Maxim Gorky - "Mother"

Timothy Titcomb - "Lessons in Life"

Will Levington Comfort - "Red Fleece"

Upton Sinclair - "Prince Hagen"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Lectures and Essays

G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays




In the twilight of history, between the fall of Rome and the rise of the
new nationalities, we dimly see the struggle going on. There is a great
insurrection of the oppressed peasantry, under the name of Bagaudae, in
Gaul. When the light dawns, a step has been gained. Slavery has been
generally succeeded by serfdom. But serfdom is hard. The peasantry of
feudal Normandy conspire against their cruel lords, hold secret
meetings, the ominous name _commune_ is heard. But the conspiracy
is discovered and suppressed with the fiendish ferocity with which panic
inspires a dominant class, whether in Normandy or Jamaica. Amidst the
religious fervour of the Crusades again breaks out a wild labour
movement, that of the Pastoureaux, striking for equality in the name of
the Holy Spirit, which, perhaps, they had as good a right to use as some
who deemed their use of it profane. This is in the country, among the
shepherds and ploughmen. In the cities labour has congregated numbers,
mutual intelligence, union on its side; it is constantly reinforced by
fugitives from rural serfdom; it builds city walls, purchases or extorts
charters of liberty. The commercial and manufacturing cities of Italy,
Germany, Flanders, become the cradles of free industry, and, at the same
time, of intellect, art, civilization. But these are points of light
amidst the feudal darkness of the rural districts. In France, for
example, the peasantry are cattle; in time of peace crushed with forced
labour, feudal burdens, and imposts of all kinds; in time of war driven,
in unwilling masses, half-armed and helpless, to the shambles.
Aristocratic luxury, gambling, profligate wars--Jacques Bonhomme pays
for them all. At Crecy and Poictiers, the lords are taken prisoners;
have to provide heavy ransoms, which, being debts of honour, like
gambling debts, are more binding than debts of honesty. But Jacques
Bonhomme's back is broad, it will bear everything. Broad as it is, it
will not bear this last straw. The tidings of Flemish freedom have,
perhaps, in some way reached his dull ear, taught him that bondage is
not, as his priest, no doubt, assures him it is, a changeless ordinance
of God, that the yoke, though strong, may be broken. He strikes, arms
himself with clubs, knives, ploughshares, rude pikes, breaks out into a
Jacquerie, storms the castles of the oppressor, sacks, burns, slays with
the fury of a wild beast unchained. The lords are stupefied. At last
they rally and bring their armour, their discipline, their experience in
war, the moral ascendency of a master-class to bear. The English
gentlemen, in spite of the hostilities, only half suspended, between the
nations, join the French gentlemen against the common enemy. Twenty
thousand peasants are soon cut down, but long afterwards the butchery
continues. Guillaume Callet, the leader of the Jacquerie, a very crafty
peasant, as he is called by the organs of the lords, is crowned with a
circlet of red-hot iron.

In England, during the same period serfdom, we know not exactly how, is
breaking up. There is a large body of labourers working for hire. But in
the midst of the wars of the great conqueror, Edward III., comes a
greater conqueror, the plague called the Black Death, which sweeps away,
some think, a third of the population of Europe. The number of labourers
is greatly diminished. Wages rise. The feudal parliament passes an Act
to compel labourers, under penalties, to work at the old rates. This Act
is followed by a train of similar Acts, limiting wages and fixing in the
employers' interest the hours of work, which, in the pages of
imaginative writers, figure as noble attempts made by legislators of a
golden age to regulate the relations between employer and employed on
some higher principle than that of contract. The same generous spirit,
no doubt, dictated the enactment prohibiting farm labourers from
bringing up their children to trades, lest hands should be withdrawn
from the land-owner's service. Connected with the Statutes of Labourers,
are those bloody vagrant laws, in which whipping, branding, hanging are
ordained as the punishment of vagrancy by lawgivers, many of whom were
themselves among the idlest and most noxious vagabonds in the country,
and the authors of senseless wars which generated a mass of vagrancy, by
filling the country with disbanded soldiers. In the reign of Richard
II., the poll tax being added to other elements of class discord, labour
strikes, takes arms under Wat Tyler, demands fixed rents, tenant right
in an extreme form, and the total abolition of serfage. A wild religious
communism bred of the preachings of the more visionary among the
Wycliffites mingles in the movement with the sense of fiscal and
industrial wrong. "When Adam delved and Eve span, where was then the
gentleman?" is the motto of the villeins, and it is one of more
formidable import than any utterance of peasant orators at Agricultural
Labourers' meetings in the present day. Then come fearful scenes of
confusion, violence and crime. London is in the power of hordes
brutalized by oppression. High offices of state, high ecclesiastics are
murdered. Special vengeance falls on the lawyers, as the artificers who
forged the cunning chains of feudal iniquity. The rulers, the troops,
are paralyzed by the aspect of the sea of furious savagery raging round
them. The boy king, by a miraculous exhibition of courageous self-
possession, saves the State; but he is compelled to grant general
charters of manumission, which, when the danger is over, the feudal
parliament forces him by a unanimous vote to repudiate. Wholesale
hanging of serfs, of course, follows the landlords' victory.

