On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, w...ith their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden,--what a sorry set of round-shouldered, sp...indle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Kicking and rolling about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those... shanks must be sound to bear up under such rollicking measures, prance as they dance in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who talks of Plato's spindle; What set it whirling round?... Eternity may dwindle, Time is unwound, Dan and Jerry Lout Change their loves about.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If factory-labor is not a means of education to the operative of to-day, it is because the employer does not do his duty. It is be...cause he treats his work-people like machines, and forgets that they are struggling, hoping, despairing human beings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The manufacturing corporation, except in comparatively few instances, no longer represents a protecting care, a parental influence..., over its operatives. It is too often a soulless organization; and its members forget that they are morally responsible for the souls and bodies, as well as for the wages, of those whose labor is the source of their wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »