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- color: black; - font-size:smaller; - padding:0.5em; - margin-bottom:5em; - font-family:sans-serif, serif; -} -.tnote ul { - padding:0; - width:100%; - margin-left: 10%;} - -/* ePub stylings */ - -div.chapter {page-break-before: always;} - -@media screen -{ -.half-title - { - margin: 6em 0; - } -} - -@media handheld -{ - body - { - margin: 0; - padding: 0; - width: 95%; - } - - .poetry - { - display: block; - margin-left: 1.5em; - } - -/* Images - ePub format */ - - img {max-width: 100%; height: auto;} - - .figcenter { - margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; - margin-top: 4px; margin-bottom: 4px; - text-align: center; - clear: both; - border: 1px solid black; - padding: 3px; - page-break-after: always; - } - - .pleasehide { - visibility: hidden; - } -} - -@media print -{ - .pleasehide { visibility: hidden;} - -/* Images - ePub format */ - - img {max-width: 100%; height: auto;} - - .figcenter { - margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; - margin-top: 4px; margin-bottom: 4px; - text-align: center; - clear: both; - border: 1px solid black; - padding: 3px; - } - - .pleasehide { - visibility: hidden; - } -} - </style> - </head> -<body> - -<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Cry for Justice, by Various</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online -at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you -are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the -country where you are located before using this eBook. -</div> - -<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: The Cry for Justice</p> -<p style='display:block; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:0;'>An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest</p> - -<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Various</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Editor: Upton Sinclair</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Contributor: Jack London</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: July 5, 2021 [eBook #65775]</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: MFR, Splendid Geryon and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)</div> - -<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRY FOR JUSTICE ***</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Frontispiece" id="Frontispiece">[Frontispiece]</a></span></p> -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 356px;" > - -<img src="images/i_frontis.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>THE HEAVY SLEDGE</p> - -<p>MAHONRI YOUNG</p> - -<p>(<i>American sculptor, born 1877</i>)</p></div> -</div> -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - -<div class="titlepage"> - -<h1><span class="smcap">The Cry for Justice</span></h1> - -<p class="mt2"> -An Anthology of the Literature<br /> -of Social Protest</p> - -<p class="mt2"> -THE WRITINGS OF PHILOSOPHERS, POETS, NOVELISTS,<br /> -SOCIAL REFORMERS, AND OTHERS WHO HAVE<br /> -VOICED THE STRUGGLE AGAINST<br /> -SOCIAL INJUSTICE -</p> - -<p class="mt2"> -<i>SELECTED FROM TWENTY-FIVE LANGUAGES</i><br /> -Covering a Period of Five Thousand Years -</p> - -<p class="ph2 mt2"> -<span class="smaller">Edited by</span><br /> -UPTON SINCLAIR<br /> -<span class="smaller"><i>Author of “Sylvia,” “The Jungle,” Etc.</i></span> -</p> - -<p class="ph2 mt2"> -<span class="smaller">With an Introduction by</span><br /> -JACK LONDON<br /> -<span class="smaller"><i>Author of “The Sea Wolf,” “The Call of the Wild,”<br /> -“The Valley of the Moon,” Etc., Etc.</i></span> -</p> - -<p class="mt4"> -<i>ILLUSTRATED WITH REPRODUCTIONS<br /> -OF SOCIAL PROTEST IN ART</i> -</p> - -<p class="mt4"> -<span class="smcap">Published by</span><br /> -UPTON SINCLAIR<br /> -NEW YORK CITY AND PASADENA, CALIFORNIA -</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> -</div> - - - -<p>Dr. John R. Haynes, of Los Angeles, very generously -purchased from the publishers the plates and copyright -of this book, in order to make possible the issuing of -this edition. I asked Dr. Haynes if he would let me -make acknowledgment to him in the book, and he -answered: “Dedicate the book to those unknown ones, -who by their dimes and quarters keep the Socialist -movement going; to the poor and obscure people who -sacrifice themselves in order to bring about a better -world, which they may never live to see. Write this as -eloquently as you can, and it will be the best possible -dedication to ‘The Cry for Justice’.”</p> - -<p>I decided, after thinking it over, to combine my own -idea with the idea of Dr. Haynes.</p> - - -<p class="center mt4"> -Copyright, 1915, by<br /> -<span class="smcap">The John C. Winston Co.</span> -</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span> -<h2>Introduction by Jack London</h2> -</div> - - -<p>This anthology, I take it, is the first edition, the first -gathering together of the body of the literature and -art of the humanist thinkers of the world. As well done -as it has been done, it will be better done in the future. -There will be much adding, there will be a little subtracting, -in the succeeding editions that are bound to come. The -result will be a monument of the ages, and there will be -none fairer.</p> - -<p>Since reading of the Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud -has enabled countless devout and earnest right-seeking -souls to be stirred and uplifted to higher and finer planes -of thought and action, then the reading of this humanist -Holy Book cannot fail similarly to serve the needs of -groping, yearning humans who seek to discern truth and -justice amid the dazzle and murk of the thought-chaos -of the present-day world.</p> - -<p>No person, no matter how soft and secluded his own life -has been, can read this Holy Book and not be aware that -the world is filled with a vast mass of unfairness, cruelty, -and suffering. He will find that it has been observed, -during all the ages, by the thinkers, the seers, the poets, and -the philosophers.</p> - -<p>And such person will learn, possibly, that this fair -world so brutally unfair, is not decreed by the will of God -nor by any iron law of Nature. He will learn that the -world can be fashioned a fair world indeed by the humans -who inhabit it, by the very simple, and yet most difficult -process of coming to an understanding of the world. -Understanding, after all, is merely sympathy in its fine -correct sense. And such sympathy, in its genuineness, -makes toward unselfishness. Unselfishness inevitably<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span> -connotes service. And service is the solution of the entire -vexatious problem of man.</p> - -<p>He, who by understanding becomes converted to the -gospel of service, will serve truth to confute liars and -make of them truth-tellers; will serve kindness so that -brutality will perish; will serve beauty to the erasement -of all that is not beautiful. And he who is strong will serve -the weak that they may become strong. He will devote -his strength, not to the debasement and defilement of his -weaker fellows, but to the making of opportunity for them -to make themselves into men rather than into slaves and -beasts.</p> - -<p>One has but to read the names of the men and women -whose words burn in these pages, and to recall that by far -more than average intelligence have they won to their -place in the world’s eye and in the world’s brain long after -the dust of them has vanished, to realize that due credence -must be placed in their report of the world herein recorded. -They were not tyrants and wastrels, hypocrites and liars, -brewers and gamblers, market-riggers and stock-brokers. -They were givers and servers, and seers and humanists. -They were unselfish. They conceived of life, not in -terms of profit, but of service.</p> - -<p>Life tore at them with its heart-break. They could not -escape the hurt of it by selfish refuge in the gluttonies of -brain and body. They saw, and steeled themselves to see, -clear-eyed and unafraid. Nor were they afflicted by some -strange myopia. They all saw the same thing. They are -all agreed upon what they saw. The totality of their -evidence proves this with unswerving consistency. They -have brought the report, these commissioners of humanity. -It is here in these pages. It is a true report.</p> - -<p>But not merely have they reported the human ills.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span> -They have proposed the remedy. And their remedy is of -no part of all the jangling sects. It has nothing to do with -the complicated metaphysical processes by which one may -win to other worlds and imagined gains beyond the sky. -It is a remedy for this world, since worlds must be taken -one at a time. And yet, that not even the jangling sects -should receive hurt by the making fairer of this world for -this own world’s sake, it is well, for all future worlds of -them that need future worlds, that their splendor be not -tarnished by the vileness and ugliness of this world.</p> - -<p>It is so simple a remedy, merely service. Not one -ignoble thought or act is demanded of any one of all men -and women in the world to make fair the world. The call -is for nobility of thinking, nobility of doing. The call -is for service, and, such is the wholesomeness of it, he who -serves all, best serves himself.</p> - -<p>Times change, and men’s minds with them. Down the -past, civilizations have exposited themselves in terms of -power, of world-power or of other-world power. No -civilization has yet exposited itself in terms of love-of-man. -The humanists have no quarrel with the previous civilizations. -They were necessary in the development of man. -But their purpose is fulfilled, and they may well pass, -leaving man to build the new and higher civilization that -will exposit itself in terms of love and service and brotherhood.</p> - -<p>To see gathered here together this great body of human -beauty and fineness and nobleness is to realize what -glorious humans have already existed, do exist, and will -continue increasingly to exist until all the world beautiful -be made over in their image. We know how gods are -made. Comes now the time to make a world.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><span class="smcap">Honolulu</span>, March 6, 1915.</p></div> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a><br /><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span> -<h2>Acknowledgments</h2> -</div> - - -<p>The editor has used his best efforts to ascertain what material -in the present volume is protected by copyright. In all such cases -he has obtained the permission of author and publisher for the use -of the material. Such permission applies only to the present -volume, and no one should assume the right to make any other -use of it without seeking permission in turn. If there has been -any failure upon the editor’s part to obtain a necessary consent, it -is due solely to oversight, and he trusts that it may be overlooked. -The following publishers have to be thanked for the permissions -which they have kindly granted; the thanks applying also to the -authors of the works.</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Mitchell Kennerley</span></p> - -<p>Patrick MacGill, “Songs of the Dead End.” Harry Kemp, -“The Cry of Youth.” Charles Hanson Towne, “Manhattan.” -Hjalmar Bergström, “Lynggaard & Co.” Donald Lowrie, “My -Life in Prison.” John G. Neihardt, “Cry of the People.” Frank -Harris, “The Bomb.” Vachel Lindsay, “The Eagle that is Forgotten” -and “To the United States Senate.” Frederik van -Eeden, “The Quest.” Edwin Davies Schoonmaker, “Trinity -Church.” Walter Lippman, “A Preface to Politics.” L. Andreyev, -“Savva.” J. C. Underwood, “Processionals.” Bliss Carman, -“The Rough Rider.” Percy Adams Hutchison, “The Swordless -Christ.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Doubleday, Page & Co.</span></p> - -<p>Frank Norris, “The Octopus.” Helen Keller, “Out of the -Dark.” Frederik van Eeden, “Happy Humanity.” Bouck White, -“The Call of the Carpenter.” Alexander Irvine, “From the Bottom -Up.” John D. Rockefeller, “Random Reminiscences.” G. -Lowes Dickinson, “Letters from a Chinese Official.” Ben B. Lindsey -and Harvey J. O’Higgins, “The Beast.” Franklin P. Adams, -“By and Large.” Edwin Markham, “The Man with the Hoe -and Other Poems.” Gerald Stanley Lee, “Crowds.” Woodrow -Wilson, “The New Freedom.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span></p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Houghton Mifflin Co.</span></p> - -<p>William Vaughn Moody, “Poems.” Vida D. Scudder, “Social -Ideals.” Florence Wilkinson Evans, “The Ride Home.” Peter -Kropotkin, “Mutual Aid” and “Memoirs of a Revolutionist.” -Helen G. Cone, “Today.” T. B. Aldrich, “Poems.” T. W. Higginson, -“Poems.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Charles Scribner’s Sons</span></p> - -<p>H. G. Wells, “A Modern Utopia.” Björnstjerne Björnson, -“Beyond Human Power.” Edith Wharton, “The House of Mirth.” -John Galsworthy, “A Motley.” Maxim Gorky, “Fóma Gordyéeff.” -J. M. Barrie, “Farm Laborers.” Walter Wyckoff, “The Workers.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">The Macmillan Co.</span></p> - -<p>John Masefield, “Dauber” and “A Consecration.” Jack London, -“The People of the Abyss” and “Revolution.” Robert Herrick, -“A Life for a Life.” Israel Zangwill, “Children of the Ghetto.” -Albert Edwards, “A Man’s World” and “Comrade Yetta.” Walter -Rauschenbusch, “Christianity and the Social Crisis.” Winston -Churchill, “The Inside of the Cup.” Rabindranath Tagore, “Gitanjali.” -Thorstein Veblen, “The Theory of the Leisure Class.” -Edward Alsworth Ross, “Sin and Society.” W. J. Ghent, “Socialism -and Success.” Vachel Lindsay, “The Congo.” Wilfrid Wilson -Gibson, “Fires.” Percy Mackaye, “The Present Hour.” -Robert Hunter, “Violence and the Labor Movement.” Ernest -Poole, “The Harbor.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">The Century Co.</span></p> - -<p>Louis Untermeyer, “Challenge.” Richard Whiteing, “No. 5 -John Street.” George Carter, “Ballade of Misery and Iron.” -James Oppenheim, “Songs for the New Age.” H. G. Wells, “In -the Days of the Comet.” Alex. Irvine, “My Lady of the Chimney -Corner.” Edwin Björkman, “Dinner à la Tango.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Small, Maynard & Co.</span></p> - -<p>Charlotte P. Gilman, “In this Our World” and “Women and -Economics.” Finley P. Dunne, “Mr. Dooley.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span></p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Brentano</span></p> - -<p>G. Bernard Shaw, “Preface to Major Barbara” and “The Problem -Play.” Eugene Brieux, “The Red Robe.” W. L. George, -“A Bed of Roses.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Duffield & Co.</span></p> - -<p>Elsa Barker, “The Frozen Grail.” H. G. Wells, “Tono-Bungay.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">B. W. Huebsch</span></p> - -<p>James Oppenheim, “Pay Envelopes.” Gerhart Hauptmann, -“The Weavers.” Maxim Gorky, “Tales of Two Countries.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">G. P. Putnam Sons</span></p> - -<p>Antonio Fogazzaro, “The Saint.” J. L. Jaurès, “Studies in -Socialism.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">George H. Doran Co.</span></p> - -<p>Will Levington Comfort, “Midstream.” Charles E. Russell, -“These Shifting Scenes.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Frederick A. Stokes Co.</span></p> - -<p>Robert Tressall, “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.” -Wilhelm Lamszus, “The Human Slaughter House.” Olive -Schreiner, “Woman and Labor.” Alfred Noyes, “The Wine -Press.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">McClure Publishing Co.</span></p> - -<p>Dana Burnet, “A Ballad of Dead Girls.” Lincoln Steffens, -“The Dying Boss” and “The Reluctant Grafter.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">The “Masses”</span></p> - -<p>John Amid, “The Tail of the World.” Dana Burnet, “Sisters -of the Cross of Shame.” Carl Sandburg, “Buttons.” J. E. -Spingarn, “Heloise sans Abelard.” Louis Untermeyer, “To a -Supreme Court Judge.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">James Pott & Co.</span></p> - -<p>David Graham Phillips, “The Reign of Gilt.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span></p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Barse & Hopkins</span></p> - -<p>R. W. Service, “The Spell of the Yukon.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">University of Chicago Press</span></p> - -<p>August Bebel, “Memoirs.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Charles H. Sergel Co.</span></p> - -<p>Verhaeren, “The Dawn: Translation by Arthur Symons.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Albert and Charles Boni</span></p> - -<p>Horace Traubel, “Chants Communal.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">A. C. McClurg & Co.</span></p> - -<p>W. E. B. du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Mother Earth Publishing Co.</span></p> - -<p>A. Berkman, “Prison Memories of an Anarchist.” Voltairine -de Cleyre, “Works.” Emma Goldman, “Anarchism.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Moffat, Yard & Co.</span></p> - -<p>Reginald Wright Kauffman, “The House of Bondage.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">John Lane</span></p> - -<p>Anatole France, “Penguin Island.” William Watson, “Poems.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Bobbs-Merrill Co.</span></p> - -<p>Brand Whitlock, “The Turn of the Balance.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">E. P. Dutton & Co.</span></p> - -<p>Patrick MacGill, “Children of the Dead End.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Charles H. Kerr Co.</span></p> - -<p>“When the Leaves Come Out.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Hillacre Bookhouse</span></p> - -<p>Arturo Giovannitti, “The Walker.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span></p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Henry Holt & Co.</span></p> - -<p>Romain Rolland, “Jean-Christophe.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Richard G. Badger</span> (<em>Poet Lore</em>)</p> - -<p>Andreyev, “King Hunger.” Gorky, “A Night’s Lodging.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Mrs. Arthur Upson</span></p> - -<p>Poems by Arthur Upson.</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><cite>New York Times</cite></p> - -<p>Elsa Barker, “Breshkovskaya.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><cite>Collier’s Weekly</cite></p> - -<p>Herman Hagedorn, “Fifth Avenue, 1915.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><cite>Poetry: A Magazine of Verse</cite></p> - -<p>F. Kiper Frank, “A Girl Strike Leader.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><cite>Life</cite></p> - -<p>Max Eastman, “To a Bourgeois Litterateur.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Walter Scott Publishing Co.</span></p> - -<p class="center">(<span class="smcap">P. P. Simmons Co.</span>, New York)</p> - -<p>Joseph Skipsey, “Mother Wept.” Jethro Bithell’s translation of -Verhaeren in “Contemporary Belgian Poetry” and of Dehmel in -“Contemporary German Poetry.” Rimbaud’s “Waifs and -Strays” in “Contemporary French Poetry.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Elkin Mathews & Co.</span></p> - -<p>William H. Davies, “Songs of Joy.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Constable & Co.</span></p> - -<p>Harold Monro, “Impressions.”</p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Duckworth & Co.</span></p> - -<p>Hilaire Belloc, “The Rebel.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span></p> - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">Swan, Sonnenschein & Co.</span></p> - -<p>Edward Carpenter, “Towards Democracy.”</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>Acknowledgments have also to be made to the following artists, -who have kindly consented to have their works used in the volume: -Mahonri Young, Wm. Balfour Ker, Ryan Walker, Charles A. -Winter, Abastenia Eberle, John Mowbray-Clarke, Isidore Konti, -Walter Crane, and Will Dyson. Also to <cite>Life</cite> Publishing Co. and -the <cite>New Age</cite>, London, for permission to use a drawing from their -files.</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span> -<h2>Contents</h2> -</div> - - -<table class="toc" summary="Contents"> -<tr> - <th>BOOK</th> - <th> </th> - <th>PAGE</th> -</tr> - -<tr> - <td class="rom">I.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">Toil</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td> -</tr> - -<tr> - <td class="rom">II.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">The Chasm</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_73">73</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td class="rom">III.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">The Outcast</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_121">121</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td class="rom">IV.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">Out of the Depths</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_179">179</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td class="rom">V.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">Revolt</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_227">227</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td class="rom">VI.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">Martyrdom</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_289">289</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td class="rom">VII.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">Jesus</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_345">345</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td class="rom">VIII.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">The Church</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_383">383</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td class="rom">IX.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">The Voice of the Ages</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_431">431</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td class="rom">X.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">Mammon</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_485">485</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td class="rom">XI.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">War</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_551">551</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td class="rom">XII.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">Country</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_593">593</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td class="rom">XIII.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">Children</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_637">637</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td class="rom">XIV.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">Humor</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_679">679</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td class="rom">XV.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">The Poet</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_725">725</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td class="rom">XVI.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">Socialism</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_783">783</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td class="rom">XVII.</td> - <td><span class="smcap">The New Day</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Page_835">835</a></td> -</tr> - -</table> - - - - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a><br /><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span> -<h2>List of Illustrations</h2> -</div> - - -<table class="toc" summary="List of Illustrations"> - -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">The Heavy Sledge</span>, <em>Mahonri Young</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#Frontispiece">Frontispiece</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <th> </th> - <th class="pag smaller">PAGE</th> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">The Man with the Hoe</span>, <em>E. M. Lilien</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo32">32</a></td> -</tr> - -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">The Vampire</span>, <em>E. M. Lilien</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo33">33</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">King Canute</span>, <em>William Balfour Ker</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo93">93</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">The Hand of Fate</span>, <em>William Balfour Ker</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo92">92</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">Without a Kennel</span>, <em>Ryan Walker</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo136">136</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">The White Slave</span>, <em>Abastenia St. Leger Eberle</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo137">137</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">Cold</span>, <em>Roger Bloche</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo200">200</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">The People Mourn</span>, <em>Jules Pierre van Biesbroeck</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo201">201</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">The Liberatress</span>, <em>Theophile Alexandre Steinlen</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo233">233</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">Outbreak</span>, <em>Käthe Kollwitz</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo232">232</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">The End</span>, <em>Käthe Kollwitz</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo297">297</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">The Surprise</span>, <em>Ilyá Efímovitch Repin</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo296">296</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">Ecce Homo</span>, <em>Constantin Meunier</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo368">368</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">Despised and Rejected of Men</span>, <em>Sigismund Goetze</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo369">369</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td>“<span class="smcap">To Sustain the Body of the Church, if You Please</span>,” <em>Denis Auguste Marie Raffet</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo392">392</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">Christ</span>, <em>John Mowbray-Clarke</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo393">393</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">The Despotic Age</span>, <em>Isidore Konti</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo456">456</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td>“<span class="smcap">Courage, Your Majesty, Only One Step More!</span>”</td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo457">457</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">Marriage à la Mode</span>, <em>William Hogarth</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo489">489</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">Mammon</span>, <em>George Frederick Watts</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo488">488</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">War</span>, <em>Arnold Böcklin</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo584">584</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">London</span>, <em>Paul Gustave Doré</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo585">585</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">A Citizen Lost</span>, <em>Ryan Walker</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo649">649</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td>“<span class="smcap">Oliver Twist Asks for More</span>,” <em>George Cruikshank</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo648">648</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">The Coal Famine</span>, <em>Thomas Theodor Heine</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo680">680</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">My Solicitor Shall Hear of This</span>, <em>Will Dyson</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo681">681</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">The Militant</span>, <em>Charles A. Winter</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo744">744</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">The Death of Chatterton</span>, <em>Henry Wallis</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo745">745</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="smcap">Once Ye Have Seen My Face Ye Dare Not Mock</span></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo808">808</a></td> -</tr> -<tr> - <td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span><span class="smcap">Justice</span>, <em>Walter Crane</em></td> - <td class="pag"><a href="#illo809">809</a></td> -</tr> -</table> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span> -<h2>Editor’s Preface</h2> -</div> - - -<p>When the idea of this collection was first thought of, -it was a matter of surprise that the task should have -been so long unattempted. There exist small collections -of Socialist songs for singing, but apparently this is the -first effort that has been made to cover the whole field -of the literature of social protest, both in prose and poetry, -and from all languages and times.</p> - -<p>The reader’s first inquiry will be as to the qualifications -of the editor. Let me say that I gave nine years of my life -to a study of literature under academic guidance, and then, -emerging from a great endowed university, discovered the -modern movement of proletarian revolt, and have given -fifteen years to the study and interpretation of that. The -present volume is thus a blending of two points of view. -I have reread the favorites of my youth, choosing from -them what now seemed most vital; and I have sought to -test the writers of my own time by the touchstone of the -old standards.</p> - -<p>The size of the task I did not realize until I had gone too -far to retreat. It meant not merely the rereading of the -classics and the standard anthologies; it meant going -through a small library of volumes by living writers, the -files of many magazines, and a dozen or more scrap-books -and collections of fugitive verse. At the end of this labor -I found myself with a pile of typewritten manuscript a -foot high; and the task of elimination was the most difficult -of all.</p> - -<p>To a certain extent, of course, the selection was self-determined. -No anthology of social protest could omit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span> -“The Song of the Shirt,” and “The Cry of the Children,” -and “A Man’s a Man for A’ That”; neither could it -omit the “Marseillaise” and the “Internationale.” -Equally inevitable were selections from Shelley and -Swinburne, Ruskin, Carlyle and Morris, Whitman, Tolstoy -and Zola. The same was true of Wells and Shaw -and Kropotkin, Hauptmann and Maeterlinck, Romain -Rolland and Anatole France. When it came to the -newer writers, I sought first their own judgment as to -their best work; and later I submitted the manuscript -to several friends, the best qualified men and women I -knew. Thus the final version was the product of a -number of minds; and the collection may be said to -represent, not its editor, but a whole movement, made -and sustained by the master-spirits of all ages.</p> - -<p>For this reason I may without suspicion of egotism -say what I think about the volume. It was significant -to me that several persons reading the manuscript and -writing quite independently, referred to it as “a new -Bible.” I believe that it is, quite literally and simply, -what the old Bible was—a selection by the living minds -of a living time of the best and truest writings known to -them. It is a Bible of the future, a Gospel of the new -hope of the race. It is a book for the apostles of a new -dispensation to carry about with them; a book to cheer -the discouraged and console the wounded in humanity’s -last war of liberation.</p> - -<p>The standards of the book are those of literature. If -there has been any letting down, it has been in the case -of old writings, which have an interest apart from that of -style. It brings us a thrill of wonder to find, in an -ancient Egyptian parchment, a father setting forth to -his son how easy is the life of the lawyer, and what a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span> -dog’s life is that of the farmer. It amuses us to read -a play, produced in Athens two thousand, two hundred -and twenty-three years ago, in which is elaborately propounded -the question which thousands of Socialist “soap-boxers” -are answering every night: “Who will do the -dirty work?” It makes us shudder, perhaps, to find -a Spaniard of the thirteenth century analyzing the evil -devices of tyrants, and expounding in detail the labor-policy -of some present-day great corporations in America.</p> - -<p>Let me add that I have not considered it my function -to act as censor to the process of social evolution. Every -aspect of the revolutionary movement has found a voice -in this book. Two questions have been asked of each -writer: Have you had something vital to say? and Have -you said it with some special effectiveness? The reader -will find, for example, one or two of the hymns of the -“Christian Socialists”; he will also find one of the parodies -on Christian hymns which are sung by the Industrial -Workers of the World in their “jungles” in the Far West. -The Anarchists and the apostles of insurrection are also -represented; and if some of the things seem to the reader -the mere unchaining of furies, I would say, let him not -blame the faithful anthologist, let him not blame even -the writer—let him blame himself, who has acquiesced -in the existence of conditions which have driven his -fellow-men to the extremes of madness and despair.</p> - -<p>In the preparation of this work I have placed myself -under obligation to so many people that it would take -much space to make complete acknowledgments. I -must thank those friends who went through the bulky -manuscript, and gave me the benefit of their detailed -criticism: George Sterling, Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, -Clement Wood, Louis Untermeyer, and my wife. I am<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span> -under obligation to a number of people, some of them -strangers, who went to the trouble of sending me scrap-books -which represented years and even decades of collecting: -Elizabeth Balch, Elizabeth Magie Phillips, -Frank B. Norman, Frank Stuhlman, J. M. Maddox, -Edward J. O’Brien, and Clement Wood. Among those -who helped me with valuable suggestions were: Edwin -Björkman, Reginald Wright Kauffman, Thomas Seltzer, -Jack London, Rose Pastor Stokes, May Beals, Elizabeth -Freeman, Arthur W. Calhoun, Frank Shay, Alexander -Berkman, Joseph F. Gould, Louis Untermeyer, Harold -Monro, Morris Hillquit, Peter Kropotkin, Dr. James P. -Warbasse, and the Baroness von Blomberg. The fullness -of the section devoted to ancient writings is in part due to -the advice of a number of scholars: Dr. Paul Carus, Professor -Crawford H. Toy, Professor William Cranston Lawton, -Professor Charles Burton Gulick, Professor Thomas -D. Goodell, Professor Walton Brooks McDaniels, Rev. -John Haynes Holmes, Professor George F. Moore, Prof. -Walter Rauschenbusch, and Professor Charles R. Lanman.</p> - -<p>With regard to the illustrations in the volume, I endeavored -to repeat in the field of art what had been done -in the field of literature: to obtain the best material, -both old and new, and select the most interesting and -vital. I have to record my indebtedness to a number -of friends who made suggestions in this field—Ryan -Walker, Art Young, John Mowbray-Clarke, Martin Birnbaum, -Odon Por, and Walter Crane. Also I must thank -Mr. Frank Weitenkampf and Dr. Herman Rosenthal of -the New York Public Library, and Dr. Clifford of the -Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To the -artists whose copyrighted work I have used I owe my -thanks for their permission: as likewise to the many<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span> -writers whose copyrighted books I have quoted. Elsewhere -in the volume I have made acknowledgments to -publishers for the rights they have kindly granted. Let -me here add this general caution: <em>The copyrighted passages -used have been used by permission, and any one who -desires to reprint them must obtain similar permission.</em></p> - -<p>One or two hundred contemporary authors responded -to my invitation and sent me specimens of their writings. -Of these authors, probably three-fourths will not find -their work included—for which seeming discourtesy I can -only offer the sincere plea of the limitations of space -which were imposed upon me. I am not being diplomatic, -but am stating a fact when I say that I had to leave out -much that I thought was of excellent quality.</p> - -<p>What was chosen will now speak for itself. Let my last -word be of the hope, which has been with me constantly, -that the book may be to others what it has been to me. I -have spent with it the happiest year of my lifetime: the -happiest, because occupied with beauty of the greatest and -truest sort. If the material in this volume means to you, -the reader, what it has meant to me, you will live with it, -love it, sometimes weep with it, many times pray with it, -yearn and hunger with it, and, above all, resolve with it. -You will carry it with you about your daily tasks, you will -be utterly possessed by it; and again and again you will be -led to dedicate yourself to the greatest hope, the most -wondrous vision which has ever thrilled the soul of humanity. -In this spirit and to this end the book is offered to -you. If you will read it through consecutively, skipping -nothing, you will find that it has a form. You will be led -from one passage to the next, and when you reach the end -you will be a wiser, a humbler, and a more tender-hearted -person.</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a><br /><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span> -<h2>A Consecration</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Masefield</span></p> - - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> - -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Not of the princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers</div> - <div class="verse">Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the years,</div> - <div class="verse">Rather the scorned—the rejected—the men hemmed in with the spears;</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies,</div> - <div class="verse">Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries,</div> - <div class="verse">The men with the broken heads and the blood running into their eyes.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Not the be-medalled Commander, beloved of the throne,</div> - <div class="verse">Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown,</div> - <div class="verse">But the lads who carried the koppie and cannot be known.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the road,</div> - <div class="verse">The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad,</div> - <div class="verse">The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout,</div> - <div class="verse">The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to the shout,</div> - <div class="verse">The drowsy man at the wheel and the tired lookout.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth,</div> - <div class="verse">The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;—</div> - <div class="verse">Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth!</div> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span></div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Theirs be the music, the color, the glory, the gold;</div> - <div class="verse">Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould.</div> - <div class="verse">Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold—</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tale be told.</div> - <div class="verse indent48"><span class="smcap">Amen.</span></div> -</div></div></div> -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span></p> - - - -<div class="titlepage"> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK I</h2> - - -<p class="ph3"><em>Toil</em></p> - -<p>The dignity and tragedy of labor; pictures of the actual conditions -under which men and women work in mills and factories, -fields and mines.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span></p> - -</div> - - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Man With the Hoe<a name="FNanchor_1" id="FNanchor_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a></h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edwin Markham</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(This poem, which was written after seeing Millet’s world-famous -painting, was published in 1899 by a California school-principal, -and made a profound impression. It has been hailed as “the -battle-cry of the next thousand years”)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans</div> - <div class="verse">Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,</div> - <div class="verse">The emptiness of ages in his face,</div> - <div class="verse">And on his back the burden of the world.</div> - <div class="verse">Who made him dead to rapture and despair,</div> - <div class="verse">A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,</div> - <div class="verse">Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?</div> - <div class="verse">Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?</div> - <div class="verse">Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?</div> - <div class="verse">Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Is this the thing the Lord God made and gave</div> - <div class="verse">To have dominion over sea and land;</div> - <div class="verse">To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;</div> - <div class="verse">To feel the passion of Eternity?</div> - <div class="verse">Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns</div> - <div class="verse">And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?</div> - <div class="verse">Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf</div> - <div class="verse">There is no shape more terrible than this—</div> - <div class="verse">More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed—</div> - <div class="verse">More filled with signs and portents for the soul—</div> - <div class="verse">More fraught with menace to the universe.</div> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span></div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">What gulfs between him and the seraphim!</div> - <div class="verse">Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him</div> - <div class="verse">Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?</div> - <div class="verse">What the long reaches of the peaks of song,</div> - <div class="verse">The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?</div> - <div class="verse">Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;</div> - <div class="verse">Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;</div> - <div class="verse">Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,</div> - <div class="verse">Plundered, profaned and disinherited,</div> - <div class="verse">Cries protest to the Judges of the World,</div> - <div class="verse">A protest that is also prophecy.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,</div> - <div class="verse">Is this the handiwork you give to God,</div> - <div class="verse">This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?</div> - <div class="verse">How will you ever straighten up this shape;</div> - <div class="verse">Touch it again with immortality;</div> - <div class="verse">Give back the upward looking and the light;</div> - <div class="verse">Rebuild in it the music and the dream;</div> - <div class="verse">Make right the immemorial infamies,</div> - <div class="verse">Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,</div> - <div class="verse">How will the Future reckon with this Man?</div> - <div class="verse">How answer his brute question in that hour</div> - <div class="verse">When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?</div> - <div class="verse">How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—</div> - <div class="verse">With those who shaped him to the thing he is—</div> - <div class="verse">When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,</div> - <div class="verse">After the silence of the centuries?</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Country Life</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Village”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George Crabbe</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(One of the earliest of English realistic poets, 1754-1832; called -“The Poet of the Poor”)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Or will you deem them amply paid in health,</div> - <div class="verse">Labor’s fair child, that languishes with wealth?</div> - <div class="verse">Go then! and see them rising with the sun,</div> - <div class="verse">Through a long course of daily toil to run;</div> - <div class="verse">See them beneath the dog-star’s raging heat,</div> - <div class="verse">When the knees tremble and the temples beat;</div> - <div class="verse">Behold them, leaning on their scythes, look o’er</div> - <div class="verse">The labor past, and toils to come explore;</div> - <div class="verse">See them alternate suns and showers engage,</div> - <div class="verse">And hoard up aches and anguish for their age;</div> - <div class="verse">Through fens and marshy moors their steps pursue,</div> - <div class="verse">Where their warm pores imbibe the evening dew;</div> - <div class="verse">Then own that labor may as fatal be</div> - <div class="verse">To these thy slaves, as thine excess to thee.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>An Aged Laborer</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Richard Jefferies</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English essayist and nature student, 1848-1887)</p> - -<p>For weeks and weeks the stark black oaks stood -straight out of the snow as masts of ships with -furled sails frozen and ice-bound in the haven of the deep -valley. Never was such a long winter.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span></p> - -<p>One morning a laboring man came to the door with a -spade, and asked if he could dig the garden, or try to, at -the risk of breaking the tool in the ground. He was -starving; he had had no work for six months, he said, -since the first frost started the winter. Nature and the -earth and the gods did not trouble about him, you see. -Another aged man came once a week regularly; white as -the snow through which he walked. In summer he -worked; since the winter began he had had no employment, -but supported himself by going round to the farms -in rotation. He had no home of any kind. Why did he -not go into the workhouse? “I be afeared if I goes in -there they’ll put me with the rough ‘uns, and very likely -I should get some of my clothes stole.” Rather than go -into the workhouse, he would totter round in the face of -the blasts that might cover his weak old limbs with drift. -There was a sense of dignity and manhood left still; his -clothes were worn, but clean and decent; he was no companion -of rogues; the snow and frost, the straw of the -outhouses, was better than that. He was struggling -against age, against nature, against circumstances; the -entire weight of society, law and order pressed upon him -to force him to lose his self-respect and liberty. He -would rather risk his life in the snow-drift. Nature, -earth and the gods did not help him; sun and stars, -where were they? He knocked at the doors of the farms -and found good in man only—not in Law or Order, but -in individual man alone.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Farm Laborers</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By James Matthew Barrie</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet, playwright and novelist, born 1860)</p> - -<p>Grand, patient, long-suffering fellows these men -were, up at five, summer and winter, foddering their -horses, maybe, hours before there would be food for -themselves, miserably paid, housed like cattle, and when -rheumatism seized them, liable to be flung aside like a -broken graip. As hard was the life of the women: coarse -food, chaff beds, damp clothes their portion, their sweethearts -in the service of masters who were loath to fee a -married man. Is it to be wondered that these lads who -could be faithful unto death drank soddenly on their -one free day; that these girls, starved of opportunities -for womanliness, of which they could make as much as -the finest lady, sometimes woke after a holiday to wish -that they might wake no more?</p> - - -<h3>Helotage</h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(<cite>From “Sartor Resartus”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Carlyle</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(One of the most famous of British essayists, 1795-1881; historian -of the French Revolution, and master of a vivid and -picturesque prose-style)</p> - -<p>It is not because of his toils that I lament for the poor: -we must all toil, or steal (howsoever we name our -stealing), which is worse; no faithful workman finds his -task a pastime. The poor is hungry and athirst; but for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span> -him also there is food and drink: he is heavy-laden and -weary; but for him also the Heavens send sleep, and of -the deepest; in his smoky cribs, a clear dewy haven of -rest envelops him, and fitful glitterings of cloud-skirted -dreams. But what I do mourn over is, that the lamp of -his soul should go out; that no ray of heavenly, or even -of earthly, knowledge should visit him; but only, in the -haggard darkness, like two spectres, Fear and Indignation -bear him company. Alas, while the body stands so -broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, -stupefied, almost annihilated!, Alas, was this too a Breath -of God; bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be -unfolded!—That there should one Man die ignorant who -had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy, were -it to happen more than twenty times in the minute, as -by some computations it does. The miserable fraction of -Science which our united Mankind, in a wide universe -of Nescience, has acquired, why is not this, with all diligence, -imparted to all?</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 515px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo32" id="illo32">[illo32]</a></span> - -<img src="images/i_032f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"> -<p>THE VAMPIRE</p> - -<p>E. M. LILIEN</p> - -<p class="center">(<i>Contemporary German illustrator</i>)</p></div> -</div> - - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 700px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo33" id="illo33">[illo33]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_033f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"> - -<p> -THE MAN WITH THE HOE<br /> -<br /> -JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET<br /> -<br /> -(<i>French painter of peasant life, 1814-75</i>) -</p> -</div> -</div> - - -<h3>Played Out</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Songs of the Dead End”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Patrick MacGill</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p class="poemintro">(A young Irishman, called the “Navvy poet”; born 1890. From -the age of twelve to twenty a farm laborer, ditch-digger and quarry-man. -As this work goes to press, he is fighting with his regiment in -Flanders)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">As a bullock falls in the crooked ruts, he fell when the day was o’er,</div> - <div class="verse">The hunger gripping his stinted guts, his body shaken and sore.</div> - <div class="verse">They pulled it out of the ditch in the dark, as a brute is pulled from its lair,</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span> - <div class="verse">The corpse of the navvy, stiff and stark, with the clay on its face and hair.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In Christian lands, with calloused hands, he labored for others’ good,</div> - <div class="verse">In workshop and mill, ditchway and drill, earnest, eager, and rude;</div> - <div class="verse">Unhappy and gaunt with worry and want, a food to the whims of fate,</div> - <div class="verse">Hashing it out and booted about at the will of the goodly and great.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">To him was applied the scorpion lash, for him the gibe and the goad—</div> - <div class="verse">The roughcast fool of our moral wash, the rugous wretch of the road.</div> - <div class="verse">Willing to crawl for a pittance small to the swine of the tinsel sty,</div> - <div class="verse">Beggared and burst from the very first, he chooses the ditch to die—</div> - <div class="verse">... Go, pick the dead from the sloughy bed, and hide him from mortal eye.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">He tramped through the colorless winter land, or swined in the scorching heat,</div> - <div class="verse">The dry skin hacked on his sapless hands or blistering on his feet;</div> - <div class="verse">He wallowed in mire unseen, unknown, where your houses of pleasure rise,</div> - <div class="verse">And hapless, hungry, and chilled to the bone, he builded the edifice.</div> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span></div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In cheerless model<a name="FNanchor_2" id="FNanchor_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">[B]</a> and filthy pub, his sinful hours were passed,</div> - <div class="verse">Or footsore, weary, he begged his grub, in the sough of the hail-whipped blast,</div> - <div class="verse">So some might riot in wealth and ease, with food and wine be crammed,</div> - <div class="verse">He wrought like a mule, in muck to his knees, dirty, dissolute, damned.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Arrogant, adipose, you sit in the homes he builded high;</div> - <div class="verse">Dirty the ditch, in the depths of it he chooses a spot to die,</div> - <div class="verse">Foaming with nicotine-tainted lips, holding his aching breast,</div> - <div class="verse">Dropping down like a cow that slips, smitten with rinderpest;</div> - <div class="verse">Drivelling yet of the work and wet, swearing as sinners swear,</div> - <div class="verse">Raving the rule of the gambling school, mixing it up with a prayer.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">He lived like a brute as the navvies live, and went as the cattle go,</div> - <div class="verse">No one to sorrow and no one to shrive, for heaven ordained it so—</div> - <div class="verse">He handed his check to the shadow in black, and went to the misty lands,</div> - <div class="verse">Never a mortal to close his eyes or a woman to cross his hands.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent6"><em>As a bullock falls in the rugged ruts</em></div> - <div class="verse indent8"><em>He fell when the day was o’er,</em></div> - <div class="verse indent6"><em>Hunger gripping his weasened guts,</em></div> - <div class="verse indent8"><em>But never to hunger more</em>—</div> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span></div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent6"><em>They pulled it out of the ditch in the dark,</em></div> - <div class="verse indent8"><em>The chilling frost on its hair,</em></div> - <div class="verse indent6"><em>The mole-skinned navvy stiff and stark</em></div> - <div class="verse indent8"><em>From no particular where.</em></div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Rounding the Horn<a name="FNanchor_3" id="FNanchor_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3" class="fnanchor">[C]</a></h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Dauber”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Masefield</span></p> - - -<p class="poemintro">(An English poet who has had a varied career as sailor, laborer and -even bartender upon the Bowery, New York. Born 1873, his -narrative poems of humble life made him famous almost over night)</p> - - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Then came the cry of “Call all hands on deck!”</div> - <div class="verse">The Dauber knew its meaning; it was come:</div> - <div class="verse">Cape Horn, that tramples beauty into wreck,</div> - <div class="verse">And crumples steel and smites the strong man dumb.</div> - <div class="verse">Down clattered flying kites and staysails: some</div> - <div class="verse">Sang out in quick, high calls: the fair-leads skirled,</div> - <div class="verse">And from the south-west came the end of the world....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Lay out!” the Bosun yelled. The Dauber laid</div> - <div class="verse">Out on the yard, gripping the yard, and feeling</div> - <div class="verse">Sick at the mighty space of air displayed</div> - <div class="verse">Below his feet, where mewing birds were wheeling.</div> - <div class="verse">A giddy fear was on him; he was reeling.</div> - <div class="verse">He bit his lip half through, clutching the jack.</div> - <div class="verse">A cold sweat glued the shirt upon his back.</div> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span></div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The yard was shaking, for a brace was loose.</div> - <div class="verse">He felt that he would fall; he clutched, he bent,</div> - <div class="verse">Clammy with natural terror to the shoes</div> - <div class="verse">While idiotic promptings came and went.</div> - <div class="verse">Snow fluttered on a wind-flaw and was spent;</div> - <div class="verse">He saw the water darken. Someone yelled,</div> - <div class="verse">“Frap it; don’t stay to furl! Hold on!” He held.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Darkness came down—half darkness—in a whirl;</div> - <div class="verse">The sky went out, the waters disappeared.</div> - <div class="verse">He felt a shocking pressure of blowing hurl</div> - <div class="verse">The ship upon her side. The darkness speared</div> - <div class="verse">At her with wind; she staggered, she careered,</div> - <div class="verse">Then down she lay. The Dauber felt her go;</div> - <div class="verse">He saw her yard tilt downwards. Then the snow</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Whirled all about—dense, multitudinous, cold—</div> - <div class="verse">Mixed with the wind’s one devilish thrust and shriek,</div> - <div class="verse">Which whiffled out men’s tears, defeated, took hold,</div> - <div class="verse">Flattening the flying drift against the cheek.