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Title: To Tramps Author: Lucy E. Parsons Date: 1884 Language: en Topics: class struggle Source: Retrieved on April 29, 2010 from http://courses.washington.edu/spcmu/speeches/lucyparsons.htm Notes: “To Tramps,” Alarm, October 4, 1884. Also printed and distributed as a leaflet by the International Working People’s Association.
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!
Dedicated to the tramps by Lucy E. Parsons.