or a plough into the land on his own account, or in any other capacity than that of a wages-slave to some bull-frog farmer, is the horror of horrors. Just as farmers in the rural districts will take vacant farms they do not want, and at rents by which they know they must be losers, merely to keep out labourers or exclude from occupancy the men they want for slaves, so will these mining and manufacturing tyrants rent on long leases, or actually buy up outright, lands in the neighbourhood of the towns where their factories are, to prevent their toiling slaves from having the chance of renting them, or any portion of them, however small, lest they might be able to escape the slavery of the mill through comparative independence.

We doubt if there be a single recorded instance in the whole history of civilized society of any king, ruler, statesman, legislator, prophet, philosopher, orator, or other public man, seeking honestly, and with probabilities of success, the reign of justice, humanity, and fraternity for his fellow-countrymen, that was not overwhelmed with calumny, overpowered by faction, and ultimately either put to death or forced to fly for his life and bury himself in poverty and obscurity to escape the malice of the oppressors of his country. But who were those oppressors? The same everywhere—the same now as ever—the idle rich, who prey on their industrious fellow-creatures through the inventions of rents, profits, interest of money, dividends, taxes, and so forth—all arising out of usurpations of the soil, and making money grow money. The ancient prophets and apostles suffered for causes not essentially different from those which destroyed the Gracchi at Rome and Agis and Cleomenes of Sparta. Romulus and Julius Cæsar were victims of the same spirit that beheaded Paul and sawed Isaiah asunder. Heraclides and Hippo of Sicily perished through landlordism and profitmongering, in no other sense than did John the Baptist under Herod; St. Stephen, by the Jewish rabble, let loose upon him by the middle-class Pharisees; and Socrates, by the hypocritical "property" classes of Athens; nay, the Saviour himself, whose crucifixion was perpetrated by like influences on behalf of like interests. All honest reformers, spiritual or temporal, must necessarily be foes to landlordism and usury, though not to the persons of landlords and usurers. The latter, however, have ever considered attacks upon their system to be attacks upon themselves: and, accordingly, they have crushed or murdered every honest reformer whose influence has hitherto