"We want to look after ourselves! You shouldn't meddle in other people's business," mumbled the obstinate snarler.
"Yes, you should! Because what you call 'other people,' that's just what they're not—they're the same!"
"Why is it always us that has to march away for everybody?"
"That's it!" said a man, and he repeated the words he had used a moment before. "More's the pity, or so much the better."
"The people—they're nothing, though they ought to be everything," then said the man who had questioned me, recalling, though he did not know it, an historic sentence of more than a century ago, but investing it at last with its great universal significance. Escaped from torment, on all fours in the deep grease of the ground, he lifted his leper-like face and looked hungrily before him into infinity.
He looked and looked. He was trying to open the gates of heaven.
"The peoples of the world ought to come to an understanding, through the hides and on the bodies of those who exploit them one way or another. All the masses ought to agree together."
"All men ought to be equal."
The word seems to come to us like a rescue.