10/17/2025
Men are but slaves of life. Slavery hedges in their days with misery and debasement and floods their nights with tears and blood.
7000 years have passed since I first was born, yet I have seen only submissive slaves and shackled prisoners.
I have traveled the east and the west of the world and wondered in the shadows of life and in its bright days. I have beheld the caravans of nations and people‘s journey from its caves to its castles, but until now I have seen only surfs bowed beneath their burdens, arms bound by chains, knees
bent before idols.
I have followed man’s path from Babylon to Paris, from Nineveh to New York. Everywhere beside his footprints in the sand, I saw the marks of his dragging chains. Everywhere, the valleys and hills echoed to the grief of generations and centuries.
I entered the palaces, the squares, the temples. I stood before thrones, alters, and pulpits. I saw the laborer a slave to the merchant, the merchant a slave to the soldier, the soldier, a slave to the general, the general a slave to the king, the king, a slave to the priest, the priest slave to the idol, the idol shaped from dust by devils and raised above a hill of dead men’s skulls.
I entered the houses of the rich and mighty, and the huts from the poor and weak. I stood in the halls and laid with ivory and glowing with gold leaf. I crouched in tenements, crowded with the ghosts of despair and the gasp of the dying. I saw babes, sucking slavery with their milk, boys learning servility with their letters, girls, donning clothing woven of bo***ge and submissiveness, women sleeping on beds of obedience and compliance.