The rising under Jack Cade, in the reign of Henry VI., was rather
political than industrial. The demands of the insurgents, political
reform and freedom of suffrage, show that progress had been made in the
condition and aspirations of the labouring class. But with the age of
the Tudors came the final breakup in England of feudalism, as well as of
Catholicism, attended by disturbances in the world of labour, similar to
those which have attended the abolition of slavery in the Southern
States. This is the special epoch of the sanguinary vagrancy laws, the
most sanguinary of which was framed by the hand of Henry VIII. The new
nobility of courtiers and upstarts, who had shared with the king the
plunder of the monasteries, were hard landlords of course; they robbed
the people of their rights of common, and swept away homesteads and
cottages, to make room for sheep farms, the wool trade being the great
source of wealth in those days. By the spoliation of the monasteries,
the great alms-houses of the Middle Ages, the poor had also been left
for a time without the relief, which was given them again in a more
regular form by the Poor Law of Elizabeth. Hence in the reign of Edward
VI., armed strikes again, in different parts of the kingdom. In the
West, the movement was mainly religious; but in the Eastern countries,
under Kett of Norfolk, it was agrarian. Kett's movement after a brief
period of success, during which the behaviour of the insurgents and
their leader was very creditable, was put down by the disciplined
mercenaries under the command of the new aristocracy, and its
suppression was of course followed by a vigorous use of the gallows. No
doubt the industrial conservatives of those days were as frightened, as
angry, and as eager for strong measures as their successors are now: but
the awkwardness of the newly liberated captive, in the use of his limbs
and eyes, is due not to his recovered liberty, but to the narrowness and
darkness of the dungeon in which he has been immured.

In Germany, at the same epoch, there was not merely a local rising, but
a wide-spread and most terrible peasants' war. The German peasantry had
been ground down beyond even an hereditary bondsman's power of endurance
by their lords generally, and by the Prince Bishop and other spiritual
lords in particular. The Reformation having come with a gospel of truth,
love, spiritual brotherhood, the peasants thought it might also have
brought some hope of social justice. The doctors of divinity had to
inform them that this was a mistake. But they took the matter into their
own hands and rose far and wide, the fury of social and industrial war
blending with the wildest fanaticism, the most delirious ecstacy, the
darkest imposture. Once more there are stormings and burnings of feudal
castles, massacring of their lords. Lords are roasted alive, hunted like
wild beasts in savage revenge for the cruelty of the game laws. Munzer,
a sort of peasant Mahomet, is at the head of the movement. Under him it
becomes Anabaptist, Antinomian, Communist. At first he and his followers
sweep the country with a whirlwind of terror and destruction: but again
the lords rally, bring up regular troops. The peasants are brought to
bay on their last hill side, behind a rampart formed of their waggons.
Their prophet assures them that the cannon-balls will fall harmless into
his cloak. The cannon-balls take their usual course: a butchery, then a
train of torturings and executions follows, the Prince Bishop, among
others, adding considerably to the whiteness of the Church's robe.
Luther is accused of having incited the ferocity of the lords against
those, who, it is alleged, had only carried his own principles to an
extreme. But in the first place Luther never taught Anabaptism or
anything that could logically lead to it; and in the second place,
before he denounced the peasants, he tried to mediate and rebuke the
tyranny of the lords. No man deserves more sympathy than a great
reformer, who is obliged to turn against the excesses of his own party.
He becomes the object of fierce hatred on one side, of exulting derision
on the other; yet he is no traitor, but alone loyal to his conscience
and his cause.

