A word to the 35,000 now tramping
the streets of this great city,
with hands in pockets, gazing listlessly about you
at the evidence of wealth and pleasure
of which you own no part,
not sufficient even to purchase yourself
a bit of food with which to appease the pangs of hunger
now knawing at your vitals.
It is with you and the hundreds of thousands of others
similarly situated in this great land of plenty,
that I wish to have a word.
Have you not worked hard all your life,
since you were old enough for your labor
to be of use in the production of wealth?
Have you not toiled long,
hard and laboriously in producing wealth?
And in all those years of drudgery
do you not know you have produced thousand upon thousands
of dollars’ worth of wealth,
which you did not then,
do not now,
and unless you ACT,
never will,
own any part in?
Do you not know that when you were harnessed to a machine
and that machine harnessed to steam,
and thus you toiled your 10, 12 and 16 hours in the 24,
that during this time in all these years
you received only enough of your labor product
to furnish yourself the bare,
coarse necessaries of life,
and that when you wished to purchase anything for yourself
and family
it always had to be of the cheapest quality?
If you wanted to go anywhere
you had to wait until Sunday,
so little did you receive for your unremitting toil
that you dare not stop for a moment,
as it were?
And do you not know that with all your squeezing,
pinching and economizing
you never were enabled to keep but a few days
ahead of the wolves of want?
And that at last when the caprice of your employer
saw fit to create an artificial famine
by limiting production,
that the fires in the furnace
were extinguished,
the iron horse to which you had been harnessed was stilled;
the factory door locked up,
you turned upon the highway a tramp,
with hunger in your stomach and rags upon your back?
Yet your employer told you
that it was overproduction
which made him close up.
Who cared for the bitter tears and heart-pangs
of your loving wife and helpless children,
when you bid them a loving “God bless you”
and turned upon the tramper’s road
to seek employment elsewhere?
I say, who cared for those heartaches and pains?
You were only a tramp now,
to be execrated and denounced
as a “worthless tramp and a vagrant”
by that very class who had been engaged
all those years in robbing you and yours.
Then can you not see
that the “good boss” or the “bad boss”
cuts no figure whatever?
that you are the common prey of both,
and that their mission is simply robbery?
Can you not see that it is the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM
and not the “boss” which must be changed?
Now, when all these bright summer
and autumn days are going by
and you have no employment,
and consequently can save up nothing,
and when the winter’s blast sweeps down
from the north
and all the earth is wrapped
in a shroud of ice,
hearken not to the voice of the hyprocrite
who will tell you that it was ordained of God
that “the poor ye have always”;
or to the arrogant robber who will say to you
that you “drank up all your wages
last summer when you had work,
and that is the reason why you have nothing now,
and the workhouse or the workyard
is too good for you;
that “you ought to be shot”
And shoot you they will
if you present your petitions in too emphatic a manner.
So, hearken not to them, but list!
Next winter when the cold blasts
are creeping through the rents
in your seedy garments,
when the frost is biting your feet
through the holes in your worn-out shoes,
and when all wretchedness
seems to have centered in and upon you,
when misery has marked you for her own
and life has become a burden
and existence a mockery,
when you have walked the streets by day
and slept upon hard boards by night,
and at last determine by your own hand
to take your life–
for you would rather go out into utter nothingness
than to longer endure an existence
which has become such a burden –
So, perchance,
you determine to dash yourself
into the cold embrace of the lake
rather than longer suffer thus.
But halt,
before you commit
this last tragic act
in the drama of your simple existence.
Stop!
Is there nothing you can do
to insure those whom you are about to orphan,
against a like fate?
The waves will only dash over you
in mockery of your rash act;
but stroll you down the avenues of the rich
and look through the magnificent plate windows
into their voluptuous homes,
and here you will discover
the very identical robbers
who have despoiled you and yours.
Then, let your tragedy be enacted here!
Awaken them from their wanton sport at your expense!
Send forth your petition
and let them read it by the red glare of destruction.
Thus when you cast “one long lingering look behind”
you can be assured that you have spoken to these robbers
in the only language which they have ever been able to understand,
for they have never yet deigned to notice any petition from their slaves
that they were not compelled to read by the red glare bursting from the cannon’s mouths,
or that was not handed to them upon the point of the sword.
You need no organization
when you make up your mind to present this kind of petition.
In fact, an organization would be a detriment to you;
but each of you hungry tramps who read these lines,
avail yourselves of those little methods of warfare
which Science has placed in the hands of the poor man,
and you will become a power in this or any other land.
Learn the use of explosives!
(Lucy Parsons)
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Based on Topics: Man Poems, God Poems, Life Poems, Night Poems, War & Peace Poems, Money & Wealth Poems, Fate & Destiny Poems, Power Poems, Education Poems, Work & Career Poems, Children PoemsBased on Keywords: denounced, consequently, production, industrial, cheapest, heartaches, employer, similarly, limiting, laboriously, detriment