Might is right, 13

‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ those three great lights of modern democracies are three colossal falsehoods, ignoble slave-shibboleths; impossible of actualisation 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, though you inscroll Freedom on countless sheepskins and rivet statues of Liberty on every harbour-rock, yet with ‘all the kings 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 drivelling 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 the editorial mill. ‘We can! We can!’ bellows the herd as it stupidly pours through the slip-rails to the pithing pen. ‘Yes, O yes! with the love of Jesus and our collection plate, whines the soft-skinned preacher as he turns over the sibylline leaves of his black art. ‘Of a certainty, we can,’ hisseth the plastic politician, the rattlesnake!—the hungry basilisk!—whose law making is more blighting than the breath of a 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 alleys 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 his money-changing—and a lean woman in 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 a galled shoulder, lieth swollen and dead on the frozen paving blocks. How nauseous it all is?

Loathsome! Loathsome! O, how loathsome…