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Not available online except in audio format as far as I know.

 

Enjoy.

 

"The terrible common people! The 'sewer-rats', they called us, the-rats that had been driven to their holes! The common people, who bear the burdens of the world, but are not to stretch out their unlovely hands to take the thing that they have fashioned; the common people who are so rude, and so indelicate, and so incapable of fine feeling, and so unable and unworthy to enjoy the act and the glory of life; the common people who are not fit to come among sensitive souls where high ideals are discussed because they are dirty, and course, and low. O yes: it is always dangerous to talk to us.

 

I remember-yes as if it were yesterday thought it is twenty years ago, and more-the memory rankles yet of the delicate disgust of a would-be reformer who came to me saying 'Some striking miners came to the club last night, and really they smelled.' No doubt they smelled, and the choke-damp, of the eternal night of the mine and all that the mine means-the grime, the body-reek, the unwashed clothes, and vile food, the vile tobacco, and the viler whiskey-no doubt they smelled of it all-that is how coal is paid for-by trhe common man who mines it! Creatuere of all disgust is the common man to those who do not pay the price for their little niceties.

 

He is dirty! yes, he is dirty-very, very dirty: the vomit of the engine and the fire-pit is on him; the grease of the machine; the splatter of the gutter and the distillation of the sewer; the ashes of the city dump heaps, the slime of rotting refuse; every parasite and every germ that ever crawled and spilled its venom on humanity has crawled upon him; just as there is no foul and filthy hole above or underground into which it has not crawled.

 

Yes, he is dirty.

 

He is hulking and ill-shapen and ungainly. Yes. His figure is unhandsome; he has crept on it too much-crept into vicious places where Life stared Death in the eyes and both clutched at him-and sometgimes he left a piece of his body in Death's fingers; when his shoulders bend together you go through a narrower aperture; when your right arm swings all day doing one work, you become one-sided; when familiarity with the machine breeds contempt your boss is in a hurry you feed your fingers to the machine sometimes; when you wait the pleasure of bailing iron, it ocassionally explodses and peppers you witrh sparks and leaves something that looks like leper spots upon the skin. Yes, the common man is ill-shapen, and deformed, and unhandsome.

 

He is diseased with vile, unnamable diseases. O yes: he has sweated in out social slaughter-pens till every vein ran fire instead of vblood, and then in raging thirst he has drunk-drunk evil drinks that has inefected himself with the tyrant that has been traken him to the hopsital, a thing for the worms to feed on before he was dead. Yes; all that, all that.

 

He is coarse, and loud-mouthed, and dull-eared, and squint-eyes-and his speech is loathsome. Yes: he is coarse; he is the diggerr in the dung-heaps; the dung-heap doesn't make people fdine-but it has to be dug.

 

Yes: He is loud-mouthed; he speaks across the roar of engine and growling wheels, above the sound-chaos of the city streets-he speaks of work, loud sounding work, in a coarse work tones, as men speak who have to do with imperative, primal activities.

 

Dull-eared: O yes, sometimes he cannot distingish a preference betwen a symphony orchestra and the slash of a rip-saw; the saw has trained him, not the violin.

 

Sqint-eyed? Yes: he has squinted at micrometers in the semi-darkness of the shop till he cannot open his eyes wide any more; he has squinted at gauges till his sight is narrowed to a guage; he has squinted down the throat of red-hot furnaces, till he has singed the very nerve of sight; dazzled and blinded, he drops his lids, and looks at the green world outside, and see it with a wide red flare over it- the burnt-in image of the furnace throat reflected.

 

His speech is loathsome. Yes, very loathsome. Full of coarse and obscene images, vulgarities for which he does not blush, boisterous curses and vapid laughter. For the worrst of all the robbery that has been done upon him is that his soul has been robbed away too; and if the beauty and the strength of the body has been twisted and malformed and sapped away, so too dimmed down the light of the Inner Man-that-might-have-been till it is but a faint spark flimmering through a junk-heap of broken possibilities, twisted and perverted passions. 

 

Yes, the common man is all that-rough, uncouth, misshapen, dull, vulgar, vapid, unfit to grace a social festivity, to bow and scrape in a dance-salon, or carry a lady's fan.

 

But also-but also, he has dug, he has mined, he has burrowed, he has tunneled, he has blasted, and forged, he has ploughed, and planted, and gathered, and piled, and shipped, and fetched, and carried: he has built-and torn down, and rebvuilt, and cleaned and scoured and repaired: he has woven, and cut, and sewed, and clothed: and Man's world cannot stand without him-not for a day, not for an hour. Without the  dancing master and the fan-carrier, it could still spin right merrirly: without the miner and the farmer and the 'sewer-rat'-never.

 

And seeing this, and understanding this, and feeling all the wrong and shame of our disinheiritance-both of the body and the mind- it happens sometiems that a figure steps from the sullen or indifferenrt ranks , and a voice arises crying in the wildserness. And this too is the Common Man: the man who is something more than all this rest I have been saying; for he is also the man who goes to unbury his fallen comrade when the mine crushes him though he knows the chances to asave are few, and the chances that he also will be crushed are many; the man who goes down into the sewer-gas to save his reeling companion and falls by his side;l the man who springs ainto the jaws of the sea to save from it what strnage her knows not and drowns togewther with the stranger; the man who thrusts a heedless fellow-craftsman from a danger-track and is ground to pieces for his generaosity; and the Man-who-cries to all these weak atropigh opiated, souls:

 

'Comrades, it is wrong. The earth is as much ours as theirs-those people who are shutting us out from its free use. The conquests of the dead are as much ours as theirs-those people who claim them as their sole inheiritance and will not let use use them. Life can be arranged otherwise. We do not need to be hungry because there is too much food, nor shelterless because we have built too many houses, nor naked because we have made too many clothes. We do not need to be idle become some one has made so much profit, that it pays him for us to be idle. We can all work, and all have leisure to straighten our backs and unbend our muscles and train our brains.

 

We can do this thing; and we can do it ourselves, and we alone can do it. No one can do it for us; no one will do it for us; and no one should do it for us If we are great enougth to make these things we are great enough to use them, great enough to manage their making and their dividing: and if anything is made by us now, which we in freedom would not make, the labor of which is costrly in human life for free men to make, then let those who to use it, make itl; or let it not be made.

 

The purpose of society should be to enable men to live mor efrely and more fully than in single combat with nature; thje purpose of work should be to build the workers' lives-not to rack, enslave, and deasteroy them. Come then, announce your will to be free men, to take full hold on life, and make it yours. No longer be the vall for politicalns to toss back and forth; they will all betray you. Be your own saviours.'

 

-Nick