“You listen to these things,” the man was saying, “and you say, ‘Yes, they are true, but they have been that way always.’ Or you say, ‘Maybe it will come, but not in my time⁠—it will not help me.’ And so you return to your daily round of toil, you go back to be ground up for profits in the worldwide mill of economic might! To toil long hours for another’s advantage; to live in mean and squalid homes, to work in dangerous and unhealthful places; to wrestle with the spectres of hunger and privation, to take your chances of accident, disease, and death. And each day the struggle becomes fiercer, the pace more cruel; each day you have to toil a little harder, and feel the iron hand of circumstance close upon you a little tighter. Months pass, years maybe⁠—and then you come again; and again I am here to plead with you, to know if want and misery have yet done their work with you, if injustice and oppression have yet opened your eyes! I shall still be waiting⁠—there is nothing else that I can do.

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