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Hellraisers Journal: Sunday July 10, 1898
Victor Hugo: “Not to be a slave is to Dare and Do.”
From the Appeal to Reason of July 9, 1898:
VICTOR HUGO’S LETTER TO THE POOR
Shall I now speak to the poor, after in vain having implored the rich? Yes, it is fitting. This, then, have I to say to the disinherited: Keep a watch upon your formidable jaw. There is one rule for the rich—to do nothing, and one for the poor—to say nothing. The poor have but one friend, silence. They should use but one monosyllable: Yes. To confess and to concede-this is all the “rights” they have. “Yes” to the judge. “Yes” to the king. The great, if it so please them, give us blows with a stick; I have had them, it is their prerogative, and they lose nothing of their greatness in cracking our bones. Let us worship the sceptre, which is the first among sticks.
If a poor man is happy he is the pickpocket of happiness. Only the rich and noble are happy by right. The rich man is he who being young has the rights of old age; being old, the lucky chances of youth; vicious, the respect of good people; a coward, the command of the stout-hearted; doing nothing, the fruits of labor.
The people fight. Whose is the glory? The king’s. They pay. Whose is the magnificence? The king’s. And the people like to be rich in this fashion. Our ruler, king or croesus, receives from the poor a crown apiece and renders back to the poor a farthing. How generous he is! The colossal pedestal looks up to the pigmy superstructure. How tall the manikin is! He is upon my back. A dwarf has an excellent method of being higher than a giant; it is to perch himself upon the other’s shoulders. But that the giant should let him do it, there’s the odd part of it; and that he should honor the baseness of the dwarf, there’s the stupidity. Human ingenuousness.
