 The Coming Nation, 10 October, 1896WHAT FOOLS THESE WAGE SLAVES BE.'We soon came to a large building that covered two or three blocks, and all over the place were thousands of tread mills, in which were tramping thousands and thousands of miserable looking men, women and children. Their hollow eyes and look of utter hopelessness was pathetic to see, while their ragged clothes hung from their shoulders like old clothing dangling from the shoulders of old-time scarecrows set up in cornfields. 'Tread, tread, tread; never stopping once to rest, but driven by the lash of slave drivers who never spared youth or age if they lagged. 'What have these people done?' I asked of Satan. 'Nothing at all, only they were born ppor, and the improved machinery and wonderful inventions robbed them of their labor, and they were hard to control in idleness, so a very wise man (an offspring of old Carnegie, the iron king of the nineteenth century), conceived the plan of dispensing with steam and electric engines in all the manufacturing plants, and run all the machinery by human tread mill power.' --from 'A Dead Man's Dream,' by A Man Without a Soul [a short piece of utopian fiction published simultaneously in The Coming Nation]
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Literary References: Shakespeare The Labor Vote Inventions Socialism |
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© 2000, Rebecca Edwards, Vassar College