</div> - <div class="verse">The yards buckled and bent, man could not speak.</div> - <div class="verse">The ship lay on her broadside; the wind’s sound</div> - <div class="verse">Had devilish malice at having got her downed....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">How long the gale had blown he could not tell,</div> - <div class="verse">Only the world had changed, his life had died.</div> - <div class="verse">A moment now was everlasting hell.</div> - <div class="verse">Nature an onslaught from the weather side,</div> - <div class="verse">A withering rush of death, a frost that cried,</div> - <div class="verse">Shrieked, till he withered at the heart; a hail</div> - <div class="verse">Plastered his oilskins with an icy mail....</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Up!” yelled the Bosun; “up and clear the wreck!”</div> - <div class="verse">The Dauber followed where he led; below</div> - <div class="verse">He caught one giddy glimpsing of the deck</div> - <div class="verse">Filled with white water, as though heaped with snow.</div> - <div class="verse">He saw the streamers of the rigging blow</div> - <div class="verse">Straight out like pennons from the splintered mast,</div> - <div class="verse">Then, all sense dimmed, all was an icy blast</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Roaring from nether hell and filled with ice,</div> - <div class="verse">Roaring and crashing on the jerking stage,</div> - <div class="verse">An utter bridle given to utter vice,</div> - <div class="verse">Limitless power mad with endless rage</div> - <div class="verse">Withering the soul; a minute seemed an age.</div> - <div class="verse">He clutched and hacked at ropes, at rags of sail,</div> - <div class="verse">Thinking that comfort was a fairy-tale</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Told long ago—long, long ago—long since</div> - <div class="verse">Heard of in other lives—imagined, dreamed—</div> - <div class="verse">There where the basest beggar was a prince.</div> - <div class="verse">To him in torment where the tempest screamed,</div> - <div class="verse">Comfort and warmth and ease no longer seemed</div> - <div class="verse">Things that a man could know; soul, body, brain,</div> - <div class="verse">Knew nothing but the wind, the cold, the pain.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Insouciance in Storm</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Cry of Youth”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Harry Kemp</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A young American poet who has wandered over the world as -sailor, harvest hand and tramp; born 1883)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Deep in an ore-boat’s hold</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where great-bulked boilers loom</div> - <div class="verse">And yawning mouths of fire</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Irradiate the gloom,</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I saw half-naked men</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Made thralls to flame and steam,</div> - <div class="verse">Whose bodies, dripping sweat,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Shone with an oily gleam.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">There, all the sullen night,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">While waves boomed overhead</div> - <div class="verse">And smote the lurching ship,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The ravenous fires they fed;</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They did not think it brave:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They even dared to joke!</div> - <div class="verse">I saw them light their pipes</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And puff calm rings of smoke!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I saw a Passer sprawl</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Over his load of coal—</div> - <div class="verse">At which a Fireman laughed</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Until it shook his soul:</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><em>All this in a hollow shell</em></div> - <div class="verse indent2"><em>Whose half-submerged form</em></div> - <div class="verse"><em>On Lake Superior tossed</em></div> - <div class="verse indent2"><em>‘Mid rushing hills of storm!</em></div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From the Sailors’ Catechism</span></h3> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Six days shalt thou labor and do all thou art able,</div> - <div class="verse">The seventh, holystone the deck and scrub the cable.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Stokers<a name="FNanchor_4" id="FNanchor_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4" class="fnanchor">[D]</a></h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Harbor”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Ernest Poole</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American playwright and novelist, born 1880)</p> - -<p>We crawled down a short ladder and through low -passageways, dripping wet, and so came into the -stokehole.</p> - -<p>This was a long narrow chamber with a row of glowing -furnace doors. Wet coal and coal-dust lay on the floor. -At either end a small steel door opened into bunkers that -ran along the sides of the ship, deep down near the bottom, -containing thousands of tons of soft coal. In the stokehole -the fires were not yet up, but by the time the ship was -at sea the furnace mouths would be white hot and the men -at work half naked. They not only shovelled coal into -the flames, they had to spread it as well, and at intervals -rake out the “clinkers” in fiery masses on the floor. -On these a stream of water played, filling the chamber -with clouds of steam. In older ships, like this one, a “lead -stoker” stood at the head of the line and set the pace for -the others to follow. He was paid more to keep up the -pace. But on the big new liners this pacer was replaced -by a gong.</p> - -<p>“And at each stroke of the gong you shovel,” said -Joe. “You do this till you forget your name. Every -time the boat pitches the floor heaves you forward, the -fire spurts at you out of the doors, and the gong keeps -on like a sledge-hammer coming down on top of your -mind. And all you think of is your bunk and the time -when you’re to tumble in.”</p> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span></p> -<p>From the stokers’ quarters presently there came a burst -of singing.</p> - -<p>“Now let’s go back,” he ended, “and see how they’re -getting ready for this.”</p> - -<p>As we crawled back, the noise increased, and swelled -to a roar as we entered. The place was pandemonium. -Those groups I had noticed around the bags had been -getting out the liquor, and now at eight o’clock in the -morning half the crew were already well soused. Some -moved restlessly about. One huge bull of a creature with -limpid shining eyes stopped suddenly with a puzzled -stare, and then leaned back on a bunk and laughed uproariously. -From there he lurched over the shoulder -of a thin, wiry, sober man who, sitting on the edge of a -bunk, was slowly spelling out the words of a newspaper -aeroplane story. The big man laughed again and spit, -and the thin man jumped half up and snarled.</p> - -<p>Louder rose the singing. Half the crew was crowded -close around a little red-faced cockney. He was the -modern “chanty man.” With sweat pouring down his -cheeks and the muscles of his neck drawn taut, he was -jerking out verse after verse about women. He sang to -an old “chanty” tune, one that I remembered well. -But he was not singing out under the stars, he was screaming -at steel walls down here in the bottom of the ship. -And although he kept speeding up his song, the crowd -were too drunk to wait for the chorus; their voices kept -tumbling in over his, and soon it was only a frenzy of -sound, a roar with yells rising out of it. The singers -kept pounding each other’s backs or waving bottles over -their heads. Two bottles smashed together and brought -a still higher burst of glee.</p> - -<p>“I’m tired!” Joe shouted. “Let’s get out!”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span></p> - -<p>I caught a glimpse of his strained frowning face. Again -it came over me in a flash, the years he had spent in holes -like this, in this hideous rotten world of his, while I had -lived joyously in mine. And as though he had read the -thought in my disturbed and troubled eyes, “Let’s go -up where <em>you</em> belong,” he said.</p> - -<p>I followed him up and away from his friends. As we -climbed ladder after ladder, fainter and fainter on our -ears rose that yelling from below. Suddenly we came out -on deck and slammed an iron door behind us. And I -was where <em>I</em> belonged.</p> - -<p>I was in dazzling sunshine and keen, frosty autumn -air. I was among gay throngs of people. Dainty women -brushed me by. I felt the softness of their furs, I breathed -the fragrant scent of them and of the flowers that they -wore, I saw their trim, fresh, immaculate clothes. I -heard the joyous tumult of their talking and their laughing -to the regular crash of the band—all the life of the -ship I had known so well.</p> - -<p>And I walked through it all as though in a dream. -On the dock I watched it spell-bound—until with handkerchiefs -waving and voices calling down good-byes, that -throng of happy travellers moved slowly out into midstream.</p> - -<p>And I knew that deep below all this, down in the bottom -of the ship, the stokers were still singing.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Caliban in the Coal Mines</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Challenge”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Louis Untermeyer</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet, born 1885)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">God, we don’t like to complain—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We know that the mine is no lark—</div> - <div class="verse">But—there’s the pools from the rain;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But—there’s the cold and the dark.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">God, You don’t know what it is—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">You, in Your well-lighted sky,</div> - <div class="verse">Watching the meteors whizz;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Warm, with the sun always by.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">God, if You had but the moon</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Stuck in Your cap for a lamp,</div> - <div class="verse">Even You’d tire of it soon,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Down in the dark and the damp.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Nothing but blackness above,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And nothing that moves but the cars—</div> - <div class="verse">God, if You wish for our love,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Fling us a handful of stars!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Fertilizer Man</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Jungle”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Upton Sinclair</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A novel portraying the lives of the workers in the Chicago -stockyards; published in 1906)</p> - -<p>His labor took him about one minute to learn. Before -him was one of the vents of the mill in which the -fertilizer was being ground—rushing forth in a great -brown river, with a spray of the finest dust floating forth -in clouds. Jurgis was given a shovel, and along with -half a dozen others it was his task to shovel this fertilizer -into carts. That others were at work he knew -by the sound, and by the fact that he sometimes collided -with them; otherwise they might as well not have been -there, for in the blinding dust-storm a man could not see -six feet in front of his face. When he had filled one cart -he had to grope around him until another came, and if -there was none on hand he continued to grope till one -arrived. In five minutes he was, of course, a mass of -fertilizer from head to feet; they gave him a sponge to -tie over his mouth, so that he could breathe, but the -sponge did not prevent his lips and eyelids from caking -up with it and his ears from filling solid. He looked like -a brown ghost at twilight—from hair to shoes he became -the color of the building and of everything in it, and for -that matter a hundred yards outside it. The building -had to be left open, and when the wind blew Durham -and Company lost a great deal of fertilizer.</p> - -<p>Working in his shirt-sleeves, and with the thermometer -at over a hundred, the phosphates soaked in through -every pore of Jurgis’ skin, and in five minutes he had a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span> -headache, and in fifteen was almost dazed. The blood -was pounding in his brain like an engine’s throbbing; -there was a frightful pain in the top of his skull, and he -could hardly control his hands. Still, with the memory -of his four jobless months behind him, he fought on, in a -frenzy of determination; and half an hour later he began -to vomit—he vomited until it seemed as if his inwards -must be torn into shreds. A man could get used to the -fertilizer-mill, the boss had said, if he would only make -up his mind to it; but Jurgis now began to see that it -was a question of making up his stomach.</p> - -<p>At the end of that day of horror, he could scarcely stand. -He had to catch himself now and then, and lean against -a building and get his bearings. Most of the men, when -they came out, made straight for a saloon—they seemed -to place fertilizer and rattlesnake poison in one class. -But Jurgis was too ill to think of drinking—he could -only make his way to the street and stagger on to a car. -He had a sense of humor, and later on, when he became -an old hand, he used to think it fun to board a street-car -and see what happened. Now, however, he was too ill -to notice it—how the people in the car began to gasp -and sputter, to put their handkerchiefs to their noses, -and transfix him with furious glances. Jurgis only knew -that a man in front of him immediately got up and gave -him a seat; and that half a minute later the two people -on each side of him got up; and that in a full minute the -crowded car was nearly empty—those passengers who -could not get room on the platform having gotten out -to walk.</p> - -<p>Of course Jurgis had made his home a miniature fertilizer-mill -a minute after entering. The stuff was half -an inch deep in his skin—his whole system was full of it,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span> -and it would have taken a week not merely of scrubbing, -but of vigorous exercise, to get it out of him. As it was, -he could be compared with nothing known to man, save -that newest discovery of the savants, a substance which -emits energy for an unlimited time, without being itself -in the least diminished in power. He smelt so that he -made all the food at the table taste, and set the whole -family to vomiting; for himself it was three days before -he could keep anything upon his stomach—he might -wash his hands, and use a knife and fork, but were not -his mouth and throat filled with the poison?</p> - -<p>And still Jurgis stuck it out! In spite of splitting headaches -he would stagger down to the plant and take up -his stand once more, and begin to shovel in the blinding -clouds of dust. And so at the end of the week he was a -fertilizer-man for life—he was able to eat again, and though -his head never stopped aching, it ceased to be so bad -that he could not work.</p> - - -<h3>Pittsburgh</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By James Oppenheim</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet and novelist; born 1882)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Over his face his gray hair drifting hides his Labor-glory in smoke,</div> - <div class="verse">Strange through his breath the soot is sifting, his feet are buried in coal and coke.</div> - <div class="verse">By night hands twisted and lurid in fires, by day hands blackened with grime and oil,</div> - <div class="verse">He toils at the foundries and never tires, and ever and ever his lot is toil.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">He speeds his soul till his body wrestles with terrible tonnage and terrible time,</div> - <div class="verse">Out through the yards and over the trestles the flat-cars clank and the engines chime,</div> - <div class="verse">His mills through windows seem eaten with fire, his high cranes travel, his ingots roll,</div> - <div class="verse">And billet and wheel and whistle and wire shriek with the speeding up of his soul.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Lanterns with reds and greens a-glisten wave the way and the head-light glares,</div> - <div class="verse">The back-bent laborers glance and listen and out through the night the tail-light flares—</div> - <div class="verse">Deep in the mills like a tipping cradle the huge converter turns on its wheel</div> - <div class="verse">And sizzling spills in the ten-ton ladle a golden water of molten steel.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Yet screwed with toil his low face searches shadow-edged fires and whited pits,</div> - <div class="verse">Gripping his levers his body lurches, grappling his irons he prods and hits,</div> - <div class="verse">And deaf with the roll and clangor and rattle with its sharp escaping staccato of steam,</div> - <div class="verse">And blind with flame and worn with battle, into his tonnage he turns his dream.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The world he has builded rises around us, our wonder-cities and weaving rails,</div> - <div class="verse">Over his wires a marvel has found us, a glory rides in our wheeled mails,</div> - <div class="verse">For the Earth grows small with strong Steel woven, and they come together who plotted apart—</div> - <div class="verse">But he who has wrought this thing in his oven knows only toil and the tired heart.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Navvy<a name="FNanchor_5" id="FNanchor_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5" class="fnanchor">[E]</a></h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Children of the Dead End”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Patrick MacGill</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_32">32</a>)</p> - -<p>At that time there were thousands of navvies working -at Kinlochleven waterworks. We spoke of waterworks, -but only the contractors knew what the work was -intended for. We did not know, and we did not care. -We never asked questions concerning the ultimate issue -of our labors, and we were not supposed to ask questions. -If a man throws red muck over a wall today and throws -it back again tomorrow, what the devil is it to him if he -keeps throwing that same muck over the wall for the rest -of his life, knowing not why nor wherefore, provided he -gets paid sixpence an hour for his labor? There were -so many tons of earth to be lifted and thrown somewhere -else; we lifted them and threw them somewhere else; -so many cubic yards of iron-hard rocks to be blasted and -carried away; we blasted and carried them away, but -never asked questions and never knew what results we -were laboring to bring about. We turned the Highlands -into a cinder-heap, and were as wise at the beginning -as at the end of the task. Only when we completed -the job, and returned to the town, did we learn from the -newspapers that we had been employed on the construction -of the biggest aluminium factory in the kingdom. -All that we knew was that we had gutted whole -mountains and hills in the operations....</p> - -<p>Above and over all, the mystery of the night and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span> -desert places hovered inscrutable and implacable. All -around the ancient mountains sat like brooding witches, -dreaming on their own story of which they knew neither -the beginning nor the end. Naked to the four winds of -heaven and all the rains of the world, they had stood -there for countless ages in all their sinister strength, -undefied and unconquered, until man, with puny hands -and little tools of labor, came to break the spirit of their -ancient mightiness.</p> - -<p>And we, the men who braved this task, were outcasts -of the world. A blind fate, a vast merciless mechanism, -cut and shaped the fabric of our existence. We were -men despised when we were most useful, rejected when -we were not needed, and forgotten when our troubles -weighed upon us heavily. We were the men sent out to -fight the spirit of the wastes, rob it of all its primeval horrors, -and batter down the barriers of its world-old defences. -Where we were working a new town would spring -up some day; it was already springing up, and then, if -one of us walked there, “a man with no fixed address,” -he would be taken up and tried as a loiterer and vagrant.</p> - -<p>Even as I thought of these things a shoulder of jagged -rock fell into a cutting far below. There was the sound -of a scream in the distance, and a song died away in the -throat of some rude singer. Then out of the pit I saw -men, red with the muck of the deep earth and redder still -with the blood of a stricken mate, come forth, bearing -between them a silent figure. Another of the pioneers -of civilization had given up his life for the sake of -society....</p> - -<p>The plaintive sunset waned into a sickly haze one -evening, and when the night slipped upwards to the -mountain peaks never a star came out into the vastness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span> -of the high heavens. Next morning we had to thaw the -door of our shack out of the muck into which it was frozen -during the night. Outside the snow had fallen heavily -on the ground, and the virgin granaries of winter had -been emptied on the face of the world.</p> - -<p>Unkempt, ragged, and dispirited, we slunk to our toil, -the snow falling on our shoulders and forcing its way -insistently through our worn and battered bluchers. -The cuttings were full of slush to the brim, and we had to -grope through them with our hands until we found the -jumpers and hammers at the bottom. These we held -under our coats until the heat of our bodies warmed them, -then we went on with our toil.</p> - -<p>At intervals during the day the winds of the mountain -put their heads together and swept a whirlstorm of snow -down upon us, wetting each man to the pelt. Our tools -froze until the hands that gripped them were scarred as -if by red-hot spits. We shook uncertain over our toil, -our sodden clothes scalding and itching the skin with -every movement of the swinging hammers. Near at hand -the lean derrick jibs whirled on their pivots like spectres -of some ghoulish carnival, and the muck-barrows crunched -backwards and forwards, all their dirt and rust hidden in -woolly mantles of snow. Hither and thither the little -black figures of the workers moved across the waste of -whiteness like shadows on a lime-washed wall. Their -breath steamed out on the air and disappeared in space -like the evanescent and fragile vapor of frying mushrooms....</p> - -<p>When night came on we crouched around the hot-plate -and told stories of bygone winters, when men -dropped frozen stiff in the trenches where they labored. -A few tried to gamble near the door, but the wind that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span> -cut through the chinks of the walls chased them to the -fire.</p> - -<p>Outside the winds of the night scampered madly, -whistling through every crevice of the shack and threatening -to smash all its timbers to pieces. We bent closer -over the hot-plate, and the many who could not draw -near to the heat scrambled into bed and sought warmth -under the meagre blankets. Suddenly the lamp went -out, and a darkness crept into the corners of the dwelling, -causing the figures of my mates to assume fantastic -shapes in the gloom. The circle around the hot-plate -drew closer, and long lean arms were stretched out towards -the flames and the redness. Seldom may a man have -the chance to look on hands like those of my mates. -Fingers were missing from many, scraggy scars seaming -along the wrists or across the palms of others told of accidents -which had taken place on many precarious shifts. -The faces near me were those of ghouls worn out in some -unholy midnight revel. Sunken eyes glared balefully -in the dim unearthly light of the fire, and as I looked -at them a moment’s terror settled on my soul. For a -second I lived in an early age, and my mates were the -cave-dwellers of an older world than mine. In the darkness, -near the door, a pipe glowed brightly for a moment, -then the light went suddenly out and the gloom settled -again.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Song of the Wage Slave</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Spell of the Yukon”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert W. Service</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Canadian poet, born 1876. His poems of Alaska and the great -Northwest have attained wide popularity)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">When the long, long day is over, and the Big Boss gives me my pay,</div> - <div class="verse">I hope that it won’t be hell-fire, as some of the parsons say.</div> - <div class="verse">And I hope that it won’t be heaven, with some of the parsons I’ve met—</div> - <div class="verse">All I want is just quiet, just to rest and forget.</div> - <div class="verse">Look at my face, toil-furrowed; look at my calloused hands;</div> - <div class="verse">Master, I’ve done Thy bidding, wrought in Thy many lands—</div> - <div class="verse">Wrought for the little masters, big-bellied they be, and rich;</div> - <div class="verse">I’ve done their desire for a daily hire, and I die like a dog in a ditch....</div> - <div class="verse">I, the primitive toiler, half naked and grimed to the eyes,</div> - <div class="verse">Sweating it deep in their ditches, swining it stark in their styes;</div> - <div class="verse">Hurling down forests before me, spanning tumultuous streams;</div> - <div class="verse">Down in the ditch building o’er me palaces fairer than dreams;</div> - <div class="verse">Boring the rock to the ore-bed, driving the road through the fen,</div> - <div class="verse">Resolute, dumb, uncomplaining, a man in a world of men.</div> - <div class="verse">Master, I’ve filled my contract, wrought in Thy many lands;</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Not by my sins wilt Thou judge me, but by the work of my hands.</div> - <div class="verse">Master, I’ve done Thy bidding, and the light is low in the west,</div> - <div class="verse">And the long, long shift is over.... Master, I’ve earned it—Rest.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Manhattan</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charles Hanson Towne</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet, born 1877)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Here in the furnace City, in the humid air they faint,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">God’s pallid poor, His people, with scarcely space for breath;</div> - <div class="verse">So foul their teeming houses, so full of shame and taint,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They cannot crowd within them for the frightful fear of Death.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Yet somewhere, Lord, Thine open seas are singing with the rain,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And somewhere underneath Thy stars the cool waves crash and beat;</div> - <div class="verse">Why is it here, and only here, are huddled Death and Pain,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And here the form of Horror stalks, a menace in the street!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The burning flagstones gleam like glass at morning and at noon,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The giant walls shut out the breeze—if any breeze should blow;</div> - <div class="verse">And high above the smothering town at midnight hangs the moon,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A red medallion in the sky, a monster cameo.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Yet somewhere, God, drenched roses bloom by fountains draped with mist</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In old, lost gardens of the earth made lyrical with rain;</div> - <div class="verse">Why is it here a million brows by hungry Death are kissed,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And here is packed, one Summer night, a whole world’s fiery pain!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>A Department-Store Clerk</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The House of Bondage”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Reginald Wright Kauffman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American novelist, born 1877)</p> - -<p>Katie Flanagan arrived at the Lennox department -store every morning at a quarter to eight -o’clock. She passed through the employees’ dark entrance, -a unit in a horde of other workers, and registered -the instant of her arrival on a time-machine that could -in no wise be suborned to perjury. She hung up her -wraps in a subterranean cloak-room, and, hurrying to -the counter to which she was assigned, first helped in -“laying out the stock,” and then stood behind her wares, -exhibiting, cajoling, selling, until an hour before noon. -At that time she was permitted to run away for exactly -forty-five minutes for the glass of milk and two pieces -of bread and jam that composed her luncheon. This -repast disposed of, she returned to the counter and -remained behind it, standing like a war-worn watcher -on the ramparts of a beleaguered city, till the store closed -at six, when there remained to her at least fifteen minutes -more of work before her sales-book was balanced -and the wares covered up for the night. There were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span> -times, indeed, when she did not leave the store until seven -o’clock, but those times were caused rather by customers -than by the management of the store, which could prevent -new shoppers from entering the doors after six, but -could hardly turn out those already inside.</p> - -<p>The automatic time-machine and a score of more -annoying, and equally automatic, human beings kept -watch upon all that she did. The former, in addition -to the floor-walker in her section of the store, recorded -her every going and coming, the latter reported every -movement not prescribed by the regulations of the establishment; -and the result upon Katie and her fellow-workers -was much the result observable upon condemned -assassins under the unwinking surveillance of the Death -Watch.</p> - -<p>If Katie was late, she was fined ten cents for each -offense. She was reprimanded if her portion of the -counter was disordered after a mauling by careless customers. -She was fined for all mistakes she made in the -matter of prices and the additions on her salesbook; -and she was fined if, having asked the floor-walker for -three or five minutes to leave the floor in order to tidy -her hair and hands, in constant need of attention through -the rapidity of her work and the handling of her dyed -wares, she exceeded her time limit by so much as a few -seconds.</p> - -<p>There were no seats behind the counters, and Katie, -whatever her physical condition, remained on her feet -all day long, unless she could arrange for relief by a fellow-worker -during that worker’s luncheon time. There was -no place for rest save a damp, ill-lighted “Recreation -Room” in the basement, furnished with a piano that -nobody had time to play, magazines that nobody had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span> -time to read, and wicker chairs in which nobody had -time to sit. All that one might do was to serve the whims -and accept the scoldings of women customers who knew -too ill, or too well, what they wanted to buy; keep a -tight rein upon one’s indignation at strolling men who -did not intend to buy anything that the shop advertised; -be servilely smiling under the innuendoes of the high-collared -floor-walkers, in order to escape their wrath; -maintain a sharp outlook for the “spotters,” or paid -spies of the establishment; thwart, if possible, those pretending -customers who were scouts sent from other -stores, and watch for shop-lifters on the one hand and -the firm’s detectives on the other.</p> - -<p>“It ain’t a cinch, by no means”—thus ran the departing -Cora Costigan’s advice to her successor—“but it -ain’t nothin’ now to what it will be in the holidays. I’d -rather be dead than work in the toy-department in -December—I wonder if the kids guess how we that sells -’em hates the sight of their playthings?—and I’d rather -be dead <em>an’</em> damned than work in the accounting department. -A girl friend of mine worked there last year,—only -it was over to Malcare’s store—an’ didn’t get through -her Christmas Eve work till two on Christmas morning, -an’ she lived over on Staten Island. She overslept on -the twenty-sixth, an’ they docked her a half-week’s pay.</p> - -<p>“An’ don’t never,” concluded Cora, “don’t never let -’em transfer you to the exchange department. The -people that exchange things all belong in the psychopathic -ward at Bellevue—them that don’t belong in Sing -Sing. Half the goods they bring back have been used -for days, an’ when the store ties a tag on a sent-on-approval -opera cloak, the women wriggle the tag inside, an’ wear -it to the theatre with a scarf draped over the string. -Thank God, I’m goin’ to be married!”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>A Cry from the Ghetto</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the Yiddish of Morris Rosenfeld</cite>)</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(The poet of the East Side Jews of New York City, born 1861. -His poems appeared in Yiddish newspapers and leaflets, and are the -genuine voice of the sweat-shop workers. The following translation -is by Charles Weber Linn)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The roaring of the wheels has filled my ears,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The clashing and the clamor shut me in;</div> - <div class="verse">Myself, my soul, in chaos disappears,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I cannot think or feel amid the din.</div> - <div class="verse">Toiling and toiling and toiling—endless toil.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For whom? For what? Why should the work be done?</div> - <div class="verse">I do not ask, or know. I only toil.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I work until the day and night are one.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The clock above me ticks away the day,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Its hands are spinning, spinning, like the wheels.</div> - <div class="verse">It cannot sleep or for a moment stay,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">It is a thing like me, and does not feel.</div> - <div class="verse">It throbs as tho’ my heart were beating there—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A heart? My heart? I know not what it means.</div> - <div class="verse">The clock ticks, and below I strive and stare.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And so we lose the hour. We are machines.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Noon calls a truce, an ending to the sound,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">As if a battle had one moment stayed—</div> - <div class="verse">A bloody field! The dead lie all around;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their wounds cry out until I grow afraid.</div> - <div class="verse">It comes—the signal! See, the dead men rise,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They fight again, amid the roar they fight.</div> - <div class="verse">Blindly, and knowing not for whom, or why,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They fight, they fall, they sink into the night.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Trousers<a name="FNanchor_6" id="FNanchor_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6" class="fnanchor">[F]</a></h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “A Motley”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Galsworthy</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English novelist and dramatist, born 1867)</p> - -<p>She held in one hand a threaded needle, in the other -a pair of trousers, to which she had been adding the -accessories demanded by our civilization. One had never -seen her without a pair of trousers in her hand, because -she could only manage to supply them with decency at the -rate of seven or eight pairs a day, working twelve hours. -For each pair she received seven farthings, and used -nearly one farthing’s worth of cotton; and this gave her -an income, in good times, of six to seven shillings a week. -But some weeks there were no trousers to be had and then -it was necessary to live on the memory of those which had -been, together with a little sum put by from weeks when -trousers were more plentiful. Deducting two shillings -and threepence for rent of the little back room, there -was therefore, on an average, about two shillings and -ninepence left for the sustenance of herself and husband, -who was fortunately a cripple, and somewhat indifferent -whether he ate or not. And looking at her face, so furrowed, -and at her figure, of which there was not much, one -could well understand that she, too, had long established -within her such internal economy as was suitable to one -who had been “in trousers” twenty-seven years, and, since -her husband’s accident fifteen years before, in trousers -only, finding her own cotton.... He was a man -with a round, white face, a little grey mustache curving<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span> -down like a parrot’s beak, and round whitish eyes. In -his aged and unbuttoned suit of grey, with his head held -rather to one side, he looked like a parrot—a bird clinging -to its perch, with one grey leg shortened and crumpled -against the other. He talked, too, in a toneless, equable -voice, looking sideways at the fire, above the rims of dim -spectacles, and now and then smiling with a peculiar -disenchanted patience.</p> - -<p>No—he said—it was no use to complain; did no good! -Things had been like this for years, and so, he had no -doubt, they always would be. There had never been -much in trousers; not this common sort that anybody’d -wear, as you might say. Though he’d never seen anybody -wearing such things; and where they went to he -didn’t know—out of England, he should think. Yes, -he had been a carman; ran over by a dray. Oh! yes, -they had given him something—four bob a week; but -the old man had died and the four bob had died too. -Still, there he was, sixty years old—not so very bad for -his age....</p> - -<p>They were talking, he had heard said, about doing -something for trousers. But what could you do for -things like these, at half a crown a pair? People must -have ’em, so you’d got to make ’em. There you were, -and there you would be! <em>She</em> went and heard them talk. -They talked very well, she said. It was intellectual for -her to go. He couldn’t go himself owing to his leg. He’d -like to hear them talk. Oh, yes! and he was silent, staring -sideways at the fire as though in the thin crackle of the -flames attacking the fresh piece of wood, he were hearing -the echo of that talk from which he was cut off. “Lor’ -bless you!” he said suddenly. “They’ll do nothing! -Can’t!” And, stretching out his dirty hand he took from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span> -his wife’s lap a pair of trousers, and held it up. “Look -at ’em! Why you can see right throu’ ’em, linings and all. -Who’s goin’ to pay more than ‘alf a crown for that? Where -they go to I can’t think. Who wears ’em? Some institution -I should say. They talk, but dear me, they’ll never -do anything so long as there’s thousands like us, glad to -work for what we can get. Best not to think about it, I -says.”</p> - -<p>And laying the trousers back on his wife’s lap he -resumed his sidelong stare into the fire.</p> - - -<h3>The Song of the Shirt</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Hood</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Popular English poet and humorist; 1799-1845)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With fingers weary and worn,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With eyelids heavy and red,</div> - <div class="verse">A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Plying her needle and thread,—</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Stitch! stitch! stitch!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In poverty, hunger, and dirt;</div> - <div class="verse">And still with a voice of dolorous pitch</div> - <div class="verse indent2">She sang the “Song of the Shirt!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Work! work! work!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">While the cock is crowing aloof!</div> - <div class="verse">And work—work—work</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Till the stars shine through the roof!</div> - <div class="verse">It’s O! to be a slave</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Along with the barbarous Turk,</div> - <div class="verse">Where woman has never a soul to save,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">If this is Christian work!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”Work—work—work</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Till the brain begins to swim!</div> - <div class="verse">Work—work—work</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Till the eyes are heavy and dim!</div> - <div class="verse">Seam, and gusset, and band,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Band, and gusset, and seam,—</div> - <div class="verse">Till over the buttons I fall asleep,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And sew them on in a dream!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“O Men, with sisters dear!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">O Men, with mothers and wives!</div> - <div class="verse">It is not linen you’re wearing out,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But human creatures’ lives!</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Stitch—stitch—stitch</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In poverty, hunger, and dirt,—</div> - <div class="verse">Sewing at once, with a double thread,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A shroud as well as a Shirt!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”But why do I talk of Death—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That phantom of grisly bone?</div> - <div class="verse">I hardly fear his terrible shape,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">It seems so like my own—</div> - <div class="verse">It seems so like my own</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Because of the fasts I keep;</div> - <div class="verse">O God! that bread should be so dear,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And flesh and blood so cheap!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Work—work—work!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">My labor never flags;</div> - <div class="verse">And what are its wages? A bed of straw,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A crust of bread—and rags.</div> - <div class="verse">That shattered roof—and this naked floor—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A table—a broken chair—</div> - <div class="verse">And a wall so blank my shadow I thank</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For something falling there!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”Work—work—work!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">From weary chime to chime!</div> - <div class="verse">Work—work—work</div> - <div class="verse indent2">As prisoners work for crime!</div> - <div class="verse">Band, and gusset, and seam,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Seam, and gusset, and band,</div> - <div class="verse">Till the heart is sick and the brain benumbed,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">As well as the weary hand.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Work—work—work</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In the dull December light!</div> - <div class="verse">And work—work—work</div> - <div class="verse indent2">When the weather is warm and bright!</div> - <div class="verse">While underneath the eaves</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The brooding swallows cling,</div> - <div class="verse">As if to show me their sunny backs</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And twit me with the Spring.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”O! but to breathe the breath</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of the cowslip and primrose sweet—</div> - <div class="verse">With the sky above my head,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the grass beneath my feet!</div> - <div class="verse">For only one short hour</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To feel as I used to feel,</div> - <div class="verse">Before I knew the woes of want,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the walk that costs a meal!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“O! but for one short hour—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A respite however brief!</div> - <div class="verse">No blessed leisure for Love or Hope,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But only time for Grief!</div> - <div class="verse">A little weeping would ease my heart;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But in their briny bed</div> - <div class="verse">My tears must stop, for every drop</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Hinders needle and thread!”</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With fingers weary and worn,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With eyelids heavy and red,</div> - <div class="verse">A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Plying her needle and thread—</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Stitch! stitch! stitch!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In poverty, hunger, and dirt;</div> - <div class="verse">And still, with a voice of dolorous pitch,</div> - <div class="verse">Would that its tone could reach the rich!—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">She sang this “Song of the Shirt!”</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>A London Sweating Den<a name="FNanchor_7" id="FNanchor_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7" class="fnanchor">[G]</a></h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The People of the Abyss”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Jack London</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(California novelist and Socialist; born 1876. The story of his life -will be found on p. 732. For the work here quoted London -lived among the people whose misery he describes)</p> - -<p>A spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement, -for all the world like tadpoles just turned frogs on -the bottom of a dry pond. In a narrow doorway, so -narrow that perforce we stepped over her, sat a woman -with a young babe, nursing at breasts grossly naked and -libelling all the sacredness of motherhood. In the black -and narrow hall behind her we waded through a mess -of young life, and essayed an even narrower and fouler -stairway. Up we went, three flights, each landing two -feet by three in area, and heaped with filth and refuse.</p> - -<p>There were seven rooms in this abomination called a -house. In six of the rooms, twenty-odd people, of both -sexes and all ages, cooked, ate, slept, and worked. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span> -size the rooms averaged eight feet by eight, or possibly -nine. The seventh room we entered. It was the den in -which five men sweated. It was seven feet wide by eight -long, and the table at which the work was performed -took up the major portion of the space. On this table -were five lasts, and there was barely room for the men -to stand to their work, for the rest of the space was -heaped with cardboard, leather, bundles of shoe uppers, -and a miscellaneous assortment of materials used in -attaching the uppers of shoes to their soles.</p> - -<p>In the adjoining room lived a woman and six children. -In another vile hole lived a widow, with an only son of -sixteen who was dying of consumption. The woman -hawked sweetmeats on the street, I was told, and more -often failed than not to supply her son with the three -quarts of milk he daily required. Further, this son, weak -and dying, did not taste meat oftener than once a week; -and the kind and quality of this meat cannot possibly -be imagined by people who have never watched human -swine eat.</p> - -<p>“The w’y ‘e coughs is somethin’ terrible,” volunteered -my sweated friend, referring to the dying boy. “We -‘ear ’im ‘ere, w’ile we’re workin’, an’ it’s terrible, I say, -terrible!”</p> - -<p>And, what of the coughing and the sweetmeats, I found -another menace added to the hostile environment of the -children of the slums.</p> - -<p>My sweated friend, when work was to be had, toiled -with four other men in his eight-by-seven room. In the -winter a lamp burned nearly all the day and added its -fumes to the over-loaded air, which was breathed, and -breathed, and breathed again.</p> - -<p>In good times, when there was a rush of work, this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span> -man told me that he could earn as high as “thirty bob a -week.”—“Thirty shillings! Seven dollars and a half!</p> - -<p>“But it’s only the best of us can do it,” he qualified. -“An’ then we work twelve, thirteen, and fourteen hours -a day, just as fast as we can. An’ you should see us -sweat! Just runnin’ from us! If you could see us, it’d -dazzle your eyes—tacks flyin’ out of mouth like from a -machine. Look at my mouth.”</p> - -<p>I looked. The teeth were worn down by the constant -friction of the metallic brads, while they were coal-black -and rotten.</p> - -<p>“I clean my teeth,” he added, “else they’d be worse.”</p> - -<p>After he had told me that the workers had to furnish -their own tools, brads, “grindery,” cardboard, rent, -light, and what not, it was plain that his thirty bob was -a diminishing quantity.</p> - -<p>“But how long does the rush season last, in which you -receive this high wage of thirty bob?” I asked.</p> - -<p>“Four months,” was the answer; and for the rest -of the year, he informed me, they average from “half -a quid” to a “quid,” a week, which is equivalent to from -two dollars and a half to five dollars. The present week -was half gone, and he had earned four bob, or one dollar. -And yet I was given to understand that this was one of -the better grades of sweating.</p> - - -<h4><cite>The Hop-pickers</cite></h4> - -<p>So far has the divorcement of the worker from the -soil proceeded, that the farming districts, the civilized -world over, are dependent upon the cities for the gathering -of the harvests. Then it is, when the land is spilling -its ripe wealth to waste, that the street folk, who have -been driven away from the soil, are called back to it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span> -again. But in England they return, not as prodigals, -but as outcasts still, as vagrants and pariahs, to be -doubted and flouted by their country brethren, to sleep -in jails or casual wards, or under the hedges, and to live -the Lord knows how.</p> - -<p>It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand -of the street people to pick her hops. And out they come, -obedient to the call, which is the call of their bellies and -of the lingering dregs of adventure-lust still in them. -Slums, stews, and ghetto pour them forth, and the festering -contents of slums, stews, and ghetto are undiminished. -Yet they overrun the country like an army -of ghouls, and the country does not want them. They -are out of place. As they drag their squat, misshapen -bodies along the highways and byways, they resemble -some vile spawn from underground. Their very presence, -the fact of their existence, is an outrage to the fresh, -bright sun and the green and growing things. The -clean, upstanding trees cry shame upon them and their -withered crookedness, and their rottenness is a slimy -desecration of the sweetness and purity of nature.</p> - -<p>Is the picture overdrawn? It all depends. For one -who sees and thinks life in terms of shares and coupons, -it is certainly overdrawn. But for one who sees and -thinks life in terms of manhood and womanhood, it cannot -be overdrawn. Such hordes of beastly wretchedness -and inarticulate misery are no compensation for a millionaire -brewer who lives in a West End palace, sates -himself with the sensuous delights of London’s golden -theatres, hobnobs with lordlings and princelings, and is -knighted by the king. Wins his spurs—God forbid! -In old time the great blonde beasts rode in the battle’s -van and won their spurs by cleaving men from pate to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span> -chin. And, after all, it is finer to kill a strong man with -a clean-slicing blow of singing steel than to make a beast -of him, and of his seed through the generations, by the -artful and spidery manipulation of industry and -politics.</p> - - -<h3>Environment</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Merrie England”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Blatchford</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(This book is probably the most widely-circulated of Socialist -books in English. Over two million copies have been sold in Great -Britain, and probably a million in America. The author is the -editor of the London <cite>Clarion</cite>; born 1851)</p></div> - -<p>Some years ago a certain writer, much esteemed for -his graceful style of saying silly things, informed us -that the poor remain poor because they show no efficient -desire to be anything else. Is that true? Are only the -idle poor? Come with me and I will show you where -men and women work from morning till night, from week -to week, from year to year, at the full stretch of their -powers, in dim and fetid dens, and yet are poor—aye, -destitute—have for their wages a crust of bread and rags. -I will show you where men work in dirt and heat, using -the strength of brutes, for a dozen hours a day, and sleep -at night in styes, until brain and muscle are exhausted, -and fresh slaves are yoked to the golden car of commerce, -and the broken drudges filter through the poor-house or -the prison to a felon’s or a pauper’s grave! I will show -you how men and women thus work and suffer and faint -and die, generation after generation; and I will show -you how the longer and the harder these wretches toil<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span> -the worse their lot becomes; and I will show you the -graves, and find witnesses to the histories of brave and -noble and industrious poor men whose lives were lives -of toil, <em>and</em> poverty, and whose deaths were tragedies.</p> - -<p>And all these things are due to sin—but it is to the -sin of the smug hypocrites who grow rich upon the robbery -and the ruin of their fellow-creatures.</p> - - -<h3>Work and Pray</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Georg Herwegh</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(German poet, 1817-1875; took part in the attempt at -revolution in Baden in 1848)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Pray and work! proclaims the world;</div> - <div class="verse">Briefly pray, for Time is gold.</div> - <div class="verse">On the door there knocketh dread—</div> - <div class="verse">Briefly pray, for Time is bread.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And ye plow and plant to grow.</div> - <div class="verse">And ye rivet and ye sow.</div> - <div class="verse">And ye hammer and ye spin—</div> - <div class="verse">Say, my people, what ye win.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Weave at loom both day and night,</div> - <div class="verse">Mine the coal to mountain height;</div> - <div class="verse">Fill right full the harvest horn—</div> - <div class="verse">Full to brim with wine and corn.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Yet where is thy meal prepared?</div> - <div class="verse">Yet where is thy rest-hour shared?</div> - <div class="verse">Yet where is thy warm hearth-fire?</div> - <div class="verse">Where is thy sharp sword of ire?</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Conventional Lies of Our Civilization</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Max Nordau</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A Hungarian Jewish physician, born 1849, whose work, -“Degeneration,” won an international audience)</p> - -<p>The modern day laborer is more wretched than the -slave of former times, for he is fed by no master -nor any one else, and if his position is one of more liberty -than the slave, it is principally the liberty of dying of -hunger. He is by no means so well off as the outlaw of -the Middle Ages, for he has none of the gay independence -of the free-lance. He seldom rebels against society, and -has neither means nor opportunity to take by violence -or treachery what is denied him by the existing conditions -of life. The rich is thus richer, the poor poorer -than ever before since the beginnings of history.</p> - - -<h3>The Failure of Civilization</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Frederic Harrison</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English essayist and philosopher, born 1831; President of the -Positivist Society)</p> - -<p>I cannot myself understand how any one who -knows what the present manner is can think that it -is satisfactory. To me, at least, it would be enough to -condemn modern society as hardly an advance on slavery -or serfdom, if the permanent condition of industry -were to be that which we behold; that ninety per cent -of the actual producers of wealth have no home that -they can call their own beyond the end of the week;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span> -have no bit of soil, or so much as a room that belongs -to them; have nothing of value of any kind, except as -much old furniture as will go in a cart; have the precarious -chance of weekly wages, which barely suffice to -keep them in health; are housed for the most part in -places that no man thinks fit for his horse; are separated -by so narrow a margin from destitution that a month -of bad trade, sickness or unexpected loss brings them -face to face with hunger and pauperism. In cities, the -increasing organization of factory work makes life more -and more crowded, and work more and more a monotonous -routine; in the country, the increasing pressure -makes rural life continually less free, healthful and cheerful; -whilst the prizes and hopes of betterment are now -reduced to a minimum. This is the normal state of the -average workman in town or country, to which we must -add the record of preventable disease, accident, suffering -and social oppression with its immense yearly roll of -death and misery. But below this normal state of the -average workman there is found the great band of the -destitute outcasts—the camp-followers of the army of -industry, at least one-tenth of the whole proletarian -population, whose normal condition is one of sickening -wretchedness. If this is to be the permanent arrangement -of modern society, civilization must be held to -bring a curse on the great majority of mankind.