Excerpt from Shop Slavery and Emancipation: A Revolutionary Appeal to the Educated Young Men of the Middle Class Abominable dormitories he describes, ate the insufficient food supplied and drudged in the shop. Then when I was fifteen I ran away one Sunday morning to my mother, and told her I would rather die than go on being a draper. That seventeen mile tramp, without breakfast, to deliver that ultimatum is still very vivid in my memory. I felt then most desperately wicked, and now I know it was nearly the best thing I ever did in my life, and not only I, but Mr. Paine. And all the brotherhood Of man fled with me that morning out of the house Of mean bondage to life and opportunity. But such a lot Of us, before it is too late, will not rather die, and there you have the secret of all the tale of pitiful degradation that Mr. Paine recounts so bitterly. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.