The French Revolution was a political movement among the middle class in
the cities, but among the peasantry in the country it was an agrarian
and labour movement, and the dismantling of chateaux, and chasing away
of their lords which then took place were a renewal of the struggle
which had given birth to the Jacquerie, the insurrection of Wat Tyler,
and the Peasants' War. This time the victory remained with the peasant,
and the lord returned no more.

In England, long after the Tudor period, industrial disturbances took
place, and wild communistic fancies welled up from the depths of a
suffering world of labour, when society was stirred by political and
religious revolution. Under the Commonwealth, communists went up on the
hill side, and began to break ground for a poor man's Utopia; and the
great movement of the Levellers, which had in it an economical as well
as a political element, might have overturned society, if it had not
been quelled by the strong hand of Cromwell. But in more recent times,
within living memory, within the memory of many here there were labour
disturbances in England, compared with which the present industrial war
is mild. [Footnote: For the following details, see Martineau's "History
of the Peace."] In 1816, there were outbreaks among the suffering
peasantry which filled the governing classes with fear. In Suffolk
nightly fires of incendiaries blazed in every district, thrashing
machines were broken or burnt in open day, mills were attacked. At
Brandon large bodies of workmen assembled to prescribe a maximum price
of grain and meat, and to pull down the houses of butchers and bakers.
They bore flags with the motto, "Bread or Blood". Insurgents from the
Fen Country, a special scene of distress, assembled at Littleport,
attacked the house of a magistrate in the night, broke open shops,
emptied the cellars of public-houses, marched on Ely, and filled the
district for two days and nights with drunken rioting and plunder. The
soldiery was called in; there was an affray in which blood flowed on
both sides, then a special commission and hangings to close the scene.
Distressed colliers in Staffordshire and Wales assembled by thousands,
stopped works, and were with difficulty diverted from marching to
London. In 1812, another stain of blood was added to the sanguinary
criminal code of those days by the Act making death the penalty for the
destruction of machinery. This was caused by the Luddite outrages, which
were carried on in the most systematic manner, and on the largest scale
in Nottingham and the adjoining counties. Bodies of desperadoes, armed
and disguised, went forth under a leader, styled General Ludd, who
divided them into bands, and aligned to each band its work of
destruction. Terror reigned around; the inhabitants were commanded to
keep in their houses and put out their lights on pain of death. In the
silence of night houses and factories were broken open, machines
demolished, unfinished work scattered on the highways. The extent and
secrecy of the conspiracy baffled the efforts of justice and the death
penalty failed to put the system down. Even the attempts made to relieve
distress became new sources of discontent and a soup kitchen riot at
Glasgow led to a two days conflict between the soldiery and the mob. In
1818, a threatening mass of Manchester spinners, on strike came into
bloody collision with the military. Then there were rick burnings,
farmers patrolling all night long, gibbets erected on Pennenden heath,
and bodies swinging on them, bodies of boys, eighteen or nineteen years
old. Six labourers of Dorsetshire, the most wretched county in England,
were sentenced to seven years' transportation nominally for
administering an illegal oath, really for Unionism. Thereupon all the
trades made a menacing demonstration, marched to Westminster, thirty
thousand strong, with a petition for the release of the labourers.
London was in an agony of fear, the Duke of Wellington prepared for a
great conflict, pouring in troops and bringing up artillery from
Woolwich. In 1840, again there were formidable movements, and society
felt itself on the crust of a volcano. Threatening letters were sent to
masters, rewards offered for firing mills, workmen were beaten, driven
out of the country, burned with vitriol, and, there was reason to fear,
murdered. Great masses of operatives collected for purposes of
intimidation, shopkeepers were pillaged, collisions again took place
between the people and the soldiery. Irish agrarianism meanwhile
prevailed, in a far more deadly form than at present. And these
industrial disturbances were connected with political disturbances
equally formidable, with Chartism, Socialism, Cato Street conspiracies,
Peterloo massacres, Bristol riots.