</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a><br /><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK II</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><i>The Chasm</i></p> - -<p>The contrast between riches and poverty; the protest of common -sense against a condition of society where one-tenth of the people -own nine-tenths of the wealth.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a><br /><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Wat Tyler</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Southey</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(One of the so-called “Lake School” of English poets, which -included Wordsworth and Coleridge; 1774-1843. Poet-Laureate -for thirty years. The refrain of this song was the motto of Wat -Tyler’s rebels, who marched upon London in 1381)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“When Adam delved and Eve span,</div> - <div class="verse">Who was then the gentleman?”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Wretched is the infant’s lot,</div> - <div class="verse">Born within the straw-roof’d cot;</div> - <div class="verse">Be he generous, wise, or brave,</div> - <div class="verse">He must only be a slave.</div> - <div class="verse">Long, long labor, little rest,</div> - <div class="verse">Still to toil, to be oppress’d;</div> - <div class="verse">Drain’d by taxes of his store,</div> - <div class="verse">Punish’d next for being poor:</div> - <div class="verse">This is the poor wretch’s lot,</div> - <div class="verse">Born within the straw-roof’d cot.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">While the peasant works,—to sleep,</div> - <div class="verse">What the peasant sows,—to reap,</div> - <div class="verse">On the couch of ease to lie,</div> - <div class="verse">Rioting in revelry;</div> - <div class="verse">Be he villain, be he fool,</div> - <div class="verse">Still to hold despotic rule,</div> - <div class="verse">Trampling on his slaves with scorn!</div> - <div class="verse">This is to be nobly born.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“When Adam delved and Eve span,</div> - <div class="verse">Who was then the gentleman?”</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Poor-Slave Household</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Sartor Resartus”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Carlyle</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_31">31</a>)</p> - -<p>“The furniture of this Caravanserai consisted of a -large iron Pot, two oaken Tables, two Benches, -two Chairs, and a Potheen Noggin. There was a Loft -above (attainable by a ladder), upon which the inmates -slept; and the space below was divided by a hurdle -into two apartments; the one for their cow and pig, the -other for themselves and guests. On entering the house -we discovered the family, eleven in number, at dinner; -the father sitting at the top, the mother at the bottom, -the children on each side, of a large oaken Board, which -was scooped out in the middle, like a trough, to receive -the contents of their Pot of Potatoes. Little holes were -cut at equal distances to contain Salt; and a bowl of -Milk stood on the table; all the luxuries of meat and -beer, bread, knives and dishes, were dispensed with.” -The Poor-Slave himself our Traveller found, as he says, -broad-backed, black-browed, of great personal strength, -and mouth from ear to ear. His Wife was a sun-browned -but well-featured woman; and his young ones, bare and -chubby, had the appetite of ravens. Of their Philosophical -or Religious tenets or observances, no notice or hint.</p> - -<p>But now, secondly, of the <em>Dandiacal Household</em>:</p> - -<p>“A Dressing-room splendidly furnished; violet-colored -curtains, chairs and ottomans of the same hue. Two -full-length Mirrors are placed, one on each side of a table, -which supports the luxuries of the Toilet. Several Bottles -of Perfume, arranged in a peculiar fashion, stand<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span> -upon a smaller table of mother-of-pearl; opposite to -these are placed the appurtenances of Lavation richly -wrought in frosted silver. A Wardrobe of Buhl is on -the left; the doors of which, being partly open, discover -a profusion of Clothes; Shoes of a singularly small size -monopolize the lower shelves. Fronting the wardrobe -a door ajar gives some slight glimpse of the Bathroom. -Folding-doors in the background.—”Enter the Author,” -our Theogonist in person, “obsequiously preceded by a -French Valet, in white silk Jacket and cambric Apron.”</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>Such are the two sects which, at this moment, divide -the more unsettled portion of the British People; and -agitate that ever-vexed country. To the eye of the -political Seer, their mutual relation, pregnant with the -elements of discord and hostility, is far from consoling. -These two principles of Dandiacal Self-worship or Demon-worship, -and Poor-Slavish or Drudgical Earth-worship, -or whatever that same Drudgism may be, do as yet -indeed manifest themselves under distant and nowise -considerable shapes: nevertheless, in their roots and -subterranean ramifications, they extend through the -entire structure of Society, and work unweariedly in the -secret depths of English national Existence; striving to -separate and isolate it into two contradictory, uncommunicating -masses.</p> - -<p>In numbers, and even individual strength, the Poor-Slaves -or Drudges, it would seem, are hourly increasing. -The Dandiacal, again, is by nature no proselytizing -Sect; but it boasts of great hereditary resources, and is -strong by union; whereas the Drudges, split into parties, -have as yet no rallying-point; or at best only co-operate -by means of partial secret affiliations. If, indeed, there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span> -were to arise a <em>Communion of Drudges</em>, as there is already -a Communion of Saints, what strangest effects would -follow therefrom! Dandyism as yet affects to look down -on Drudgism; but perhaps the hour of trial, when it -will be practically seen which ought to look down, and -which up, is not so distant.</p> - -<p>To me it seems probable that the two Sects will one -day part England between them; each recruiting itself -from the intermediate ranks, till there be none left to -enlist on either side. These Dandiacal Manicheans, with -the host of Dandyizing Christians, will form one body; -the Drudges, gathering round them whosoever is Drudgical, -be he Christian or Infidel Pagan; sweeping-up likewise -all manner of Utilitarians, Radicals, refractory -Potwallopers, and so forth, into their general mass, will -form another. I could liken Dandyism and Drudgism -to two bottomless boiling Whirlpools that had broken-out -on opposite quarters of the firm land; as yet they -appear only disquieted, foolishly bubbling wells, which -man’s art might cover-in; yet mark them, their diameter -is daily widening; they are hollow Cones that boil-up -from the infinite Deep, over which your firm land is but -a thin crust or rind! Thus daily is the intermediate -land crumbling-in, daily the empire of the two Buchan-Bullers -extending; till now there is but a foot-plank, a -mere film of Land between them; this too is washed -away; and then—we have the true Hell of Waters, and -Noah’s Deluge is outdeluged!</p> - -<p>Or better, I might call them two boundless, and indeed -unexampled Electric Machines (turned by the “Machinery -of Society”), with batteries of opposite quality; -Drudgism the Negative, Dandyism the Positive; one -attracts hourly towards it and appropriates all the Posi<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>tive -Electricity of the nation (namely, the Money thereof); -the other is equally busy with the Negative (that is to -say the Hunger) which is equally potent. Hitherto you -see only partial transient sparkles and sputters; but wait -a little, till the entire nation is in an electric state; till -your whole vital Electricity, no longer healthfully Neutral, -is cut into two isolated portions of Positive and -Negative (of Money and of Hunger); and stands there -bottled-up in two World-Batteries! The stirring of a -child’s finger brings the two together; and then—What -then? The Earth is but shivered into impalpable smoke -by that Doom’s-thunderpeal; the Sun misses one of his -Planets in Space, and thenceforth there are no eclipses of -the Moon.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Charles Maurice de Talleyrand</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(French bishop and statesman, 1754-1838)</p> - -<p>Society is divided into two classes; the shearers -and the shorn. We should always be with the former -against the latter.</p> - - -<h3>The Lotus Eaters</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Alfred Tennyson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Probably the most popular of English lyrical poets; 1809-1892. -Made Poet-laureate in 1850, and a baron in 1884)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,</div> - <div class="verse">In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined</div> - <div class="verse">On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.</div> - <div class="verse">For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl’d</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl’d</div> - <div class="verse">Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:</div> - <div class="verse">Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,</div> - <div class="verse">Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,</div> - <div class="verse">Clanging fights and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.</div> - <div class="verse">But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song</div> - <div class="verse">Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,</div> - <div class="verse">Like a tale of little meaning tho’ the words are strong;</div> - <div class="verse">Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,</div> - <div class="verse">Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,</div> - <div class="verse">Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;</div> - <div class="verse">Till they perish and they suffer—some, ’tis whisper’d—down in hell.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Yeast</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charles Kingsley</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(English clergyman and novelist, 1819-1875; founder of the -Christian Socialist movement. In the scene here quoted, a young -University man is taken by a game-keeper to see the degradation -of English village life)</p></div> - -<p>“Can’t they read? Can’t they practice light and -interesting handicrafts at home, as the German -peasantry do?”</p> - -<p>“Who’ll teach ’em, sir? From the plough-tail to the -reaping-hook, and back again, is all they know. Besides,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span> -sir, they are not like us Cornish; they are a stupid pig-headed -generation at the best, these south countrymen. -They’re grown-up babies who want the parson and the -squire to be leading them, and preaching to them, and -spurring them on, and coaxing them up, every moment. -And as for scholarship, sir, a boy leaves school at nine -or ten to follow the horses; and between that time and -his wedding-day he forgets every word he ever learnt, -and becomes, for the most part, as thorough a heathen -savage at heart as those wild Indians in the Brazils -used to be.”</p> - -<p>“And then we call them civilized Englishmen!” said -Lancelot. “We can see that your Indian is a savage, -because he wears skins and feathers; but your Irish -cotter or your English laborer, because he happens to -wear a coat and trousers, is to be considered a civilized -man.”</p> - -<p>“It’s the way of the world, sir,” said Tregarva, “judging -carnal judgment, according to the sight of its own -eyes; always looking at the outsides of things and men, -sir, and never much deeper. But as for reading, sir, it’s -all very well for me, who have been a keeper and dawdled -about like a gentleman with a gun over my arm; but -did you ever do a good day’s farm-work in your life? -If you had, man or boy, you wouldn’t have been game -for much reading when you got home; you’d do just -what these poor fellows do—tumble into bed at eight -o’clock, hardly waiting to take your clothes off, knowing -that you must turn up again at five o’clock the next -morning to get a breakfast of bread, and, perhaps, a dab -of the squire’s dripping, and then back to work again; -and so on, day after day, sir, week after week, year after -year, without a hope or chance of being anything but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span> -what you are, and only too thankful if you can get work -to break your back, and catch the rheumatism over.”</p> - -<p>“But do you mean to say that their labor is so severe -and incessant?”</p> - -<p>“It’s only God’s blessing if it is incessant, sir, for if -it stops, they starve, or go to the house to be worse fed -than the thieves in gaol. And as for its being severe, -there’s many a boy, as their mothers will tell you, comes -home night after night, too tired to eat their suppers, -and tumble, fasting, to bed in the same foul shirt which -they’ve been working in all the day, never changing -their rag of calico from week’s end to week’s end, or -washing the skin that’s under it once in seven years.”</p> - -<p>“No wonder,” said Lancelot, “that such a life of -drudgery makes them brutal and reckless.”</p> - -<p>“No wonder, indeed, sir: they’ve no time to think; -they’re born to be machines, and machines they must -be; and I think, sir,” he added bitterly, “it’s God’s -mercy that they daren’t think. It’s God’s mercy that -they don’t feel. Men that write books and talk at elections -call this a free country, and say that the poorest -and meanest has a free opening to rise and become prime -minister, if he can. But you see, sir, the misfortune is, -that in practice he can’t; for one who gets into a gentleman’s -family, or into a little shop, and so saves a few -pounds, fifty know that they’ve no chance before them, -but day-laborer born, day-laborer live, from hand to -mouth, scraping and pinching to get not meat and beer -even, but bread and potatoes; and then, at the end of -it all, for a worthy reward, half-a-crown-a-week of parish -pay—or the work-house. That’s a lively hopeful prospect -for a Christian man!” ...</p> - -<p>Into the booth they turned; and as soon as Lancelot’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span> -eyes were accustomed to the reeking atmosphere, he saw -seated at two long temporary tables of board, fifty or -sixty of “My brethren,” as clergymen call them in their -sermons, wrangling, stupid, beery, with sodden eyes and -drooping lips—interspersed with more girls and brazen-faced -women, with dirty flowers in their caps, whose -sole business seemed to be to cast jealous looks at each -other, and defend themselves from the coarse overtures -of their swains.</p> - -<p>Lancelot had been already perfectly astonished at the -foulness of language which prevailed; and the utter -absence of anything like chivalrous respect, almost of -common decency, towards women. But lo! the language -of the elder women was quite as disgusting as that of the -men, if not worse. He whispered a remark on the point -to Tregarva, who shook his head.</p> - -<p>“It’s the field-work, sir—the field-work, that does it -all. They get accustomed there from their childhood -to hear words whose very meanings they shouldn’t know; -and the elder teach the younger ones, and the married -ones are worst of all. It wears them out in body, sir, -that field-work, and makes them brutes in soul and in -manners....”</p> - -<p>Sadder and sadder, Lancelot tried to listen to the -conversation of the men round him. To his astonishment -he hardly understood a word of it. It was half -articulate, nasal, guttural, made up almost entirely of -vowels, like the speech of savages. He had never before -been struck with the significant contrast between the -sharp, clearly defined articulation, the vivid and varied -tones of the gentleman, or even of the London street-boy, -when compared with the coarse, half-formed growls, as -of a company of seals, which he heard round him. That<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span> -single fact struck him, perhaps, more deeply than any; -it connected itself with many of his physiological fancies; -it was the parent of many thoughts and plans of his after-life. -Here and there he could distinguish a half sentence. -An old shrunken man opposite him was drawing figures -in the spilt beer with his pipe-stem, and discoursing of -the glorious times before the great war, “when there -was more food than there were mouths, and more work -than there were hands.” “Poor human nature!” thought -Lancelot, as he tried to follow one of those unintelligible -discussions about the relative prices of the loaf and the -bushel of flour, which ended, as usual, in more swearing, -and more quarrelling, and more beer to make it up—“Poor -human nature! always looking back, as the German -sage says, to some fancied golden age, never looking -forward to the real one which is coming!”</p> - -<p>“But I say, vather,” drawled out some one, “they -say there’s a sight more money in England now, than -there was afore the war-time.”</p> - -<p>“Eees, booy,” said the old man; “<em>but it’s got into -too few hands</em>.”</p> - -<p>“Well,” thought Lancelot, “there’s a glimpse of practical -sense, at least.” And a pedler who sat next him, -a bold, black-whiskered bully from the Potteries, hazarded -a joke—</p> - -<p>“It’s all along of this new sky-and-tough-it farming. -They used to spread the money broad cast, but now -they drills it all in one place, like bone-dust under their -fancy plants, and we poor self-sown chaps gets none.”</p> - -<p>This garland of fancies was received with great applause; -whereat the pedler, emboldened, proceeded to observe, -mysteriously, that “donkeys took a beating, but horses -kicked at it; and that they’d found out that in Stafford<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span>shire -long ago. You want a good Chartist lecturer down -here, my covies, to show you donkeys of laboring men -that you have got iron on your heels, if you only knowed -how to use it....”</p> - -<p>Blackbird was by this time prevailed on to sing, and -burst out as melodious as ever, while all heads were -cocked on one side in delighted attention.</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“I zeed a vire o’ Monday night,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A vire both great and high;</div> - <div class="verse">But I wool not tell you where, my boys,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Nor wool not tell you why.</div> - <div class="verse">The varmer he comes screeching out,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To zave ‘uns new brood mare;</div> - <div class="verse">Zays I, ‘You and your stock may roast,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Vor aught us poor chaps care.’</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p>“Coorus, boys, coorus!”</p> - -<p>And the chorus burst out—</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Then here’s a curse on varmers all</div> - <div class="verse indent2">As rob and grind the poor;</div> - <div class="verse">To re’p the fruit of all their works</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In —— for evermoor-r-r-r.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”A blind owld dame come to the vire,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Zo near as she could get;</div> - <div class="verse">Zays, ‘Here’s a luck I warn’t asleep,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To lose this blessed hett.</div> - <div class="verse">They robs us of our turfing rights</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Our bits of chips and sticks,</div> - <div class="verse">Till poor folks now can’t warm their hands,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Except by varmers’ ricks.’</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent8">“Then, etc.”</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span></p> -<p>And again the boy’s delicate voice rang out the ferocious -chorus, with something, Lancelot fancied, of fiendish -exultation, and every worn face lighted up with a coarse -laugh, that indicated no malice—but also no mercy....</p> - -<p>Lancelot almost ran out into the night—into a triad -of fights, two drunken men, two jealous wives, and a -brute who struck a poor, thin, worn-out woman, for -trying to coax him home. Lancelot rushed up to interfere, -but a man seized his uplifted arm.</p> - -<p>“He’ll only beat her all the more when he getteth -home.”</p> - -<p>“She has stood that every Saturday night for the -last seven years, to my knowledge,” said Tregarva; -“and worse, too, at times.”</p> - -<p>“Good God! is there no escape for her from her tyrant?”</p> - -<p>“No, sir. It’s only you gentlefolks who can afford -such luxuries; your poor man may be tied to a harlot, -or your poor woman to a ruffian, but once done, done -for ever.”</p> - -<p>“Well,” thought Lancelot, “we English have a characteristic -way of proving the holiness of the marriage -tie. The angel of Justice and Pity cannot sever it, only -the stronger demon of Money.”</p> - - -<h3>Alton Locke</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charles Kingsley</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_78">78</a>)</p> - -<p>“What!” shriek the insulted respectabilities, “have -we not paid him his wages weekly, and has he -not lived upon them?” Yes; and have you not given -your sheep and horses their daily wages, and have they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span> -not lived on them? You wanted to work them; and -they could not work, you knew, unless they were alive. -But here lies your iniquity; you have given the laborer -nothing but his daily food—not even his lodgings; the -pigs were not stinted of their wash to pay for their sty-room, -the man was; and his wages, thanks to your competitive -system, were beaten down deliberately and conscientiously -(for was it not according to political economy, -and the laws thereof?) to the minimum on which he -could or would work, without the hope or the possibility -of saving a farthing. You know how to invest your -capital profitably, dear Society, and to save money over -and above your income of daily comforts; but what has -he saved?—what is he profited by all those years of labor? -He has kept body and soul together—perhaps he could -have done that without you or your help. But his wages -are used up every Saturday night. When he stops working, -you have in your pocket the whole profits of his -nearly fifty years’ labor, and he has nothing. And -then you say that you have not eaten him!</p> - - -<h3>Looking Backward</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edward Bellamy</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(One of the classics of the Socialist movement, this book sold over -four hundred thousand copies in the first years of its publication. -Its author was an American school-teacher, 1850-1898)</p> - -<p>By way of attempting to give the reader some general -impression of the way people lived together in those -days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor -to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than compare<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span> -society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the -masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely -along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver -was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace -was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing -the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was -covered with passengers who never got down, even at -the steepest ascents. The seats on top were very breezy -and comfortable. Well up out of the dust their occupants -could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss -the merits of the straining team. Naturally such -places were in great demand and the competition for -them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in life -to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave -it to his child after him. By the rule of the coach a man -could leave his seat to whom he wished, but on the other -hand there were many accidents by which it might at -any time be wholly lost. For all that they were so easy, -the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt -of the coach persons were slipping out of them and falling -to the ground, where they were instantly compelled -to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on -which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was -naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one’s -seat, and the apprehension that this might happen to -them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the -happiness of those who rode.</p> - -<p>But did they think only of themselves? you ask. Was -not their very luxury rendered intolerable to them by -comparison with the lot of their brothers and sisters in -the harness, and the knowledge that their own weight -added to their toil! Had they no compassion for fellow -beings from whom fortune only distinguished them? Oh,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span> -yes; commiseration was frequently expressed by those -who rode for those who had to pull the coach, especially -when the vehicle came to a bad place in the road, as it -was constantly doing, or to a particularly steep hill. At -such times, the desperate straining of the team, their -agonized leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing -of hunger, the many who fainted at the rope and were -trampled in the mire, made a very distressing spectacle, -which often called forth highly creditable displays of -feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the passengers -would call down encouragingly to the toilers of -the rope, exhorting them to patience, and holding out -hopes of possible compensation in another world for the -hardness of their lot, while others contributed to buy -salves and liniments for the crippled and injured. It -was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach should -be so hard to pull, and there was a sense of general relief -when the specially bad piece of road was gotten over. -This relief was not, indeed, wholly on account of the -team, for there was always some danger at these bad -places of a general overturn in which all would lose their -seats.</p> - -<p>It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of -the spectacle of the misery of the toilers at the rope was -to enhance the passengers’ sense of the value of their -seats upon the coach, and to cause them to hold on to -them more desperately than before. If the passengers -could only have felt assured that neither they nor their -friends would ever fall from the top, it is probable that, -beyond contributing to the funds for liniments and -bandages, they would have troubled themselves extremely -little about those who dragged the coach.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Rich and Poor</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Leo Tolstoy</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Russian novelist and reformer, 1828-1910)</p> - -<p>The present position which we, the educated and well-to-do -classes, occupy, is that of the Old Man of the -Sea, riding on the poor man’s back; only, unlike the Old -Man of the Sea, we are very sorry for the poor man, -very sorry; and we will do almost anything for the poor -man’s relief. We will not only supply him with food -sufficient to keep him on his legs, but we will teach and -instruct him and point out to him the beauties of the -landscape; we will discourse sweet music to him and give -him abundance of good advice.</p> - -<p>Yes, we will do almost anything for the poor man, -anything but get off his back.</p> - - -<h3>A Tale of Two Cities</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charles Dickens</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Celebrated English novelist, 1812-1870. The novel here quoted -deals with the French Revolution, and the scene narrates how -one of Monseigneur’s guests drives away from the palace)</p> - -<p>Not many people had talked with him at the reception; -he had stood in a little space apart, and -Monseigneur might have been warmer in his manner. -It appeared under the circumstances, rather agreeable -to him to see the common people dispersed before his -horses, and often barely escaping from being run down. -His man drove as if he were charging an enemy, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span> -furious recklessness of the man brought no check into the -face, or to the lips, of the master. The complaint had -sometimes made itself audible, even in that deaf city -and dumb age, that, in the narrow streets without footways, -the fierce patrician custom of hard driving endangered -and maimed the mere vulgar in a barbarous manner. -But few cared enough for that to think of it a second -time, and, in this matter, as in all others, the common -wretches were left to get out of their difficulties as they -could.</p> - -<p>With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment -of consideration not easy to be understood in -these days, the carriage dashed through streets and swept -round corners, with women screaming before it, and men -clutching each other and clutching children out of its -way. At last, swooping at a street corner by a fountain, -one of its wheels came to a sickening little jolt, -and there was a loud cry from a number of voices, and -the horses reared and plunged.</p> - -<p>But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage probably -would not have stopped; carriages were often known to -drive on, and leave their wounded behind, and why not? -But the frightened valet had got down in a hurry, and -there were twenty hands at the horses’ bridles.</p> - -<p>“What has gone wrong?” said Monsieur, calmly looking -out.</p> - -<p>A tall man in a nightcap had caught up a bundle from -among the feet of the horses, and had laid it on the -basement of the fountain, and was down in the mud and -wet, howling over it like a wild animal.</p> - -<p>“Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!” said a ragged and -submissive man, “it is a child.”</p> - -<p>“Why does he make that abominable noise? Is it -his child?”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span></p> - -<p>“Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis—it is a pity—yes.”</p> - -<p>The fountain was a little removed; for the street -opened, where it was, into a space some ten or twelve -yards square. As the tall man suddenly got up from -the ground, and came running at the carriage, Monsieur -the Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.</p> - -<p>“Killed!” shrieked the man, in wild desperation, extending -both arms at their length above his head, and -staring at him. “Dead!”</p> - -<p>The people closed round, and looked at Monsieur the -Marquis. There was nothing revealed by the many eyes -that looked at him but watchfulness and eagerness; there -was no visible menacing or anger. Neither did the -people say anything; after the first cry, they had been -silent, and they remained so. The voice of the submissive -man who had spoken, was flat and tame in its extreme -submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes over -them all, as if they had been mere rats come out of their -holes.</p> - -<p>He took out his purse.</p> - -<p>“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people -cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One -or the other of you is for ever in the way. How do I -know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give -him that.”</p> - -<p>He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, -and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might -look down at it as it fell. The tall man called out again -with a most unearthly cry, “Dead!”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Paris</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Émile Zola</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(French novelist, 1840-1902, founder of the school of “Naturalism.” -The present is one of his later works, in which he indicates his -hope of the regeneration of French society. The hero is a Catholic -priest who first attempts to reform the Church, and then leaves it)</p></div> - -<p>Pierre remembered that frightful house in the Rue -des Saules, where so much want and suffering were -heaped up. He saw again the yard filthy like a quagmire, -the evil-smelling staircases, the sordid, bare, icy -rooms, the families fighting for messes which even stray -dogs would not have eaten; the mothers, with exhausted -breasts, carrying screaming children to and fro; the old -men who fell in corners like brute beasts, and died of -hunger amidst filth. And then came his other hours -with the magnificence or the quietude or the gaiety of -the <em>salons</em> through which he had passed, the whole insolent -display of financial Paris, and political Paris, and -society Paris. And at last he came to the dusk, and to -that Paris-Sodom and Paris-Gomorrah before him, which -was lighting itself up for the night, for the abominations -of that accomplice night which, like fine dust, was little -by little submerging the expanse of roofs. And the -hateful monstrosity of it all howled aloud under the pale -sky where the first pure, twinkling stars were gleaming.</p> - -<p>A great shudder came upon Pierre as he thought of -all that mass of iniquity and suffering, of all that went -on below amid wealth and vice. The <em>bourgeoisie</em>, wielding -power, would relinquish naught of the sovereignty which it -had conquered, wholly stolen; while the people, the eternal -dupe, silent so long, clenched its fists and growled, claiming -its legitimate share. And it was that frightful injus<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>tice -which filled the growing gloom with anger. From -what dark-breasted cloud would the thunderbolt fall? -For years he had been waiting for that thunderbolt, which -low rumbles announced on all points of the horizon. -And if he had written a book full of candour and hope, -if he had gone in all innocence to Rome, it was to avert -that thunderbolt and its frightful consequences. But -all hope of the kind was dead within him; he felt that the -thunderbolt was inevitable, that nothing henceforth -could stay the catastrophe. And never before had he -felt it to be so near, amidst the happy impudence of -some, and the exasperated distress of others. It was -gathering, and it would surely fall over that Paris, all -lust and bravado, which, when evening came, thus stirred -up its furnace.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 480px;"> -<img src="images/i_092f.jpg" alt="" /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo92" id="illo92">[illo92]</a></span> -<div class="caption"><p>THE HAND OF FATE</p> - -<p>WILLIAM BALFOUR KER</p> - -<p>(<i>Contemporary American illustrator</i>)</p> - -<p><cite>Copyright by J. A. Mitchell.</cite></p></div> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 700px;"> -<img src="images/i_093f.jpg" alt="" /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo93" id="illo93">[illo93]</a></span> -<div class="caption"><p>KING CANUTE</p> - -<p> -<cite>Copyright by J. A. Mitchell</cite> -</p> - -<p>KING CANUTE</p></div> -</div> - - -<h3>King Hunger</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Leonid Andreyev</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Russian novelist and dramatist of social protest; born 1871. -In this grim symbolical drama is voiced the despair of Russia’s -intellectuals after the tragic failure of the Revolution. In the -first scene King Hunger is shown inciting the starving factory-slaves -to revolt; in the second, he presides over a gathering of the -outcasts of society, who meet in a cellar to discuss projects of -ferocious vengeance upon the idlers in the ball-room over their -heads, but break up in a drunken brawl instead. In the present -scene, King Hunger turns traitor to his victims, and presides as -a judge passing sentence upon them. The leisure class attend as -spectators in the court-room, the women in evening gowns and -jewels, “the men in dress coats and surtouts, carefully shaven and -dressed at the wig-makers”)</p></div> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—Show in the first starveling.</p> - -<p>(<i>The first starveling, a ragged old man with lacerated -feet, is conducted into the court-room. A wire muzzle -encases his face.</i>)</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span></p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—Take the muzzle off the starveling. -What’s your offense, Starveling?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Old Man</span> (<i>speaking in a broken voice</i>):—Theft.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—How much did you steal?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Old Man</span>:—I stole a five-pound loaf, but it was wrested -from me. I had only time to bite a small piece of it. -Forgive me, I will never again——</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—How? Have you acquired an inheritance? -Or won’t you eat hereafter?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Old Man</span>:—No. It was wrested from me. I only -chewed off a small piece——</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—But how won’t you steal? Why -haven’t you been working?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Old Man</span>:—There’s no work.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—But where’s your brood, Starveling? -Why don’t they support you?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Old Man</span>:—My children died of hunger.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—Why did you not starve to death, -as they?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Old Man</span>:—I don’t know. I had a mind to live.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—Of what use is life to you, Starveling?</p> - -<p>(<i>Voices of Spectators.</i>)</p> - -<p>—Indeed, how do they live? I don’t comprehend it.</p> - -<p>—To work.</p> - -<p>—To glorify God and be confirmed in the consciousness -that life—</p> - -<p>—Well, I don’t suppose they exalt Him.</p> - -<p>—It were better if he were dead.</p> - -<p>—A rather wearisome old fellow. And what style of -trousers!</p> - -<p>—Listen! Listen!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span> (<i>rising, speaks aloud</i>):—Now, ladies and -gentlemen, we will feign to meditate. Honorable judges, -I beg you to simulate a meditative air.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span></p> - -<p>(<i>The judges for a brief period appear in deep thought—they -knit their brows, gaze up at the ceiling, prop up their -noses, sigh and obviously endeavor to think. Venerable -silence. Then with faces profoundly solemn and earnest, -silent as before, the judges rise, and simultaneously they -turn around facing Death. And all together they bow low -and lingering, stretching themselves forward.</i>)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span> (<i>with bent head</i>):—What is your pleasure?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Death</span> (<i>swiftly rising, wrathfully strikes the table with -his clenched fist and speaks in a grating voice</i>):—Condemned—in -the name of Satan!</p> - -<p>(<i>Then as quickly he sits down and sinks into a malicious -inflexibility. The judges resume their places.</i>)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—Starveling, you’re condemned.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Old Man</span>:—Have mercy!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—Put the muzzle over him. Bring -the next starveling....</p> - -<p>(<i>The next starveling is led into the room. She is a -graceful, but extremely emaciated young woman, with a face -pallid and tragic to view. The black, fine eyebrows join -over her nose; her luxuriant hair is negligently tied in a -knot, falling down her shoulders. She makes no bows nor -looks around, is as if seeing nobody. Her voice is apathetic -and dull.</i>)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—What’s your offense, Starveling?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Young Woman</span>:—I killed my child.</p> - -<p>(<i>Spectators.</i>)</p> - -<p>—Oh, horrors! This woman is altogether destitute of -motherly feelings.</p> - -<p>—What do you expect of them? You astonish me.</p> - -<p>—How charming she is. There’s something tragical -about her.</p> - -<p>—Then marry her.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span></p> - -<p>—Crimes of infanticide were not regarded as such in -ancient times, and were looked upon as a natural right -of parents. Only with the introduction of humanism -into our customs——</p> - -<p>—Oh, please, just a second, professor.</p> - -<p>—But science, my child——</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—Tell us, Starveling, how it happened.</p> - -<p>(<i>With drooping hands and motionless, the woman speaks -up dully and dispassionately.</i>)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Young Woman</span>:—One night my baby and I crossed -the long bridge over the river. And since I had long -before decided, so then approaching the middle, where -the river is deep and swift, I said: “Look, baby dear, -how the water is a-roaring below.” She said, “I can’t -reach, mamma, the railing is so high.” I said, “Come, -let me lift you, baby dear.” And when she was gazing -down into the black deep, I threw her over. That’s all.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—Did she grip you?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Young Woman</span>:—No.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—She screamed?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Young Woman</span>:—Yes, once.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—What was her name?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Young Woman</span>:—Baby dear.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—No, her name. How was she called?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Young Woman</span>:—Baby dear.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span> (<i>covering his face, he speaks in sad, -quivering voice</i>):—Honorable judges, I beg you to simulate -a meditative air. (<i>The judges knit their brows, gaze -on the ceiling, chew their lips. Venerable silence. Then -they rise and gravely bow to Death.</i>)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Death</span>:—Condemned—in the name of Satan!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span> (<i>rising, speaks aloud, extending his hands -to the woman, as if veiling her in an invisible, black shroud</i>):—<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span> -You’re condemned, woman, do you hear? Death awaits -you. In blackest hell you will be tormented and burnt on -everlasting, slakeless fires! Devils will rack your heart -with their iron talons! The most venomous serpents of -the infernal abyss will suck your brain and sting, sting -you, and nobody will heed your agonizing cries, for -you’ll be silenced. Let eternal night be over you. Do -you hear, Starveling?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Young Woman</span>:—Yes.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">King Hunger</span>:—Muzzle her.</p> - -<p>(<i>The starveling is led away. King Hunger addresses the -spectators in a frank and joyous manner.</i>) Now, ladies -and gentlemen, I propose recess for luncheon. Adjudication -is a fatiguing affair, and we need to invigorate -ourselves. (<i>Gallantly.</i>) Especially our charming matrons -and the young ladies. Please!</p> - -<p>(<i>Joyful exclamations.</i>)</p> - -<p>—To dine! To dine!</p> - -<p>—’Tis about time!</p> - -<p>—Mamma dear, where are the bonbons?</p> - -<p>—Your little mind is only on bonbons!</p> - -<p>—Which—is tried? (<i>Waking up.</i>)</p> - -<p>—Dinner is ready, Your Excellency.</p> - -<p>—Ah! Why didn’t you wake me up before?</p> - -<p>(<i>Everything assumes at once a happy, amiable, homelike -aspect. The judges pull off their wigs, exposing their bald -heads, and gradually they lose themselves in the crowd, -shake hands, and with feigned indifference they look askance, -contemplating the dining. Portly waiters in rich liveries, -with difficulty and bent under the weight of immense dishes, -bring gigantic portions; whole mutton trunks, colossal -hams, high, mountain-like roasts. Before the stout man, -on a low stool, they place a whole roasted pig, which is brought -in by three. Doubtful, he looks at it.</i>)</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span></p> - -<p>—Would you assist me, Professor?</p> - -<p>—With pleasure, Your Excellency.</p> - -<p>—And you, Honorable Judge?</p> - -<p>—Although I am not hungry—but with your leave—</p> - -<p>—I may, perhaps, be suffered to—(<i>the Abbot modestly -speaks, his mouth watering.</i>)</p> - -<p>(<i>The four seat themselves about the pig and silently they -carve it greedily with their knives. Occasionally the eyes of -the Professor and of the Abbot meet, and with swollen cheeks, -powerless to chew, they are smitten with reciprocal hatred -and contempt. Then choking, they ardently champ on. -Everywhere small groups eating. Death produces a dry -cheese sandwich from his pocket and eats in solitude. A -heavy conversation of full-crammed mouths. Munching.</i>)</p> - - -<h3>London</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Heinrich Heine</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(German poet and essayist, one of the most musical and most -unhappy of singers; 1797-1856)</p> - -<p>It is in the dusky twilight that Poverty with her mates, -Vice and Crime, glide forth from their lairs. They -shun daylight the more anxiously, the more cruelly their -wretchedness contrasts with the pride of wealth which -glitters everywhere; only Hunger sometimes drives them -at noonday from their dens, and then they stand with -silent, speaking eyes, staring beseechingly at the rich -merchant who hurries along, busy and jingling gold, or -at the lazy lord who, like a surfeited god, rides by on his -high horse, casting now and then an aristocratically indifferent -glance at the mob below, as though they were -swarming ants, or, at all events, a mass of baser beings,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span> -whose joys and sorrows have nothing in common with -his feelings....</p> - -<p>Poor Poverty! how agonizing must thy hunger be -where others swell in scornful superfluity! And when -some one casts with indifferent hand a crust into thy -lap, how bitter must the tears be wherewith thou moistenest -it! Thou poisonest thyself with thine own tears. -Well art thou in the right when thou alliest thyself to -Vice and Crime. Outlawed criminals often bear more -humanity in their hearts than those cold, blameless -citizens of virtue, in whose white hearts the power of -evil is quenched; but also the power of good. I have -seen women on whose cheeks red vice was painted, and -in whose hearts dwelt heavenly purity.</p> - - -<h3>London</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Blake</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet and painter of strange and terrible visions. -1757-1827)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I wander through each chartered street,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Near where the chartered Thames does flow;</div> - <div class="verse">A mark in every face I meet,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Marks of weakness, marks of woe.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In every cry of every man,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In every infant’s cry of fear,</div> - <div class="verse">In every voice, in every ban,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The mind-forged manacles I hear:</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">How the chimney-sweeper’s cry</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Every blackening church appals,</div> - <div class="verse">And the hapless soldier’s sigh</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Runs in blood down palace-walls.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But most, through midnight streets I hear</div> - <div class="verse indent2">How the youthful harlots curse</div> - <div class="verse">Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>A Life for a Life<a name="FNanchor_8" id="FNanchor_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8" class="fnanchor">[H]</a></h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Herrick</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(American novelist, professor in the University of Chicago; born -1868. In this novel a young American, hungering for success and -about to marry the daughter a great captain of industry, is taken -by a strange man, “the bearded Anarch,” and shown the horrors of -American industrialism)</p></div> - -<p>And thus this strange pilgrimage, like another descent -into purgatory and even unto hell, continued,—the -shabby bearded Anarch leading his companion from -factory, warehouse, and mill to mine and railroad and -shop, teaching him by the sight of his own eyes what -life means to the silent multitude upon whose bent shoulders -the fabric of society rests,—what that “life, liberty -and the pursuit of happiness”—brave aspirations of the -forefathers—has brought to the common man in this -land of destiny and desire.</p> - -<p>The wanderer breathed the deadly fumes of smelter -and glass works, saw where men were burned in great -converters, or torn limb from limb upon the whirling -teeth of swift machines,—done to death in this way and -that, or maimed and cast useless upon the rubbish heap -of humanity,—waste product of the process.</p> - -<p>“For,” as his guide repeated, “in this country, where -Property is sacred, nothing is cheaper than human life. -For, remember, the supply of raw labor is inexhaustible.”</p> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span></p> -<p>He recalled the words of a sleek and comfortable man -of business, at the end of the day, with his good dinner -comfortably in his belly and a fat cigar between his lips: -“There’s too much sentimentalism in the air. Some -religion less effeminate than Christ’s is needed to fit the -facts of life. In the struggle the weak must go under, -and it is a crime to interfere with natural law.” The -weak must go under! Surely if that were the law, any -religion that would offer an anodyne to the hopeless were -a blessing. But again and again the question rose unanswered -to his lips,—who are the weak? And the sleek -one with his cigar said, “Those who go under!” ...</p> - -<p>So they passed on their way through squalid factory -towns reeking with human vice and disease, through the -network of railroad terminals crowded with laden cars -rolling forth to satisfy desires. They loitered in busy -city stores, in dim basement holes where bread and -clothes were making, in filthy slaughter-houses where -beasts were slain by beasts....</p> - -<p>At sunset of a glowing day the two sat upon an upper -ridge of the hills. All the imperial colors of the firmament -dyed the western heavens among the broken peaks -of the mountains. Below in the lonely valleys were the -excoriations of the mines, the refuse, the smudged stains -of the rough surface of the earth. The guide pointed -into the distance where the huge smelter of Senator -Dexter’s mine sent a yellow cloud upward.</p> - -<p>“Near that is the charred debris where the miners -blew up the old works. Below the brow of yonder hills -lies that stockade where miners, with their women and -children, were penned for weeks like wild animals, guarded -by the troops of the nation. Beyond is the edge of the -great desert, into whose waterless waste others were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span> -driven to their death. Of these I was one that escaped. -Men were shot and women raped. But I tell over old -tales known to all. In this place it has been truly a life -for a life according to the primitive text—but more -honest than the cunning and hidden ways of the law. -Here the eaten is face to face, at least, with the eater.”</p> - -<p>The twilight came down like a curtain, hiding the -scars of man’s dominion over the earth. The two sat -in silent thought. This was the apex of their journey -together, and the end. Behind this lofty table-land of -the continent began the grim desert, not yet subdued -by man, and beyond came other fertile valleys and other -mountains, and finally another ocean. Thither had been -carried the same civilization, the same spirit of conquest -and greed, and that noble aspiration after “life, liberty, -and the pursuit of happiness” bore the same fruit in the -blood of man. Wherever the victorious race had forced -its way, it sowed the seeds of hate and industrial crime. -And the flower must bloom, early or late, upon the lonely -cattle ranch, in the primeval forest, the soft southern -grove, or the virgin valley of the “promised land.”</p> - -<p>Thus spoke the Anarch.</p> - -<p>In the glimmering twilight the fierce eyes of the bearded -one rested upon the wanderer.</p> - -<p>“Have you seen enough?”</p> - -<p>“Enough! God knows.”</p> - -<p>“So at last you understand the meaning of it all!”</p> - -<p>“Not yet!” And from the depth of his being there -flashed the demand, “Why have you shown me the sore -surface of life? What have you to do with it? And -what have I?”</p> - -<p>His guide replied, “So you still long for the smooth -paths of prosperity? You would like to shield your eyes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span> -from the disagreeable aspects of a world that is good to -you? You would still have your comfort and your heart’s -desire? Your ambitious fancy still turns to the daughter -of privilege, dainty and lovely and sweet to the eyes?”</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>(The young man returns to the rich woman whom he -had meant to marry.)</p> - -<p>He knelt and taking the hem of her garment held it in -his hands.</p> - -<p>“See!” He crushed the soft fabric in his hand. “Silk -with thread of gold. It is the tears! See!” He touched -her girdle with his hands. “Gold and precious stones. -They are the groans! See!” He put his fingers upon -the golden hair. “A wreath of pure gold! Tears and -groans and bloody sweat! You are a tissue of the lives -of others, from feet to the crown upon your hair.... -See!” His hot hands crushed the orchids at her breast. -“Even the flower at your breast is stained with blood.... -I see the tears of others on your robe. I hear their -sighs in your voice. I see defeated desires in the light -of your eyes. You are the Sacrifice of the many—I -cannot touch!”</p> - - -<h3>Isabella, or The Pot of Basil</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Keats</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(One of the loveliest of English poets, 1795-1821; a chemist’s -assistant, who lived unrecognized and died despairing)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Enrichèd from ancestral merchandise,</div> - <div class="verse">And for them many a weary hand did swelt</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In torchèd mines and noisy factories,</div> - <div class="verse">And many once proud-quiver’d loins did melt</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In blood from stinging whip,—with hollow eyes</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Many all day in dazzling river stood,</div> - <div class="verse">To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And went all naked to the hungry shark;</div> - <div class="verse">For them his ears gushed blood; for them in death</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark</div> - <div class="verse">Lay full of darts; for them alone did seethe</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A thousand men in troubles wide and dark;</div> - <div class="verse">Half-ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel,</div> - <div class="verse">That set sharp wracks at work, to pinch and peel.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Sons of Martha</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Rudyard Kipling</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Under this title the English poet has written a striking picture -of the social chasm. He figures the world’s toilers as the “Sons of -Martha,” who, because their mother “was rude to the Lord, her -Guest,” are condemned forever to unrequited toil. “It is their care -in all the ages to take the buffet and cushion the shock.” The poem -goes on to tell of the ignorance and torment in which they live—while -the Sons of Mary, who “have inherited that good part,” live -in ease upon their toil.)</p></div> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>/p -“They sit at the Feet—and they hear the Word—they see how truly the promise runs. -They have cast their burdens upon the Lord, and—the Lord He lays them on Martha’s sons.” -p/</p> - -<p>On the other hand the sons of Martha have to face reality.</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“They do not preach that their God will rouse them an hour before the nuts work loose,</div> - <div class="verse">They do not teach that His pity allows them to leave their work when they damn-well choose.”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p>The entire poem may be found in the 1918 Collected Edition -of Mr. Kipling’s poems.</p></div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Reflections Upon Poverty</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The New Grub Street”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George Gissing</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Novelist of English middle-class life, 1857-1903. Few have ever -equalled him in the portrayal of the sordid, every-day realities of -poverty. The story of his own tragic life is told in a novel called -“The Private Life of Henry Maitland,” by Morley Roberts)</p></div> - -<p>As there was sunshine Amy accompanied her husband -for his walk in the afternoon; it was long since -they had been out together. An open carriage that -passed, followed by two young girls on horseback, gave -a familiar direction to Reardon’s thoughts.