Caesar's Column

ar He

es. I have traversed death in life. I have looked with my very

new-found friend) woke me very earl

the latest fashion and most perfect fit. Instead of the singular-looking mountaineer of the day before, for whom the police were diligently searching, and on whose head a reward of one thousand d

or. We chatted together as we drov

ked

even the vicious, membe

ch you can build confidence or trust. Only those who have fiber enough to persist in labor, unde

number of you

ey amount to more than

with ast

I said, "there must cer

f the organization; the directing intelligence dwells elsewhere. The multitude are like the soldie

brought us into the

I never beheld. Street after street they unrolled before us; there seemed to be millions of them. They were all poorly clad, and many of them in rags. The women, with the last surviving instinct of the female heart, had tried to decorate themselves; and here and there I could observe a bit of bright color on bonnet or apron; but the bonnets represented the fashions of ten years past, and the aprons were too often frayed and darned, and relics of some former, more opulent owners. There were multitudes of children, but they were without the gambols which characterize the young of all animals; and there was not even the chirp of a winter bird about them; their

contemptible, sordid struggle for a mere existence. If they produced children it was reluctantly or unmeaningly; for they knew the wretches must tread in their footsteps, and enter, like them, that narrow, gloomy, high-walled pathway, out of which they could never climb; which began almost in infancy and ended in a pauper's grave--nay, I am wrong, not even in a pauper's grave; for they might have claimed, perhaps, some sort of ownership over the earth which enfolded them, which touched them and mingled with their dust. But public safety and the demands of science had long ago decreed that they should be whisked off, as soon as dead, a score or two at a time, and swept on iron tram-cars into furnaces heated

to do the work required, with such little surplus of vitality as might be necessary to perpetuate the wretched race; so that the world's work should not end with the death of one starved generation. I do not know if there is a hell in the spiritual universe, but if there is not, one should certainly be created for the souls of the men who originated, or justified,

hick air as made us gasp when entering it; an atmosphere full of life, hostile to the life of man. Think, my brother, as you sit upon your mountain side; your gentle sheep feeding around you; breathing the exquisite air of those elevated regions; and looking off over the mysterious, ancient world, and the great river valleys leading down to the marvelous Nile-land afar,--land of temples, ruins, pyramids,--cradle of civilization, grave of buried empires,--think, I say, of these millions condemned to live their brief, h

ed sleep, battling with vermin, in a polluted atmosphere; and then up again and to work; and so on, and on, in endless, mirthless, hopeless

at or mouse" "A rat or mouse!" I exclaimed. "Oh yes," he replied, "the rats and mice were important articles of diet,--just as they had been for centuries in China. The little children, not yet able to work, fished for them in the sewers, w

lmost to our own times, in the islands of the Pacific Ocean, because they had contained no animals of large size with whi

ple ever marr

y marry? There is no virtue among them. No," he said, "they had almost gotten down to the condition of the Australi

man was one of the Brotherh

fellow-creatures. But here, too, were the fruits of misgovernment. If it were possible we might trace back from yonder robber and murderer--a human hyena--the long ancestral line of brutality, until we see it starting from some poor peasant of the Middle Ages, trampled into crime under the

rsal injustice is wrought. If there were enough of these outlaws they might establish a system of jurisprudence for the world under which it would be lawful to rob and murder by the rule of the strong right hand, but c

urse, even at the cost of a broken head, which will heal in a few days, with the awful doom of the poor multitude, who from the cradle to the grave w

nditions, a flight from world to world, or at worst annihilation, rather than to be hurled into the living tomb which I

s, whose selfishness takes the form of the bloody knife, the firebrand, or the bludgeon; but those who, equally selfish, corrupt the foundations o

ter to a conclusion, and subsc

ectionat

br