Those of us who have craved
unsuccessfully for permission to do what the Maker of us all has
fitted us to do alone understand how revolutions are generated. Talk
about the atrocities of the Revolution! All the atrocities of the
democracy heaped together ever since the world began would not equal,
if we had any gauge by which to measure them, the atrocities
perpetrated in a week upon the poor, simply because they are poor;
and the marvel rather is, not that there is every now and then a
September massacre at which all the world shrieks, but that such
horrors are so infrequent. Again, I say, let no man judge communist
or anarchist TILL HE HAS ASKED FOR LEAVE TO WORK, and a "Damn your
eyes!" has rung in his ears.
Zachariah had some self-respect; he was cared for by God, and in
God's Book was a registered decree concerning him. These men treated
him as if he were not a person, an individual soul, but as an atom of
a mass to be swept out anywhere, into the gutter--into the river. He
was staggered for a time. Hundreds and thousands of human beings
swarmed past him, and he could not help saying to himself as he
looked up to the grey sky, "Is it true, then? Does God really know
anything about me? Are we not born by the million every week, like
spawn, and crushed out of existence like spawn? Is not humanity the
commonest and cheapest thing in the world?" But as yet his faith was
unshaken, and he repelled the doubt as a temptation of Satan.
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