</p> - -<p>“If one were as rich as those people. They pass so -close to us; they see us, and we see them; but the distance -between is infinity. They don’t belong to the -same world as we poor wretches. They see everything -in a different light; they have powers which would seem -supernatural if we were suddenly endowed with them.”</p> - -<p>“Of course,” assented his companion with a sigh.</p> - -<p>“Just fancy, if one got up in the morning with the -thought that no reasonable desire that occurred to one -throughout the day need remain ungratified! And that -it would be the same, any day and every day, to the end -of one’s life! Look at those houses; every detail, within -and without, luxurious. To have such a home as that!”</p> - -<p>“And they are empty creatures who live there.”</p> - -<p>“They do <em>live</em>, Amy, at all events. Whatever may be -their faculties, they all have free scope. I have often -stood staring at houses like these until I couldn’t believe -that the people owning them were mere human beings -like myself. The power of money is so hard to realize,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span> -one who has never had it marvels at the completeness with -which it transforms every detail of life. Compare what -we call our home with that of rich people; it moves -one to scornful laughter. I have no sympathy with the -stoical point of view; between wealth and poverty is -just the difference between the whole man and the -maimed. If my lower limbs are paralyzed I may still -be able to think, but then there is no such thing in life -as walking. As a poor devil I may live nobly; but one -happens to be made with faculties of enjoyment, and -those have to fall into atrophy. To be sure, most rich -people don’t understand their happiness; if they did, -they would move and talk like gods—which indeed they -are.”</p> - -<p>Amy’s brow was shadowed. A wise man, in Reardon’s -position, would not have chosen this subject to dilate -upon.</p> - -<p>“The difference,” he went on, “between the man with -money and the man without is simply this: the one -thinks, ‘How shall I use my life?’ and the other, ‘How -shall I keep myself alive?’ A physiologist ought to be -able to discover some curious distinction between the -brain of a person who has never given a thought to the -means of subsistence, and that of one who has never -known a day free from such cares. There must be some -special cerebral development representing the mental -anguish kept up by poverty.”</p> - -<p>“I should say,” put in Amy, “that it affects every -function of the brain. It isn’t a special point of suffering, -but a misery that colors every thought.”</p> - -<p>“True. Can I think of a single object in all the sphere -of my experience without the consciousness that I see -it through the medium of poverty? I have no enjoyment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span> -which isn’t tainted by that thought, and I can suffer -no pain which it doesn’t increase. The curse of poverty -is to the modern world just what that of slavery was to -the ancient. Rich and destitute stand to each other as -free man and bond. You remember the line of Homer -I have often quoted about the demoralizing effect of -enslavement; poverty degrades in the same way.”</p> - -<p>“It has had its effect upon me—I know that too well,” -said Amy, with bitter frankness.</p> - -<p>Reardon glanced at her, and wished to make some -reply, but he could not say what was in his thoughts.</p> - - -<h3>The Veins of Wealth</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Ruskin</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English art critic and university professor, 1819-1900; author of -many works upon social questions, and master of perhaps -the greatest English prose style)</p> - -<p>Primarily, which is very notable and curious, -I observe that men of business rarely know the -meaning of the word “rich.” At least if they know, -they do not in their reasonings allow for the fact, that -it is a relative word, implying its opposite “poor” as -positively as the word “north” implies its opposite -“south.” Men nearly always speak and write as if riches -were absolute, and it were possible, by following certain -scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas -riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only -through inequalities or negations of itself. The force -of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly -on the default of a guinea in your neighbor’s pocket.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span> -If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the -degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the -need or desire he has for it,—and the art of making yourself -rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist’s sense, is -therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your -neighbor poor.</p> - - -<h3>Lynggaard & Co.</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Hjalmar Bergström</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Contemporary Danish dramatist, born 1868. The present play -deals with the modern industrial struggle. The wife of a great -manufacturer has become the victim of melancholia after a strike)</p></div> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mrs. Lynggaard</span> (<i>absorbed in her memories</i>):—I -shall never forget the day when the people went -back to work. I was watching them from my bedroom -window. For four months they had been starving—starving, -do you understand?—they and theirs. Then -they turned up again one winter morning before daylight, -and there they stood and shivered in the yards. They -had no over-clothes, of course, and they were shaking -both from cold and from weakness. And then their -faces were all covered with beards, so that one couldn’t -recognize them. There they stood and waited a long -time, a very long time.... At last Heymann [the -manager] appeared in the doorway and read something -from a paper. It was the conditions of surrender, I suppose. -None of them looked up. Then, as they were -about to walk in and begin working, Heymann stopped -them by holding up his hand, and he said something -I couldn’t hear. But after a little while I saw Olsen -[the strike-leader] standing all by himself in a cleared<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span> -place. (<i>A shiver runs through her at the recollection.</i>) -Once I saw a picture of an execution in a prison yard.... -It lasted only a few seconds. Then Olsen said a -few words to his comrades and walked away, looking -white as a ghost. The crowd opened up to let him -pass through. Then the rest stood there for a while -looking so strangely depressed and not knowing what -to do. And at last they went in, one by one, bent and -broken.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mikkelsen</span>:—Olsen wasn’t allowed to go back to work?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mrs. Lynggaard</span>:—It was he who had been their -leader, and it was his fault that they had held out as -long as they did. And then Olsen began to look for -work elsewhere, but none of the other companies would -have anything to do with him.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mikkelsen</span> (<i>shrugging his shoulders</i>):—War is war.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mrs. Lynggaard</span>:—A few months later, as I was taking -a walk, I was stopped on the street by Olsen’s wife. I -tell you, the way she looked made my heart shrink within -me. Her husband was completely broken down, she -told me. And on top of it all he had taken to drink. -Everything she and the children could scrape together, -he spent on whiskey. She herself was so far gone with -her eighth child that she would soon have to quit work.... -Then I went home to my husband and begged and -prayed him to take Olsen back and make a man of him -again. It was the first time during our marriage that -I saw him beside himself with rage. There came into his -eyes such an evil expression that I wish I had never -seen it, for I have never since been able to forget it -entirely. But, of course, I guessed who was back of it. -(<i>With emphasis.</i>) Then I did the most humiliating thing -I have ever done: I went in secret to Heymann and -pleaded for that discharged workman.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span></p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mikkelsen</span>:—Well, and Heymann?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mrs. Lynggaard</span>:—Since that moment I hate Heymann. -There I was, humbling myself before him. And -he measured me with cold eyes and said: “If I am to -be in charge of this plant, madam, I must ask once for -all and absolutely, that no outsiders interfere with the -running of it.”</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mikkelsen</span>:—I don’t see that he could have done -anything else.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mrs. Lynggaard</span>:—What I cannot forgive myself is -that I let myself be imposed upon by that man. I -behaved like a coward. At that moment I should have -gone to my husband and said: “This is what has happened—now -you must choose between Heymann and -me!” But I was so cowardly, that I didn’t even tell -my husband what I had done.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mikkelsen</span>:—Nor was it proper for you to go behind -your husband’s back like that.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mrs. Lynggaard</span> (<i>with an expression of abject horror -in her fixed gaze</i>):—A little afterwards this thing happened. -It was one of the first warm summer days, and -I was walking in the garden with Jacob. At that time -a splendid old chestnut tree was growing in one corner. -And there, in the midst of green leaves, and singing -birds, Olsen was hanging, cold and dead. And the flies -were crawling in and out of his face.... (<i>She trembles -visibly.</i>)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mikkelsen</span>:—Yes, life is cruel.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mrs. Lynggaard</span>:—And there I perceived for the first -time how utterly poor a human being may become. -Anything so pitiful and miserable I had never seen before. -There was no sign of underclothing between his trousers -and the vest. And I don’t know why, but it seemed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span> -almost as if this was what hurt me most—much more -than that he had hanged himself.... And since that -day I haven’t known a single hour of happiness.</p> - - -<h3>My Religion</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Leo Tolstoy</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(From an essay in which the Russian novelist and reformer, -1828-1910, has set forth the creed by which he lived)</p> - -<p>What is the law of nature? Is it to know that my -security and that of my family, all my amusements -and pleasures, are purchased at the expense of misery, -deprivation, and suffering to thousands of human beings—by -the terror of the gallows; by the misfortune of -thousands stifling within prison walls; by the fears -inspired by millions of soldiers and guardians of civilization, -torn from their homes and besotted by discipline, -to protect our pleasures with loaded revolvers against -the possible interference of the famishing! Is it to purchase -every fragment of bread that I put in my mouth -and the mouths of my children by the numberless privations -that are necessary to procure my abundance? Or -is it to be certain that my piece of bread only belongs -to me when I know that everyone else has a share, and -that no one starves while I eat?</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Octopus<a name="FNanchor_9" id="FNanchor_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9" class="fnanchor">[I]</a></h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Frank Norris</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(The young American novelist, 1870-1902, planned this as the -first of a trilogy of novels, the “Epic of the Wheat.” The second -volume, “The Pit,” was written, but his death interrupted the -third. The present story narrates the long struggle between the -farmers of the San Joaquin valley and the railroad “octopus.” -The farmers have been beaten, and several of them killed while -resisting eviction from their homes. The hero is at a dinner party -in San Francisco, at the same time that the widow and child of one -of the victims are wandering the streets outside)</p></div> - -<p>All around the table conversations were going forward -gayly. The good wines had broken up the slight -restraint of the early part of the evening and a spirit of -good humor and good fellowship prevailed. Young -Lambery and Mr. Gerard were deep in reminiscences of -certain mutual duck-shooting expeditions. Mrs. Gerard -and Mrs. Cedarquist discussed a novel—a strange mingling -of psychology, degeneracy, and analysis of erotic -conditions—which had just been translated from the -Italian. Stephen Lambert and Beatrice disputed over -the merits of a Scotch collie just given to the young lady. -The scene was gay, the electric bulbs sparkled, the wine -flashing back the light. The entire table was a vague -glow of white napery, delicate china, and glass as brilliant -as crystal. Behind the guests the serving-men -came and went, filling the glasses continually, changing -the covers, serving the entrées, managing the dinner -without interruption, confusion, or the slightest unnecessary -noise.</p> - -<p>But Presley could find no enjoyment in the occasion. -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>From that picture of feasting, that scene of luxury, that -atmosphere of decorous, well-bred refinement, his thoughts -went back to Los Muertos and Quien Sabe and the irrigating -ditch at Hooven’s. He saw them fall, one by one, -Harran, Annixter, Osterman, Broderson, Hooven. The -clink of the wine glasses was drowned in the explosion of -revolvers. The Railroad might indeed be a force only, -which no man could control and for which no man was -responsible, but his friends had been killed, but years of -extortion and oppression had wrung money from all the -San Joaquin, money that had made possible this very -scene in which he found himself. Because Magnus had -been beggared, Gerard had become Railroad King; -because the farmers of the valley were poor, these men -were rich.</p> - -<p>The fancy grew big in his mind, distorted, caricatured, -terrible. Because the farmers had been killed at the -irrigating ditch, these others, Gerard and his family, fed -full. They fattened on the blood of the People, on the -blood of the men who had been killed at the ditch. It -was a half-ludicrous, half-horrible “dog eat dog,” an -unspeakable cannibalism. Harran, Annixter, and Hooven -were being devoured there under his eyes. These dainty -women, his cousin Beatrice and little Miss Gerard, frail, -delicate; all these fine ladies with their small fingers and -slender necks, suddenly were transfigured in his tortured -mind into harpies tearing human flesh. His head swam -with the horror of it, the terror of it. Yes, the People -<em>would</em> turn some day, and, turning, rend those who now -preyed upon them. It would be “dog eat dog” again, -with positions reversed, and he saw for an instant of time -that splendid house sacked to its foundations, the tables -overturned, the pictures torn, the hangings blazing, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span> -Liberty, the red-handed Man in the Street, grimed with -powder smoke, foul with the gutter, rush yelling, torch -in hand, through every door.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>At ten o’clock Mrs. Hooven fell.</p> - -<p>Luckily she was leading Hilda by the hand at the -time and the little girl was not hurt. In vain had Mrs. -Hooven, hour after hour, walked the streets. After a -while she no longer made any attempt to beg; nobody -was stirring, nor did she even try to hunt for food with -the stray dogs and cats. She had made up her mind to -return to the park in order to sit upon the benches there, -but she had mistaken the direction, and, following up -Sacramento Street, had come out at length, not upon -the park, but upon a great vacant lot at the very top of -the Clay Street hill. The ground was unfenced and rose -above her to form the cap of the hill, all overgrown with -bushes and a few stunted live-oaks. It was in trying to -cross this piece of ground that she fell....</p> - -<p>“You going to sleep, mammy?” inquired Hilda, touching -her face.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Hooven roused herself a little.</p> - -<p>“Hey? Vat you say? Asleep? Yais, I guess I wass -asleep.”</p> - -<p>Her voice trailed unintelligibly to silence again. She -was not, however, asleep. Her eyes were open. A grateful -numbness had begun to creep over her, a pleasing -semi-insensibility. She no longer felt the pain and -cramps of her stomach, even the hunger was ceasing -to bite.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>“These stuffed artichokes are delicious, Mrs. Gerard,” -murmured young Lambert, wiping his lips with a corner<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span> -of his napkin. “Pardon me for mentioning it, but your -dinner must be my excuse.”</p> - -<p>“And this asparagus—since Mr. Lambert has set the -bad example,” observed Mrs. Cedarquist, “so delicate, -such an exquisite flavor. How <em>do</em> you manage?”</p> - -<p>“We get all our asparagus from the southern part of -the State, from one particular ranch,” explained Mrs. -Gerard. “We order it by wire and get it only twenty -hours after cutting. My husband sees to it that it is -put on a special train. It stops at this ranch just to take -on our asparagus. Extravagant, isn’t it, but I simply -can not eat asparagus that has been cut more than a -day.”</p> - -<p>“Nor I,” exclaimed Julian Lambert, who posed as an -epicure. “I can tell to an hour just how long asparagus -has been picked.”</p> - -<p>“Fancy eating ordinary market asparagus,” said Mrs. -Gerard, “that has been fingered by Heaven knows how -many hands.”</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>“Mammy, mammy, wake up,” cried Hilda, trying to -push open Mrs. Hooven’s eyelids, at last closed. -“Mammy, don’t. You’re just trying to frighten me.”</p> - -<p>Feebly Hilda shook her by the shoulder. At last Mrs. -Hooven’s lips stirred. Putting her head down, Hilda -distinguished the whispered words:</p> - -<p>“I’m sick. Go to schleep.... Sick.... Noddings -to eat.”</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>The dessert was a wonderful preparation of alternate -layers of biscuit, glacés, ice cream, and candied chestnuts.</p> - -<p>“Delicious, is it not?” observed Julian Lambert, partly -to himself, partly to Miss Cedarquist. “This <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Moscovite -fouetté</i>—upon my word, I have never tasted its equal.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span></p> - -<p>“And you should know, shouldn’t you?” returned the -young lady.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>“Mammy, mammy, wake up,” cried Hilda. “Don’t -sleep so. I’m frightened.”</p> - -<p>Repeatedly she shook her; repeatedly she tried to -raise the inert eyelids with the point of her finger. But -her mother no longer stirred. The gaunt, lean body, -with its bony face and sunken eye-sockets, lay back, prone -upon the ground, the feet upturned and showing the -ragged, worn soles of the shoes, the forehead and gray -hair beaded with fog, the poor, faded bonnet awry, the -poor, faded dress soiled and torn.</p> - -<p>Hilda drew close to her mother, kissing her face, twining -her arms around her neck. For a long time she lay -that way, alternately sobbing and sleeping. Then, after -a long time, there was a stir. She woke from a doze -to find a police officer and two or three other men bending -over her. Some one carried a lantern. Terrified, smitten -dumb, she was unable to answer the questions put to -her. Then a woman, evidently the mistress of the house -on the top of the hill, arrived and took Hilda in her arms -and cried over her.</p> - -<p>“I’ll take the little girl,” she said to the police officer. -“But the mother, can you save her? Is she too far -gone?”</p> - -<p>“I’ve sent for a doctor,” replied the other.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>Just before the ladies left the table, young Lambert -raised his glass of Madeira. Turning towards the wife -of the Railroad King, he said:</p> - -<p>“My best compliments for a delightful dinner.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span></p> - -<p>The doctor, who had been bending over Mrs. Hooven, -rose.</p> - -<p>“It’s no use,” he said; “she has been dead some time—exhaustion -from starvation.”</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Anatole France</span></h3> - -<p>The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as -well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the -streets and to steal bread.</p> - - -<h3>Progress and Poverty</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Henry George</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(One of the most widely-read treatises upon economics ever -published, this book was the fountain head of the single-tax movement. -The writer was a California journalist, 1839-1897, who -devoted all his life to the propaganda of economic justice)</p></div> - -<p>Unpleasant as it may be to admit it, it is at last -becoming evident that the enormous increase in -productive power which has marked the present century -and is still going on with accelerating ratio, has no tendency -to extirpate poverty or to lighten the burdens of -those compelled to toil. It simply widens the gulf -between Dives and Lazarus, and makes the struggle for -existence more intense. The march of invention has -clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago -the boldest imagination could not have dreamed. But -in factories where labor-saving machinery has reached -its most wonderful development, little children are at -work; wherever the new forces are anything like fully<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span> -utilized, large classes are maintained by charity or live -on the verge of recourse to it; amid the greatest accumulations -of wealth, men die of starvation, and puny infants -suckle dry breasts; while everywhere the greed of gain, -the worship of wealth, shows the force of the fear of -want. The promised land flies before us like the mirage. -The fruits of the tree of knowledge turn, as we grasp -them, to apples of Sodom that crumble at the touch....</p> - -<p>This association of poverty with progress is the great -enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which -spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex -the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy -and education grapple in vain. From it come -the clouds that overhang the future of the most progressive -and self-reliant nations. It is the riddle which the -Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to -answer is to be destroyed. So long as all the increased -wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build -up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper -the contrast between the House of Have and the House -of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent. -The reaction must come. The tower leans from its foundations, -and every new story but hastens the final catastrophe. -To educate men who must be condemned to -poverty, is but to make them restive; to base on a state -of most glaring social inequality political institutions -under which men are theoretically equal, is to stand a -pyramid on its apex.</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a><br /><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK III</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><i>The Outcast</i></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>The life of the underworld, of those thrown upon the scrap-heap -of the modern industrial machine; vivid and powerful -passages portraying the lives of tramps, criminals and prostitutes.</p></div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a><br /><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Not Guilty</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Blatchford</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_66">66</a>)</p> - -<p>In defending the Bottom Dog I do not deal with hard -science only; but with the dearest faiths, the oldest -wrongs and the most awful relationships of the great -human family, for whose good I strive and to whose -judgment I appeal. Knowing, as I do, how the hard-working -and hard-playing public shun laborious thinking -and serious writing, and how they hate to have their -ease disturbed or their prejudices handled rudely, I still -make bold to undertake this task, because of the vital -nature of the problems I shall probe.</p> - -<p>The case for the Bottom Dog should touch the public -heart to the quick, for it affects the truth of our religions, -the justice of our laws and the destinies of our children -and our children’s children. Much golden eloquence has -been squandered in praise of the successful and the good; -much stern condemnation has been vented upon the -wicked. I venture now to plead for those of our poor -brothers and sisters who are accursed of Christ and -rejected of men.</p> - -<p>Hitherto all the love, all the honors, all the applause -of this world, and all the rewards of heaven, have been -lavished on the fortunate and the strong; and the portion -of the unfriended Bottom Dog, in his adversity and -weakness, has been curses, blows, chains, the gallows and -everlasting damnation. I shall plead, then, for those -who are loathed and tortured and branded as the sinful -and unclean; for those who have hated us and wronged<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span> -us, and have been wronged and hated by us. I shall -defend them for right’s sake, for pity’s sake and for the -benefit of society and the race. For these also are of -our flesh, these also have erred and gone astray, these -also are victims of an inscrutable and relentless Fate.</p> - -<p>If it concerns us that the religions of the world are -childish dreams or nightmares; if it concerns us that our -penal laws and moral codes are survivals of barbarism -and fear; if it concerns us that our most cherished and -venerable ideas of our relations to God and to each other -are illogical and savage, then the case for the Bottom -Dog concerns us nearly.</p> - -<p>If it moves us to learn that disease may be prevented, -that ruin may be averted, that broken hearts and broken -lives may be made whole; if it inspires us to hear how -beauty may be conjured out of loathsomeness and glory -out of shame; how waste may be turned to wealth and -death to life, and despair to happiness, then the case -for the Bottom Dog is a case to be well and truly tried.</p> - - -<h3>Moleskin Joe<a name="FNanchor_10" id="FNanchor_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10" class="fnanchor">[J]</a></h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Children of the Dead End”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Patrick MacGill</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>)</p> - -<p>’Twas towards the close of a fine day on the following -summer that we were at work in the dead end -of a cutting, Moleskin and I, when I, who had been -musing on the quickly passing years, turned to Moleskin -and quoted a line from the Bible.</p> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span></p> -<p>“Our years pass like a tale that is told,” I said.</p> - -<p>“Like a tale that is told damned bad,” answered my -mate, picking stray crumbs of tobacco from his waistcoat -pocket and stuffing them into the heel of his pipe. -“It’s a strange world, Flynn. Here today, gone tomorrow; -always waiting for a good time comin’ and knowin’ that -it will never come. We work with one mate this evenin’, -we beg for crumbs with another on the mornin’ after. -It’s a bad life, ours, and a poor one, when I come to -think of it, Flynn.”</p> - -<p>“It is all that,” I assented heartily.</p> - -<p>“Look at me!” said Joe, clenching his fists and squaring -his shoulders. “I must be close on forty years, maybe -on the graveyard side of it, for all I know. I’ve horsed -it ever since I can mind; I’ve worked like a mule for -years, and what have I to show for it all today, matey? -Not the price of an ounce of tobacco! A midsummer -scarecrow wouldn’t wear the duds that I’ve to wrap -around my hide! A cockle-picker that has no property -only when the tide is out is as rich as I am. Not the -price of an ounce of tobacco! There is something wrong -with men like us, surely, when we’re treated like swine -in a sty for all the years of our life. It’s not so bad here, -but it’s in the big towns that a man can feel it most. -No person cares for the like of us, Flynn. I’ve worked -nearly ev’rywhere; I’ve helped to build bridges, dams, -houses, ay, and towns! When they were finished, what -happened? Was it for us—the men who did the buildin’—to -live in the homes that we built, or walk through -the streets that we laid down? No earthly chance of -that! It was always, ‘Slide! we don’t need you any -more,’ and then a man like me, as helped to build a -thousand houses big as castles, was hellish glad to get<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span> -the shelter of a ten-acre field and a shut-gate between -me and the winds of night. I’ve spent all my money, -have I? It’s bloomin’ easy to spend all that fellows like -us can earn. When I was in London I saw a lady spend -as much on fur to decorate her carcase with as would -keep me in beer and tobacco for all the rest of my life. -And that same lady would decorate a dog in ribbons and -fol-the-dols, and she wouldn’t give me the smell of a crust -when I asked her for a mouthful of bread. What could -you expect from a woman who wears the furry hide of -some animal round her neck, anyhow? We are not -thought as much of as dogs, Flynn. By God! them rich -buckos do eat an awful lot. Many a time I crept up to -a window just to see them gorgin’ themselves.”</p> - -<p>“I have looked in at windows too,” I said.</p> - -<p>“Most men do,” answered Joe. “You’ve heard of -old Moses goin’ up the hill to have a bit peep at the -Promist Land. He was just like me and you, Flynn, -wantin’ to have a peep at the things which he’d never -lay his claws on.”</p> - -<p>“Those women who sit half-naked at the table have -big appetites,” I said.</p> - -<p>“They’re all gab and guts, like young crows,” said -Moleskin. “And they think more of their dogs than -they do of men like me and you. I’m an Antichrist!”</p> - -<p>“A what?”</p> - -<p>“One of them sort of fellows as throws bombs at kings.”</p> - -<p>“You mean an Anarchist.”</p> - -<p>“Well, whatever they are, I’m one. What is the good -of kings, of fine-feathered ladies, of churches, of anything -in the country, to men like me and you?”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Carter and the Carpenter<a name="FNanchor_11" id="FNanchor_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11" class="fnanchor">[K]</a></h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The People of the Abyss”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Jack London</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_62">62</a>)</p> - -<p>The Carter, with his clean-cut face, chin beard, and -shaved upper lip, I should have taken in the United -States for anything from a master workman to a well-to-do -farmer. The Carpenter—well, I should have taken -him for a carpenter. He looked it, lean and wiry, with -shrewd, observant eyes, and hands that had grown twisted -to the handles of tools through forty-seven years’ work at -the trade. The chief difficulty with these men was that -they were old, and that their children, instead of growing -up to take care of them, had died. Their years had told -on them, and they had been forced out of the whirl of -industry by the younger and stronger competitors who -had taken their places.</p> - -<p>These two men, turned away from the casual ward of -Whitechapel Workhouse, were bound with me for Poplar -Workhouse. Not much of a show, they thought, but to -chance it was all that remained to us. It was Poplar, -or the streets and night. Both men were anxious for a -bed, for they were “about gone,” as they phrased it. -The Carter, fifty-eight years of age, had spent the last -three nights without shelter or sleep, while the Carpenter, -sixty-five years of age, had been out five nights.</p> - -<p>But, O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, with -white beds and airy rooms waiting you each night, how -can I make you know what it is to suffer as you would -suffer if you spent a weary night on London’s streets? -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>Believe me, you would think a thousand centuries had -come and gone before the east paled into dawn; you would -shiver till you were ready to cry aloud with the pain -of each aching muscle; and you would marvel that you -could endure so much and live. Should you rest upon -a bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the -policeman would rouse you and gruffly order you to -“move on.” You may rest upon the bench, and benches -are few and far between; but if rest means sleep, on you -must go, dragging your tired body through the endless -streets. Should you, in desperate slyness, seek some -forlorn alley, or dark passage-way, and lie down, the -omnipresent policeman will rout you out just the same. -It is his business to rout you out. It is a law of the -powers that be that you shall be routed out.</p> - -<p>But when the dawn came, the nightmare over, you -would hale you home to refresh yourself, and until you -died you would tell the story of your adventure to groups -of admiring friends. It would grow into a mighty story. -Your little eight-hour night would become an Odyssey -and you a Homer.</p> - -<p>Not so with these homeless ones who walked to Poplar -Workhouse with me. And there are thirty-five thousand -of them, men and women, in London Town this night. -Please don’t remember it as you go to bed; if you are -as soft as you ought to be you may not rest so well as -usual. But for old men of sixty, seventy, and eighty, -ill-fed, with neither meat nor blood, to greet the dawn -unrefreshed, and to stagger through the day in mad -search for crusts, with relentless night rushing down -upon them again, and to do this five nights and days—O -dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, how can you -ever understand?</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span></p> - -<p>I walked up Mile End Road between the Carter and -the Carpenter. Mile End Road is a wide thoroughfare, -cutting the heart of East London, and there are tens of -thousands of people abroad on it. I tell you this so -that you may fully appreciate what I shall describe in -the next paragraph. As I say, we walked along, and -when they grew bitter and cursed the land, I cursed -with them, cursed as an American waif would curse, -stranded in a strange and terrible land. And, as I tried -to lead them to believe, and succeeded in making them -believe, they took me for a “seafaring man,” who had -spent his money in riotous living, lost his clothes (no -unusual occurrence with seafaring men ashore), and was -temporarily broke while looking for a ship. This accounted -for my ignorance of English ways in general -and casual wards in particular, and my curiosity concerning -the same.</p> - -<p>The Carter was hard put to keep the pace at which -we walked (he told me that he had eaten nothing that -day), but the Carpenter, lean and hungry, his grey and -ragged overcoat flapping mournfully in the breeze, swung -on in a lone and tireless stride which reminded me strongly -of the plains wolf or coyote. Both kept their eyes upon -the pavement as they walked and talked, and every now -and then one or the other would stoop and pick something -up, never missing his stride the while. I thought -it was cigar and cigarette stumps they were collecting, -and for some time took no notice. Then I did notice.</p> - -<p><em>From the slimy, spittle-drenched sidewalk, they were -picking up bits of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, -and they were eating them. The pits of greengage plums -they cracked between their teeth for the kernels inside. They -picked up stray crumbs of bread the size of peas, apple cores<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span> -so black and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, -and these things these two men took into their mouths, and -chewed them, and swallowed them; and this, between six -and seven o’clock in the evening of August 20, year of our -Lord 1902, in the heart of the greatest, wealthiest, and most -powerful empire the world has ever seen.</em></p> - -<p>These two men talked. They were not fools, they -were merely old. And, naturally, their guts a-reek with -pavement offal, they talked of bloody revolution. They -talked as anarchists, fanatics, and madmen would talk. -And who shall blame them? In spite of my three good -meals that day, and the snug bed I could occupy if I -wished, and my social philosophy, and my evolutionary -belief in the slow development and metamorphosis of -things—in spite of all this, I say, I felt impelled to talk -rot with them or hold my tongue. Poor fools! Not -of their sort are revolutions bred. And when they are -dead and dust, which will be shortly, other fools will -talk bloody revolution as they gather offal from the -spittle-drenched sidewalk along Mile End Road to Poplar -Workhouse.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Horace Greeley.</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(American editor, 1811-1872; prominent abolitionist)</p> - -<p>Morality and religion are but words to him who -fishes in gutters for the means of sustaining life, -and crouches behind barrels in the street for shelter -from the cutting blasts of a winter night.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Hunt for the Job</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Pay Envelopes”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By James Oppenheim</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_45">45</a>)</p> - -<p>The Hunt began early next morning—the Hunt for -the Job. The hunter, however, is really the hunted. -Now and then he bares his skin to the unthinking blows -of the world, and runs off to hide himself in the crowd. -You may see him bobbing along the turbulent man-currents -of Broadway, a tide-tossed derelict in the -thousand-foot shadows of the sky-scrapers. The mob -about him is lusty with purpose, each unit making his -appointed place, the morning rush to work bearing the -stenographer to her machine, the broker to his ticker, -the ironworker to his sky-dangling beam. In the mighty -machine of the city each has his place, each is provided -for, each gets the glow of sharing in the world’s work. -The morning rush, splashed at street crossings with the -gold of the Eastern sun, is rippled with fresh eyes and -busy lips. They are all in the machine. But our young -man crouching in a corner of the crowded car is not -of these; slinking down Broadway he is aware that the -machine has thrown him out and he cannot get in. He -is an exile in the midst of his own people. The sense of -loneliness and inferiority eats the heart out of the breast; -the good of life is gone; the blackness soaks across the -city and into his home, his love, his soul.</p> - -<p>Some go bitter and are for throwing bombs; some -despair and are for wiping themselves away; some—the -rank and file—are for fighting to the last ditch. Peter -pendulated between all three of these moods. In ordi<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>nary -times he would have been all fight; in these hard -times, drenched with the broadcast hopelessness of men, -he knew he was foredoomed to defeat. Only a miracle -could save him.</p> - -<p>Trudging up Seventy-ninth Street to Third Avenue, -fresh with Annie’s kiss and the baby’s pranks, he had -the last bit of daring dashed out of him by a strange -throng of men. Before a small Hebrew synagogue, -packed in the deep area were forty unemployed workers, -jammed crowd-thick against the windows and gate. It -was fresh weather, not cold, yet the men shivered. Their -bodies had for long been unwarmed by sufficient food or -clothing; there was a grayness about them as of famished -wolves; their lips and fingers were blue; they were unshaved -and frowzy with some vile sleeping place. Hard -times had blotched the city with a myriad of such groups. -And as Peter stopped and imagined himself driven at -last among them, he saw a burly fellow emerge from the -house and begin handing out charity bowls of hot coffee -and charity bread. Peter, independent American workman, -was stung at the sight; the souls of these workers -were somehow being outraged; they were eating out -of the hands of the comfortable, like so many gutter -dogs.</p> - -<p>The rest of the morning Peter dared now and then to -present himself at an office to ask work. At some places -he tried boldness, at others meekness, and at last he -begged, “For God’s sake, I have a wife and baby—” -He met with various receptions at the hands of clerks, -office boys, and bosses. A few were sorry, some turned -their backs, the rest hurried him out. Each refusal, -each “not wanted in the scheme of things,” shot him -out into the streets, stripped of another bit of self-reliance.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span> -In spite of himself, he began to feel his poor appearance, -his drooping lip, his broken purpose. He was a failure -and the world could not use him. He hardly dared to -look a man in the eyes, to lift his voice above a whisper, -to make a demand, to dare a refusal. He slunk home -at last like a cowed and beaten animal.</p> - - -<h3>The Unemployable</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Workers”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Walter A. Wyckoff</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A professor in Princeton University who went out and lived for -long periods as a laborer, in order to know the facts of -industry at first hand)</p> - -<p>Many of the men were so weakened by the want -and hardship of the winter that they were no -longer in condition for effective labor. Some of the -bosses who were in need of added hands were obliged to -turn men away because of physical incapacity. One -instance of this I shall not soon forget. It was when -I overheard, early one morning, at a factory gate, an -interview between a would-be laborer and the boss. I -knew the applicant for a Russian Jew, who had at home -an old mother and a wife and two young children to -support. He had had intermittent employment throughout -the winter in a sweater’s den, barely enough to keep -them all alive, and, after the hardships of the cold season, -he was again in desperate straits for work.</p> - -<p>The boss had all but agreed to take him on for some -sort of unskilled labor, when, struck by the cadaverous -look of the man, he told him to bare his arm. Up went<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span> -the sleeve of his coat and his ragged flannel shirt, exposing -a naked arm with the muscles nearly gone, and the -blue-white transparent skin stretched over sinews and -the outline of the bones. Pitiful beyond words were his -efforts to give a semblance of strength to the biceps -which rose faintly to the upward movement of the forearm. -But the boss sent him off with an oath and a contemptuous -laugh, and I watched the fellow as he turned -down the street, facing the fact of his starving family -with a despair at his heart which only mortal man can -feel and no mortal tongue can speak.</p> - - -<h3>The Bread Line</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Berton Braley</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American poet)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Well, here they are—they stand and stamp and shiver</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Waiting their food from some kind stranger hand,</div> - <div class="verse">Their weary limbs with eagerness a-quiver</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Hungry and heartsick in a bounteous land.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Beggars and bums?” Perhaps, and largely worthless.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Shaky with drink, unlovely, craven, low,</div> - <div class="verse">With obscene tongues and hollow laughter mirthless;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But who shall give them scorn for being so?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Yes, here they are—with gaunt and pallid faces,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With limbs ill-clad and fingers stiff and blued,</div> - <div class="verse">Shuffling and stamping on their pavement places,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Waiting and watching for their bit of food.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We boast of vast achievements and of power,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of human progress knowing no defeat,</div> - <div class="verse">Of strange new marvels every day and hour—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And here’s the bread line in the wintry street!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ten thousand years of war and peace and glory,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of hope and work and deeds and golden schemes,</div> - <div class="verse">Of mighty voices raised in song and story,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of huge inventions and of splendid dreams;</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ten thousand years replete with every wonder,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of empires risen and of empires dead;</div> - <div class="verse">Yet still, while wasters roll in swollen plunder,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">These broken men must stand in line—for bread!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Unemployed Problem</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Past and Present”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Carlyle</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>)</p> - -<p>And truly this first practical form of the Sphinx-question, -inarticulately and so audibly put there, -is one of the most impressive ever asked in the world. -“Behold us here, so many thousands, millions, and increasing -at the rate of fifty every hour. We are right -willing and able to work; and on the Planet Earth is -plenty of work and wages for a million times as many. -We ask, If you mean to lead us towards work; to try -to lead us,—by ways new, never yet heard of till this -new unheard-of Time? Or if you declare that you can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>not -lead us? And expect that we are to remain quietly -unled, and in a composed manner perish of starvation? -What is it you expect of us? What is it you mean to -do with us?” This question, I say, has been put in the -hearing of all Britain; and will be again put, and ever -again, till some answer be given it.</p> - - -<h3>An Answer</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Howard Taft</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Ex-president of the United States; born 1857)</p> - -<p>“What is a man to do who is starving, and cannot -find work?”</p> - -<p>“God knows.”</p> - - -<h3>The Parish Workhouse</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George Crabbe</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_29">29</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor,</div> - <div class="verse">Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;</div> - <div class="verse">There, where the putrid vapors flagging play,</div> - <div class="verse">And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;</div> - <div class="verse">There children dwell who know no parents’ care;</div> - <div class="verse">Parents, who know no children’s love, dwell there;</div> - <div class="verse">Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,</div> - <div class="verse">Forsaken wives and mothers never wed;</div> - <div class="verse">Dejected widows with unheeded tears,</div> - <div class="verse">And crippled age with more than childhood-fears;</div> - <div class="verse">The lame, the blind, and—far the happiest they!—</div> - <div class="verse">The moping idiot and the madman gay.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Here too the sick their final doom receive,</div> - <div class="verse">Here brought amid the scenes of grief to grieve,</div> - <div class="verse">Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow,</div> - <div class="verse">Mixed with the clamors of the crowd below;</div> - <div class="verse">Here, sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow scan,</div> - <div class="verse">And the cold charities of man to man:</div> - <div class="verse">Whose laws indeed for ruined age provide,</div> - <div class="verse">And strong compulsion plucks the scrap from pride;</div> - <div class="verse">But still that scrap is bought with many a sigh,</div> - <div class="verse">And pride imbitters what it can’t deny.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Say ye, oppressed by some fantastic woes,</div> - <div class="verse">Some jarring nerve that baffles your repose;</div> - <div class="verse">Who press the downy couch while slaves advance</div> - <div class="verse">With timid eye, to read the distant glance;</div> - <div class="verse">Who with sad prayers the weary doctor tease,</div> - <div class="verse">To name the nameless ever-new disease;</div> - <div class="verse">Who with mock patience dire complaints endure,</div> - <div class="verse">Which real pain and that alone can cure:</div> - <div class="verse">How would ye bear in real pain to lie,</div> - <div class="verse">Despised, neglected, left alone to die?</div> - <div class="verse">How would ye bear to draw your latest breath</div> - <div class="verse">Where all that’s wretched paves the way for death?</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Kenkō Hoshi</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Japanese Buddhist priest of the Fourteenth Century)</p> - -<p>It is desirable for a ruler that no man should suffer -from cold and hunger under his rule. Man cannot -maintain his standard of morals when he has no ordinary -means of living.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Bread of Affliction</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Children of the Ghetto”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Israel Zangwill</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet and novelist, born 1864; has written with tenderness -and charm of the struggles of Judaism in contact with -modern commercialism)</p> - -<p>At half-past five the stable-doors were thrown open, -and the crowd pressed through a long, narrow white-washed -stone corridor into a barn-like compartment, with -a white-washed ceiling traversed by wooden beams. -Within this compartment, and leaving but a narrow -circumscribing border, was a sort of cattle-pen, into -which the paupers crushed, awaiting amid discomfort -and universal jabber the divine moment. The single -jet of gas-light depending from the ceiling flared upon -the strange simian faces, and touched them into a grotesque -picturesqueness that would have delighted Doré.</p> - -<p>They felt hungry, these picturesque people; their near -and dear ones were hungering at home. Voluptuously -savoring in imagination the operation of the soup, they -forgot its operation as a dole in aid of wages; were -unconscious of the grave economical possibilities of -pauperization and the rest, and quite willing to swallow -their independence with the soup. Even Esther, who had -read much, and was sensitive, accepted unquestioningly -the theory of the universe that was held by most people -about her, that human beings were distinguished from -animals in having to toil terribly for a meagre crust, but -that their lot was lightened by the existence of a small -and semi-divine class called <em>Takeefim</em>, or rich people, -who gave away what they didn’t want. How these rich<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span> -people came to be, Esther did not inquire; they were -as much a part of the constitution of things as clouds -and horses. The semi-celestial variety was rarely to be -met with. It lived far away from the Ghetto, and a -small family of it was said to occupy a whole house. -Representatives of it, clad in rustling silks or impressive -broad-cloth, and radiating an indefinable aroma of super-humanity, -sometimes came to the school, preceded by the -beaming Head Mistress; and then all the little girls rose -and curtseyed, and the best of them, passing as average -members of the class, astonished the semi-divine persons -by their intimate acquaintance with the topography of -the Pyrenees and the disagreements of Saul and David, -the intercourse of the two species ending in effusive -smiles and general satisfaction. But the dullest of the -girls was alive to the comedy, and had a good-humored -contempt for the unworldliness of the semi-divine persons, -who spoke to them as if they were not going to -recommence squabbling, and pulling one another’s hair, -and copying one another’s sums, and stealing one another’s -needles, the moment the semi-celestial backs were turned.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 582px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo136" id="illo136">[illo136]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_136f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>WITHOUT A KENNEL</p> - -<p>RYAN WALKER</p> - -<p>(<i>American Socialist cartoonist, born 1870</i>)</p></div> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 429px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo137" id="illo137">[illo137]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_137f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>THE WHITE SLAVE</p> - -<p>ABASTENIA ST. LEGER EBERLE</p> - -<p>(<i>American sculptor, born 1878</i>)</p></div> -</div> - - -<h3>No. 5 John Street</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Richard Whiteing</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English author and journalist, born 1840. The volume here -quoted is one of the most amazing pictures of slum-life -ever penned)</p> - -<p>After midnight the gangs return in carousal from the -gin shops, the more thoughtful of them with stored -liquor for the morning draft. Now it is three stages of -man—no more: man gushing, confiding, uplifted, as he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span> -feels the effect of the lighter fumes; disputatious, quarrelsome, -as the heavier mount in a second brew of hell; -raging with wrath and hate, as the very dregs send their -emanations to the tortured brain.</p> - -<p>The embrace, the wrangle, and the blow—this is the -order of succession. Till one—to mark it by the clock—we -sing, “‘Art to ‘art an’ ‘and to ‘and.” At about -one forty-five you may expect the tribal row between -the gangs, who prey on one another for recreation, and -on society for a living. Our brutes read the current gospel -of the survival of the fittest in their own way, and they -dimly apprehend that mankind is still organized as a -predatory horde. The ever-open door brings us much -trouble from the outside. The unlighted staircase is a -place of rendezvous, and, not unfrequently, of deadly -quarrel, in undertones of concentrated fury, between -wretches who seek seclusion for the work of manslaughter. -Our latest returning inmate, the other night, stumbled -over the body of a woman not known at No. 5. She -had been kicked to death within sight and sound of -lodgers who, believing it to be a matrimonial difference, -held interference to be no business of theirs.</p> - -<p>The first thud of war between the “Hooligans” is -generally for two sharp. The seconds set to, along with -their principals, as in the older duel. For mark that in -most things we are as our betters were just so many -centuries ago, and are simply belated with our flint age. -And now our shapelier waves of sound break into a mere -foam of oath and shriek. At times there is an interval -of silence more awful than the tumult; and you may -know that the knife is at its silent work, and that the -whole meaner conflict is suspended for an episode of -tragedy. If it is a hospital case, it closes the celebra<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>tion. -If it is not, the entertainment probably dies out -in a slanging match between two of the fair; and the -unnamable in invective and vituperation rises, as in -blackest vapor, from our pit to the sky. At this, every -room that holds a remnant of decency closes its window, -and all withdraw, except, perhaps, the little boys and -girls, who are beginning to pair according to the laws -of the ooze and of the slime....</p> - - -<h3>Night in the Slums<a name="FNanchor_12" id="FNanchor_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12" class="fnanchor">[L]</a></h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The People of the Abyss”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Jack London</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>)</p> - -<p>I was glad the keepers were there, for I did not have -on my “seafaring” clothes, and I was what is called -a “mark” for the creatures of prey that prowled up -and down. At times, between keepers, these males -looked at me sharply, hungrily, gutter-wolves that they -were, and I was afraid of their hands, of their naked -hands, as one may be afraid of the paws of a gorilla. -They reminded me of gorillas. Their bodies were small, -ill-shaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, -no abundant thews and wide-spreading shoulders. They -exhibited, rather, an elemental economy of nature, such -as the cave-men must have exhibited. But there was -strength in those meagre bodies, the ferocious, primordial -strength to clutch and tear and gripe and rend. When -they spring upon their human prey they are known even -to bend the victim backward and double its body till<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span> -the back is broken. They possess neither conscience nor -sentiment, and they will kill for half a sovereign, without -fear or favor....</p> - -<p>The dear soft people of the golden theatres and wonder-mansions -of the West End do not see these creatures, -do not dream that they exist. But they are here, alive, -very much alive in their jungle. And woe the day when -England is fighting in her last trench, and her able-bodied -men are on the firing line! For on that day they -will crawl out of their dens and lairs, and the people of -the West End will see them, as the dear soft aristocrats -of Feudal France saw them and asked one another, -“Whence come they?” “Are they men?”