2004-10-29
THE ROAD TO PROGRESS
Intuit's Vibe | No Struggle, No Progress | by Frederick Douglass [1857]
¶ 10:34 The whole history of progress of human liberty / Shows that all concessions / Yet made to her august claims / Have been born of earnest struggle.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress / Those who profess to favor freedom, / And yet deprecate agitation, / Are men [and women] who want crops / Without plowing up the ground, / They want rain / Without thunder and lightning.
They want the ocean / Without the awful roar of its waters.
This struggle may be a moral one; / Or it may be a physical one; / Or it may be both moral and physical; / But it must be a struggle.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. / It never did, and it never will.
Find out just what any people / Will quietly submit to / And you have found the exact measure / Of injustice and wrong / Which will be imposed upon them, / And these will continue till they are resisted.
The limits. . . are prescribed / By the endurance of those whom. . [are] oppress[ed]. / Men [and Women] may not get all they pay for in this world, but they pay for all they get.
If we ever get free / from the oppressions and wrong heaped on us, / we must pay for their removal. / We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, / and if needs be by our lives and the lives of others.
