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Originally I thought this essay from Voltairine's Haymarket speeches wasn't online but it actually is online.

 

In any case I was reading (re-reading really) Voltairine's collected Haymarket Speeches by Avrich and came across some passages I particularly liked. This is the first of two of them.

 

Tomorrow if not soon after I should have another one and this time it will  be from one of the speeches that isn't  online. :)

 

I saw the rose fire of the furnace shining on the blanched face of the man who tended it, and I knew surely as I knew anything in life, that never would a free man feed his blood to the fire like that.

 

I saw swart bodies, all mangled and crushed, borne from the mouths of the mines to be stowed away in a grave hardly less narrow and dark than that in which the living form had crouched ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day; and I knew that in order that I might be warm — I, and you, and those others who never do any dirty work — those men had slaved away in those black graves, and been crushed to death at last.

 

I saw beside city streets great heaps of horrible colored earth, and down at the bottom of the trench from which it was thrown, so far down that nothing else was visible, bright gleaming eyes, like a wild animal's hunted into its hole. And I knew that free men never chose to labor there, with pick and shovel in that foul, sewage-soaked earth, in that narrow trench, in that deadly sewer gas ten, eight, even six hours a day. Only slaves would do it.

 

I saw deep down in the hull of the ocean liner the men who shoveled the coal — burned and seared like paper before the grate; and I knew that "the record" of the beautiful monster, and the pleasure of the ladies who laughed on the deck, were paid for with these withered bodies and souls.

 

I saw the scavenger carts go up and down, drawn by sad brutes driven by sadder ones; for never a man, a man in full possession of his self-hood, would freely choose to spend all his days in the nauseating stench that forces him to swill alcohol to neutralize it.

 

And I saw in the lead works how men were poisoned, and in the sugar refineries how they went insane; and in the factories how they lost their decency; and in the stores how they learned to lie; and I knew it was slavery made them do all this. I knew the Anarchists were right, — the whole thing must be changed, the whole thing was wrong, — the whole system of production and distribution, the whole ideal of life.

 

Source: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bright/cleyre/nov11.html

 

-Nick