</p> - -<p>But they were not the only beasts that ranged the -menagerie. They were only here and there, lurking in -dark courts and passing like grey shadows along the -walls; but the women from whose rotten loins they -spring were everywhere. They whined insolently, and -in maudlin tones begged me for pennies, and worse. -They held carouse in every boozing den, slatternly, unkempt, -bleary-eyed, and tousled, leering and gibbering, -overspilling with foulness and corruption, and, gone in -debauch, sprawling across benches and bars, unspeakably -repulsive, fearful to look upon.</p> - -<p>And there were others, strange, weird faces and forms -and twisted monstrosities that shouldered me on every -side, inconceivable types of sodden ugliness, the wrecks -of society, the perambulating carcasses, the living deaths—women, -blasted by disease and drink till their shame -brought not tuppence in the open mart; and men, in -fantastic rags, wrenched by hardship and exposure out -of all semblance of men, their faces in a perpetual writhe -of pain, grinning idiotically, shambling like apes, dying<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span> -with every step they took and every breath they drew. -And there were young girls, of eighteen and twenty, with -trim bodies and faces yet untouched with twist and -bloat, who had fetched the bottom of the Abyss plump, -in one swift fall. And I remember a lad of fourteen, -and one of six or seven, white-faced and sickly, homeless, -the pair of them, who sat upon the pavement with their -backs against a railing and watched it all....</p> - -<p>The unfit and the unneeded! The miserable and -despised and forgotten, dying in the social shambles. -The progeny of prostitution—of the prostitution of men -and women and children, of flesh and blood, and sparkle -and spirit; in brief, the prostitution of labor. If this -is the best that civilization can do for the human, then -give us howling and naked savagery. Far better to be -a people of the wilderness and desert, of the cave and -the squatting place, than to be a people of the machine -and the Abyss.</p> - - -<h3>A Night’s Lodging</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Maxim Gorky</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(A true voice of the Russian masses, born 1868; by turns peddler, -scullery-boy, baker’s assistant and tramp, he became all at -once the most widely known of Russian writers. In this play he -has portrayed the misery of the outcasts of his country. The -scene is in the cellar of an inn, the haunt of thieves and tramps. -Luka, the aged pilgrim, is talking to a young girl)</p></div> - -<p><span class="smcap">Luka</span>:—Treat everyone with friendliness—injure no -one.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Natasha</span>:—How good you are, grandfather! How is -it that you are so good?</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span></p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Luka</span>:—I am good, you say. Nyah—if it is true, all -right. But you see, my girl—there must be some one -to be good. We must have pity on mankind. Christ, -remember, had pity for us all and so taught us. Have -pity when there is still time, believe me, that is right. -I was once, for example, employed as a watchman, at -a country place which belonged to an engineer, not far -from the city of Tomsk, in Siberia. The house stood in -the middle of the forest, an out-of-the-way location; -and it was winter and I was all alone in the country -house. It was beautiful there—magnificent! And once—I -heard them scrambling up!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Natasha</span>:—Thieves?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Luka</span>:—Yes. They crept higher, and I took my rifle -and went outside. I looked up—two men, opening a -window, and so busy that they did not see anything -of me at all. I cried to them: Hey, there, get out of -that! And would you think it, they fell on me with a -hand ax! I warned them. Halt, I cried, or else I fire! -Then I aimed first at one and then at the other. They -fell on their knees saying, Pardon us! I was pretty -hot—on account of the hand ax, you remember. You -devils, I cried, I told you to clear out and you didn’t! -And now, I said, one of you go into the brush and get -a switch. It was done. And now, I commanded, one -of you stretch out on the ground, and the other thrash -him. And so they whipped each other at my command. -And when they had each had a sound beating, they said -to me: Grandfather, said they, for the sake of Christ -give us a piece of bread. We haven’t a bite in our bodies. -They, my daughter, were the thieves who had fallen upon -me with the hand ax. Yes, they were a pair of splendid -fellows. I said to them, If you had asked for bread!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span> -Then they answered: We had gotten past that. We had -asked and asked, and nobody would give us anything. -Endurance was worn out. Nyah—and so they remained -with me the whole winter. One of them, Stephen by -name, liked to take the rifle and go into the woods. -And the other, Jakoff, was constantly ill, always coughing. -The three of us watched the place, and when spring -came, they said, Farewell, grandfather, and went away—to -Russia.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Natasha</span>:—Were they convicts, escaping?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Luka</span>:—They were fugitives—they had left their -colony. A pair of splendid fellows. If I had not had -pity on them—who knows what would have happened? -They might have killed me. Then they would be taken -to court again, put in prison, sent back to Siberia—why -all that? You can learn nothing good in prison, nor in -Siberia. But a man, what can he not learn!</p> - - -<h3>The Menagerie</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Night in a County Workhouse</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Upton Sinclair</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Oh come, ye lords and ladies of the realm,</div> - <div class="verse">Come from your couches soft, your perfumed halls,</div> - <div class="verse">Come watch with me throughout the weary hours.</div> - <div class="verse">Here are there sounds to thrill your jaded nerves,</div> - <div class="verse">Such as the cave-men, your forefathers, heard,</div> - <div class="verse">Crouching in forests of primeval night;</div> - <div class="verse">Here tier on tier in steel-barred cages pent</div> - <div class="verse">The beasts ye breed and hunt throughout the world.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Hark to that snore—some beast that slumbers deep;</div> - <div class="verse">Hark to that roar—some beast that dreams of blood;</div> - <div class="verse">Hark to that moan—some beast that wakes and weeps;</div> - <div class="verse">And then in sudden stillness mark the sound—</div> - <div class="verse">Some beast that rasps his vermin-haunted hide!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Oh come, ye lords and ladies of the realm,</div> - <div class="verse">Come keep the watch with me; this show is yours.</div> - <div class="verse">Behold the source of all your joy and pride,</div> - <div class="verse">The beasts ye harness fast and set to draw</div> - <div class="verse">The chariots of your pageantry and pomp!</div> - <div class="verse">It is their blood ye shed to make your feasts,</div> - <div class="verse">It is their treadmill that moves all your world.</div> - <div class="verse">Come gather now, and think how it will be</div> - <div class="verse">When God shall send his flaming angel down</div> - <div class="verse">And break these bars—so hath he done of yore,</div> - <div class="verse">So doeth he to lords and ladies grand—</div> - <div class="verse">And loose these beasts to raven in your streets!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>A Sentiment on Social Reform</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Eugene V. Debs</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American locomotive engineer; born 1855; president of his union, -and later the best known of American Socialist lecturers)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">While there is a lower class, I am in it.</div> - <div class="verse">While there is a criminal element, I am of it.</div> - <div class="verse">While there is a soul in jail, I am not free.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span></p> - -<p>The “Solitary”</p> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “My Life in Prison”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Donald Lowrie</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(The writer of this picture of prison life, after serving a sentence of -fifteen years in San Quentin, has become one of the leaders -in the prison reform movement in California)</p> - -<p>He was a thin young man of medium height, with -long, straggly blonde hair and beard. He was -garbed in a ragged suit of dirty stripes. His steel-gray -eyes blinked as though the light hurt them, and yet they -were very alert, and there was a defiance, an indomitableness -in their depths. They protruded slightly, as the -eyes of persons who have suffered so frequently do. -The lines radiating from the corners bespoke mental as -well as physical distress, as did the spasmodic twitching -of his mouth. His skin was akin to the color of a thirsty -road and his garments looked as though he had not had -them off for months—the knees and elbows bulged and -the frayed edges of the coat curled under. I was conscious -of a warring within me. I had not yet learned -who he was, and still I knew I was gazing at a human -creature who had been through hell....</p> - -<p>“Treat Morrell right,” admonished the lieutenant as -he withdrew from the room and left us together.</p> - -<p>Morrell! The notorious “Ed” Morrell, about whom I -had heard so much, and who had been confined in the -“incorrigibles” for five years!</p> - -<p>The majority of the prisoners, as well as the freemen, -believed him innocent of the offence with which he had -been charged and for which he had been subjected to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span> -such awful punishment. So this man was Ed Morrell! -No wonder I had been agitated....</p> - -<p>He arose from the chair and stood dejectedly while -I took the necessary measurements, and then I led the -way to the back room, where the bathtub was located. -I started to return to the front room for the purpose -of marking his clothes, but he stopped me.</p> - -<p>“Wait a minute,” he urged. “Wait and see what a -man looks like after five years in hell. I was a husky -when I went up there, hard as nails and full of red blood, -but look at me now.”</p> - -<p>While speaking, he had dropped off the outer rags, and -a moment after stood nude beside the tub of warm water. -The enormity of what he had suffered could not have -been more forcibly demonstrated. His limbs were horribly -emaciated, the knee, elbow, and shoulder bones -stood out like huge knots through the drawn and yellow -skin, while his ribs reminded me of the carcass of a sheep -hanging in front of a butcher’s establishment. The hollows -between them were deep and dark. I thought of -the picture I had seen of the famine-stricken wretches -of India....</p> - -<p>“What are those scars on your back?” I asked as he -sank onto his knees in the water.</p> - -<p>“Scars,” he laughed, sardonically. “Scars? Those -ain’t scars. They’re only the marks where the devil -prodded me. I was in the jacket, cinched up so that -I was breathing from my throat when he came and tried -to make me ‘come through,’ and when I sneered at him -he kicked me over the kidneys. I don’t know how many -times he kicked; the first kick took my breath away -and I saw black, but after they took me out of the sack -I couldn’t get up, and I had running sores down here<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span> -for months afterwards. I ain’t right down there now; -I’ve got a bad rupture, and sometimes it feels as if there -was a knife being twisted around inside of me. It wouldn’t -be so bad if they’d got me right, but to give a man a deal -like that dead wrong is hell, let me tell you....”</p> - -<p>As we stepped into the barber shop there was a noticeable -air of expectancy. The word had passed through -the prison that the new warden had released “Ed” -Morrell from “solitary.” All but one of the half dozen -barbers were strangers to Morrell. They had been committed -to the prison after his siege of solitary confinement -had begun. The one exception was old Frank, a -lifer with twenty years’ service behind him....</p> - -<p>He took a step backward and a hush fell over the -little group.</p> - -<p>“With all due respect, Ed, you’re the finest living -picture of Jesus Christ that I’ve ever seen, so help me -God. And, Ed,” he added, hastily, his voice breaking, -“we’re all Jesus Christs, if we’d only remember it.”</p> - - -<h3>Prisons</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Emma Goldman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Anarchist lecturer and writer; born in Russia, 1869)</p> - -<p>Year after year the gates of prison hells return to -the world an emaciated, deformed, will-less shipwrecked -crew of humanity, with the Cain mark on their -foreheads, their hopes crushed, all their natural inclinations -thwarted. With nothing but hunger and inhumanity -to greet them, these victims soon sink back into -crime as the only possibility of existence. It is not at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span> -all an unusual thing to find men and women who have -spent half their lives—nay, almost their entire existence—in -prison. I know a woman on Blackwell’s Island, who -has been in and out thirty-eight times; and through a -friend I learn that a young boy of seventeen, whom he -had nursed and cared for in the Pittsburgh penitentiary, -had never known the meaning of liberty. From the -reformatory to the penitentiary had been the path of -this boy’s life, until, broken in body, he died a victim -of social revenge. These personal experiences are substantiated -by extensive data giving overwhelming proof -of the futility of prisons as a means of deterrence or -reform.</p> - - -<h3>The Prison System</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Resurrection”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Leo Tolstoy</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>)</p> - -<p>“It is just as if a problem had been set: to find the -best, the surest means, of depraving the greatest -number of people!” thought Nehlúdof, while getting an -insight into the deeds that were being done in the prisons -and halting-stations. Every year hundreds of thousands -were brought to the highest pitch of depravity, and when -completely depraved they were liberated to spread broadcast -the moral disease they had caught in prison.</p> - -<p>In the prisons of Tumén, Ekáterinburg, Tomsk, and at -the halting-stations, Nehlúdof saw how successfully the -object society seemed to have set itself was attained. -Ordinary simple men holding the Russian peasant social<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span> -and Christian morality lost this conception, and formed -a new, prison, one founded chiefly on the idea that any -outrage to or violation of human beings is justifiable, if it -seems profitable. After living in prison these people -became conscious with the whole of their being that, -judging by what was happening to themselves, all those -moral laws of respect and sympathy for others which -the Church and the moral teachers preach, were set aside -in real life, and that therefore they, too, need not keep these -laws. Nehlúdof noticed this effect of prison life in all the -prisoners he knew. He learnt, during his journey, that -tramps who escape into the marshes will persuade comrades -to escape with them, and will then kill them and -feed on their flesh. He saw a living man who was accused -of this, and acknowledged the act. And the most terrible -thing was, that this was not a solitary case of cannibalism, -but that the thing was continually recurring.</p> - -<p>Only by a special cultivation of vice such as was carried -on in these establishments, could a Russian be brought to -the state of these tramps, who excelled Nietzsche’s newest -teaching, holding everything allowable and nothing forbidden, -and spreading this teaching, first among the convicts -and then among the people in general.</p> - -<p>The only explanation of what was being done was that -it aimed at the prevention of crime, at inspiring awe, at -correcting offenders, and at dealing out to them “lawful -vengeance,” as the books said. But in reality nothing in -the least resembling these results came to pass. Instead -of vice being put a stop to, it only spread farther; instead -of being frightened, the criminals were encouraged (many -a tramp returned to prison of his own free will); instead -of correction, every kind of vice was systematically -instilled; while the desire for vengeance, far from being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span> -weakened by the measures of Government, was instilled -into the people to whom it was not natural.</p> - -<p>“Then why is it done?” Nehlúdof asked himself, and -could find no answer.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From the Psalms</span></h3> - -<p>He hath looked down from the height of his sanctuary -... to hear the sighing of the prisoner; to -loose those that are appointed to death.</p> - - -<h3>Ballade of Misery and Iron</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George Carter</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Some years ago the <cite>Century Magazine</cite> received several poems -from an inmate of the State penitentiary of Minnesota. Upon -investigation it was found that the poet, a young Englishman, had -been driven to stealing by starvation. Subsequently his pardon was -procured)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Haggard faces and trembling knees,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Eyes that shine with a weakling’s hate,</div> - <div class="verse">Lips that mutter their blasphemies,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Murderous hearts that darkly wait:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">These are they who were men of late,</div> - <div class="verse">Fit to hold a plow or a sword.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">If a prayer this wall may penetrate,</div> - <div class="verse">Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Poets sing of life at the lees</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In tender verses and delicate;</div> - <div class="verse">Of tears and manifold agonies—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Little they know of what they prate.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span> - <div class="verse indent2">Out of this silence, passionate</div> - <div class="verse">Sounds a deeper, a wilder chord.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">If sound be heard through the narrow grate,</div> - <div class="verse">Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Hark, that wail of the distant breeze,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Piercing ever the close-barred gate,</div> - <div class="verse">Fraught with torturing memories</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of eyes that kindle and lips that mate.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ah, by the loved ones desolate,</div> - <div class="verse">Whose anguish never can pen record,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">If thou be truly compassionate,</div> - <div class="verse">Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p><span class="smcap">L’Envoi</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">These are pawns that the hand of Fate</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Careless sweeps from the checker-board.</div> - <div class="verse">Thou that know’st if the game be straight,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Have pity on these my comrades, Lord!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Kenkō Hoshi</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_135">135</a>)</p> - -<p>So long as people, being ill-governed, suffer from -hunger, criminals will never disappear. It is -extremely unkind to punish those who, being sufferers -from hunger, are compelled to violate laws.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Red Robe</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Eugène Brieux</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(French dramatist, born 1858; author of a series of powerful -dramas exposing the sources of corruption in French social, -political and business life. The present play has for its theme -the law as a snare for the feet of the poor and friendless. The -principal character is a government prosecuting attorney, driven -by professional ambition and jealousy, and the nagging of his -wife and daughters. A murder has been committed, and the -newspapers are scolding because the criminal has not been caught. -Suspicion falls upon a poor wretch of a smuggler, who is hounded -and bullied into incriminating himself. At the last moment, when -the case is in the hands of the jury, the prosecuting attorney’s conscience -is troubled, and he realizes that he is sending an innocent -man to the gallows)</p></div> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mme. Vagret</span>:—But—these circumstances, how -could you have ignored them up to now?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Vagret</span> (<i>his head bowed</i>):—You think I have ignored -them?—Would I dare to tell you all? I am not a bad -man, you’d grant? I wouldn’t desire that anyone should -suffer through my fault. Well!—Oh! but how it shames -me to confess it, to say it aloud, after having confessed -it to myself! Well! When I studied this case, I had got -it so fixed in my head, in advance, that this fellow Etchepare -was a criminal, that when an argument in his favor -presented itself to my mind, I kept it away from me, -shrugging my shoulders. As to the facts about which I am -telling you, and from which suddenly my doubt has been -born—at first I sought only to prove to myself that these -facts were false, taking, in the testimony of the witnesses, -only what would combat their exactness, repelling all the -rest, with a frightful <em>naiveté</em> in my bad faith.—And in the -end, to dissipate my last scruples, I said to myself, like<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span> -you: “It is the affair of the defense, not mine!” Listen -and see to just what point the exercise of the profession of -prosecutor renders us unjust and cruel; I had, myself—I -had a thrill of joy at first, when I saw that the judge, -in his questioning, left in the shadow the sum of those -little facts. There, that is the trade! you understand, -the trade! Ah! poor creatures that we are, poor creatures!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mme. Vagret</span>:—Possibly the jury may not condemn -him?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Vagret</span>:—It will condemn him.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mme. Vagret</span>:—Or that it will admit some extenuating -circumstances.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Vagret</span>:—No. I urged them too emphatically against -this. Was I not ardent enough, my God! violent enough?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mme. Vagret</span>:—That’s true. Why should you have -developed your argument with so much passion?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Vagret</span>:—Ah! why! why! Long before the session, it -was so well understood by everyone that the accused -was the culprit! And then, everyone was trying to -rouse my dander, trying to make me drunk! I was the -spokesman for humanity, I had to reassure the country, -bring peace to the family—I don’t know what all else! -My first demands were comparatively moderate. But -when I saw that famous advocate make the jury weep, -I thought I was lost; I felt that the case was getting -away from me. Contrary to my custom, I made a reply. -When I stood up again, I was like a combattant who -goes to meet defeat, and who fights with desperation. -From that moment, Etchepare no longer existed, so to -speak. I no longer had the care to defend society, or -to maintain the accusation—I was fighting against that -advocate; it was a tourney of orators, a contest of actors; -I had to come out the conqueror at all hazards. I had to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span> -convince the jury, to seize it and tear from it the “Yes” -of a verdict. It was no longer a question of Etchepare, -I tell you; it was a question of myself, of my vanity, -of my reputation, of my honor, of my future. It’s -shameful, I repeat, it’s shameful! At any cost, I wanted -to avoid the acquittal which I felt was certain. And -I was possessed by such a fear of not succeeding, that I -employed all the arguments, good and bad—even those -which consisted in representing to those frightened men -their homes in flames, their loved ones assassinated. -I spoke of the vengeance of God upon judges who had -no severity. And all that in good faith—or rather without -consciousness, in a fit of passion, in a fit of passion -against the advocate whom I hated with all my forces.... -The success was even greater than I could have wished; -the jury is ready to obey me, and for myself, my dear—I -let myself be congratulated, and I pressed the hands -which were held out to me.—That’s what it is to be a -prosecutor!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mme. Vagret</span>:—Console yourself. There are perhaps -not ten men in France who would have acted otherwise.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Vagret</span>:—You are right. Only—if one reflects, it -is precisely that which is frightful.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Kenkō Hoshi</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>)</p> - -<p>The governing class should stop their luxurious -expenditures in order to help the governed class. -For only when a man has been provided with the ordinary -means of living, and yet steals, may he be really called -a thief.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>A Hanging in Prison</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Oscar Wilde</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(English poet and dramatist, 1856-1900, leader of the so-called -“esthetes.” The poem from which these extracts are taken was -the fruit of his long imprisonment, and is one of the most moving -and terrible narratives in English poetry)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With slouch and swing around the ring</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We trod the Fools’ Parade;</div> - <div class="verse">We did not care; we knew we were</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The Devil’s Own Brigade:</div> - <div class="verse">And shaven head and feet of lead</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Make a merry masquerade.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We tore the tarry rope to shreds</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With blunt and bleeding nails;</div> - <div class="verse">We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And cleaned the shining rails:</div> - <div class="verse">And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And clattered with the pails.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We turned the dusty drill:</div> - <div class="verse">We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And sweated on the mill:</div> - <div class="verse">But in the heart of every man</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Terror was lying still.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">So still it lay that every day</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Crawled like a weed-clogged wave;</div> - <div class="verse">And we forgot the bitter lot</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That waits for fool and knave,</div> - <div class="verse">Till once, as we tramped in from work,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We passed an open grave.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With yawning mouth the yellow hole</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Gaped for a living thing;</div> - <div class="verse">The very mud cried out for blood</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To the thirsty asphalt ring:</div> - <div class="verse">And we knew that ere one dawn grew fair</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Some prisoner had to swing.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Right in we went, with soul intent</div> - <div class="verse indent2">On Death and Dread and Doom:</div> - <div class="verse">The hangman, with his little bag,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Went shuffling through the gloom:</div> - <div class="verse">And each man trembled as he crept</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Into his numbered tomb.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">That night the empty corridors</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Were full of forms of Fear,</div> - <div class="verse">And up and down the iron town</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Stole feet we could not hear,</div> - <div class="verse">And through the bars that hide the stars</div> - <div class="verse indent2">White faces seemed to peer....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We were as men who through a fen</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of filthy darkness grope:</div> - <div class="verse">We did not dare to breathe a prayer,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Or to give our anguish scope:</div> - <div class="verse">Something was dead in each of us,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And what was dead was Hope.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">For Man’s grim Justice goes its way,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And will not swerve aside:</div> - <div class="verse">It slays the weak, it slays the strong,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">It has a deadly stride:</div> - <div class="verse">With iron heel it slays the strong,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The monstrous parricide</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We waited for the stroke of eight:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Each tongue was thick with thirst:</div> - <div class="verse">For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That makes a man accursed,</div> - <div class="verse">And Fate will use a running noose</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For the best man and the worst</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We had no other thing to do,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Save to wait for the sign to come:</div> - <div class="verse">So, like things of stone in a valley lone,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Quiet we sat and dumb:</div> - <div class="verse">But each man’s heart beat thick and quick</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Like a madman on a drum!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With sudden shock the prison-clock</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Smote on the shivering air,</div> - <div class="verse">And from all the gaol rose up a wail</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of impotent despair,</div> - <div class="verse">Like the sound that frightened marshes hear</div> - <div class="verse indent2">From some leper in his lair.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And as one sees most fearful things</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In the crystal of a dream,</div> - <div class="verse">We saw the greasy hempen rope</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Hooked to the blackened beam,</div> - <div class="verse">And heard the prayer the hangman’s snare</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Strangled into a scream.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And all the woe that moved him so</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That he gave that bitter cry,</div> - <div class="verse">And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">None knew so well as I:</div> - <div class="verse">For he who lives more lives than one</div> - <div class="verse indent2">More deaths than one must die.</div> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span></div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">There is no chapel on the day</div> - <div class="verse indent2">On which they hang a man:</div> - <div class="verse">The Chaplain’s heart is far too sick,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Or his face is far too wan,</div> - <div class="verse">Or there is that written in his eyes</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Which none should look upon.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">So they kept us close till nigh on noon,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And then they rang the bell,</div> - <div class="verse">And the Warders with their jingling keys</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Opened each listening cell,</div> - <div class="verse">And down the iron stairs we tramped,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Each from his separate Hell.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Out into God’s sweet air we went,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But not in wonted way,</div> - <div class="verse">For this man’s face was white with fear,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And that man’s face was grey,</div> - <div class="verse">And I never saw sad men who looked</div> - <div class="verse indent2">So wistfully at the day.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I never saw sad men who looked</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With such a wistful eye</div> - <div class="verse">Upon that little tent of blue</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We prisoners call the sky,</div> - <div class="verse">And at every careless cloud that passed</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In happy freedom by....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The Warders strutted up and down,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And kept their herd of brutes,</div> - <div class="verse">Their uniforms were spick and span,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And they were their Sunday suits,</div> - <div class="verse">But we knew the work they had been at</div> - <div class="verse indent2">By the quicklime on their boots.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">For where a grave had opened wide</div> - <div class="verse indent2">There was no grave at all:</div> - <div class="verse">Only a stretch of mud and sand</div> - <div class="verse indent2">By the hideous prison-wall,</div> - <div class="verse">And a little heap of burning lime,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That the man should have his pall.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">For he has a pall, this wretched man,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Such as few men can claim;</div> - <div class="verse">Deep down below a prison-yard,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Naked for greater shame,</div> - <div class="verse">He lies, with fetters on each foot,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Wrapt in a sheet of flame!...</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I know not whether Laws be right,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Or whether Laws be wrong;</div> - <div class="verse">All that we know who lie in jail</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Is that the wall is strong;</div> - <div class="verse">And that each day is like a year,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A year whose days are long.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But this I know, that every Law</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That men have made for Man,</div> - <div class="verse">Since first Man took his brother’s life,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the sad world began,</div> - <div class="verse">But straws the wheat and saves the chaff</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With a most evil fan.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">This too I know—and wise it were</div> - <div class="verse indent2">If each could know the same—</div> - <div class="verse">That every prison that men build</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Is built with bricks of shame,</div> - <div class="verse">And bound with bars lest Christ should see</div> - <div class="verse indent2">How men their brothers maim.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With bars they blur the gracious moon,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And blind the goodly sun:</div> - <div class="verse">And they do well to hide their Hell,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For in it things are done</div> - <div class="verse">That Son of God nor son of Man</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ever should look upon!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The vilest deeds like poison weeds</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Bloom well in prison-air:</div> - <div class="verse">It is only what is good in Man</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That wastes and withers there:</div> - <div class="verse">Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the Warder is Despair.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">For they starve the little frightened child</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Till it weeps both night and day:</div> - <div class="verse">And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And gibe the old and grey,</div> - <div class="verse">And some grow mad, and all grow bad,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And none a word may say.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Punishment of Thieves</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Utopia”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Sir Thomas More</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(One of the great classic Utopias, written by the English statesman, -1478-1535; executed upon Tower Hill, for opposing -the will of King Henry VIII)</p> - -<p>In this poynte, not you onlye, but also the most part -of the world, be like evyll scholemaisters, which be -readyer to beate, than to teache, their scholers. For -great and horrible punishmentes be appointed for theves,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span> -whereas much rather provision should have ben made, -that there were some meanes, whereby they myght get -their livyng, so that no man shoulde be dryven to this -extreme necessitie, firste to steale, and then to dye.</p> - - -<h3>The Turn of the Balance<a name="FNanchor_13" id="FNanchor_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13" class="fnanchor">[M]</a></h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Brand Whitlock</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(American novelist and reformer, born 1869; for many years -mayor of Toledo, Ohio, and now Minister to Belgium. The present -novel is the life-story of Archie Koerner, a boy of the tenements, -who is driven to crime by the evil forces of society)</p></div> - -<p>“All ready, Archie.”</p> - -<p>Jimmy Ball touched him on the shoulder. He -glanced toward the open grated door, thence across the -flagging to the other door, and tried to take a step. -Out there he could see one or two faces thrust forward -suddenly; they peered in, then hastily withdrew. He -tried again to take a step, but one leg had gone to sleep, -it prickled, and as he bore his weight upon it, it seemed -to swell suddenly to elephantine proportions. And he -seemed to have no knees at all; if he stood up he would -collapse. How was he ever to walk that distance?</p> - -<p>“Here!” said Ball. “Get on that other side of him, -Warden.”</p> - -<p>Then they started. The Reverend Mr. Hoerr, waiting -by the door, had begun to read something in a strange, -unnatural voice, out of a little red book he held at his -breast in both his hands.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span></p> - -<p>“Good-by, Archie!” they called from behind, and he -turned, swayed a little, and looked back over his shoulder.</p> - -<p>“Good-by, boys,” he said. He had a glimpse of their -faces; they looked gray and ugly, worse even than they -had that evening—or was it that evening when with -sudden fear he had seen them crouching there behind -him?</p> - -<p>Perhaps just at the last minute the governor would -change his mind. They were walking the long way -to the door, six yards off. The flagging was cold to his -bare feet; his slit trouser-legs flapped miserably, revealing -his white calves. Walking had suddenly become laborious; -he had to lift each leg separately and manage it; he -walked much as that man in the rear rank of Company 21 -walked. He would have liked to stop and rest an instant, -but Ball and the warden walked beside him, urged him -resistlessly along, each gripping him at the wrist and -upper arm.</p> - -<p>In the room outside, Archie recognized the reporters -standing in the sawdust. What they were to write that -night would be in the newspapers the next morning, but -he would not read it. He heard Beck lock the door of -the death chamber, locking it hurriedly, so that he could -be in time to look on. Archie had no friend in the group -of men that waited in silence, glancing curiously at him, -their faces white as the whitewashed wall. The doctors -held their watches in their hands. And there before -him was the chair, its oil-cloth cover now removed, its -cane bottom exposed. But he would have to step up on -the little platform to get to it.</p> - -<p>“No—yes, there you are, Archie, my boy!” whispered -Ball. “There!”</p> - -<p>He was in it, at last. He leaned back; then, as his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span> -back touched the back of the chair, he started violently. -But there were hands on his shoulders pressing him down, -until he could feel his back touch the chair from his -shoulders down to the very end of his spine. Some -one had seized his legs, turned back the slit trousers from -his calves.</p> - -<p>“Be quick!” he heard the warden say in a scared voice. -He was at his right where the switch and the indicator -were.</p> - -<p>There were hands, too, at his head, at his arms—hands -all over him. He took one last look. Had the governor—? -Then the leather mask was strapped over his eyes and it -was dark. He could only feel and hear now—feel the -cold metal on his legs, feel the moist sponge on the top -of his head where the barber had shaved him, feel the -leather straps binding his legs and arms to the legs and -the arms of the chair, binding them tightly, so that they -gave him pain, and he could not move. Helpless he lay -there, and waited. He heard the loud ticking of a watch; -then on the other side of him the loud ticking of another -watch; fingers were at his wrists. There was no sound -but the mumble of Mr. Hoerr’s voice. Then some one -said:</p> - -<p>“All ready.”</p> - -<p>He waited a second, or an age, then, suddenly, it -seemed as if he must leap from the chair, his body was -swelling to some monstrous, impossible, unhuman shape; -his muscles were stretched, millions of hot and dreadful -needles were piercing and pricking him, a stupendous -roaring was in his ears, then a million colors, colors he -had never seen or imagined before, colors beyond the -range of the spectra, new, undiscovered, summoned by -some mysterious agency from distant corners of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span> -universe, played before his eyes. Suddenly they were -shattered by a terrific explosion in his brain—then -darkness.</p> - -<p>But no, there was still sensation; a dull purple color -slowly spread before him, gradually grew lighter, expanded, -and with a mighty pain he struggled, groping his way in -torture and torment over fearful obstacles from some far -distance, remote as black stars in the cold abyss of the -universe; he struggled back to life—then an appalling -confusion, a grasp at consciousness; he heard the ticking -of the two watches—then, through his brain there slowly -trickled a thread of thought that squirmed and glowed -like a white-hot wire....</p> - -<p>A faint groan escaped the pale lips below the black -leather mask, a tremor ran through the form in the chair, -then it relaxed and was still.</p> - -<p>“It’s all over.” The doctor, lifting his fingers from -Archie’s wrist, tried to smile, and wiped the perspiration -from his face with a handkerchief.</p> - -<p>Some one flung up a window, and a draught of cool -air sucked through the room. On the draught was borne -from the death-chamber the stale odor of Russian cigarettes. -And then a demoniacal roar shook the cell-house. -The convicts had been awake.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Police-Court Reporter</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Midstream”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Will Levington Comfort</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American novelist and war-correspondent, born 1878)</p> - -<p>When I think of prisons; of the men who send -other men there; of chairs of death and hangings, -and of all that bring these things about—it comes to me -that the City is organized hell; that there is no end to -our cruelty and stupidity. I bought from door to door -in city streets the stuff that makes murder; I sat in the -forenoon under the corrective forces, which were quite -as blindly stupid and cruel.</p> - -<p>The women I passed in the night, appeared often in -the morning. I talked to them in the nights, and heard -them weep in the days; I saw them in the nights with -the men who judged them in the days. Out of all that -evil, there was no voice; out of all the corrective force -there was no voice. The City covered us all. I was -one and the other. The women thought themselves -beasts; the men thought themselves men—and, voiceless -between them, the City stood.</p> - -<p>The most tragic sentence I ever heard, was from the -lips of one of these women.... I talked with her -through the night. She called it her work; she had an -ideal about her work. Every turning in her life had -been man-directed. She confessed that she had begun -with an unabatable passion; that men had found her -sensuousness very attractive when it was fresh. She had -preserved a certain sweetness; through such stresses that -the upper world would never credit. Thousands of men -had come to her; all perversions, all obsessions, all mad<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span>ness, -and drunkenness, to her alone in this little room. -She told of nights when twenty came. Yet there was -something inextinguishable about her—something patient -and optimistic. In the midst of it all, it was like a little -girl speaking:</p> - -<p>“<em>I wake up in the morning, and find a man beside me. -I am always frightened, even yet,—until I remember. I -remember who I am and what I am.... Then I try to -think what he is like—what his companions called him—what -he said to me. I try to remember how he looked—because -you know in the morning, his face is always turned -away.</em>”</p> - -<p>Does it help you to see that we are all one?... Yet -I couldn’t have seen then, trained by men and the City. -I belonged to the ranks of the corrective forces in the -eyes of the City—and she, to the destructive.... She -would have gone to the pen, I sitting opposite waiting -for something more important to make a news bulletin.... -From the City’s point of view, I was at large, safe -and sane....</p> - -<p>The extreme seriousness with which men regard themselves -as municipal correctives—as soldiers, lovers, -monopolists—has risen for me into one of the most -remarkable facts of life.</p> - - -<h3>The Straight Road</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Paul Hanna</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American poet)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They got y’, kid: they got y’—just like I said they would.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">You tried to walk the narrow path,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">You tried, and got an awful laugh;</div> - <div class="verse">And laughs are all y’ did get, kid—they got y’ good!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They never knew the little kid—the kid I used to know;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The little bare-legged girl back home,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The little kid that played alone—</div> - <div class="verse">They don’t know half the things I know, kid, ain’t it so?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They got y’, kid, they got y’—you know they got y’ right;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They waited till they saw y’ limp,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Then introduced y’ to the pimp—</div> - <div class="verse">Ah, you were down then, kid, and couldn’t fight!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I guess y’ know what some don’t know, and others know damn well—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That sweatshops don’t grow angels’ wings,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That workin’ girls is easy things,</div> - <div class="verse">And poverty’s the straightest road t’ Hell!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The “Cadet”</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The House of Bondage”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Reginald Wright Kauffman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_53">53</a>)</p> - -<p>Wherever there is squalor seeking ease, he is -there. Wherever there is distress crying for succor, -discontent complaining for relief, weariness sighing -for rest, there is this missionary, offering the quack salvation -of his temporal church. He knows and takes -subtle advantage of the Jewish sisters sent to work for -the education of Jewish brothers; the Irish, the Germans, -the Russians, and the Syrians ground in one or another -economic mill; the restless neurotic native daughters -untrained for work and spoiled for play. He is at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span> -door of the factory when it releases its white-faced women -for a breath of night air; he is at the cheap lunch-room -where the stenographers bolt unwholesome noonday food -handed about by underpaid waitresses; he lurks around -the corner for the servant and the shop-clerk. He -remembers that these are girls too tired to do household -work in their evenings, too untaught to find continued -solace in books; that they must go out, that they must -move about; and so he passes his own nights at the -restaurants and theaters, the moving-picture shows, the -dancing academies, the dance-halls. He may go into -those stifling rooms where immigrants, long before they -learn to make a half-complete sentence of what they call -the American language, learn what they are told are -American dances: the whirling “spiel” with blowing -skirts, the “half-time waltz” with jerking hips. He may -frequent the more sophisticated forms of these places, -may even be seen in the more expensive cafés, or may -journey into the provinces. But he scents poverty from -afar.</p> - - -<h3>The Priestess of Humanity</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “A History of European Morals”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William E. H. Lecky</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English historian and philosopher, 1838-1903. The following -much quoted passage may be said to represent the Victorian -view of its subject)</p> - -<p>Under these circumstances, there has arisen in -society a figure which is certainly the most mournful, -and in some respects the most awful, upon which the -eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span> -very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a -cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself -as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned and -insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for the -most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an -early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol -of the degradation and sinfulness of man. Herself the -supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient -guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity -of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a -few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think -of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the -agony of remorse and despair. On that one degraded and -ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might -have filled the world with shame. She remains, while -creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess -of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.</p> - - -<h3>Sisterhood</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Mary Craig Sinclair</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American writer)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Last night I woke, and in my tranquil bed</div> - <div class="verse">I lay, and thanked my God with fervent prayer</div> - <div class="verse">That I had food and warmth, a cosy chair</div> - <div class="verse">Beside a jolly fire, and roses red</div> - <div class="verse">To give my room a touch of light and grace.</div> - <div class="verse">And I thanked God, oh thanked Him! that my face</div> - <div class="verse">Was beautiful, that it was fair to men:</div> - <div class="verse">I thought awhile, then thanked my God again.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span> - <div class="verse">For yesterday, on Broadway I had walked,</div> - <div class="verse">And I had stopped to watch them as they stalked</div> - <div class="verse">Their prey; and I was glad I had no sons</div> - <div class="verse">To look with me upon those woeful ones—</div> - <div class="verse">Paint on their lips, and from a corpse their hair,</div> - <div class="verse">And eyes of simulated lust, astare!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Woman of the Streets</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Blatchford</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>)</p> - -<p>Consider now the outcast Jezebel of the London -pavement. Fierce and cunning, and false and vile. -Ghastly of visage under her paint and grease. A creature -debased below the level of the brute, with the hate of a -devil in her soul and the fire of hell in her eyes. Lewd -of gesture, strident of voice, wanton of gaze, using language -so foul as to shock the pot-house ruffian, and laughter -whose sound makes the blood run cold. A dreadful -spectre, shameless, heartless, reckless, and horrible. A -creature whose touch is contamination, whose words -burn like a flame, whose leers and ogles make the soul -sick. A creature living in drunkenness and filth. A -moral blight. A beast of prey who has cast down many -wounded, whose victims fill the lunatic ward and the -morgue; a thief, a liar, a hopeless, lost, degraded wretch, -of whom it has been well said, “Her feet take hold of -hell; her house is the way to the grave, going down -to the chamber of death.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>In the Strand</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Arthur Symons</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet and critic, born 1865)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With eyes and hands and voice convulsively</div> - <div class="verse">She craves the bestial wages. In her face</div> - <div class="verse">What now is left of woman? whose lost place</div> - <div class="verse">Is filled with greed’s last eating agony.</div> - <div class="verse">She lives to be rejected and abhorred,</div> - <div class="verse">Like a dread thing forgotten. One by one</div> - <div class="verse">She hails the passers, whispers blindly; none</div> - <div class="verse">Heeds now the voice that had not once implored</div> - <div class="verse">Those alms in vain. The hour has struck for her,</div> - <div class="verse">And now damnation is scarce possible</div> - <div class="verse">Here on the earth; it waits for her in hell.</div> - <div class="verse">God! to be spurned of the last wayfarer</div> - <div class="verse">That haunts a dark street after midnight! Now</div> - <div class="verse">Shame’s last disgrace is hot upon her brow.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Bridge of Sighs</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Hood</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_59">59</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">One more Unfortunate</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Weary of breath,</div> - <div class="verse">Rashly importunate,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Gone to her death!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Take her up tenderly,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Lift her with care;</div> - <div class="verse">Fashion’d so slenderly,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Young, and so fair!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Look at her garments</div> - <div class="verse">Clinging like cerements;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Whilst the wave constantly</div> - <div class="verse">Drips from her clothing;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Take her up instantly,</div> - <div class="verse">Loving, not loathing.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Touch her not scornfully;</div> - <div class="verse">Think of her mournfully,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Gently and humanly;</div> - <div class="verse">Not of the stains of her—</div> - <div class="verse">All that remains of her</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Now is pure womanly.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Make no deep scrutiny</div> - <div class="verse">Into her mutiny</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Rash and undutiful:</div> - <div class="verse">Past all dishonor,</div> - <div class="verse">Death has left on her</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Only the beautiful.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Still, for all slips of hers,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">One of Eve’s family—</div> - <div class="verse">Wipe those poor lips of hers</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Oozing so clammily.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Loop up her tresses</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Escaped from the comb,</div> - <div class="verse">Her fair auburn tresses;</div> - <div class="verse">Whilst wonderment guesses</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where was her home?