Or is it the capitalist? "I will add field to field," he cries
aloud, despite his own Scripture; "I will join railway to railway.
I will juggle into my own hands all the instruments for the
production of wealth that my cunning can lay hold of; and I will
use them for my own purposes against producer and consumer alike
with impartial egoism. Corn and coal shall lie in the hollow of my
hand. I will enrich myself by making dear by craft the necessaries
of life; the poor shall lack, that I may roll down fair streets in
needless luxury. Let them starve, and feed me!" That temper, too,
humanity must outlive. And those who are incapable of outliving it
of themselves must be taught by stern lessons, as in the splendid
uprising of the spirit of man in France, that their race has
outstripped them.
Next comes the monopoly of human life, the hideous wrong of
slavery. That, thank goodness, is now gone. 'Twas the vilest of
them all--the nakedest assertion of the monopolist platform:--"You
live, not for yourself, but wholly and solely for me. I disregard
your claims to your own body and soul, and use you as my chattel."
That worst form has died. It withered away before the moral
indignation even of existing humanity. We have the satisfaction of
seeing one dragon slain, of knowing that one monopolist instinct at
least is now fairly bred out of us.
Last, and hardest of all to eradicate in our midst, comes the
monopoly of the human heart, which is known as marriage. Based upon
the primitive habit of felling the woman with a blow, stunning her
by repeated strokes of the club or spear, and dragging her off by
the hair of her head as a slave to her captor's hut or rock-shelter,
this ugly and barbaric form of serfdom has come in our own time by
some strange caprice to be regarded as of positively divine origin.
The Man says now to himself, "This woman is mine. Law and the Church
have bestowed her on me. Mine for better, for worse; mine, drunk or
sober. If she ventures to have a heart or a will of her own, woe
betide her! I have tabooed her for life: let any other man touch
her, let her so much as cast eyes on any other man to admire or
desire him--and, knife, dagger, or law-court, they shall both of
them answer for it." There you have in all its native deformity
another monopolist instinct--the deepest-seated of all, the
grimmest, the most vindictive. "She is not yours," says the moral
philosopher of the new dispensation; "she is her own; release her!
The Turk hales his offending slave, sews her up in a sack, and casts
her quick into the eddying Bosphorus. The Christian Englishman, with
more lingering torture, sets spies on her life, drags what he thinks
her shame before a prying court, and divorces her with contumely.
All this is monopoly, and essentially slavery. Mankind must outlive
it on its way up to civilization."