Now the present movement even in England, where there is so much
suffering and so much ignorance, has been marked by a comparative
absence of violence, and comparative respect for law. Considering what
large bodies of men have been out on strike, how much they have endured
in the conflict, and what appeals have been made to their passions, it
is wonderful how little of actual crime or disturbance there has been.
There were the Sheffield murders the disclosure of which filled all the
friends of labour with shame and sorrow, all the enemies of labour with
malignant exultation. But we should not have heard so much of the
Sheffield murders if such things had been common. Sheffield is an
exceptional place; some of the work there is deadly, life is short and
character is reckless. Even at Sheffield, a very few, out of the whole
number of trades, were found to have been in any way implicated. The
denunciation of the outrages by the trades through England generally,
was loud and sincere; an attempt was made, of course, to fix the guilt
on all the Unions, but this was a hypocritical libel. It was stated, in
one of our Canadian journals, the other day, that Mr. Roebuck had lost
his seat for Sheffield, by protesting against Unionist outrage. Mr.
Roebuck lost his seat for Sheffield by turning Tory. The Trades'
candidate, by whom Mr. Roebuck was defeated, was Mr. Mundella, a
representative of whom any constituency may be proud, a great employer
of labour, and one who has done more than any other man of his class in
England to substitute arbitration for industrial war, and to restore
kindly relations between the employers and the employed. To Mr. Mundella
the support of Broadhead and the criminal Unionists was offered, and by
him it was decisively rejected.

The public mind has been filled with hideous fantasies, on the subject
of Unionism, by sensation novelists like Mr. Charles Reade and Mr.
Disraeli, the latter of whom has depicted the initiation of a working
man into a Union with horrid rites, in a lofty and spacious room, hung
with black cloth and lighted with tapers, amidst skeletons, men with
battle axes, rows of masked figures in white robes, and holding torches;
the novice swearing an awful oath on the Gospel, to do every act which
the heads of the society enjoin, such as the chastisement of "nobs," the
assassination of tyrannical masters, and the demolition of all mills
deemed incorrigible by the society. People may read such stuff for the
sake of amusement and excitement, if they please; but they will fall
into a grave error if they take it for a true picture of the Amalgamated
Carpenters or the Amalgamated Engineers. Besides, the Sheffield outrages
were several years old at the time of their discovery. They belong,
morally, to the time when the unions of working men being forbidden by
unfair laws framed in the masters' interest were compelled to assume the
character of conspiracies; when, to rob a union being no theft,
unionists could hardly be expected to have the same respect as the
better protected interests for public justice; when, moreover, the
mechanics, excluded from political rights, could scarcely regard
Government as the impartial guardian of their interests, or the
governing classes as their friends. Since the legalization of the
unions, the extension of legal security to their funds and the admission
of the mechanics to the suffrage there has been comparatively little of
unionist crime.

I do not say that there has been none. I do not say that there is none
now. Corporate selfishness of which Trade Unions after all are
embodiments seldom keeps quite clear of criminality. But the moral
dangers of corporate selfishness are the same in all associations and in
all classes. The Pennsylvanian iron master who comes before our
Commissions of Inquiry to testify against Unionist outrage in
Pennsylvania where a very wild and roving class of workmen are managed
by agents who probably take little thought for the moral condition of
the miner--this iron master I say is himself labouring through his paid
organs in the press, through his representatives in Congress, and by
every means in his power to keep up hatred of England and bad relations
between the two countries at the constant risk of war because it suits
the interest of his Protectionist Ring. The upper classes of Europe in
the same spirit applauded what they called the salvation of society by
the _coup d'etat_, the massacre on the Boulevards and the lawless
deportation of the leaders of the working men in France. In the main
however I repeat the present movement has been legal and pacific and so
long as there is no violence, so long as no weapons but those of
argument are employed, so long as law and reason reign, matters are sure
to come right in the end. The result may not be exactly what we wish
because we may wish to take too much for ourselves and to give our
fellow men too little, but it will be just and we cannot deliberately
desire more. If the law is broken by the Unionists, if violence or
intimidation is employed by them instead of reason, let the Government
protect the rights of the community and let the community strengthen the
hands of the Government for that purpose.

