Be industrious, little children, and learn
your lessons, that when the time comes you may be ready to take from
our hands the creaking oar, to slip into our seat at the roaring
loom. For we shall not be slaves for ever, little children. It is
the good law of the land. So many years in the galleys, so many
years in the fields; then we can claim our freedom. Then we shall
go, little children, back to the land of our birth. And you we must
leave behind us to take up the tale of our work. So, off to your
schools, little children, and learn to be good little slaves.
Next, pompous and sleek, come the educated slaves--journalists,
doctors, judges, and poets; the attorney, the artist, the player,
the priest. They likewise scurry across the Park, looking anxiously
from time to time at their watches, lest they be late for their
appointments; thinking of the rates and taxes to be earned, of the
bonnets to be paid for, the bills to be met. The best scourged,
perhaps, of all, these slaves. The cat reserved for them has fifty
tails in place of merely two or three. Work, you higher
middle-class slave, or you shall come down to the smoking of
twopenny cigars; harder yet, or you shall drink shilling claret;
harder, or you shall lose your carriage and ride in a penny bus;
your wife's frocks shall be of last year's fashion; your trousers
shall bag at the knees; from Kensington you shall be banished to
Kilburn, if the tale of your bricks run short.
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