Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Upton Sinclair, ed. (1878–1968). rn The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest. 1915.

The Sight of Inequality
(From “The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe”)

Defoe, Daniel

Daniel Defoe

(English novelist and pamphleteer, 1660?–1731; many times imprisoned for satires upon the authorities)

I SAW the world round me, one part laboring for bread, and the other part squandering in vile excess or empty pleasures, equally miserable, because the end they proposed still fled from them; for the man of pleasure every day surfeited of his vice, and heaped up work for sorrow and repentance; and the man of labor spent his strength in daily struggling for bread to maintain the vital strength he labored with; so living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of a wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread.