you say, 'Yes, they are true, but they have been that way
always.' Or you say, 'Maybe it will come, but not in
my time -- it will not help me.' And so you return to
your daily round of toil, you go back to be ground up for
profits in the world-wide mill of economic might! To toil
long hours for another's advantage; to live in mean and
squalid homes, to work in dangerous and unhealthful
places; to wrestle with the specters of hunger and priva~
tion, to take your chances of accident, disease, and death.
And each day the struggle becomes fiercer, the pace more
cruel; each day you have to toil a little harder, and feel
the iron hand of circumstance close upon you a little
tighter. Months pass, years maybe -- and then you come
again; and again I am here to plead with you, to know if
want and misery have yet done their work with you, if in~
justice and oppression have yet opened your eyes! I shall
still be waiting -- there is nothing else that I can do.
There is no wilderness where I can hide from these things,
there is no haven where I can escape them; though I
travel to the ends of the earth, I find the same accursed
system, -- I find that all the fair and noble impulses of
humanity, the dreams of poets and the agonies of martyrs,
are shackled and bound in the service of organized and
predatory Greed! And therefore I cannot rest, I cannot
be silent; therefore I cast aside comfort and happiness,
health and good repute -- and go out into the world and
cry out the pain of my spirit! Therefore I am not to be
silenced by poverty and sickness, not by hatred and oblo~
quy, by threats and ridicule -- not by prison and perse~
cution, if they should come -- not by any power that is
upon the earth or above the earth, that was, or is, or ever
can be created. If I fail tonight, I can only try tomorrow;
knowing that the fault must be mine -- that if once the
vision of my soul were spoken upon earth, if once the
anguish of its defeat were uttered in human speech, it
would break the stoutest barriers of prejudice, it would
shake the most sluggish soul to action! It would abash
the most cynical, it would terrify the most selfish; and the
voice of mockery would be silenced, and fraud and false~

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v?