as been indicted. It has failed in
its management and its management is to be taken away from it. Seven
million men of the working-class say that they are going to get the rest
of the working-class to join with them and take the management away. The
revolution is here, now. Stop it who can.

SACRAMENTO RIVER.
_March_ 1905.

THE SOMNAMBULISTS

"'Tis only fools speak evil of the clay--
The very stars are made of clay like mine."

The mightiest and absurdest sleep-walker on the planet! Chained in the
circle of his own imaginings, man is only too keen to forget his origin
and to shame that flesh of his that bleeds like all flesh and that is
good to eat. Civilization (which is part of the circle of his
imaginings) has spread a veneer over the surface of the soft-shelled
animal known as man. It is a very thin veneer; but so wonderfully is man
constituted that he squirms on his bit of achievement and believes he is
garbed in armour-plate.

Yet man to-day is the same man that drank from his enemy's skull in the
dark German forests, that sacked cities, and stole his women from
neighbouring clans like any howling aborigine. The flesh-and-blood body
of man has not changed in the last several thousand years. Nor has his
mind changed. There is no faculty of the mind of man to-day that did not
exist in the minds of the men of long ago. Man has to-day no concept
that is too wide and deep and abstract for the mind of Plato or Aristotle
to grasp. Give to Plato or Aristotle the same fund of knowledge that man
to-day has access to, and Plato and Aristotle would reason as profoundly
as the man of to-day and would achieve very similar conclusions.

It is the same old animal man, smeared over, it is true, with a veneer,
thin and magical, that makes him dream drunken dreams of self-exaltation
and to sneer at the flesh and the blood of him beneath the smear. The
raw animal crouching within him is like the earthquake monster pent in
the crust of the earth. As he persuades himself against the latter till
it arouses and shakes down a city, so does he persuade himself against
the former until it shakes him out of his dreaming and he stands
undisguised, a brute like any other brute.

Starve him, let him miss six meals, and see gape through the veneer the
hungry maw of the animal beneath. Get between him and the female of his
kind upon whom his mating instinct is bent, and see his eyes blaze like
an angry cat'