</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Who was her father?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Who was her mother?</div> - <div class="verse">Had she a sister?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Had she a brother?</div> - <div class="verse">Or was there a dearer one</div> - <div class="verse">Still, and a nearer one</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Yet, than all other?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Alas! for the rarity</div> - <div class="verse">Of Christian charity</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Under the sun!</div> - <div class="verse">O! it was pitiful!</div> - <div class="verse">Near a whole city full,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Home she had none.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Sisterly, brotherly,</div> - <div class="verse">Fatherly, motherly,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Feelings had changed;</div> - <div class="verse">Love, by harsh evidence,</div> - <div class="verse">Thrown from its eminence;</div> - <div class="verse">Even God’s providence</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Seeming estranged.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Where the lamps quiver</div> - <div class="verse">So far in the river,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With many a light</div> - <div class="verse">From window and casement,</div> - <div class="verse">From garret to basement,</div> - <div class="verse">She stood, with amazement,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Houseless by night.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The bleak wind of March</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Made her tremble and shiver;</div> - <div class="verse">But not the dark arch,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Or the black flowing river:</div> - <div class="verse">Mad from life’s history,</div> - <div class="verse">Glad to death’s mystery</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Swift to be hurl’d—</div> - <div class="verse">Anywhere, anywhere</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Out of the world!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In she plunged boldly,</div> - <div class="verse">No matter how coldly</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The rough river ran;</div> - <div class="verse">Over the brink of it,—</div> - <div class="verse">Picture it, think of it,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Dissolute Man!</div> - <div class="verse">Lave in it, drink of it</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Then, if you can!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Take her up tenderly,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Lift her with care;</div> - <div class="verse">Fashion’d so slenderly,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Young, and so fair!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ere her limbs frigidly</div> - <div class="verse">Stiffen too rigidly,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Decently, kindly,</div> - <div class="verse">Smooth and compose them;</div> - <div class="verse">And her eyes, close them,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Staring so blindly!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Dreadfully staring</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Thro’ muddy impurity,</div> - <div class="verse">As when with the daring</div> - <div class="verse">Last look of despairing</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Fix’d on futurity.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Perishing gloomily,</div> - <div class="verse">Spurr’d by contumely,</div> - <div class="verse">Cold inhumanity,</div> - <div class="verse">Burning insanity,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Into her rest.</div> - <div class="verse">—Cross her hands humbly</div> - <div class="verse">As if praying dumbly,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Over her breast!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Owning her weakness,</div> - <div class="verse">Her evil behavior,</div> - <div class="verse">And leaving, with meekness,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Her sins to her Saviour!</div> -</div></div></div> -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a><br /><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK IV</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><i>Out of the Depths</i></p> - -<p>The protest of the soul of man confronted with injustice and -groping for a remedy.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a><br /><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The People’s Anthem</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Ebenezer Elliott</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(One of the leaders of the Chartist movement in England, 1781-1849; -known as the “Poet of the People,” and by his enemies -as the “Corn-law Rhymer”)</p> - - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">When wilt thou save the people?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">O God of mercy! when?</div> - <div class="verse">Not kings and lords, but nations!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Not thrones and crowns, but men!</div> - <div class="verse">Flowers of thy heart, O God, are they!</div> - <div class="verse">Let them not pass, like weeds, away!</div> - <div class="verse">Their heritage a sunless day!</div> - <div class="verse indent12">God save the people!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Shall crime bring crime for ever,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Strength aiding still the strong?</div> - <div class="verse">Is it thy will, O Father!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That man shall toil for wrong?</div> - <div class="verse">“No!” say thy mountains; “No!” thy skies;</div> - <div class="verse">“Man’s clouded sun shall brightly rise,</div> - <div class="verse">And songs be heard instead of sighs.”</div> - <div class="verse indent12">God save the people!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">When wilt thou save the people?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">O God of mercy! when?</div> - <div class="verse">The people, Lord! the people!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Not thrones and crowns, but men!</div> - <div class="verse">God save the people! thine they are;</div> - <div class="verse">Thy children, as thy angels fair;</div> - <div class="verse">Save them from bondage and despair!</div> - <div class="verse indent12">God save the people!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span></p> - -<p>A Hymn</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Gilbert K. Chesterton</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English essayist and poet, born 1874)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O God of earth and altar</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Bow down and hear our cry,</div> - <div class="verse">Our earthly rulers falter,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Our people drift and die;</div> - <div class="verse">The walls of gold entomb us,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The swords of scorn divide,</div> - <div class="verse">Take not Thy thunder from us,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But take away our pride.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">From all that terror teaches,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">From lies of tongue and pen,</div> - <div class="verse">From all the easy speeches</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That comfort cruel men,</div> - <div class="verse">From sale and profanation</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of honor and the sword,</div> - <div class="verse">From sleep and from damnation,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Deliver us, good Lord.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Tie in a living tether</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The priest and prince and thrall,</div> - <div class="verse">Bind all our lives together,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Smite us and save us all;</div> - <div class="verse">In ire and exultation</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Aflame with faith, and free,</div> - <div class="verse">Lift up a living nation,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A single sword to Thee.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The World’s Way</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Shakespeare</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(One of the series of sonnets in which the English dramatist, 1564-1616, -voiced his inmost soul)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Tired with all these, for restful death I cry—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">As, to behold desert a beggar born,</div> - <div class="verse">And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And purest faith unhappily forsworn,</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And gilded honor shamefully misplaced,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,</div> - <div class="verse">And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And strength by limping sway disablèd,</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And art made tongue-tied by authority,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,</div> - <div class="verse">And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And captive Good attending captain Ill:—</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,</div> - <div class="verse">Save that, to die, I leave my Love alone.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Written in London, September, 1802</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Wordsworth</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(One of the great sonnets of England’s poet of nature; 1770-1850. -Poet laureate in 1843)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O friend! I know not which way I must look</div> - <div class="verse">For comfort, being, as I am, opprest</div> - <div class="verse">To think that now our life is only drest</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span> - <div class="verse">For show; mean handy-work of craftsman, cook,</div> - <div class="verse">Or groom!—We must run glittering like a brook</div> - <div class="verse">In the open sunshine, or we are unblest;</div> - <div class="verse">The wealthiest man among us is the best;</div> - <div class="verse">No grandeur now in nature or in book</div> - <div class="verse">Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense,</div> - <div class="verse">This is idolatry; and these we adore;</div> - <div class="verse">Plain living and high thinking are no more:</div> - <div class="verse">The homely beauty of the good old cause</div> - <div class="verse">Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence,</div> - <div class="verse">And pure religion breathing household laws.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Preface to “Les Miserables”</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Victor Hugo</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(The poet and humanitarian of France, 1802-1885, has in this -passage set forth the purpose of one of the half-dozen -greatest novels of the world)</p> - -<p>So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, -a social condemnation, which, in the face of -civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates -a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; -so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation -of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and -the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are -not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social -asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a -yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance -and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be -useless.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Bound</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By May Beals</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American writer and lecturer)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Sometimes I feel the tide of life in me</div> - <div class="verse">Flood upward, high and higher, till I stand</div> - <div class="verse">Tiptoe, aflame with energy, a god,</div> - <div class="verse">Young, virile, glorying in my youth and power.</div> - <div class="verse">But not for long; the grip of poverty</div> - <div class="verse">Seizes me, sets my daily task; the eyes</div> - <div class="verse">Of those I love, looking to me for bread</div> - <div class="verse">Pierce me like eagles’ beaks through very love.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I am Prometheus bound; these cares and fears</div> - <div class="verse">Tear at my vitals, leave me broken, spent.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And unavailingly ’tis spent, my life,</div> - <div class="verse">My wondrous life, so pregnant with rich powers.</div> - <div class="verse">That stuff in me from which heroic deeds,</div> - <div class="verse">Great thoughts and noble poems might be made</div> - <div class="verse">Is wrenched from me, is coined in wealth, and spent</div> - <div class="verse">By others; save that I and mine receive</div> - <div class="verse">A mere existence, bare of hope and joy,</div> - <div class="verse">Bare even of comfort.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent22">Comrades, stretched and bound</div> - <div class="verse">In agony on labor’s rock, we live—</div> - <div class="verse">And die—to fatten vultures!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span></p> - -<p>To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Walt Whitman</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(America’s most original and creative poet, 1819-1892; printer -and journalist, during the war an army nurse, and later a government -clerk, discharged for publishing what his superiors considered an -“indecent” book)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Not songs of loyalty alone are these,</div> - <div class="verse">But songs of insurrection also;</div> - <div class="verse">For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel, the world over,</div> - <div class="verse">And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind him,</div> - <div class="verse">And stakes his life, to be lost at any moment....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">When liberty goes out of a place, it is not the first to go, nor the second or third to go,</div> - <div class="verse">It waits for all the rest to go—it is the last.</div> - <div class="verse">When there are no more memories of martyrs and heroes,</div> - <div class="verse">And when all life, and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth,</div> - <div class="verse">Then only shall liberty, or the idea of liberty, be discharged from that part of the earth,</div> - <div class="verse">And the infidel come into full possession.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span></p> - -<p>Chants Communal</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Horace Traubel</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet and editor, born 1858; disciple and biographer of -Walt Whitman)</p> - -<p>You will long resist me. You will deceive yourself -with initial victories. You will find me weak. -You will count me only one against a million. You -will see the world seem to go on just as it is. One day -confirming another. Presidents succeeding Presidents in -unvarying mediocrity. Millionaires dead reborn in millionaire -children. Starvation handing starvation on. -The people innocently played against the people. -Demand and supply cohabited for the production of a -blind progeny. The landlord suborning the land. The -moneylord suborning money. The storelord suborning -production. All will seem to go on just as it is. And -you who resist me will be fooled. You will say the universe -is against me. You will say I am cursed. Or -you will in your tenderer moments ask: What’s the use? -But all this time I will be keeping on. Doing nothing -unusual. Only keeping on. Asleep or awake, keeping on. -Compelled to say the say of justice all by myself. Willing -to wait until you are shaken up and convinced. -Until you will say it to yourself. And say it to yourself -you will.</p> - -<p>There are things ahead that will stir you out of your -indifference or lethargy or doubt. Give you an immortal -awakening. So you will never sleep again. I do -not know just what it will be. But something. And -you will know it when it comes. And then you will -understand why I am calm. Why I am not worried by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span> -delay. Why I am not defeated by postponements. Why -all the big things that seem to be against me do not -seem to worry the one little thing that is for me. Why -my faith maintains itself against your property. Why -my soul maintains itself against injustice. Why I am -willing to say words that are thought personally unkind -for the sake of a result that is universally sweet. Why -I look in your face and see you long before you are able -to see yourself. Why you with all your fortified rights -doubt and despair. Why I without any right at all am -cheerful and confident. Why you tremble when one -little man with one little voice asks you a question. -Why I do not tremble with all the states and churches -and political economies at my heels.</p> - - -<h3>These Populations</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Towards Democracy”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edward Carpenter</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet and philosopher, born 1844; disciple of Walt Whitman)</p> - -<p>These populations—</p> - -<p>So puny, white-faced, machine-made,</p> - -<p>Turned out by factories, out of offices, out of drawing-rooms, -by thousands all alike—</p> - -<p>Huddled, stitched up, in clothes, fearing a chill, a drop -of rain, looking timidly at the sea and sky as at strange -monsters, or running back so quick to their suburban -runs and burrows,</p> - -<p>Dapper, libidinous, cute, with washed-out small eyes—</p> - -<p>What are these?</p> - -<p>Are they men and women?</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span></p> - -<p>Each denying himself, hiding himself?</p> - -<p>Are they men and women?</p> - -<p>So timorous, like hares—a breath of propriety or custom, -a draught of wind, the mere threat of pain or of -danger?</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>O for a breath of the sea and the great mountains!</p> - -<p>A bronzed hardy live man walking his way through it -all;</p> - -<p>Thousands of men companioning the waves and the -storms, splendid in health, naked-breasted, catching the -lion with their hands;</p> - -<p>A thousand women swift-footed and free—owners of -themselves, forgetful of themselves; in all their actions—full -of joy and laughter and action;</p> - -<p>Garbed not so differently from the men, joining with -them in their games and sports, sharing also their labors;</p> - -<p>Free to hold their own, to grant or withhold their love, -the same as the men;</p> - -<p>Strong, well-equipped in muscle and skill, clear of -finesse and affectation—</p> - -<p>(The men, too, clear of much brutality and conceit)—</p> - -<p>Comrades together, equal in intelligence and adventure,</p> - -<p>Trusting without concealment, loving without shame -but with discrimination and continence towards a perfect -passion.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>O for a breath of the sea!</p> - -<p>The necessity and directness of the great elements -themselves!</p> - -<p>Swimming the rivers, braving the sun, the cold, taming -the animals and the earth, conquering the air with wings, -and each other with love—</p> - -<p>The true, the human society!</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Ship of Humanity</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Gloucester Moors”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Vaughn Moody</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet and dramatist, 1869-1910)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">God, dear God! Does she know her port,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Though she goes so far about?</div> - <div class="verse">Or blind astray, does she make her sport</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To brazen and chance it out?</div> - <div class="verse">I watched when her captains passed:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">She were better captainless.</div> - <div class="verse">Men in the cabin, before the mast,</div> - <div class="verse">But some were reckless and some aghast,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And some sat gorged at mess.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">By her battened hatch I leaned and caught</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Sounds from the noisome hold,—</div> - <div class="verse">Cursing and sighing of souls distraught</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And cries too sad to be told.</div> - <div class="verse">Then I strove to go down and see;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But they said, “Thou art not of us!”</div> - <div class="verse">I turned to those on the deck with me</div> - <div class="verse">And cried, “Give help!” But they said, “Let be:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Our ship sails faster thus.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Jill-o’er-the-ground is purple blue,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Blue is the quaker-maid,</div> - <div class="verse">The alder-clump where the brook comes through</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Breeds cresses in its shade.</div> - <div class="verse">To be out of the moiling street,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With its swelter and its sin!</div> - <div class="verse">Who has given to me this sweet,</div> - <div class="verse">And given my brother dust to eat?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And when will his wage come in?</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Freedom</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By James Russell Lowell</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(American scholar and poet, 1819-1891, author of many impassioned -poems of human freedom. An ardent anti-slavery advocate, -it was said during the Civil War that his poetry was worth an army -corps to the Union)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Men! whose boast it is that ye</div> - <div class="verse">Come of fathers brave and free,</div> - <div class="verse">If there breathe on earth a slave,</div> - <div class="verse">Are ye truly free and brave?</div> - <div class="verse">If ye do not feel the chain</div> - <div class="verse">When it works a brother’s pain,</div> - <div class="verse">Are ye not base slaves indeed,</div> - <div class="verse">Slaves unworthy to be freed?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Is true Freedom but to break</div> - <div class="verse">Fetters for our own dear sake,</div> - <div class="verse">And, with leathern hearts, forget</div> - <div class="verse">That we owe mankind a debt?</div> - <div class="verse">No! True Freedom is to share</div> - <div class="verse">All the chains our brothers wear,</div> - <div class="verse">And, with heart and hand, to be</div> - <div class="verse">Earnest to make others free!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They are slaves who fear to speak</div> - <div class="verse">For the fallen and the weak;</div> - <div class="verse">They are slaves who will not choose</div> - <div class="verse">Hatred, scoffing and abuse,</div> - <div class="verse">Rather than in silence shrink</div> - <div class="verse">From the truth they needs must think:</div> - <div class="verse">They are slaves who dare not be</div> - <div class="verse">In the right with two or three.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Gray</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(English poet and scholar, 1716-1771; Cambridge professor. It is -said that Major Wolfe, while sitting in a row-boat on his way to -the night attack upon Quebec, remarked that he would rather have -been the author of this poem than the taker of the city)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;</div> - <div class="verse">How jocund did they drive their team afield!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;</div> - <div class="verse">Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The short and simple annals of the Poor.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And all that beauty, all that wealth, e’er gave</div> - <div class="verse">Await alike th’ inevitable hour:—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The paths of glory lead but to the grave....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Can storied urn, or animated bust,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?</div> - <div class="verse">Can honor’s voice provoke the silent dust,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Or flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;</div> - <div class="verse">Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre;</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But knowledge to their eyes her ample page,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Rich with the spoils of time, did ne’er unroll;</div> - <div class="verse">Chill penury repressed their noble rage,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And froze the genial current of the soul.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Full many a gem of purest ray serene</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;</div> - <div class="verse">Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And waste its sweetness on the desert air.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Some village Hampden, that, with dauntless breast,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The little tyrant of his fields withstood,</div> - <div class="verse">Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The applause of listening senates to command,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The threats of pain and ruin to despise,</div> - <div class="verse">To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And read their history in a nation’s eyes,</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Their lot forbade: nor circumscribed alone</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;</div> - <div class="verse">Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And shut the gates of mercy on mankind;</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,</div> - <div class="verse">Or heap the shrine of luxury and pride</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With incense kindled at the Muse’s flame.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their sober wishes never learned to stray;</div> - <div class="verse">Along the cool sequestered vale of life</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Land Question</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Cardinal Manning</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English prelate of the Catholic Church, 1808-1892)</p> - -<p>The land question means hunger, thirst, nakedness, -notice to quit, labor spent in vain, the toil of years -seized upon, the breaking up of homes; the misery, sickness, -deaths of parents, children, wives; the despair and -wildness which springs up in the hearts of the poor, -when legal force, like a sharp harrow, goes over the most -sensitive and vital rights of mankind. All this is contained -in the land question.</p> - - -<h3>The Lady Poverty</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Jacob Fisher</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American poet)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I met her on the Umbrian Hills,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Her hair unbound, her feet unshod;</div> - <div class="verse">As one whom secret glory fills</div> - <div class="verse indent2">She walked alone—with God.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I met her in the city street;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Oh, changed her aspect then!</div> - <div class="verse">With heavy eyes and weary feet</div> - <div class="verse indent2">She walked alone—with men.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span></p> - -<p>Preface to “Major Barbara”</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By G. Bernard Shaw</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Irish dramatist and critic, born 1856; recognized as one of the -world’s most brilliant advocates of Socialism)</p> - -<p>The thoughtless wickedness with which we scatter -sentences of imprisonment, torture in the solitary -cell and on the plank bed, and flogging, on moral invalids -and energetic rebels, is as nothing compared to the stupid -levity with which we tolerate poverty as if it were either -a wholesome tonic for lazy people or else a virtue to be -embraced as St. Francis embraced it. If a man is indolent, -let him be poor. If he is drunken, let him be poor. -If he is not a gentleman, let him be poor. If he is -addicted to the fine arts or to pure science instead of to -trade and finance, let him be poor. If he chooses to -spend his urban eighteen shillings a week or his agricultural -thirteen shillings a week on his beer and his family -instead of saving it up for his old age, let him be poor. -Let nothing be done for “the undeserving”: let him be -poor. Serves him right! Also—somewhat inconsistently—blessed -are the poor!</p> - -<p>Now what does this Let Him Be Poor mean? It -means let him be weak. Let him be ignorant. Let him -become a nucleus of disease. Let him be a standing -exhibition and example of ugliness and dirt. Let him -have rickety children. Let him be cheap and let him -drag his fellows down to his price by selling himself to do -their work. Let his habitations turn our cities into poisonous -congeries of slums. Let his daughters infect our -young men with the diseases of the streets and his sons -revenge him by turning the nation’s manhood into scrofula,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span> -cowardice, cruelty, hypocrisy, political imbecility, and all -the other fruits of oppression and malnutrition. Let the -undeserving become still less deserving; and let the -deserving lay up for himself, not treasures in heaven, but -horrors in hell upon earth. This being so, is it really -wise to let him be poor? Would he not do ten times -less harm as a prosperous burglar, incendiary, ravisher, -or murderer, to the utmost limits of humanity’s comparatively -negligible impulses in these directions? Suppose -we were to abolish all penalties for such activities, and -decide that poverty is the one thing we will not tolerate—that -every adult with less than, say, £365 a year, -shall be painlessly but inexorably killed, and every -hungry half naked child forcibly fattened and clothed, -would not that be an enormous improvement on our -existing system, which has already destroyed so many -civilizations, and is visibly destroying ours in the same -way?</p> - - -<h3>The Jungle</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Upton Sinclair</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>)</p> - -<p>Now the dreadful winter was come upon them. In -the forests, all summer long, the branches of the -trees do battle for light, and some of them lose and die; -and then come the raging blasts, and the storms of snow -and hail, and strew the ground with these weaker branches. -Just so it was in Packingtown; the whole district braced -itself for the struggle that was an agony, and those whose -time was come died off in hordes. All the year round<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span> -they had been serving as cogs in the great packing-machine; -and now was the time for the renovating of -it, and the replacing of damaged parts. There came -pneumonia and grippe, stalking among them, seeking for -weakened constitutions; there was the annual harvest -of those whom tuberculosis had been dragging down. -There came cruel cold, and biting winds, and blizzards -of snow, all testing relentlessly for failing muscles and -impoverished blood. Sooner or later came the day when -the unfit one did not report for work; and then, with -no time lost in waiting, and no inquiries or regrets, there -was a chance for a new hand....</p> - -<p>Home was not a very attractive place—at least not -this winter. They had only been able to buy one stove, -and this was a small one, and proved not big enough to -warm even the kitchen in the bitterest weather. This -made it hard for Teta Elzbieta all day, and for the children -when they could not get to school. At night they -would sit huddled around this stove, while they ate -their supper off their laps; and then Jurgis and Jonas -would smoke a pipe, after which they would all crawl -into their beds to get warm, after putting out the fire -to save the coal. Then they would have some frightful -experiences with the cold. They would sleep with all -their clothes on, including their overcoats, and put over -them all the bedding and spare clothing they owned; -the children would sleep all crowded into one bed, and -yet even so they could not keep warm. The outside -ones would be shivering and sobbing, crawling over the -others and trying to get down into the center, and causing -a fight. This old house with the leaky weather-boards -was a very different thing from their cabins at home, -with great thick walls plastered inside and outside with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span> -mud; and the cold which came upon them was a living -thing, a demon-presence in the room. They would waken -in the midnight hours, when everything was black; perhaps -they would hear it yelling outside, or perhaps there -would be deathlike stillness—and that would be worse -yet. They could feel the cold as it crept in through -the cracks, reaching out for them with its icy, death-dealing -fingers; and they would crouch and cower, and -try to hide from it, all in vain. It would come, and it -would come; a grisly thing, a spectre born in the black -caverns of terror; a power primeval, cosmic, shadowing -the tortures of the lost souls flung out to chaos and destruction. -It was cruel, iron-hard; and hour after hour they -would cringe in its grasp, alone, alone. There would -be no one to hear them if they cried out; there would -be no help, no mercy. And so on until morning—when -they would go out to another day of toil, a little weaker, -a little nearer to the time when it would be their turn -to be shaken from the tree.</p> - - -<h3>The Sad Sight of the Hungry</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Li Hung Chang</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A poem by the Chinese statesman, 1823-1901; known as the -“Bismarck of Asia,” and said to have been the richest -man in the world)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">’Twould please me, gods, if you would spare</div> - <div class="verse">Mine eyes from all this hungry stare</div> - <div class="verse">That fills the face and eyes of men</div> - <div class="verse">Who search for food o’er hill and glen.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Their eyes are orbs of dullest fire,</div> - <div class="verse">As if the flame would mount up higher;</div> - <div class="verse">But in the darkness of their glow</div> - <div class="verse">We know the fuel’s burning low.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Such looks, O gods, are not from thee!</div> - <div class="verse">No, they’re the stares of misery!</div> - <div class="verse">They speak of hunger’s frightful hold</div> - <div class="verse">On lips a-dry and stomachs cold.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Bread, bread,” they cry, these weary men,</div> - <div class="verse">With wives and children from the glen!</div> - <div class="verse">O, they would toil the live-long day</div> - <div class="verse">But for a meal, their lives to stay.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But where is it in all the land?</div> - <div class="verse">Unless the gods with gen’rous hand</div> - <div class="verse">Send sweetsome rice and strength’ning corn</div> - <div class="verse">To these vast crowds to hunger born!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Right to be Lazy</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Paul Lafargue</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A well-known Socialist writer of France. He and his wife, finding -themselves helpless from old age and penury, committed -suicide together)</p> - -<p>Does any one believe that, because the toilers of the -time of the mediæval guilds worked five days out -of seven in a week, they lived upon air and water only, -as the deluding political economists tell us? Go to! -They had leisure to taste of earthly pleasure, to cherish -love, to make and to keep open house in honor of the -great God, <em>Leisure</em>. In those days, that morose, hypo<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span>critically -Protestant England was called “Merrie England.” -Rabelais, Quevedo, Cervantes, the unknown -authors of the spicy novels of those days, make our -mouths water with their descriptions of those enormous -feasts, at which the peoples of that time regaled themselves, -and towards which “nothing was spared.” Jordaens -and the Dutch school of painters have portrayed -them for us, in their pictures of jovial life. Noble, giant -stomachs, what has become of you? Exalted spirits, ye -who comprehended the whole of human thought, whither -are ye gone? We are thoroughly degenerated and -dwarfed. Tubercular cows, potatoes, wine made with -fuchsine, beer from saffron, and Prussian whiskey in wise -conjunction with compulsory labor have weakened our -bodies and dulled our intellects. And at the same time -that mankind ties up its stomach, and the productivity -of the machine goes on increasing day by day, the political -economists wish to preach to us Malthusian doctrine, the -religion of abstinence and the dogma of work!</p> - - -<h3>The First Machine</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Antiparos</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek, First Century, A. D. The poet celebrates the invention -of the water-mill for grinding corn)</p> - -<p>The goddess has commanded the work of the girls -to be done by the Nymphs; and now these skip -lightly over the wheels, so that the shaken axles revolve -with the spokes, and pull around the load of the revolving -stones. Let us live the life of our fathers, and let us -rest from work and enjoy the gifts that the goddess has -sent us!</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By John Stuart Mill</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(English philosopher, 1806-1873)</p> - -<p>Hitherto, it is questionable if all the mechanical -inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil -of any human being.</p> - - -<h3>The Man Under the Stone</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Man with the Hoe and other Poems”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edwin Markham</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_27">27</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">When I see a workingman with mouths to feed,</div> - <div class="verse">Up, day after day, in the dark before the dawn,</div> - <div class="verse">And coming home, night after night, thro’ the dusk,</div> - <div class="verse">Swinging forward like some fierce silent animal,</div> - <div class="verse">I see a man doomed to roll a huge stone up an endless steep.</div> - <div class="verse">He strains it onward inch by stubborn inch,</div> - <div class="verse">Crouched always in the shadow of the rock....</div> - <div class="verse">See where he crouches, twisted, cramped, misshapen!</div> - <div class="verse indent4">He lifts for their life;</div> - <div class="verse indent4">The veins knot and darken—</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Blood surges into his face....</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Now he loses—now he wins—</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Now he loses—loses—(God of my soul!)</div> - <div class="verse indent4">He digs his feet into the earth—</div> - <div class="verse indent4">There’s a movement of terrified effort....</div> - <div class="verse indent4">It stirs—it moves!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span> - <div class="verse indent4">Will the huge stone break his hold</div> - <div class="verse indent4">And crush him as it plunges to the Gulf?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The silent struggle goes on and on,</div> - <div class="verse">Like two contending in a dream.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Boethius</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Roman philosopher, 470-524)</p> - -<p>Though the goddess of riches should bestow as -much as the sand rolled by the wind-tossed sea, or -as many as the stars that shine, the human race will not -cease to wail.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 398px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo200" id="illo200">[illo200]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_200f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>COLD</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">ROGER BLOCHE</span> (<i>French sculptor; from the Luxembourg Museum</i>)</p></div> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 623px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo201" id="illo201">[illo201]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_201f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>THE PEOPLE MOURN</p> - -<p>JULES PIERRE VAN BIESBROECK</p> - -<p class="center">(<i>Sculptor of the Belgian Socialist and co-operative movements; -born 1873</i>)</p></div> -</div> - - -<h3>The Wolf at the Door</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charlotte Perkins Gilman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(America’s most brilliant woman poet and critic; born 1860)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">There’s a haunting horror near us</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That nothing drives away;</div> - <div class="verse">Fierce lamping eyes at nightfall,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A crouching shade by day;</div> - <div class="verse">There’s a whining at the threshold,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">There’s a scratching at the floor.</div> - <div class="verse">To work! To work! In Heaven’s name!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The wolf is at the door!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The day was long, the night was short,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The bed was hard and cold;</div> - <div class="verse">Still weary are the little ones,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Still weary are the old.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span> - <div class="verse">We are weary in our cradles</div> - <div class="verse indent2">From our mother’s toil untold;</div> - <div class="verse">We are born to hoarded weariness</div> - <div class="verse indent2">As some to hoarded gold.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We will not rise! We will not work!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Nothing the day can give</div> - <div class="verse">Is half so sweet as an hour of sleep;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Better to sleep than live!</div> - <div class="verse">What power can stir these heavy limbs?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">What hope these dull hearts swell?</div> - <div class="verse">What fear more cold, what pain more sharp</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Than the life we know so well?...</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The slow, relentless, padding step</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That never goes astray—</div> - <div class="verse">The rustle in the underbrush—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The shadow in the way—</div> - <div class="verse">The straining flight—the long pursuit—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The steady gain behind—</div> - <div class="verse">Death-wearied man and tireless brute,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the struggle wild and blind!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">There’s a hot breath at the keyhole</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And a tearing as of teeth!</div> - <div class="verse">Well do I know the bloodshot eyes</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the dripping jaws beneath!</div> - <div class="verse">There’s a whining at the threshold—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">There’s a scratching at the floor—</div> - <div class="verse">To work! To work! In Heaven’s name!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The wolf is at the door!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span></p> - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Robert Herrick</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Old English lyric poet, 1591-1674)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">To mortal man great loads allotted be;</div> - <div class="verse">But of all packs, no pack like poverty.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Each Against All</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charles Fourier</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(One of the early French Utopian writers, 1772-1837; author of a -theory of social co-operation which is still known by his name)</p> - -<p>The present social order is a ridiculous mechanism, -in which portions of the whole are in conflict and -acting against the whole. We see each class in society -desire, from interest, the misfortune of the other classes, -placing in every way individual interest in opposition to -public good. The lawyer wishes litigations and suits, -particularly among the rich; the physician desires sickness. -(The latter would be ruined if everybody died -without disease, as would the former if all quarrels were -settled by arbitration.) The soldier wants a war, which -will carry off half his comrades and secure him promotion; -the undertaker wants burials; monopolists and -forestallers want famine, to double or treble the price -of grain; the architect, the carpenter, the mason, want -conflagrations, that will burn down a hundred houses -to give activity to their branches of business.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Matthew Arnold</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(English essayist and poet, 1822-1888)</p> - -<p>Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes -our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Fomá Gordyéeff</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Maxim Gorky</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A novel in which the Russian has portrayed the spiritual agonies -of his race. In this scene a poor school-teacher -voices his despair)</p> - -<p>Yozhov drank his tea at one draught, thrust the -glass on the saucer, placed his feet on the edge of -the chair, and clasping his knees in his hands, rested his -chin upon them. In this pose, small sized and flexible -as rubber, he began:</p> - -<p>“The student Sachkov, my former teacher, who is -now a doctor of medicine, a whist player and a mean -fellow all around, used to tell me whenever I knew my -lesson well: ‘You’re a fine fellow, Kolya! You are an -able boy. We proletarians, plain and poor people, coming -from the backyard of life, we must study and study, -in order to come to the front, ahead of everybody. Russia -is in need of wise and honest people. Try to be such, and -you will be master of your fate and a useful member of -society. On us commoners rest the best hopes of the -country. We are destined to bring into it light, truth,’ -and so on. I believed him, the brute. And since then -about twenty years have elapsed. We proletarians have -grown up, but have neither appropriated any wisdom nor -brought light into life. As before, Russia is suffering -from its chronic disease—a superabundance of rascals; -while we, the proletarians, take pleasure in filling their -dense throngs.”</p> - -<p>Yozhov’s face wrinkled into a bitter grimace, and he -began to laugh noiselessly, with his lips only. “I, and -many others with me, we have robbed ourselves for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span> -sake of saving up something for life. Desiring to make -myself a valuable man, I have underrated my individuality -in every way possible. In order to study and not -die of starvation, I have for six years in succession taught -blockheads how to read and write, and had to bear a -mass of abominations at the hands of various papas and -mammas, who humiliated me without any constraint. -Earning my bread and tea, I could not, I had not the -time to earn my shoes, and I had to turn to charitable -institutions with humble petitions for loans on the strength -of my poverty. If the philanthropists could only reckon -up how much of the spirit they kill in man while supporting -the life of his body! If they only knew that each -rouble they give for bread contains ninety-nine copecks -worth of poison for the soul! If they could only burst -from excess of their kindness and pride, which they draw -from their holy activity! There is no one on earth -more disgusting and repulsive than he who gives alms. -Even as there is no one so miserable as he who accepts -them.”</p> - - -<h3>The Sight of Inequality</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Daniel Defoe</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English novelist and pamphleteer, 1661-1731; many times -imprisoned for satires upon the authorities)</p> - -<p>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 pleas<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span>ure -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.</p> - - -<h3>Settlement Work<a name="FNanchor_14" id="FNanchor_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14" class="fnanchor">[N]</a></h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “A Man’s World”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Albert Edwards</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Pen-name of Arthur Bullard, American novelist and war-correspondent)</p> - -<p>After all, what good were these settlement workers -doing? Again and again this question demanded an -answer. Sometimes I went out with Mr. Dawn to help -in burying the dead. I could see no adequate connection -between his kindly words to the bereaved and the -hideous dragon of tuberculosis which stalked through the -crowded district. What good did Dawn’s ministrations -do? Sometimes I went out with Miss Bronson, the -kindergartner, and listened to her talk to uncomprehending -mothers about their duties to their children. -What could Miss Bronson accomplish by playing a few -hours a day with the youngsters who had to go to filthy -homes? They were given a wholesome lunch at the -settlement. But the two other meals a day they must -eat poorly cooked, adulterated food. Sometimes I went -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span>out with Miss Cole, the nurse, to visit her cases. It -was hard for me to imagine anything more futile than -her single-handed struggle against unsanitary tenements -and unsanitary shops.</p> - -<p>I remember especially one visit I made with her. It -was the crisis for me. The case was a child-birth. There -were six other children, all in one unventilated room; -its single window looked out on a dark, choked airshaft; -and the father was a drunkard. I remember sitting -there, after the doctor had gone, holding the next youngest -baby on my knee, while Miss Cole was bathing the -puny newcomer.</p> - -<p>“Can’t you make him stop crying for a minute?” -Miss Cole asked nervously.</p> - -<p>“No,” I said with sudden rage. “I can’t. I wouldn’t -if I could. Why shouldn’t he cry? Why don’t the -other little fools cry? Do you want them to laugh?”</p> - -<p>She stopped working with the baby and offered me a -flask of brandy from her bag. But brandy was not -what I wanted. Of course I knew men sank to the very -dregs. But I had never realized that some are born -there.</p> - -<p>When she had done all she could for the mother and -child, Miss Cole put her things back in the bag and we -started home. It was long after midnight, but the streets -were still alive.</p> - -<p>“What good does it do?” I demanded vehemently. -“Oh, I know—you and the doctor saved the mother’s -life—brought a new one into the world and all that. -But what good does it do? The child will die—it was a -girl—let’s get down on our knees right here and pray -the gods that it may die soon—not grow up to want and -fear—and shame.” Then I laughed. “No, there’s no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span> -use praying. She’ll die all right! They’ll begin feeding -her beer out of a can before she’s weaned. No. Not -that. I don’t believe the mother will be able to nurse -her. She’ll die of skimmed milk. And if that don’t -do the trick there’s T. B. and several other things for her -to catch. Oh, she’ll die all right! And next year there’ll -be another. For God’s sake, what’s the use? What -good does it do?” Abruptly I began to swear.</p> - -<p>“You mustn’t talk like that,” Miss Cole said in a -strained voice.</p> - -<p>“Why shouldn’t I curse?” I said fiercely, turning on -her challengingly, trying to think of some greater blasphemy -to hurl at the muddle of life. But the sight of -her face, livid with weariness, her lips twisting spasmodically -from nervous exhaustion, showed me one reason -not to. The realization that I had been so brutal to her -shocked me horribly.</p> - -<p>“Oh, I beg your pardon,” I cried.</p> - -<p>She stumbled slightly. I thought she was going to -faint and I put my arm about her to steady her. She -was almost old enough to be my mother, but she put her -head on my shoulder and cried like a little child. We -stood there on the sidewalk—in the glare of a noisy, loathsome -saloon—like two frightened children. I don’t think -either of us saw any reason to go anywhere. But we -dried our eyes at last and from mere force of habit walked -blindly back to the children’s house. On the steps she -broke the long silence.</p> - -<p>“I know how you feel—everyone’s like that at first, -but you’ll get used to it. I can’t tell ‘why.’ I can’t see -that it does much good. But it’s got to be done. You -mustn’t think about it. There are things to do, today, -tomorrow, all the time. Things that must be done.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span> -That’s how we live. So many things to do, we can’t -think. It would kill you if you had time to think. -You’ve got to work—work.</p> - -<p>“You’ll stay too. I know. You won’t be able to go -away. You’ve been here too long. You won’t ever -know ‘why.’ You’ll stop asking if it does any good. -And I tell you if you stop to think about it, it will kill -you. You must work.”</p> - -<p>She went to her room and I across the deserted courtyard -and up to mine. But there was no sleep. It was -that night that I first realized that I also <em>must</em>. I had -seen so much I could never forget. It was something -from which there was no escape. No matter how glorious -the open fields, there would always be the remembered -stink of the tenements in my nostrils. The vision of a -sunken-cheeked, tuberculosis-ridden pauper would always -rise between me and the beauty of the sunset. A crowd -of hurrying ghosts—the ghosts of the slaughtered babies—would -follow me everywhere, crying “Coward,” if I ran -away. The slums had taken me captive.</p> - - -<h3>Concerning Women</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Aurora Leigh”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Elizabeth Barrett Browning</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poetess, 1806-1861; wife of Robert Browning, and an ardent -champion of the liberties of the Italian people)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I call you hard</div> - <div class="verse">To general suffering. Here’s the world half blind</div> - <div class="verse">With intellectual light, half brutalized</div> - <div class="verse">With civilization, having caught the plague</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span> - <div class="verse">In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west</div> - <div class="verse">Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain</div> - <div class="verse">And sin too!... does one woman of you all,</div> - <div class="verse">(You who weep easily) grow pale to see</div> - <div class="verse">This tiger shake his cage?—does one of you</div> - <div class="verse">Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls,</div> - <div class="verse">And pine and die because of the great sum</div> - <div class="verse">Of universal anguish?—Show me a tear</div> - <div class="verse">Wet as Cordelia’s, in eyes bright as yours,</div> - <div class="verse">Because the world is mad. You cannot count,</div> - <div class="verse">That you should weep for this account, not you!</div> - <div class="verse">You weep for what you know. A red-haired child</div> - <div class="verse">Sick in a fever, if you touch him once,</div> - <div class="verse">Though but so little as with a finger-tip,</div> - <div class="verse">Will set you weeping; but a million sick—</div> - <div class="verse">You could as soon weep for the rule of three</div> - <div class="verse">Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world,</div> - <div class="verse">Uncomprehended by you.—Women as you are,</div> - <div class="verse">Mere women, personal and passionate,</div> - <div class="verse">You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives,</div> - <div class="verse">Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints!</div> - <div class="verse">We get no Christ from you,—and verily</div> - <div class="verse">We shall not get a poet, in my mind.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Women and Economics</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charlotte Perkins Gilman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_200">200</a>)</p> - -<p>Recognizing her intense feeling on moral lines, -and seeing in her the rigidly preserved virtues of -faith, submission, and self-sacrifice—qualities which in -the dark ages were held to be the first of virtues,—we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span> -have agreed of late years to call woman the moral superior -of man. But the ceaseless growth of human life, social -life, has developed in him new virtues, later, higher, -more needful; and the moral nature of woman, as maintained -in this rudimentary stage by her economic dependence, -is a continual check to the progress of the human -soul. The main feature of her life—the restriction of her -range and duty to the love and service of her own immediate -family—acts upon us continually as a retarding -influence, hindering the expansion of the spirit of social -love and service on which our very lives depend. It -keeps the moral standard of the patriarchal era still before -us, and blinds our eyes to the full duty of man.