Perhaps you will say that I have forgotten the International and the
Commune. There is undoubtedly a close connection between the labour
movement and democracy, between the struggle for industrial and the
struggle for political emancipation, as there is a connection between
both and Secularism, the frank form assumed among the working men by
that which is concealed and conformist Scepticism among the upper class.
In this respect the present industrial crisis resembles those of the
past which as we have seen were closely connected with religious and
political revolutions. In truth the whole frame of humanity generally
moves at once. With the International, however, as an organ of political
incendiarism, labour had very little to do. The International was, in
its origin, a purely industrial association, born of Prince Albert's
International Exhibition, which held a convention at Geneva, where
everybody goes pic-nicing, for objects which, though chimerical, were
distinctly economical, and free from any taint of petroleum. But a band
of political conspirators got hold of the organization and used it, or
at least, so much of it as they could carry with them, for a purpose
entirely foreign to the original intent. Mark, too, that it was not so
much labour or even democracy that charged the mine which blew up Paris,
as the reactionary Empire, which, like reaction in countries more nearly
connected with us than France, played the demagogue for its own ends,
set the labourers against the liberal middle class, and crowded Paris
with operatives, bribed by employment on public works. I detest all
conspiracy, whether it be that of Ignatius Loyola, or that of Karl Marx-
-not by conspiracy, not by dark and malignant intrigue, is society to be
reformed, but by open, honest and kindly appeals to the reason and
conscience of mankind. Yet, let us be just, even to the Commune. The
destruction of the column at the Place Vendome was not a good act; but
if it was in any measure the protest of labour against war, it was a
better act than ever was done by the occupant of that column. On that
column it was that, when Napoleon's long orgy of criminal glory was
drawing to a close, the hand of misery and bereavement wrote "Monster,
if all the blood you have shed could be collected in this square, you
might drink without stooping." Thiers is shooting the Communists;
perhaps justly, though humanity will be relieved when the gore ceases to
trickle, and vengeance ends its long repast. But Thiers has himself been
the literary arch-priest of Napoleon and of war: of all the incendiaries
in France, he has been the worst.

The Trade Unions are new things in industrial history. The guilds of the
Middle Ages, with which the unions are often identified, were
confederations of all engaged in the trade, masters as well as men,
against outsiders. The Unions are confederations of the men against the
masters. They are the offspring of an age of great capitalists,
employing large bodies of hired workmen. The workmen, needy, and obliged
to sell their labour without reserve, that they might eat bread, found
themselves, in their isolation, very much at the mercy of their masters,
and resorted to union as a source of strength. Capital, by collecting in
the centres of manufacture masses of operatives who thus became
conscious of their number and their force, gave birth to a power which
now countervails its own. To talk of a war of labour against capital
generally would, of course, be absurd. Capital is nothing but the means
of undertaking any industrial or commercial enterprise, of setting up an
Allan line of steamships or setting up a costermonger's cart. We might
as well talk of a war of labour against water power.

Capital is the fruit of labour past, the condition of labour present,
without it no man could do a stroke of work, at least of work requiring
tools or food for him who uses them. Let us dismiss from our language
and our minds these impersonations, which though mere creatures of fancy
playing with abstract nouns end by depraving our sentiments and
misdirecting our actions, let us think and speak of capital impersonally
and sensibly as an economical force and as we would think and speak of
the force of gravitation. Relieve the poor word of the big _c_,
which is a greatness thrust upon it, its tyranny, and the burning hatred
of its tyranny will at once cease. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a
working man standing alone, and without a breakfast for himself or his
family, is not in a position to obtain the best terms from a rich
employer, who can hold out as long as he likes or hire other labour on
the spot. Whether Unionism has had much effect in producing a general
rise of wages is very doubtful. Mr. Brassey's book, "Work and Wages,"
goes far to prove that it has not, and that while, on the one hand, the
unionists have been in a fool's paradise, the masters, on the other,
have been crying out before they were hurt. No doubt the general rise of
wages is mainly and fundamentally due to natural causes: the
accumulation of capital, the extension of commercial enterprise, and the
opening up of new countries, which have greatly increased the
competition for labour, and consequently, raised the price, while the
nominal price of labour as well as of all other commodities has been
raised by the influx of gold. What Unionism, as I think, has evidently
effected, is the economical emancipation of the working man. It has
rendered him independent instead of dependent, and, in some cases almost
a serf, as he was before. It has placed him on an equal footing with his
employer, and enabled him to make the best terms for himself in every
respect. There is no employer who does not feel that this is so, or whom
Mr. Brassey's statistics, or any statistics, would convince that it is
not.