That selfishness has all to do with it I entirely deny. The
human race for ages upon ages has been enslaved by ignorance and
by interested persons whose object it has been to confine the
minds of men, thereby doing more injury than if with infected
hands they purposely imposed disease on the heads of the people. Almost
worse than these, and at the present day as injurious, are those persons
incessantly declaring, teaching, and
impressing upon all that to work is man's highest condition.
This falsehood is the interested superstition of an age
infatuated with money, which having accumulated it cannot even
expend it in pageantry. It is a falsehood propagated for the
doubtful benefit of two or three out of ten thousand, It is the
lie of a morality founded on money only, and utterly outside and
having no association whatever with the human being in itself.
Many superstitions have been got rid of in these days; time it is that this,
the last and worst, were eradicated.

At this hour, out of thirty-four millions who inhabit this
country, two-thirds--say twenty-two millions--live within thirty
years of that abominable institution the poorhouse. That any
human being should dare to apply to another the epithet "pauper" is, to me,
the greatest, the vilest, the most unpardonable crime that could be
committed. Each human being, by mere birth, has a birthright in this earth
and all its productions; and if they do not receive it, then it is they who
are injured, and it is not the "pauper"--oh, inexpressibly wicked word!--it
is the well-to-do, who are the criminal classes.
It matters not in the least if the poor be improvident, or drunken, or evil
in any way. Food and drink, roof and clothes, are the inalienable right of
every child born into the light. If the world does not provide it
freely--not as a grudging gift but as a right, as a son of the house sits