Chapter 2-8

8.

‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ those three great lights of Modern Democracies are three colossal Falsehoods, ignoble slave-shibboleths; impossible of actualization, even if proclaimed by some superhuman Satan, followed by armed hosts of un-killable demons, all armed to the teeth with flaming swords, Greek-fire and dynamite cannon.

You may trace Equality in letters of silver on tablets of burnished gold, but without engineering a perpetual miracle, you cannot make it, true.

You may write Fraternity in blazing diamonds on walls of enduring granite, but without reversing the mechanism of the Universe, you cannot make it a fact.

And, although you enscroll Freedom on countless sheepskins and rivet Statues of Liberty on every harbor-rock, yet with ‘all the king’s horses and all the kings men’ one being born to be a hireling and a subordinate, no power can free.

Can you build up a marble palace with mud and slime, O! ye driveling bedlamites? Can you raise up a conqueror from the dunghill, or make the stupid great? Can you manufacture heroes out of hogs, O! ye snuffling ‘Educated’ swine?

“We can! We can! We can!” shrieketh the raging rhetoricians of the market place and editorial mill. “We can! We can!” bellows the herd, as it stupidly pours through the slip-rails to the pithing pan. “Yes, O! Yes! With the love of Jesus and our collection plate,” whines the soft-skinned preacher as he turns over the sybaline leaves of his Black-Art. “Of a certainty, we can,” hisseth the plastic politician, the rattlesnake! The hungry basilisk! Whose lawmaking is more blighting that the breath of the simoom.

Thereupon, toward you, O! America! They, one and all, point the finger of pride! Towards you!

America! Where the politicians rage and the people imagine vain things! And the dogs in the valleys are baying at the moon!

Then, turn I away! Sadly! Sadly! Sadly! And I brush against a slave in copper riveted overalls, hurrying to his mill, and against another in gold chain and silken hat, hasting to money-changing, and a lean woman is sordid rags, with a pile of lumber balanced upon her crown; and a splendid harlot in diamonds and brilliant plumage, rideth slowly by.

And the cattle in the slaughter yard are lowing for their hay; and a draught mare, with galled shoulder, lieth swollen and dead on the frozen paving blocks. How nauseous it all is?

Loathsome! Loathsome! O, how loathsome?