</p> - - -<h3>The Wrongfulness of Riches</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Grant Allen</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English essayist and nature student, 1848-1899)</p> - -<p>If you are on the side of the spoilers, then you are a -bad man. If you are on the side of social justice, -then you are a good one. There is no effective test of -high morality at the present day save this.</p> - -<p>Critics of the middle-class type often exclaim, of reasoning -like this, “What on earth makes him say it? What -has <em>he</em> to gain by talking in that way? What does he -expect to get by it?” So bound up are they in the idea -of a self-interest as the one motive of action that they -never even seem to conceive of honest conviction as a -ground for speaking out the truth that is in one. To such -critics I would answer, “The reason why I write all this -is because I profoundly believe it. I believe the poor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span> -are being kept out of their own. I believe the rich are -for the most part selfish and despicable. I believe wealth -has been generally piled up by cruel and unworthy means. -I believe it is wrong in us to acquiesce in the wicked -inequalities of our existing social state, instead of trying -our utmost to bring about another, where right would -be done to all, where poverty would be impossible. I -believe such a system is perfectly practicable, and that -nothing stands in its way save the selfish fears and prejudices -of individuals. And I believe that even those -craven fears and narrow prejudices are wholly mistaken; -that everybody, including the rich themselves, would be -infinitely happier in a world where no poverty existed, -where no hateful sights and sounds met the eye at every -turn, where all slums were swept away, and where everybody -had their just and even share of pleasures and -refinements in a free and equal community.”</p> - - -<h3>Despair</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Lady Wilde</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Irish poetess, mother of Oscar Wilde; wrote under the pen-name -of Speranza)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Before us dies our brother, of starvation;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Around are cries of famine and despair!</div> - <div class="verse">Where is hope for us, or comfort or salvation—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where—oh! where?</div> - <div class="verse">If the angels ever hearken, downward bending,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They are weeping, we are sure,</div> - <div class="verse">At the litanies of human groans ascending</div> - <div class="verse indent2">From the crushed hearts of the poor.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We never knew a childhood’s mirth and gladness,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Nor the proud heart of youth free and brave;</div> - <div class="verse">Oh, a death-like dream of wretchedness and sadness</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Is life’s weary journey to the grave!</div> - <div class="verse">Day by day we lower sink, and lower,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Till the God-like soul within</div> - <div class="verse">Falls crushed beneath the fearful demon power</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of poverty and sin.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">So we toil on, on with fever burning</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In heart and brain;</div> - <div class="verse">So we toil on, on through bitter scorning,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Want, woe, and pain.</div> - <div class="verse">We dare not raise our eyes to the blue heavens</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Or the toil must cease—</div> - <div class="verse">We dare not breathe the fresh air God has given</div> - <div class="verse indent2">One hour in peace.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Inequality of Wealth</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By G. Bernard Shaw</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_193">193</a>)</p> - -<p>I am not bound to keep my temper with an imposture -so outrageous, so abjectly sycophantic, as the pretence -that the existing inequalities of income correspond to -and are produced by moral and physical inferiorities and -superiorities—that Barnato was five million times as -great and good a man as William Blake, and committed -suicide because he lost two-fifths of his superiority; that -the life of Lord Anglesey has been on a far higher plane -than that of John Ruskin; that Mademoiselle Liane de -Pougy has been raised by her successful sugar specula<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span>tion -to moral heights never attained by Florence Nightingale; -and that an arrangement to establish economic -equality between them by duly adjusted pensions would -be impossible. I say that no sane person can be expected -to treat such impudent follies with patience, much less -with respect.</p> - - -<h3>The Two Songs</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Blake</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_98">98</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I heard an Angel singing</div> - <div class="verse">When the day was springing:</div> - <div class="verse">“Mercy, pity, and peace,</div> - <div class="verse">Are the world’s release.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">So he sang all day</div> - <div class="verse">Over the new-mown hay,</div> - <div class="verse">Till the sun went down,</div> - <div class="verse">And haycocks looked brown</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I heard a Devil curse</div> - <div class="verse">Over the heath and the furze:</div> - <div class="verse">“Mercy could be no more</div> - <div class="verse">If there were nobody poor,</div> - <div class="verse">And pity no more could be</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">If all were happy as ye:</div> - <div class="verse">And mutual fear brings peace.</div> - <div class="verse">Misery’s increase</div> - <div class="verse">Are mercy, pity, peace.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">At his curse the sun went down,</div> - <div class="verse">And the heavens gave a frown.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span></p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By James Anthony Froude</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English historian, 1818-1894)</p> - -<p>The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor -is the marvel of human society.</p> - - -<h3>Savva</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Leonid Andreyev</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(In this strange drama, which might be called a symbolic tragi-comedy, -the Russian writer has set forth the plight of the educated -people of his country, confronted by the abject superstition of the -peasantry. Savva, a fanatical revolutionist, endeavors to wipe -out this superstition by blowing up a monastery full of drunken -monks. But the plot is revealed to the monks, who carry out the -ikon, or sacred image, before the explosion, and afterwards carry it -back into the ruins. The peasants, arriving on the scene and finding -the ikon uninjured, hail a supreme miracle; the whole country -is swept by a wave of religious frenzy, in the course of which Savva -is trampled to death by a mob.</p> - -<p>In the following scene Savva argues with his sister, a religious -believer. The tramp of pilgrims is heard outside)</p></div> - -<p><span class="smcap">Savva</span> (<i>smiling</i>):—The tramp of death!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Lipa</span>:—Remember that each one of these would -consider himself happy in killing you, in crushing you -like a reptile. Each one of these is your death. Why, -they beat a simple thief to death, a horse thief. What -would they not do to you? You who wanted to steal -their God!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Savva</span>:—Quite true. That’s property too.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Lipa</span>:—You still have the brazenness to joke? Who -gave you the right to do such a thing? Who gave you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span> -the power over people? How dare you meddle with what -to them is right? How dare you interfere with their life?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Savva</span>:—Who gave me the right? You gave it to me. -Who gave me the power? You gave it to me—you with -your malice, your ignorance, your stupidity! You with -your wretched impotence! Right! Power! They have -turned the earth into a sewer, an outrage, an abode of -slaves. They worry each other, they torture each other, -and they ask: “Who dares to take us by the throat?” -I! Do you understand? I!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Lipa</span>:—But to destroy all! Think of it!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Savva</span>:—What could you do with them? What would -<em>you</em> do? Try to persuade the oxen to turn away from -their bovine path? Catch each one by his horn and pull -him away? Would you put on a frock-coat and read a -lecture? Haven’t they had plenty to teach them? As -if words and thought had any significance to them! -Thought—pure, unhappy thought! They have perverted -it. They have taught it to cheat and defraud. -They have made it a salable commodity, to be bought -at auction in the market. No, sister, life is short, and I -am not going to waste it in arguments with oxen. The -way to deal with them is by fire. That’s what they -require—fire!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Lipa</span>:—But what do you want? What do you want?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Savva</span>:—What do I want? To free the earth, to free -mankind. Man—the man of today—is wise. He has -come to his senses. He is ripe for liberty. But the past -eats away his soul like a canker. It imprisons him within -the iron circle of things already accomplished. I want -to do away with everything behind man, so that there -is nothing to see when he looks back. I want to take -him by the scruff of his neck and turn his face toward -the future!</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Man Forbid</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Davidson</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Scotch poet and dramatist, 1857-1909; after struggling for many -years in London against poverty and ill-health, committed suicide, -leaving some of the most striking and original poetry of the present -age)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">This Beauty, this Divinity, this Thought,</div> - <div class="verse">This hallowed bower and harvest of delight</div> - <div class="verse">Whose roots ethereal seemed to clutch the stars,</div> - <div class="verse">Whose amaranths perfumed eternity,</div> - <div class="verse">Is fixed in earthly soil enriched with bones</div> - <div class="verse">Of used-up workers; fattened with the blood</div> - <div class="verse">Of prostitutes, the prime manure; and dressed</div> - <div class="verse">With brains of madmen and the broken hearts</div> - <div class="verse">Of children. Understand it, you at least</div> - <div class="verse">Who toil all day and writhe and groan all night</div> - <div class="verse">With roots of luxury, a cancer struck</div> - <div class="verse">In every muscle: out of you it is</div> - <div class="verse">Cathedrals rise and Heaven blossoms fair;</div> - <div class="verse">You are the hidden putrefying source</div> - <div class="verse">Of beauty and delight, of leisured hours,</div> - <div class="verse">Of passionate loves and high imaginings;</div> - <div class="verse">You are the dung that keeps the roses sweet.</div> - <div class="verse">I say, uproot it; plough the land; and let</div> - <div class="verse">A summer-fallow sweeten all the World.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Peasantry</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Death and the Child”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Stephen Crane</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American novelist and poet, 1870-1900)</p> - -<p>These stupid peasants, who, throughout the world, -hold potentates on their thrones, make statesmen -illustrious, provide generals with lasting victories, all with -ignorance, indifference, or half-witted hatred, moving the -world with the strength of their arms, and getting their -heads knocked together, in the name of God, the king, -or the stock exchange—immortal, dreaming, hopeless -asses, who surrender their reason to the care of a shining -puppet, and persuade some toy to carry their lives in -his purse.</p> - - -<h3>An Italian Restaurant</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “A Bed of Roses”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By W. L. George</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary English novelist)</p> - -<p>They sat at a marble topped table, flooded with light -by incandescent gas. In the glare the waiters -seemed blacker, smaller and more stunted than by the -light of day. Their faces were pallid, with a touch of -green: their hair and moustaches were almost blue black. -Their energy was that of automata. Victoria looked at -them, melting with pity.</p> - -<p>“There’s a life for you,” said Farwell, interpreting her -look. “Sixteen hours’ work a day in an atmosphere<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span> -of stale food. For meals, plate scourings. For sleep -and time to get to it, eight hours. For living, the rest -of the day.”</p> - -<p>“It’s awful, awful,” said Victoria. “They might -as well be dead.”</p> - -<p>“They will be soon,” said Farwell, “but what does -that matter? There are plenty of waiters. In the -shadow of the olive groves tonight in far-off Calabria, -at the base of the vine-clad hills, couples are walking -hand in hand, with passion flashing in their eyes. Brown -peasant boys are clasping to their breast young girls -with dark hair, white teeth, red lips, hearts that beat -and quiver with ecstasy. They tell a tale of love and -hope. So we shall not be short of waiters.”</p> - - -<h3>Tonight</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Carlos Wupperman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American poet)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Tonight the beautiful, chaste moon</div> - <div class="verse indent2">From heaven’s height</div> - <div class="verse">Scatters over the bridal earth</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Blossoms of white;</div> - <div class="verse">And spring’s renewed glad charms unfold</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Endless delight.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Such mystic wonder the hushed world wears,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Evil has fled</div> - <div class="verse">Far, far away; in every heart</div> - <div class="verse indent2">God reigns instead....</div> - <div class="verse">Tonight a starving virgin sells</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Her soul for bread.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>A South-Sea Islander</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Francis Adams</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet and rebel, 1862-1893; his life, a brief struggle with -poverty and disease, was ended by his own hand)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Aloll in the warm clear water,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">On her back with languorous limbs</div> - <div class="verse">She lies. The baby upon her breast</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Paddles and falls and swims.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With half-closed eyes she smiles,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Guarding it with her hands;</div> - <div class="verse">And the sob swells up in my heart—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In my heart that understands.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><em>Dear, in the English country,</em></div> - <div class="verse indent2"><em>The hatefullest land on earth,</em></div> - <div class="verse"><em>The mothers are starved and the children die</em></div> - <div class="verse indent2"><em>And death is better than birth!</em></div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Out of the Dark</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Helen Keller</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(America’s most famous blind girl, born 1880, who has come to see -more than most people with normal eyes)</p> - -<p>Step by step my investigation of blindness led me -into the industrial world. And what a world it is! -I must face unflinchingly a world of facts—a world of -misery and degradation, of blindness, crookedness, and -sin, a world struggling against the elements, against the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span> -unknown, against itself. How reconcile this world of -fact with the bright world of my imagining? My darkness -had been filled with the light of intelligence, and, -behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping -in social blindness. At first I was most unhappy; -but deeper study restored my confidence. By learning -the sufferings and burdens of men, I became aware as -never before of the life-power that has survived the forces -of darkness—the power which, though never completely -victorious, is continuously conquering. The very fact -that we are still here carrying on the contest against the -hosts of annihilation proves that on the whole the battle -has gone for humanity. The world’s great heart has -proved equal to the prodigious undertaking which God -set it. Rebuffed, but always persevering; self-reproached, -but ever regaining faith; undaunted, tenacious, the heart -of man labors towards immeasurably distant goals. Discouraged -not by difficulties without, or the anguish of -ages within, the heart listens to a secret voice that -whispers: “Be not dismayed; in the future lies the -Promised Land.”</p> - - -<h3>Heirs of Time</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Wentworth Higginson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet and essayist, 1823-1911; a vehement anti-slavery -agitator, he was colonel of the first negro regiment during the -Civil War, and in later life became a devoted Socialist)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">From street and square, from hill and glen,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of this vast world beyond my door,</div> - <div class="verse">I hear the tread of marching men,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The patient armies of the poor.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Not ermine-clad or clothed in state,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their title-deeds not yet made plain,</div> - <div class="verse">But waking early, toiling late,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The heirs of all the earth remain.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The peasant brain shall yet be wise,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The untamed pulse grow calm and still;</div> - <div class="verse">The blind shall see, the lowly rise,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And work in peace Time’s wondrous will.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Some day, without a trumpet’s call</div> - <div class="verse indent2">This news will o’er the world be blown:</div> - <div class="verse">“The heritage comes back to all;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The myriad monarchs take their own.”</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Beyond Human Might</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Björnstjerne Björnson</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Next to Ibsen, the greatest of Norwegian dramatists, 1832-1910. -In the following scene, from a two-part symbolic drama of the -problem of labor and capital, a young clergyman is speaking to -a crowd of miners in the midst of a bitterly fought strike)</p></div> - -<p><span class="smcap">Bratt</span>:—Here it is dark and cold. Here few work -hopefully, and no one joyfully. Here the children -won’t thrive—they yearn for the sea and the daylight. -They crave the sun. But it lasts only a little while, -and then they give up. They learn that among those -who have been cast down here there is rarely one who -can climb up again.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Several</span>:—That’s right!...</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Bratt</span>:—What is there to herald the coming of better -things? A new generation up there? Listen to what -their young people answer for themselves: “We want a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span> -good time!” And their books? The books and the -youth together make the future. And what do the -books say? Exactly the same as the youth: “Let us -have a good time! Ours are the light and the lust of -life, its colors and its joys!” That’s what the youth -and their books say.—They are right! It is all theirs! -There is no law to prevent their taking life’s sunlight -and joy away from the poor people. For those who have -the sun have also made the law.—But then the next -question is whether we might not scramble up high enough -to take part in the writing of a new law. (<i>This is received -with thundering cheers.</i>) What is needed is that one generation -makes an effort strong enough to raise all coming -generations into the vigorous life of full sunlight.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Many</span>:—Yes, yes!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Bratt</span>:—But so far every generation has put it off on -the next one. Until at last <em>our</em> turn has come—to bear -sacrifices and sufferings like unto those of death itself!</p> - - -<h3>Weavers</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Heinrich Heine</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_97">97</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Their eyelids are drooping, no tears lie beneath;</div> - <div class="verse">They stand at the loom and grind their teeth;</div> - <div class="verse">“We are weaving a shroud for the doubly dead,</div> - <div class="verse">And a threefold curse in its every thread—</div> - <div class="verse indent4">We are weaving, still weaving.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”A curse for the Godhead to whom we have bowed</div> - <div class="verse">In our cold and our hunger, we weave in the shroud;</div> - <div class="verse">For in vain have we hoped and in vain have prayed;</div> - <div class="verse">He has mocked us and scoffed at us, sold and betrayed—</div> - <div class="verse indent4">We are weaving, still weaving.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“A curse for the king of the wealthy and proud,</div> - <div class="verse">Who for us had no pity, we weave in the shroud;</div> - <div class="verse">Who takes our last penny to swell out his purse,</div> - <div class="verse">While we die the death of a dog—yea, a curse—</div> - <div class="verse indent4">We are weaving, still weaving.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”A curse for our country, whose cowardly crowd</div> - <div class="verse">Hold her shame in high honor, we weave in the shroud;</div> - <div class="verse">Whose blossoms are blighted and slain in the germ,</div> - <div class="verse">Whose filth and corruption engender the worm—</div> - <div class="verse indent4">We are weaving, still weaving.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“To and fro flies our shuttle—no pause in its flight,</div> - <div class="verse">’Tis a shroud we are weaving by day and by night;</div> - <div class="verse">We are weaving a shroud for the worse than dead,</div> - <div class="verse">And a threefold curse in its every thread—</div> - <div class="verse indent4">We are weaving—still weaving.”</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Alton Locke</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charles Kingsley</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>)</p> - -<p>Yes, it was true. Society had not given me my -rights. And woe unto the man on whom that idea, -true or false, rises lurid, filling all his thoughts with -stifling glare, as of the pit itself. Be it true, be it false, -it is equally a woe to believe it; to have to live on a negation; -to have to worship for our only idea, as hundreds -of thousands of us have this day, the hatred of the things -which are. Ay, though one of us here and there may -die in faith, in sight of the promised land, yet is it not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span> -hard, when looking from the top of Pisgah into “the good -time coming,” to watch the years slipping away one by -one, and death crawling nearer and nearer, and the -people wearying themselves in the fire for very vanity, -and Jordan not yet passed, the promised land not yet -entered? While our little children die around us, like -lambs beneath the knife, of cholera and typhus and consumption, -and all the diseases which the good time can -and will prevent; which, as science has proved, and you -the rich confess, might be prevented at once, if you -dared to bring in one bold and comprehensive measure, -and not sacrifice yearly the lives of thousands to the -idol of vested interests, and a majority in the House. -Is it not hard to men who smart beneath such things -to help crying aloud—“Thou cursed Moloch-Mammon, -take my life if thou wilt; let me die in the wilderness, -for I have deserved it; but these little ones in mines and -factories, in typhus cellars and Tooting pandemoniums, -what have they done? If not in their fathers’ cause, -yet still in theirs, were it so great a sin to die upon a -barricade?”</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK V</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><i>Revolt</i></p> - -<p>The struggle to do away with injustice; the battle-cries of the -new army which is gathering for the deliverance of humanity.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a><br /><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>A Man’s a Man for a’ That</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Burns</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Scotland’s most popular poet, 1759-1796)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Is there, for honest poverty,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That hangs his head, and a’ that?</div> - <div class="verse">The coward slave, we pass him by,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We daur be puir, for a’ that!</div> - <div class="verse indent6">For a’ that, and a’ that,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Our toils obscure and a’ that,</div> - <div class="verse">The rank is but the guinea’s stamp—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The man’s the gowd for a’ that.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">What though on hamely fare we dine,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Wear hoddin-grey and a’ that;</div> - <div class="verse">Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A man’s a man for a’ that.</div> - <div class="verse indent6">For a’ that, and a’ that,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their tinsel show and a’ that,</div> - <div class="verse">The honest man, though e’er sae puir,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Is king o’ men for a’ that.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ye see yon birkie, ca’ed a lord,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Wha struts, and stares, and a’ that;</div> - <div class="verse">Though hundreds worship at his word,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">He’s but a coof for a’ that:</div> - <div class="verse indent6">For a’ that, and a’ that,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">His riband, star, and a’ that;</div> - <div class="verse">The man of independent mind,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">He looks and laughs at a’ that.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">A king can make a belted knight,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A marquis, duke, and a’ that;</div> - <div class="verse">But an honest man’s aboon his might,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Gude faith, he maunna fa’ that!</div> - <div class="verse indent6">For a’ that, and a’ that,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their dignities and a’ that,</div> - <div class="verse">The pith o’ sense and pride o’ worth</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Are higher rank than a’ that.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Then let us pray that come it may,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">(As come it will for a’ that)</div> - <div class="verse">That sense and worth, o’er a’ the earth,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">May bear the gree and a’ that.</div> - <div class="verse indent6">For a’ that, and a’ that—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">It’s coming yet, for a’ that,</div> - <div class="verse">When man to man, the warld o’er,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Shall brithers be for a’ that.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Jefferson</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(President of the United States and author of the Declaration of -Independence, 1743-1826)</p> - -<p>All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. -The general spread of the light of science has already -laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the -mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their -backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to -ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>A Vindication of Natural Society</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edmund Burke</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(British statesman and orator, 1729-1797; defended the American -colonies in Parliament during the Revolutionary War)</p> - -<p>Ask of politicians the ends for which laws were originally -designed, and they will answer that the laws -were designed as a protection for the poor and weak, -against the oppression of the rich and powerful. But -surely no pretence can be so ridiculous; a man might as -well tell me he has taken off my load, because he has -changed the burden. If the poor man is not able to -support his suit according to the vexatious and expensive -manner established in civilized countries, has not the -rich as great an advantage over him as the strong has -over the weak in a state of nature?...</p> - -<p>The most obvious division of society is into rich and -poor, and it is no less obvious that the number of the -former bear a great disproportion to those of the latter. -The whole business of the poor is to administer to the -idleness, folly, and luxury of the rich, and that of the -rich, in return, is to find the best methods of confirming -the slavery and increasing the burdens of the poor. In -a state of nature it is an invariable law that a man’s -acquisitions are in proportion to his labors. In a state -of artificial society it is a law as constant and invariable -that those who labor most enjoy the fewest things, and -that those who labor not at all have the greatest number -of enjoyments. A constitution of things this, strange -and ridiculous beyond expression! We scarce believe a -thing when we are told it which we actually see before -our eyes every day without being in the least surprised.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span> -I suppose that there are in Great Britain upwards of an -hundred thousand people employed in lead, tin, iron, -copper, and coal mines; these unhappy wretches scarce -ever see the light of the sun; they are buried in the -bowels of the earth; there they work at a severe and dismal -task, without the least prospect of being delivered -from it; they subsist upon the coarsest and worst sort -of fare; they have their health miserably impaired, and -their lives cut short, by being perpetually confined in -the close vapors of these malignant minerals. An hundred -thousand more at least are tortured without remission -by the suffocating smoke, intense fires, and constant -drudgery necessary in refining and managing the -products of those mines. If any man informed us that -two hundred thousand innocent persons were condemned -to so intolerable slavery, how should we pity the unhappy -sufferers, and how great would be our just indignation -against those who inflicted so cruel and ignominious a -punishment! This is an instance—I could not wish a -stronger—of the numberless things which we pass by in -their common dress, yet which shock us when they are -nakedly represented....</p> - -<p>In a misery of this sort, admitting some few lenitives, -and those too but a few, nine parts in ten of the whole -race of mankind drudge through life. It may be urged, -perhaps, in palliation of this, that at least the rich few -find a considerable and real benefit from the wretchedness -of the many. But is this so in fact?...</p> - -<p>The poor by their excessive labor, and the rich by -their enormous luxury, are set upon a level, and rendered -equally ignorant of any knowledge which might -conduce to their happiness. A dismal view of the interior -of all civil society! The lower part broken and ground<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span> -down by the most cruel oppression; and the rich by their -artificial method of life bringing worse evils on themselves -than their tyranny could possibly inflict on those -below them.</p> - - -<h3>The Antiquity of Freedom</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Cullen Bryant</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet and editor, 1794-1878; author of “Thanatopsis”)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O freedom! thou art not, as poets dream,</div> - <div class="verse">A fair young girl, with light and delicate limbs,</div> - <div class="verse">And wavy tresses gushing from the cap</div> - <div class="verse">With which the Roman master crowned his slave</div> - <div class="verse">When he took off the gyves. A bearded man,</div> - <div class="verse">Armed to the teeth, art thou; one mailed hand</div> - <div class="verse">Grasps the broad shield, and one the sword; thy brow,</div> - <div class="verse">Glorious in beauty though it be, is scarred</div> - <div class="verse">With tokens of old wars; thy massive limbs</div> - <div class="verse">Are strong with struggling. Power at thee has launched</div> - <div class="verse">His bolts, and with his lightnings smitten thee;</div> - <div class="verse">They could not quench the life thou hast from heaven.</div> - <div class="verse">Merciless Power has dug thy dungeon deep,</div> - <div class="verse">And his swart armorers, by a thousand fires,</div> - <div class="verse">Have forged thy chain; yet, while he deems thee bound,</div> - <div class="verse">The links are shivered, and the prison walls</div> - <div class="verse">Fall outward; terribly thou springest forth,</div> - <div class="verse">As springs the flame above a burning pile,</div> - <div class="verse">And shoutest to the nations, who return</div> - <div class="verse">Thy shoutings, while the pale oppressor flies.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span></p> - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Lord Byron</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet of liberty, 1788-1824; died while taking part in the -war for the liberation of Greece)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not</div> - <div class="verse">Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?</div> - <div class="verse">By their right arms the conquest must be wrought?</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Concerning Moderation</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Lafcadio Hearn</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A writer of Irish and Greek parentage, 1850-1904; became a -lecturer on English in the University of Tokio. Japan’s -ablest interpreter to the western world)</p> - -<p>Permit me to say something in opposition to a -very famous and very popular Latin proverb—In -medio tutissimus ibis—“Thou wilt go most safely by -taking the middle course.” In speaking of two distinct -tendencies in literature, you might expect me to say -that the aim of the student should be to avoid extremes, -and to try not to be either too conservative or too liberal. -But I should certainly never give any such advice. On -the contrary, I think that the proverb above quoted is -one of the most mischievous, one of the most pernicious, -one of the most foolish, that ever was invented in the -world. I believe very strongly in extremes—in violent -extremes; and I am quite sure that all progress in this -world, whether literary, or scientific, or religious, or political, -or social, has been obtained only with the assistance -of extremes. But remember that I say, “With the as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span>sistance,”—I -do not mean that extremes alone accomplish -the aim: there must be antagonism, but there -must also be conservatism. What I mean by finding -fault with the proverb is simply this—that it is very -bad advice for a young man. To give a young man -such advice is very much like telling him not to do his -best, but only to do half of his best—or, in other words, -to be half-hearted in his undertaking.... It is not the -old men who ever prove great reformers: they are too -cautious, too wise. Reforms are made by the vigor and -courage and the self-sacrifice and the emotional conviction -of young men, who did not know enough to be -afraid, and who feel much more deeply than they think. -Indeed great reforms are not accomplished by reasoning, -but by feeling.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo232" id="illo232">[illo232]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_232f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>OUTBREAK</p> - -<p>KÄTHE KOLLWITZ</p> - -<p class="center">(<i>Contemporary German -etching; from the -“Peasant-cycle”</i>)</p></div> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo233" id="illo233">[illo233]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_233f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>THE LIBERATRESS</p> - -<p>THÉOPHILE ALEXANDRE -STEINLEN</p> - -<p>(<i>French illustrator, -born 1859</i>)</p></div> -</div> - - -<h3>The First Issue of “The Liberator”</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>January 1, 1831</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Lloyd Garrison</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(America’s most ardent anti-slavery agitator, 1805-1879. The -following pronouncement marked the beginning -of the anti-slavery campaign)</p> - -<p>I am aware that many object to the severity of my -language; but is there not cause for severity? I -will be as harsh as Truth, and as uncompromising as -Justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or -speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man -whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell -him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the -ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span> -from the fire into which it has fallen—but urge me not -to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in -earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will -not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard. The -apathy of the people is enough to make every statue -leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of -the dead.</p> - - -<h3>Working and Taking</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the Lincoln-Douglas debates, 1858</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Abraham Lincoln</span></p> - -<p>That is the real issue that will continue in this country -when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and -myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between -these two principles, right and wrong, throughout the -world. They are the two principles that have stood -face to face from the beginning of time. The one is the -common right of humanity, the other the divine right -of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it -develops itself. It is the same spirit that says “you -toil and work and earn bread and I’ll eat it.”</p> - - -<h3>Address to President Lincoln</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By the International Workingmen’s Association</span></p> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Drafted by Karl Marx</cite>)</p> - -<p>When an oligarchy of three hundred thousand -slaveholders, for the first time in the annals of -the world, dared to inscribe “Slavery” on the banner -of armed revolt; when on the very spot where hardly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span> -a century ago the idea of one great democratic republic -had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the -Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given -to the European revolution of the eighteenth century, -when on that very spot the counter-revolution cynically -proclaimed property in man to be “the corner-stone of -the new edifice”—then the working classes of Europe -understood at once that the slaveholders’ rebellion was -to sound the tocsin for a general holy war of property -against labor; and that for the men of labor, with their -hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at -stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of -the Atlantic.</p> - - -<h3>Boston Hymn</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Ralph Waldo Emerson</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(American essayist, philosopher and poet. The two stanzas -following, which may be said to sum up the revolutionary view of -the subject of “confiscation,” are taken from a poem read in Boston -on Emancipation day, January 1, 1863)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Today unbind the captive,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">So only are ye unbound;</div> - <div class="verse">Lift up a people from the dust,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Trump of their rescue, sound!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Pay ransom to the owner</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And fill the bag to the brim.</div> - <div class="verse">Who is the owner? The slave is owner,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And ever was. Pay him.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Battle Hymn of the Chinese Revolution (1912)</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the Chinese</cite>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Freedom, one of the greatest blessings of Heaven,</div> - <div class="verse">United to Peace, thou wilt work on this earth ten thousand wonderful new things.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Grave as a spirit, great as a giant rising to the very skies,</div> - <div class="verse">With the clouds for a chariot and the wind for a steed,</div> - <div class="verse">Come, come to reign over the earth!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">For the sake of the black hell of our slavery,</div> - <div class="verse">Come, enlighten us with a ray of thy sun!...</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In this century we are working to open a new age.</div> - <div class="verse">In this century, with one voice, all virile men</div> - <div class="verse">Are calling for a new making of heaven and earth.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Hin-Yun, our ancestor, guide us!</div> - <div class="verse">Spirit of Freedom, come and protect us!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Revolution</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Richard Wagner</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p class="poemintro">(It is not generally recalled that the composer of the world’s -greatest music-dramas, 1813-1883, was an active revolutionist, -who took part in street fighting in the German Revolution of 1848, -and escaped a long imprisonment only by flight. The following is -from his contributions to the Dresden <i lang="de" xml:lang="de">Volksblätter</i>)</p></div> - -<p>I am the secret of perpetual youth, the everlasting -creator of life; where I am not, death rages. I am -the comfort, the hope, the dream of the oppressed. I -destroy what exists; but from the rock whereon I light<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span> -new life begins to flow. I come to you to break all -chains which bear you down; to free you from the -embrace of death, and instill a new life into your veins. -All that exists must perish; that is the eternal condition -of life, and I the all-destroying fulfil that law to create -a fresh, new existence. I will renovate to the very foundations -the order of things in which you live, for it is the -offspring of sin, whose blossom is misery and whose fruit -is crime. The grain is ripe, and I am the reaper. I will -dissipate every delusion which has mastery over the -human race. I will destroy the authority of the one -over the many; of the lifeless over the living; of the -material over the spiritual. I will break into pieces the -authority of the great; of the law of property. Let the -will of each be master of mankind, one’s own strength -be one’s one property, for the freeman is the sacred man, -and there is nothing sublimer than he....</p> - -<p>I will destroy the existing order of things which divides -one humanity into hostile peoples, into strong and weak, -into privileged and outlawed, into rich and poor; for -that makes unfortunate creatures of one and all. I will -destroy the order of things which makes millions the slaves -of the few, and those few the slaves of their own power, -of their own wealth. I will destroy the order of things -which severs enjoyment from labor, which turns labor -into a burden and enjoyment into a vice, which makes -one man miserable through want and another miserable -through super-abundance. I will destroy the order of -things which consumes the vigor of manhood in the -service of the dead, of inert matter, which sustains one -part of mankind in idleness or useless activity, which -forces thousands to devote their sturdy youth to the -indolent pursuits of soldiery, officialism, speculation and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span> -usury, and the maintenance of such like despicable conditions, -while the other half, by excessive exertion and -sacrifice of all the enjoyment of life, bears the burden -of the whole infamous structure. I will destroy even -the very memory and trace of this delirious order of -things which, pieced together out of force, falsehood, -trouble, tears, sorrow, suffering, need, deceit, hypocrisy -and crime, is shut up in its own reeking atmosphere, -and never receives a breath of pure air, to which no ray -of pure joy ever penetrates....</p> - -<p>Arise, then, ye people of the earth, arise, ye sorrow-stricken -and oppressed. Ye, also, who vainly struggle to -clothe the inner desolation of your hearts, with the transient -glory of riches, arise! Come and follow in my track -with the joyful crowd, for I know not how to make distinction -between those who follow me. There are but two -peoples from henceforth on earth—the one which follows -me, and the one which resists me. The one I will lead to -happiness, but the other I will crush in my progress. For -I am the Revolution, I am the new creating force. I am -the divinity which discerns all life, which embraces, -revives, and rewards.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Cry of the People</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John G. Neihardt</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Western poet and novelist, born 1881)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Tremble before your chattels,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Lords of the scheme of things!</div> - <div class="verse">Fighters of all earth’s battles,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ours is the might of kings!</div> - <div class="verse">Guided by seers and sages,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The world’s heart-beat for a drum,</div> - <div class="verse">Snapping the chains of ages,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Out of the night we come!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Lend us no ear that pities!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Offer no almoner’s hand!</div> - <div class="verse">Alms for the builders of cities!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">When will you understand?</div> - <div class="verse">Down with your pride of birth</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And your golden gods of trade!</div> - <div class="verse">A man is worth to his mother, Earth,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">All that a man has made!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We are the workers and makers!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We are no longer dumb!</div> - <div class="verse">Tremble, O Shirkers and Takers!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Sweeping the earth—we come!</div> - <div class="verse">Ranked in the world-wide dawn,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Marching into the day!</div> - <div class="verse"><em>The night is gone and the sword is drawn</em></div> - <div class="verse indent2"><em>And the scabbard is thrown away!</em></div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span></p> - -<p>Woman’s Right</p> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Woman and Labor”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Olive Schreiner</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(South African novelist, born 1859. In the preface to this book -one learns that it is only a faint sketch from memory of part of a -great work, the manuscript of which was destroyed during the Boer -war)</p></div> - -<p>Thrown into strict logical form, our demand is this: -We do not ask that the wheels of time should reverse -themselves, or the stream of life flow backward. We do -not ask that our ancient spinning-wheels be again resuscitated -and placed in our hands; we do not demand that -our old grindstones and hoes be returned to us, or that -man should again betake himself entirely to his ancient -province of war and the chase, leaving to us all domestic -and civil labor. We do not even demand that society -shall immediately so reconstruct itself that every woman -may be again a childbearer (deep and overmastering as -lies the hunger for motherhood in every virile woman’s -heart!); neither do we demand that the children we bear -shall again be put exclusively into our hands to train. -This, we know, cannot be. The past material conditions -of life have gone for ever; no will of man can recall them. -But <em>this</em> is our demand: We demand that, in that strange -new world that is arising alike upon the man and the -woman, where nothing is as it was, and all things are -assuming new shapes and relations, that in this new world -we also shall have our share of honored and socially useful -human toil, our full half of the labor of the Children -of Woman. We demand nothing more than this, and will -take nothing less. <em>This is our</em> “WOMAN’S RIGHT!”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Ladies in Rebellion</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Abigail Adams</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Wife of one president of the United States, and mother of another. -From a letter to her husband written in 1774, during the -session of the first Continental Congress)</p> - -<p>I long to hear that you have declared an independency. -And in the new code of laws which I suppose it will -be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember -the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to -them than your ancestors.... If particular care and -attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to -foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by -any laws in which we have no voice or representation.</p> - - -<h3>A Doll’s House</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Henrik Ibsen</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Norwegian dramatist, 1828-1906. A play which may be called -the source of the modern Feminist movement. In the following -scene a young wife announces her revolt)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Nora</span>:—While I was at home with father, he used to -tell me his opinions, and I held the same opinions. -If I had others, I concealed them, because he wouldn’t -have liked it. He used to call me his doll-child, and -played with me as I played with my dolls. Then I came -to live in your house—</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Helmer</span>:—What an expression to use about our -marriage!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Nora</span> (<i>undisturbed</i>):—I mean I passed from father’s -hands into yours. You settled everything according to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span> -your taste; and I got the same tastes as you; or I pretended -to—I don’t know which—both ways, perhaps. -When I look back on it now, I seem to have been living -here like a beggar, from hand to mouth. I lived by -performing tricks for you, Torvald. But you would -have it so. You and father have done me a great wrong. -It is your fault that my life has been wasted.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Helmer</span>:—Why, Nora, how unreasonable and ungrateful -you are. Haven’t you been happy here?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Nora</span>:—No, only merry. And you have always been -so kind to me. But your house has been nothing but a -play-room. Here I have been your doll-wife, just as at -home I used to be papa’s doll-child. And the children, in -their turn, have been my dolls. I thought it fun when -you played with me, just as the children did when I -played with them. That has been our marriage, -Torvald.... And that is why I am now leaving you!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Helmer</span> (<i>jumping up</i>):—What—do you mean to say—</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Nora</span>:—I must stand quite alone, to know myself and -my surroundings; so I can’t stay with you.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Helmer</span>:—Nora! Nora!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Nora</span>:—I am going at once. Christina will take me -for tonight.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Helmer</span>:—You are mad! I shall not allow it. I forbid -it.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Nora</span>:—It is no use your forbidding me anything now. -I shall take with me what belongs to me. From you -I will accept nothing, either now or afterwards....</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Helmer</span>:—To forsake your home, your husband, and -your children! You don’t consider what the world -will say.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Nora</span>:—I can pay no heed to that. I only know what -I must do.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span></p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Helmer</span>:—It is exasperating! Can you forsake your -holiest duties in this world?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Nora</span>:—What do you call my holiest duties?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Helmer</span>:—Do you ask me that? Your duties to your -husband and your children.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Nora</span>:—I have other duties equally sacred.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Helmer</span>:—Impossible! What duties do you mean?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Nora</span>:—My duties towards myself.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Helmer</span>:—Before all else you are a wife and a mother.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Nora</span>:—That I no longer believe. I think that before -all else I am a human being, just as much as you are—or -at least I will try to become one.</p> - - -<h3>A Girl Strike-Leader</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Florence Kiper Frank</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poetess, born 1886)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">A white-faced, stubborn little thing</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Whose years are not quite twenty years,</div> - <div class="verse">Eyes steely now and done with tears,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Mouth scornful of its suffering—</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The young mouth!—body virginal</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Beneath the cheap, ill-fitting suit,</div> - <div class="verse">A bearing quaintly resolute,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A flowering hat, satirical.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">A soul that steps to the sound of the fife</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And banners waving red to war,</div> - <div class="verse">Mystical, knowing scarce wherefore—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A Joan in a modern strife.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Comrade Yetta<a name="FNanchor_15" id="FNanchor_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15" class="fnanchor">[O]</a></h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Albert Edwards</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(The story of an East Side sweat-shop worker who becomes a -strike-leader. The present scene describes a meeting -in Carnegie Hall)</p> - -<p>Yetta stood there alone, the blood mounting to her -cheeks, looking more and more like an orchid, and -waited for the storm to pass.</p> - -<p>“I’m not going to talk about this strike,” she said -when she could make herself heard. “It’s over. I want -to tell you about the next one—and the next. I wish -very much I could make you understand about the -strikes that are coming....