Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Iron Heel by Jack London
page 193 of 321 (60%)
farmers simply surrendered the land to the farm trust. There was nothing
else for them to do. And having surrendered the land, the farmers next
went to work for the farm trust, becoming managers, superintendents,
foremen, and common laborers. They worked for wages. They became
villeins, in short--serfs bound to the soil by a living wage. They could
not leave their masters, for their masters composed the Plutocracy.
They could not go to the cities, for there, also, the Plutocracy was
in control. They had but one alternative,--to leave the soil and become
vagrants, in brief, to starve. And even there they were frustrated, for
stringent vagrancy laws were passed and rigidly enforced.

Of course, here and there, farmers, and even whole communities of
farmers, escaped expropriation by virtue of exceptional conditions. But
they were merely strays and did not count, and they were gathered in
anyway during the following year.*

* The destruction of the Roman yeomanry proceeded far less
rapidly than the destruction of the American farmers and
small capitalists. There was momentum in the twentieth
century, while there was practically none in ancient Rome.

Numbers of the farmers, impelled by an insane lust for the
soil, and willing to show what beasts they could become,
tried to escape expropriation by withdrawing from any and
all market-dealing. They sold nothing. They bought
nothing. Among themselves a primitive barter began to
spring up. Their privation and hardships were terrible, but
they persisted. It became quite a movement, in fact. The
manner in which they were beaten was unique and logical and
simple. The Plutocracy, by virtue of its possession of the
DigitalOcean Referral Badge