Or is it the capitalist? "I will add field to field," he cries

aloud, despite his own Scripture; "I will join railway to railway.

I will juggle into my own hands all the instruments for the

production of wealth that my cunning can lay hold of; and I will

use them for my own purposes against producer and consumer alike

with impartial egoism. Corn and coal shall lie in the hollow of my

hand. I will enrich myself by making dear by craft the necessaries

of life; the poor shall lack, that I may roll down fair streets in

needless luxury. Let them starve, and feed me!" That temper, too,

humanity must outlive. And those who are incapable of outliving it

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of themselves must be taught by stern lessons, as in the splendid

uprising of the spirit of man in France, that their race has

outstripped them.

Next comes the monopoly of human life, the hideous wrong of

slavery. That, thank goodness, is now gone. 'Twas the vilest of

them all--the nakedest assertion of the monopolist platform:--"You

live, not for yourself, but wholly and solely for me. I disregard

your claims to your own body and soul, and use you as my chattel."

That worst form has died. It withered away before the moral

indignation even of existing humanity. We have the satisfaction of

seeing one dragon slain, of knowing that one monopolist instinct at

least is now fairly bred out of us.

Last, and hardest of all to eradicate in our midst, comes the

monopoly of the human heart, which is known as marriage. Based upon

the primitive habit of felling the woman with a blow, stunning her

by repeated strokes of the club or spear, and dragging her off by

the hair of her head as a slave to her captor's hut or rock-shelter,

this ugly and barbaric form of serfdom has come in our own time by

some strange caprice to be regarded as of positively divine origin.

The Man says now to himself, "This woman is mine. Law and the Church

have bestowed her on me. Mine for better, for worse; mine, drunk or

sober. If she ventures to have a heart or a will of her own, woe

betide her! I have tabooed her for life: let any other man touch

her, let her so much as cast eyes on any other man to admire or

desire him--and, knife, dagger, or law-court, they shall both of

them answer for it." There you have in all its native deformity

another monopolist instinct--the deepest-seated of all, the

grimmest, the most vindictive. "She is not yours," says the moral

philosopher of the new dispensation; "she is her own; release her!

The Turk hales his offending slave, sews her up in a sack, and casts

her quick into the eddying Bosphorus. The Christian Englishman, with

more lingering torture, sets spies on her life, drags what he thinks

her shame before a prying court, and divorces her with contumely.

All this is monopoly, and essentially slavery. Mankind must outlive

it on its way up to civilization."




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