Читать книгу The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West онлайн

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Suddenly there dawns upon you an undreamed-of significance in the machinery of social restraint. The policeman on the crossing in his slouching uniform bespattered with the oozing slime of the miry streets where he controls the streams of traffic, even as the Fellaheen direct the water of the Nile through the net-work of their irrigation ditches, is the outstretched hand of the law ready to lay hold on you, should you violate in your despair the rules of social order. Behind him you see the patrol wagon and the station-house and the courts of law and the State’s prison and enforced labor, the whole elaborate process by means of which society would reassimilate you, an excrement, a non-social being as a transgressor of the law, into the body politic once more, and set you to fulfilling a functional activity as a part of the social organism.

This result, with the means of living which it implies and the link that it gives you to your kind, even if it be the relation of a criminal to society, may become the object of a desire so strong that the shame and punishment involved may lose their deterring force for you.