Free The Cotton-Pickers by B. Traven Page A

a penniless native. The Indian could have sat there for twenty-four hours if he’d wanted to, but sleeping on a park bench wasn’t permitted. Freedom didn’t go that far, though the bench was in Freedom Square. Locally, it was the sort of freedom in which anyone in authority could whip anyone not in authority: the age-old antagonism between two worlds, almost as old as the story of the expulsion from Paradise; the age-old antagonism between the police and the weary, burdened ones, the tired and hungry. The Indian had been in the wrong and he knew it; that was why he said nothing but only moaned. Satan or Gabriel ― this policeman regarded himself as the latter ― was in the right.
    No! He wasn’t in the right! No! No! The blood rushed to my head. In England, Germany, the USA, everywhere it is the police who do the whipping and the one in rags who gets whipped. And then the people who sit smugly at their well-laden tables are surprised when someone rocks the table, overturns it, and shatters everything to fragments. A bullet wound heals. A cut with a whip never heals. It eats ever more deeply into the flesh, reaches the heart and finally the brain, releasing a cry to make the very earth tremble, a cry of “Revenge!” Why is Russia in the hands of the bolshies? Because the Russians were a people most whipped before the rise of the new era. The policeman’s whip or club prepares the way for an offensive that makes continents quiver and political systems explode.
    Woe to the complacent and smug when the whipped cry “Revenge!” Woe to the satiated when the welts of lashes eat into the hearts of the hungry and turn the minds of the long-suffering! I was forced to become a rebel and a revolutionary, a revolutionary out of love of justice, out of a desire to help the wretched and the ragged. The sight of injustice and cruelty makes as many revolutionaries as do privation and hunger.
    I leaped to my feet and got over to the bench where the policeman was still standing, drawing his whip through his hand, slashing it through the air, grinning bright-eyed at his writhing victim. He took no notice of me. Obviously he thought that I was just going to sit down on the bench.
    But I went right up to him and said: “Take me to the police station at once. I’m going to report you. Your instructions only give you the right to use the whip if you are attacked, or in a street riot after you’ve given warning. You must know that.”
    “But the dog was asleep on the bench here.” The little devil of a cop scarcely taller than five feet, was trying to defend himself.
     “You could have awakened him and told him that he shouldn’t sleep here, and if he fell asleep again you could then have turned him off the bench, but under no circumstances should you strike him. So come along with me to the station. By tomorrow you won’t have a chance to whip anyone.”
     The little cop eyed me for a moment, took note that I was a white man, and realized that I was in earnest. He hung his whip onto the hook of his belt, and with one lightning leap disappeared as if the earth had swallowed him.
    The Indian, without a word, disappeared into the night. I walked slowly back to where I had left Antonio. What now, when I see him again?
    What is murder? I thought. It all comes to the same thing, the law of the jungle. The whole world is a jungle. Eat or be eaten! The fly by the spider, the spider by the bird, the bird by the snake ― so it went, round and round. Until there came a world disaster, or a revolution; and the whole circle would begin again, only the other way around.
    Antonio, you were right! You are right! The living are always right! It is the dead who are guilty. If you hadn’t murdered Gonzalo, he’d have murdered you. Perhaps. No, certainly. It’s the law of the jungle. You pick it up so quickly in the bush. It’s all around you and, after all, is only the natural result of an outstanding capacity for