“I was born a hater of injustice; from my most tenders years my blood boiled against heaven when I beheld the sick, and against men when I witnessed the sorrows of the poor; the pauper’s crust stuck in my throat when I sat down to eat my dainites, and the cripple child has set me weeping.
What was there in that but what was noble? And yet observe to what a fall these thoughts have led me! Year after year this passion for the lost besieged me closer. What hope was there in kings? What hope in these well-feathered classes that now roll in money?
I had observed the course of history; I knew the burgess, our ruler of to-day, to be base, cowardly and dull; I saw him, in every age, combine to pull down what was immediately above and to prey upon those that were below; his dullness, I knew, would ultimately bring about his ruin; I knew his days were numbered, and yet how was I to wait? How was I to let the poor child shiver in the rain?
The better days, indeed, were coming, but the child would die before that. Alas, your highness, in surely no ungenerous impatience I enrolled myself among the enemies of this unjust and doomed society; in surely no unnatural desire to keep the fires of my philanthropy alight, I bound myself by an irrevocable oath.”
An excerpt from ‘The Dynamiter’ by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van DeGrift Stevenson.
Proof that the problems of our age transcend time.
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