Life of Albert Parsons

steal a great deal more than they can consume; in fact they steal, like most of our respectable citizens, regardless of their capacity of consumption.)

My philosophy has always been that the object of life can consist in the enjoyment of life only, and that the rational application of this principle is true morality.

I held that asceticism, as taught by the Church, was a crime against nature.

Now observing that the vast mass of the people were wasting their lives in drudgery, acco1npanied with want and misery, it was but natural for me to inquire into the causes. (I had up to that time never read a book, or even an impartial essay on Modern Socialism.) Was this self-abnegation, this se1fcrucifixion of the people voluntary, or was it forced upon them; and if so, by whom?

About this time, while looking over my books in search of something, my attention was attracted by this passage from Aristotle: "When, at some future age, every tool upon command, or by predestination, will perform its work as the art works of Daedalus did, who moved by themselves, or like the feet of Hephaestos, who went to their sacred work spontaneously, when thus the weaver shuttles will weave by themselves, then we will no longer require masters and slaves."

Had this time, long ago anticipated by the great thinker, not come? Yes. It had. There were the machines. But master and slave still existed. The question arose in my mind, is their existence still necessary?

Antiporas, a Greek poet, who lived at the time of Cicero, had in like manner greeted the inventions of the water-mill (water power) as the emancipator of male and female slaves. "Oh, these heathens '" writes Karl Marx, after quoting the above; "they knew nothing of Political Economy and Christendom ! They failed to conceive how nicely the machines could be employed to lengthen the hours of toil and to intensify the burdens of the slaves. They (the heathens) excused the slavery of one on the ground that it would afford the opportunity of human development to another. But to preach the slavery of the masses in order that a few rude and arrogant parvenus might become 'eminent spinners,' 'extensive sausage-makers' and 'influential shoe black dealers'-to do this they lacked that specific Christian organ."

I think it was in 1875, at the time the "Workingmen's Party of Illinois" was organized, when, upon the invitation of a friend, 1 visited the first meeting in which a lecture on Socialism was delivered. Viewed from a rhetorical standpoint this lecture, delivered by a young mechanic, was not very impressive, but the substance ... I will simply say that this lecture gave me the passepartout to the many interrogation marks which had worried me for a number of years.

I procured every piece of literature I could get on the subject; whether it was adverse or friendly to Socialism made no difference. In the beginning