</p> - -<p>“Perhaps there’s some of you never thought much -about strikes till now. Well. There’s been strikes all -the time. I don’t believe there’s ever been a year when -there wasn’t dozens here in New York. When we began, -the skirt-finishers was out. They lost their strike. They -went hungry just the way we did, but nobody helped -them. And they’re worse now than ever. There ain’t -no difference between one strike and another. Perhaps -they are striking for more pay or recognition or closed -shops. But the next strike’ll be just like ours. It’ll -be people fighting so they won’t be so much slaves like -they was before.</p> - -<p>“The Chairman said perhaps I’d tell you about my -experience. There ain’t nothing to tell except everybody -has been awful kind to me. It’s fine to have people so -kind to me. But I’d rather if they’d try to understand -what this strike business means to all of us workers—this -strike we’ve won and the ones that are coming....</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span></p> - -<p>“I come out of the workhouse today, and they tell -me a lady wants to give me money to study, she wants -to have me go to college like I was a rich girl. It’s very -kind. I want to study. I ain’t been to school none -since I was fifteen. I guess I can’t even talk English -very good. I’d like to go to college. And I used to -see pictures in the papers of beautiful rich women, and -of course it would be fine to have clothes like that. But -being in a strike, seeing all the people suffer, seeing all -the cruelty—it makes things look different.</p> - -<p>“The Chairman told you something out of the Christian -Bible. Well, we Jews have got a story too—perhaps -it’s in your Bible—about Moses and his people in Egypt. -He’d been brought up by a rich Egyptian lady—a princess—just -like he was her son. But as long as he tried to -be an Egyptian he wasn’t no good. And God spoke to -him one day out of a bush on fire. I don’t remember -just the words of the story, but God said: ‘Moses, you’re -a Jew. You ain’t got no business with the Egyptians. -Take off those fine clothes and go back to your own -people and help them escape from bondage.’ Well. Of -course, I ain’t like Moses, and God has never talked -to me. But it seems to me sort of as if—during this -strike—I’d seen a <span class="smcap">BLAZING BUSH</span>. Anyhow I’ve seen -my people in bondage. And I don’t want to go to -college and be a lady. I guess the kind princess couldn’t -understand why Moses wanted to be a poor Jew instead -of a rich Egyptian. But if you can understand, if you -can understand why I’m going to stay with my own -people, you’ll understand all I’ve been trying to say.</p> - -<p>“We’re a people in bondage. There’s lots of people -who’s kind to us. I guess the princess wasn’t the only -Egyptian lady that was kind to the Jews. But kindness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span> -ain’t what people want who are in bondage. Kindness -won’t never make us free. And God don’t send any -more prophets nowadays. We’ve got to escape all by -ourselves. And when you read in the papers that there’s -a strike—it don’t matter whether it’s street-car conductors -or lace-makers, whether it’s Eyetalians or Polacks -or Jews or Americans, whether it’s here or in Chicago—it’s -my People—the People in Bondage who are starting -out for the Promised Land.”</p> - -<p>She stopped a moment, and a strange look came over -her face—a look of communication with some distant -spirit. When she spoke again, her words were unintelligible -to most of the audience. Some of the Jewish -vest-makers understood. And the Rev. Dunham Denning, -who was a famous scholar, understood. But even -those who did not were held spellbound by the swinging -sonorous cadence. She stopped abruptly.</p> - -<p>“It’s Hebrew,” she explained. “It’s what my father -taught me when I was a little girl. It’s about the Promised -Land—I can’t say it in good English—I——”</p> - -<p>“Unless I’ve forgotten my Hebrew,” the Reverend -Chairman said, stepping forward, “Miss Rayefsky has -been repeating God’s words to Moses as recorded in the -third chapter of Exodus. I think it’s the seventh verse:—</p> - -<p>“‘And the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction -of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their -cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their -sorrows;</p> - -<p>“‘And I am come down to deliver them out of the -hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that -land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing -with milk and honey.’”</p> - -<p>“Yes. That’s it,” Yetta said. “Well, that’s what -strikes mean. We’re fighting for the old promises.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>“New” Women</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Olive Schreiner</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_240">240</a>)</p> - -<p>We are not new! If you would understand us, go -back two thousand years, and study our descent; -our breed is our explanation. We are the daughters of -our fathers as well as our mothers. In our dreams we -still hear the clash of the shields of our forebears, as they -struck them together before battle and raised the shout -of “Freedom!” In our dreams it is with us still, and -when we wake it breaks from our own lips. We are the -daughters of these men.</p> - - -<h3>Bread and Roses</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By James Oppenheim</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(In a parade of the strikers of Lawrence, Mass., some young girls -carried a banner inscribed, “We want Bread, and Roses too!”)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,</div> - <div class="verse">A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray</div> - <div class="verse">Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,</div> - <div class="verse">For the people hear us singing, “Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men—</div> - <div class="verse">For they are women’s children and we mother them again.</div> - <div class="verse">Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes—</div> - <div class="verse">Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead</div> - <div class="verse">Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;</div> - <div class="verse">Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew—</div> - <div class="verse">Yes, it is bread we fight for—but we fight for Roses, too.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days—</div> - <div class="verse">The rising of the women means the rising of the race—</div> - <div class="verse">No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil where one reposes—</div> - <div class="verse">But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Great Strike<a name="FNanchor_16" id="FNanchor_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16" class="fnanchor">[P]</a></h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Happy Humanity”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Frederik van Eeden</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(The Dutch physician, poet and novelist has here told for American -readers a personal experience in the labor struggles -of his own country)</p> - -<p>About forty of us were sent as delegates to different -towns to lead and encourage the strikers there. -The password was given and a date and hour secretly -appointed. On Monday morning, the sixth of April, -1903, no train was to run on any railway in the Netherlands.</p> - -<p>Sunday evening I set out, as one of the forty delegates, -on the warpath. I took leave of my family, filled a suit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span>case -with pamphlets and fly-leaves, and arrived in the -middle of the night at the little town of Amersfoort, an -important railway junction, to bring my message from -headquarters that a strike would be declared that night -in the whole country. Expecting the Government to -be very active and energetic and not unlikely to arrest -me, I took an assumed name, and was dressed like a -laborer....</p> - -<p>I stayed a week in that little town, living in the -houses of the strikers, sharing their meals and their hours -of suspense and anxiety. There was a dark, dingy -meeting-room where they all preferred to gather, rather -than stay at home. The women also regularly attended -these meetings, sometimes bringing their children, and -they all sought the comfort of being in company, talking -of hopes and fears, cheering each other up by songs, and -trying to raise each other’s spirits during the long days -of inaction. I addressed them, three or four times a -day, trying to give them sound notions on social conditions -and preparing them for the defeat which I soon -knew to be inevitable. I may say, however, that, though -I was of all the forty delegates the least hopeful of ultimate -success, my little party was the last to surrender -and showed the smallest percentage of fugitives.</p> - -<p>I saw in those days of strife that of the two contending -parties, the stronger, the victorious one, was by far the -least sympathetic in its moral attitude and methods. -The strikers were pathetically stupid and ignorant about -the strength of their opponents and their own weakness. -If they had unexpectedly gained a complete victory they -would have been utterly unable to use it. If the political -power had shifted from the hands of the Government -to those of the leading staff of that general strike, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span> -result would have been a terrible confusion. There was -no mind strong enough, no hand firm enough among them -to rule and reorganize that mass of workers, unaccustomed -to freedom, untrained to self-control, unable to work -without severe authority and discipline. Yet the feelings -and motives of that multitude were fair and just—they -showed a chivalry, a generosity, an idealism and -an enthusiasm with which the low methods of their powerful -opponents contrasted painfully.</p> - -<p>Every striker had to fight his own fight at home. -Every evening he had to face the worn and anxious face -of his wife, the sight of his children in danger of starvation -and misery. He had to notice the hidden tears of -the woman, or to answer her doubts and reproaches, with -a mind itself far from confident. He had to fight in -his own heart the egotistical inclination to save himself -and give up what he felt to be his best sentiment, solidarity, -the faith towards his comrades.</p> - -<p>I believe no feeling man of the leisure class could have -gone through a week in those surroundings and taken -part in a struggle like this without acquiring a different -conception of the ethics of socialism and class war.</p> - -<p>For on the other side there were the Government, the -companies, the defendants of existing order, powerful by -their wealth, by their routine, by their experience, and -supported by the servility of the great public and the -army. They had not to face any real danger (the strikers -showed no inclination to deeds of violence), and the arms -they used were intimidation and bribery. The only -thing for them to do was to demoralize the striker, to -make him an egoist, a coward, a traitor to his comrades. -And this was done quietly and successfully.</p> - -<p>Demoralizing the enemy may be the lawful object of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span> -every war—the unavoidable evil to prevent a greater -wrong; yet in this case, where the method of corruption -could be used only on one side, it showed the ugly character -of the conflict. This was no fair battle with common -moral rules of chivalry and generosity; it was a -pitiful and hopeless struggle between a weak slave and -a strong usurper, between an ill-treated, revolting child -and a brutal oppressor, who cared only for the restoration -of his authority, not for the morals of the child.</p> - - -<h3>What Meaneth a Tyrant, and how he Useth his Power in a Kingdom When he hath Obtained it</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Las Siete Partidas”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Alfonso the Wise</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A Spanish king of great learning; 1226-1284)</p> - -<p>A tyrant doth signify a cruel lord, who, by force -or by craft, or by treachery, hath obtained power -over any realm or country; and such men be of such -nature, that when once they have grown strong in the -land, they love rather to work their own profit, though -it be to the harm of the land, than the common profit -of all, for they always live in an ill fear of losing it. And -that they may be able to fulfil this their purpose unencumbered, -the wise of old have said that they use their -power against the people in three manners. The first is, -that they strive that those under their mastery be ever -ignorant and timorous, because, when they be such, they -may not be bold to rise against them, nor to resist their -wills; and the second is, that their victims be not kindly -and united among themselves, in such wise that they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span> -trust not one another, for while they live in disagreement, -they shall not dare to make any discourse against their -lord, for fear faith and secrecy should not be kept among -themselves; and the third way is, that they strive to make -them poor, and to put them upon great undertakings, -which they can never finish, whereby they may have so -much harm that it may never come into their hearts -to devise anything against their ruler. And above all -this, have tyrants ever striven to make spoil of the strong -and to destroy the wise; and have forbidden fellowship -and assemblies of men in their land, and striven always -to know what men said or did; and do trust their counsel -and the guard of their person rather to foreigners, who -will serve at their will, than to them of the land, who -serve from oppression.</p> - - -<h3>An Open Letter to the Employers</h3> - -<p><span class="smcap">By</span> “A.E.” (<span class="smcap">George W. Russell</span>)</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(This remarkable piece of eloquence, published in the Dublin -<cite>Times</cite> at the time of the great strike of 1913, is said to have completely -revolutionized public opinion on the question. The author, -born 1867, is one of Ireland’s greatest poets, and an ardent advocate -of agricultural co-operation)</p></div> - -<p>Sirs:—I address this warning to you, the aristocracy -of industry in this city, because, like all aristocracies, -you tend to grow blind in long authority, and to be -unaware that you and your class and its every action -are being considered and judged day by day by those -who have power to shake or overturn the whole social -order, and whose restlessness in poverty today is making -our industrial civilization stir like a quaking bog. You<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span> -do not seem to realize that your assumption that you -are answerable to yourselves alone for your actions in -the industries you control is one that becomes less and -less tolerable in a world so crowded with necessitous life. -Some of you have helped Irish farmers to upset a landed -aristocracy in the island, an aristocracy richer and more -powerful in its sphere than you are in yours, with its -roots deep in history. They, too, as a class, though not -all of them, were scornful or neglectful of the workers -in the industry by which they profited; and to many -who knew them in their pride of place and thought them -all-powerful they are already becoming a memory, the -good disappearing with the bad. If they had done their -duty by those from whose labor came their wealth, they -might have continued unquestioned in power and prestige -for centuries to come. The relation of landlord and -tenant is not an ideal one, but any relations in a social -order will endure if there is infused into them some of -that spirit of human sympathy which qualifies life for -immortality. Despotisms endure while they are benevolent, -and aristocracies while “<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">noblesse oblige</i>” is not a -phrase to be referred to with a cynical smile. Even an -oligarchy might be permanent if the spirit of human -kindness, which harmonizes all things otherwise incompatible, -were present....</p> - -<p>Those who have economic power have civic power -also, yet you have not used the power that was yours to -right what was wrong in the evil administration of this -city. You have allowed the poor to be herded together -so that one thinks of certain places in Dublin as of a -pestilence. There are twenty thousand rooms, in each -of which live entire families, and sometimes more, where -no functions of the body can be concealed, and delicacy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span> -and modesty are creatures that are stifled ere they are -born. The obvious duty of you in regard to these things -you might have left undone, and it be imputed to ignorance -or forgetfulness; but your collective and conscious -action as a class in the present labor dispute has revealed -you to the world in so malign an aspect that the mirror -must be held up to you, so that you may see yourself -as every humane person sees you.</p> - -<p>The conception of yourselves as altogether virtuous -and wronged is, I assure you, not at all the one which -onlookers hold of you.... The representatives of labor -unions in Great Britain met you, and you made of them -a preposterous, an impossible demand, and because they -would not accede to it you closed the Conference; you -refused to meet them further; you assumed that no other -guarantees than those you asked were possible, and you -determined deliberately, in cold anger, to starve out one-third -of the population of this city, to break the manhood -of the men by the sight of the suffering of their -wives and the hunger of their children. We read in the -Dark Ages of the rack and thumbscrew. But these -iniquities were hidden and concealed from the knowledge -of men in dungeons and torture-chambers. Even in the -Dark Ages humanity could not endure the sight of such -suffering, and it learnt of such misuse of power by slow -degrees, through rumor, and when it was certain it razed -its Bastilles to their foundations. It remained for the -twentieth century and the capital city of Ireland to see -an oligarchy of four hundred masters deciding openly -upon starving one hundred thousand people, and refusing -to consider any solution except that fixed by their pride. -You, masters, asked men to do that which masters of -labor in any other city in these islands had not dared<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span> -to do. You insolently demanded of these men who were -members of a trade union that they should resign from -that union; and from those who were not members you -insisted on a vow that they would never join it.</p> - -<p>Your insolence and ignorance of the rights conceded -to workers universally in the modern world were incredible, -and as great as your inhumanity. If you had -between you collectively a portion of human soul as large -as a three-penny bit, you would have sat night and day -with the representatives of labor, trying this or that -solution of the trouble, mindful of the women and children, -who at least were innocent of wrong against you. -But no! You reminded labor you could always have -your three square meals a day while it went hungry. -You went into conference again with representatives of -the State, because, dull as you are, you knew public -opinion would not stand your holding out. You chose -as your spokesman the bitterest tongue that ever wagged -in this island, and then, when an award was made by -men who have an experience in industrial matters a -thousand times transcending yours, who have settled -disputes in industries so great that the sum of your petty -enterprises would not equal them, you withdraw again, -and will not agree to accept their solution, and fall back -again on your devilish policy of starvation. Cry aloud -to Heaven for new souls! The souls you have got cast -upon the screen of publicity appear like the horrid and -writhing creatures enlarged from the insect world, and -revealed to us by the cinematograph.</p> - -<p>You may succeed in your policy and ensure your own -damnation by your victory. The men whose manhood -you have broken will loathe you, and will always be -brooding and scheming to strike a fresh blow. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span> -children will be taught to curse you. The infant being -molded in the womb will have breathed into its starved -body the vitality of hate. It is not they—it is you who -are blind Samsons pulling down the pillars of the social -order. You are sounding the death-knell of autocracy -in industry. There was autocracy in political life, and -it was superseded by democracy. So surely will democratic -power wrest from you the control of industry. The -fate of you, the aristocracy of industry, will be as the -fate of the aristocracy of land if you do not show that -you have some humanity still among you. Humanity -abhors, above all things, a vacuum in itself, and your -class will be cut off from humanity as the surgeon cuts -the cancer and alien growth from the body. Be warned -ere it is too late.</p> - - -<h3>God and the Strong Ones</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Margaret Widdemer</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American poet)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“We have made them fools and weak!” said the Strong Ones:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“We have bound them, they are dumb and deaf and blind;</div> - <div class="verse">We have crushed them in our hands like a heap of crumbling sands,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We have left them naught to seek or find:</div> - <div class="verse">They are quiet at our feet!” said the Strong Ones;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“We have made them one with wood and stone and clod;</div> - <div class="verse">Serf and laborer and woman, they are less than wise or human!—--”</div> - <div class="verse indent6"><em>“I shall raise the weak!” saith God.</em></div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“They are stirring in the dark!” said the Strong Ones,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“They are struggling, who were moveless like the dead;</div> - <div class="verse">We can hear them cry and strain hand and foot against the chain,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We can hear their heavy upward tread....</div> - <div class="verse">What if they are restless?” said the Strong Ones;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“What if they have stirred beneath the rod?</div> - <div class="verse">Fools and weak and blinded men, we can tread them down again——”</div> - <div class="verse indent6"><em>“Shall ye conquer Me?” saith God.</em></div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“They will trample us and bind!” said the Strong Ones;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“We are crushed beneath the blackened feet and hands;</div> - <div class="verse">All the strong and fair and great they will crush from out the state;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They will whelm it with the weight of pressing sands—</div> - <div class="verse">They are maddened and are blind!” said the Strong Ones;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“Black decay has come where they have trod;</div> - <div class="verse">They will break the world in twain if their hands are on the rein—”</div> - <div class="verse indent6"><em>“What is that to me?” saith God.</em></div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><em>“Ye have made them in their strength, who were Strong Ones,.</em></div> - <div class="verse indent2"><em>Ye have only taught the blackness ye have known:.</em></div> - <div class="verse"><em>These are evil men and blind?—Ay, but molded to your mind!.</em></div> - <div class="verse indent2"><em>How shall ye cry out against your own?.</em></div> - <div class="verse"><em>Ye have held the light and beauty I have given.</em></div> - <div class="verse indent2"><em>Far above the muddied ways where they must plod:.</em></div> - <div class="verse"><em>Ye have builded this your lord with the lash and with the sword—.</em></div> - <div class="verse indent6"><em>Reap what ye have sown!” saith God.</em></div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span></p> - -<p>The Weavers</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Gerhart Hauptmann</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p class="poemintro">(German dramatist and poet, born 1862. The present play is a -wonderful picture of the lives of the weavers of Silesia, driven -to revolt by starvation. Moritz, a soldier, has just come home to his -friends)</p></div> - -<p><span class="smcap">Ansorge</span>:—Come, then, Moritz, tell us your opinion, -you that’s been out and seen the world. Are things -at all like improving for us weavers, eh?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Moritz</span>:—They would need to.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Ansorge</span>:—We’re in an awful state here. It’s not -livin’ an’ it’s not dyin’. A man fights to the bitter end, -but he’s bound to be beat at last—to be left without a -roof over his head, you may say without ground under -his feet. As long as he can work at the loom he can -earn some sort o’ poor, miserable livin’. But it’s many -a day since I’ve been able to get that sort o’ job. Now -I tries to put a bite into my mouth with this here basket-makin’. -I sits at it late into the night, and by the time -I tumbles into bed I’ve earned twelve pfennig. I put it -to you if a man can live on that, when everything’s so -dear? Nine marks goes in one lump for house tax, three -marks for land tax, nine marks for mortgage interest—that -makes twenty-one marks. I may reckon my year’s -earnin’s at just double that money, and that leaves me -twenty-one marks for a whole year’s food, an’ fire, an’ -clothes, an’ shoes; and I’ve got to keep up some sort -of place to live in. Is it any wonder that I’m behind-hand -with my interest payments?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Old Baumert</span>:—Some one would need to go to Berlin -an’ tell the King how hard put to it we are.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span></p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Moritz</span>:—Little good that would do, Father Baumert. -There’s been plenty written about it in the newspapers. -But the rich people, they can turn and twist things -round—as cunning as the devil himself.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Old Baumert</span> (<i>shaking his head</i>):—To think they’ve -no more sense than that in Berlin!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Ansorge</span>:—And is it really true, Moritz? Is there -no law to help us? If a man hasn’t been able to scrape -together enough to pay his mortgage interest, though he’s -worked the very skin off his hands, must his house be -taken from him? The peasant that’s lent the money -on it, he wants his rights—what else can you look for -from him? But what’s to be the end of it all, I don’t -know.—If I’m put out o’ the house.... (<i>In a voice -choked by tears.</i>) I was born here, and here my father -sat at his loom for more than forty years. Many was -the time he said to mother: Mother, when I’m gone, the -house’ll still be here. I’ve worked hard for it. Every -nail means a night’s weaving, every plank a year’s dry -bread. A man would think that....</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Moritz</span>:—They’re quite fit to take the last bite out -of your mouth—that’s what they are.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Ansorge</span>:—Well, well, well! I would rather be carried -out than have to walk out now in my old days. -Who minds dyin’? My father, he was glad to die. At -the very end he got frightened, but I crept into bed -beside him, an’ he quieted down again. I was a lad of -thirteen then. I was tired and fell asleep beside him—I -knew no better—and when I woke he was quite cold....</p> - -<p>(<i>They eat the food which the soldier has brought, but the -old man Baumert is too far exhausted to retain it, and has -to run from the room. He comes back crying with rage.</i>)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Baumert</span>:—It’s no good! I’m too far gone! Now<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span> -that I’ve at last got hold of somethin’ with a taste in it, -my stomach won’t keep it. (<i>He sits down on the bench -by the stove crying.</i>)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Moritz</span> (<i>with a sudden violent ebullition of rage</i>):—And -yet there are people not far from here, justices they call -themselves too, over-fed brutes, that have nothing to do -all the year round but invent new ways of wasting their -time. And these people say that the weavers would be -quite well off if only they weren’t so lazy.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Ansorge</span>:—The men as say that are no men at all, -they’re monsters.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Moritz</span>:—Never mind, Father Ansorge; we’re making -the place hot for ’em. Becker and I have been and given -Dreissiger (<i>the master</i>) a piece of our mind, and before -we came away we sang him “Bloody Justice.”</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Ansorge</span>:—Good Lord! Is that the song?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Moritz</span>:—Yes; I have it here.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Ansorge</span>:—They call it Dreissiger’s song, don’t they?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Moritz</span>:—I’ll read it to you.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Mother Baumert</span>:—Who wrote it?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Moritz</span>:—That’s what nobody knows. Now listen. -(<i>He reads, hesitating like a schoolboy, with incorrect accentuation, -but unmistakably strong feeling. Despair, suffering, -rage, hatred, thirst for revenge, all find utterance.</i>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The justice to us weavers dealt</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Is bloody, cruel, and hateful;</div> - <div class="verse">Our life’s one torture, long drawn out:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For lynch law we’d be grateful.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Stretched on the rack day after day,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Hearts sick and bodies aching,</div> - <div class="verse">Our heavy sighs their witness bear</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To spirit slowly breaking.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span></p> -<p>(<i>The words of the song make a strong impression on Old -Baumert. Deeply agitated, he struggles against the temptation -to interrupt Moritz. At last he can keep quiet no -longer.</i>)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Old Baumert</span> (<i>to his wife, half laughing, half crying, -stammering</i>):—“Stretched on the rack day after day.” -Whoever wrote that, mother, knew the truth. You can -bear witness ... eh, how does it go? “Our heavy sighs -their witness bear” ... what’s the rest?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Moritz</span>:—“To spirit slowly breaking.”</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Old Baumert</span>:—You know the way we sigh, mother, -day and night, sleepin’ an’ wakin’.</p> - -<p>(<i>Ansorge has stopped working, and cowers on the floor, -strongly agitated. Mother Baumert and Bertha wipe their -eyes frequently during the course of the reading.</i>)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Moritz</span> (<i>continues to read</i>):—</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The Dreissigers true hangmen are,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Servants no whit behind them;</div> - <div class="verse">Masters and men with one accord</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Set on the poor to grind them.</div> - <div class="verse">You villains all, you brood of hell——</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p><span class="smcap">Old Baumert</span> (<i>trembling with rage, stamping on the -floor</i>):—Yes, brood of hell!!!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Moritz</span> (<i>reads</i>):—</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent2">You fiends in fashion human,</div> - <div class="verse">A curse will fall on all like you,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Who prey on man and woman.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p><span class="smcap">Ansorge</span>:—Yes, yes, a curse upon them!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Old Baumert</span> (<i>clenching his fist, threateningly</i>):—You -prey on man and woman.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span></p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Moritz</span> (<i>reads</i>):—</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Then think of all our woe and want,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">O ye who hear this ditty!</div> - <div class="verse">Our struggle vain for daily bread</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Hard hearts would move to pity.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But pity’s what you’ve never known,—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">You’d take both skin and clothing,</div> - <div class="verse">You cannibals, whose cruel deeds</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Fill all good men with loathing.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p><span class="smcap">Old Baumert</span> (<i>jumps up, beside himself with excitement</i>):—Both -skin and clothing. It’s true, it’s all true! -Here I stand, Robert Baumert, master-weaver of Kaschbach. -Who can bring up anything against me?... -I’ve been an honest, hard-working man all my life long, -an’ look at me now! What have I to show for it? Look -at me! See what they’ve made of me! Stretched on -the rack day after day. (<i>He holds out his arms.</i>) Feel -that! Skin and bone! “You villains all, you brood of -hell!!” (<i>He sinks down on a chair, weeping with rage and -despair.</i>)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Ansorge</span> (<i>flings his basket from him into a corner, -rises, his whole body trembling with rage, gasps</i>):—And the -time’s come now for a change, I say. We’ll stand it no -longer! We’ll stand it no longer! Come what may!</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Alton Locke’s Song: 1848</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charles Kingsley</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Weep, weep, weep and weep</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For pauper, dolt and slave!</div> - <div class="verse">Hark! from wasted moor and fen</div> - <div class="verse">Feverous alley, stifling den,</div> - <div class="verse">Swells the wail of Saxon men—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Work! or the grave!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Down, down, down and down,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With idler, knave, and tyrant!</div> - <div class="verse">Why for sluggards cark and moil?</div> - <div class="verse">He that will not live by toil</div> - <div class="verse">Has no right on English soil!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">God’s word’s our warrant!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Up, up, up and up!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Face your game and play it!</div> - <div class="verse">The night is past, behold the sun!</div> - <div class="verse">The idols fall, the lie is done!</div> - <div class="verse">The Judge is set, the doom begun!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Who shall stay it?</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By G. Bernard Shaw</span></h3> - -<p>Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What -is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is -the matter with the Rich is Uselessness.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Robert G. Ingersoll</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(American lawyer and lecturer, 1883-1899)</p> - -<p>Whoever produces anything by weary labor, does -not need a revelation from heaven to teach him -that he has a right to the thing produced.</p> - - -<h3>Labor</h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(A parody upon a poem by Rudyard Kipling; author unknown. -The poem is frequently, but incorrectly, attributed to -Mr. Kipling)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We have fed you all for a thousand years,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And you hail us still unfed,</div> - <div class="verse">Tho’ there’s never a dollar of all your wealth</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But marks the workers’ dead.</div> - <div class="verse">We have yielded our best to give you rest,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And you lie on crimson wool;</div> - <div class="verse">For if blood be the price of all your wealth</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Good God, we ha’ paid in full!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">There’s never a mine blown skyward now</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But we’re buried alive for you;</div> - <div class="verse">There’s never a wreck drifts shoreward now</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But we are its ghastly crew;</div> - <div class="verse">Go reckon our dead by the forges red,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the factories where we spin.</div> - <div class="verse">If blood be the price of your cursed wealth</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Good God, we ha’ paid it in!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We have fed you all for a thousand years,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For that was our doom, you know,</div> - <div class="verse">From the days when you chained us in your fields</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To the strike of a week ago.</div> - <div class="verse">You ha’ eaten our lives and our babies and wives,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And we’re told it’s your legal share;</div> - <div class="verse">But, if blood be the price of your lawful wealth,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Good God, we ha’ bought it fair!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Two “Reigns of Terror”</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(America’s favorite humorist, 1837-1910)</p> - -<p>There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would -but remember it and consider it; the one wrought -murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; -the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand -years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand -persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders -are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the -momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the -horror of swift death by the axe, compared with life-long -death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? -What is swift death by lightning compared with -death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could -contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we -have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn -over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled -by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter -and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to -see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.</p> - -<p> -(Quoted by special permission of Harper & Brothers.) -</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>In Trafalgar Square</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Songs of the Army of the Night”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Francis W. L. Adams</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_219">219</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The stars shone faint through the smoky blue;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The church-bells were ringing;</div> - <div class="verse">Three girls, arms laced, were passing through,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Tramping and singing.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Their heads were bare; their short skirts swung</div> - <div class="verse indent2">As they went along;</div> - <div class="verse">Their scarf-covered breasts heaved up, as they sung</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their defiant song.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">It was not too clean, their feminine lay,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But it thrilled me quite</div> - <div class="verse">With its challenge to task-master villainous day</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And infamous night,</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With its threat to the robber rich, the proud,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The respectable free.</div> - <div class="verse">And I laughed and shouted to them aloud,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And they shouted to me!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“<em>Girls, that’s the shout, the shout we will utter</em></div> - <div class="verse indent2"><em>When, with rifles and spades,</em></div> - <div class="verse"><em>We stand, with the old Red Flag aflutter,</em></div> - <div class="verse indent2"><em>On the barricades!</em>”</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span></p> - -<p>The Orator on the Barricade</p> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Les Miserables”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Victor Hugo</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_182">182</a>)</p> - -<p>Friends, the hour in which we live, and in which -I speak to you, is a gloomy hour, but of such is the -terrible price of the future. A revolution is a toll-gate. -Oh! the human race shall be delivered, uplifted and consoled! -We affirm it on this barricade. Whence shall -arise the shout of love, if it be not from the summit of -sacrifice? O my brothers, here is the place of junction -between those who think and those who suffer; this -barricade is made neither of paving-stones, nor of timbers, -nor of iron; it is made of two mounds, a mound of -ideas and a mound of sorrows. Misery here encounters -the ideal. Here day embraces night, and says: I will -die with thee and thou shalt be born again with me. -From the pressure of all desolations faith gushes forth. -Sufferings bring their agony here, and ideas their immortality. -This agony and this immortality are to mingle -and compose our death. Brothers, he who dies here -dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering -a grave illumined by the dawn.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Europe: The 72nd and 73rd Years of These States</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Walt Whitman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(The European revolutions of 1848-49)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Suddenly out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves,</div> - <div class="verse">Like lightning it le’pt forth half startled at itself,</div> - <div class="verse">Its feet upon the ashes and the rags, its hands tight to the throats of kings.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O hope and faith!</div> - <div class="verse">O aching close of exiled patriots’ lives!</div> - <div class="verse">O many a sicken’d heart!</div> - <div class="verse">Turn back unto this day, and make yourselves afresh.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And you, paid to defile the People! you liars, mark!</div> - <div class="verse">Not for numberless agonies, murders, lusts,</div> - <div class="verse">For court thieving in its manifold mean forms, worming from his simplicity the poor man’s wages,</div> - <div class="verse">For many a promise sworn by royal lips, and broken, and laugh’d at in the breaking,</div> - <div class="verse">Then in their power, not for all these, did the blows strike revenge, or the heads of the nobles fall;</div> - <div class="verse">The People scorn’d the ferocity of kings.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But the sweetness of mercy brew’d bitter destruction, and the frighten’d monarchs come back;</div> - <div class="verse">Each comes in state, with his train—hangman, priest, tax-gatherer,</div> - <div class="verse">Soldier, lawyer, lord, jailer, and sycophant.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Yet behind all, lowering, stealing—lo, a Shape,</div> - <div class="verse">Vague as the night, draped interminable, head, front, and form, in scarlet folds,</div> - <div class="verse">Whose face and eyes none may see,</div> - <div class="verse">Out of its robes only this—the red robes, lifted by the arm,</div> - <div class="verse">One finger, crook’d, pointed high over the top, like the head of a snake appears.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Meanwhile, corpses lie in new-made graves—bloody corpses of young men;</div> - <div class="verse">The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of princes are flying, the creatures of power laugh aloud,</div> - <div class="verse">And all these things bear fruits—and they are good.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Those corpses of young men,</div> - <div class="verse">Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets—those hearts pierc’d by the gray lead,</div> - <div class="verse">Cold and motionless as they seem, live elsewhere with unslaughter’d vitality.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They live in other young men, O kings!</div> - <div class="verse">They live in brothers again ready to defy you!</div> - <div class="verse">They were purified by death—they were taught and exalted.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Not a grave of the murder’d for freedom, but grows seed for freedom, in its turn to bear seed,</div> - <div class="verse">Which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the snows nourish.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Not a disembodied spirit can the weapons of tyrants let loose,</div> - <div class="verse">But it stalks invisibly over the earth, whispering, counselling, cautioning.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Liberty! let others despair of you! I never despair of you.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Is the house shut? Is the master away?</div> - <div class="verse">Nevertheless, be ready—be not weary of watching;</div> - <div class="verse">He will return soon—his messengers come anon.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Dead to the Living</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Ferdinand Freiligrath</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p class="poemintro">(German revolutionary poet, 1810-1876. Part of a poem written -after the uprising of 1848, in Berlin, when the people marched -past the palace-gates with their slain, and compelled the king to -stand upon the balcony and take off his hat to the bodies)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With bullets through and through our breast—our forehead split with pike and spear,</div> - <div class="verse">So bear us onward shoulder high, laid dead upon a blood-stained bier;</div> - <div class="verse">Yea, shoulder-high above the crowd, that on the man that bade us die,</div> - <div class="verse">Our dreadful death-distorted face may be a bitter curse for aye;</div> - <div class="verse">That he may see it day and night, or when he wakes, or when he sleeps,</div> - <div class="verse">Or when he opes his holy book, or when with wine high revel keeps;</div> - <div class="verse">That always each disfeatured face, each gaping wound his sight may sear,</div> - <div class="verse">And brood above his bed of death, and curdle all his blood with fear!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Free Speech</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Sir Leslie Stephen</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English essayist and critic, 1832-1904)</p> - -<p>I, for one, am fully prepared to listen to any arguments -for the propriety of theft or murder, or if -it be possible, of immorality in the abstract. No doctrine, -however well established, should be protected from -discussion. If, as a matter of fact, any appreciable -number of persons are so inclined to advocate murder -on principle, I should wish them to state their opinions -openly and fearlessly, because I should think that the -shortest way of exploding the principle and of ascertaining -the true causes of such a perversion of moral sentiment. -Such a state of things implies the existence of -evils which cannot be really cured till their cause is -known, and the shortest way to discover the cause is -to give a hearing to the alleged reasons.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Wendell Phillips</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(American anti-slavery agitator, 1811-1884)</p> - -<p>If there is anything that cannot bear free thought, -let it crack.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Mask of Anarchy</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Percy Bysshe Shelley</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet of nature and human liberty, 1792-1822, whose whole -life was a cry for beauty and freedom. He died in obloquy and -neglect, and today is known as “the Poets’ Poet”)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Men of England, Heirs of Glory,</div> - <div class="verse">Heroes of unwritten story,</div> - <div class="verse">Nurslings of one mighty mother,</div> - <div class="verse">Hopes of her, and one another!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Rise, like lions after slumber,</div> - <div class="verse">In unvanquishable number,</div> - <div class="verse">Shake your chains to earth like dew,</div> - <div class="verse">Which in sleep had fall’n on you.</div> - <div class="verse">Ye are many, they are few.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">What is Freedom! Ye can tell</div> - <div class="verse">That which Slavery is too well,</div> - <div class="verse">For its very name has grown</div> - <div class="verse">To an echo of your own.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">’Tis to work, and have such pay</div> - <div class="verse">As just keeps life from day to day</div> - <div class="verse">In your limbs as in a cell</div> - <div class="verse">For the tyrants’ use to dwell:</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">So that ye for them are made,</div> - <div class="verse">Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade;</div> - <div class="verse">With or without your own will, bent</div> - <div class="verse">To their defence and nourishment.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">’Tis to see your children weak</div> - <div class="verse">With their mothers pine and peak,</div> - <div class="verse">When the winter winds are bleak:—</div> - <div class="verse">They are dying whilst I speak.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">’Tis to hunger for such diet</div> - <div class="verse">As the rich man in his riot</div> - <div class="verse">Casts to the fat dogs that lie</div> - <div class="verse">Surfeiting beneath his eye.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">’Tis to be a slave in soul,</div> - <div class="verse">And to hold no strong control</div> - <div class="verse">Over your own wills, but be</div> - <div class="verse">All that others make of ye.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Real Liberty</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Henrik Ibsen</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_241">241</a>)</p> - -<p>Away with the State! I will take part in that revolution. -Undermine the whole conception of a state, -declare free choice and spiritual kinship to be the only -all-important conditions of any union, and you will have -the commencement of a liberty that is worth something.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Christmas in Prison</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Jungle”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Upton Sinclair</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>)</p> - -<p>In the distance there was a church-tower bell that -tolled the hours one by one. When it came to midnight -Jurgis was lying upon the floor with his head in -his arms, listening. Instead of falling silent at the end, -the bell broke out into a sudden clangor. Jurgis raised -his head; what could that mean—a fire? God! suppose -there were to be a fire in this jail! But then he made -out a melody in the ringing; there were chimes. And -they seemed to waken the city—all around, far and near, -there were bells, ringing wild music; for fully a minute -Jurgis lay lost in wonder, before, all at once, the meaning -of it broke over him—that this was Christmas Eve!</p> - -<p>Christmas Eve—he had forgotten it entirely! There -was a breaking of flood-gates, a whirl of new memories -and new griefs rushing into his mind. In far Lithuania -they had celebrated Christmas; and it came to him as -if it had been yesterday—himself a little child, with his -lost brother and his dead father in the cabin in the deep -black forest, where the snow fell all day and all night and -buried them from the world. It was too far off for Santa -Claus in Lithuania, but it was not too far for peace and -good-will to men, for the wonder-bearing vision of the -Christ-child.</p> - -<p>But no, their bells were not ringing for him—their -Christmas was not meant for him, they were simply not -counting him at all. He was of no consequence, like a -bit of trash, the carcass of some animal. It was horrible,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span> -horrible! His wife might be dying, his baby might be -starving, his whole family might be perishing in the -cold—and all the while they were ringing their Christmas -chimes! And the bitter mockery of it—all this was -punishment for him! They put him in a place where -the snow could not beat in, where the cold could not eat -through his bones; they brought him food and drink—why, -in the name of heaven, if they must punish him, -did they not put his family in jail and leave him outside—why -could they find no better way to punish him than -to leave three weak women and six helpless children to -starve and freeze?</p> - -<p>That was their law, that was their justice! Jurgis -stood upright, trembling with passion, his hands clenched -and his arms upraised, his whole soul ablaze with hatred -and defiance. Ten thousand curses upon them and their -law! Their justice—it was a lie, a sham and a loathsome -mockery. There was no justice, there was no right, -anywhere in it—it was only force, it was tyranny, the -will and the power, reckless and unrestrained!</p> - -<p>These midnight hours were fateful ones to Jurgis; in -them was the beginning of his rebellion, of his outlawry -and his unbelief. He had no wit to trace back the social -crime to its far sources—he could not say it was the thing -men have called “the system” that was crushing him -to the earth; that it was the packers, his masters, who -had bought up the law of the land, and had dealt out -their brutal will to him from the seat of justice. He -only knew that he was wronged, and that the world had -wronged him; that the law, that society, with all its -powers, had declared itself his foe. And every hour his -soul grew blacker, every hour he dreamed new dreams -of vengeance, of defiance, of raging, frenzied hate.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Robbers and Governments</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Leo Tolstoy</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>)</p> - -<p>The robber generally plundered the rich, the governments -generally plunder the poor and protect those -rich who assist in their crimes. The robber doing his -work risked his life, while the governments risk nothing, -but base their whole activity on lies and deception. The -robber did not compel anyone to join his band, the governments -generally enrol their soldiers by force.... The -robber did not intentionally vitiate people, but the governments, -to accomplish their ends, vitiate whole generations -from childhood to manhood with false religions and -patriotic instruction.</p> - - -<h3>“Gunmen” in Israel</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “A Sociological Study of the Bible”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Louis Wallis</span></p> - -<p>We saw that the great revolt under David was put -down by the assistance of mercenary troops, or -hired “strong men,” and that by their aid Solomon was -elevated to the throne against the wishes of the peasantry. -In the Hebrew text, these men of power are called <i lang="he" xml:lang="he">gibborim</i>. -They were among the principal tools used by -the kings in maintaining the government. It was the -<i lang="he" xml:lang="he">gibborim</i> who garrisoned the royal strongholds that held -the country in awe. In cases where the peasants refused -to submit, bands of <i lang="he" xml:lang="he">gibborim</i> were sent out by the kings -and the great nobles. Through them the peasantry were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span> -“civilized”; and through them, apparently, the Amorite -law was enforced in opposition to the old justice.</p> - -<p>Hence the prophets were very bitter against these tools -of the ruling class. Hosea writes: “Thou didst trust in -thy way, in the multitude of thy <i lang="he" xml:lang="he">gibborim</i>; therefore -shall a tumult arise against thy people; and all thy fortresses -shall be destroyed.” Amos, the shepherd, says -that when Jehovah shall punish the land, the <i lang="he" xml:lang="he">gibborim</i> -shall fall: “Flight shall perish from the swift ... neither -shall the <i lang="he" xml:lang="he">gibbor</i> deliver himself; neither shall he stand -that handeth the bow; and he that is swift of foot shall -not deliver himself; ... and he that is courageous among -the <i lang="he" xml:lang="he">gibborim</i> shall flee away naked in that day, saith -Jehovah.”</p> - - -<h3>“Gunmen” in West Virginia</h3> - -<p class="center">(“<cite>When the Leaves Come Out</cite>”)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By a Paint Creek Miner</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Written during the terrible strike of 1911-12)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The hills are very bare and cold and lonely;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I wonder what the future months will bring.</div> - <div class="verse">The strike is on—our strength would win, if only—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">O, Buddy, how I’m longing for the spring!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They’ve got us down—their martial lines enfold us;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They’ve thrown us out to feel the winter’s sting,</div> - <div class="verse">And yet, by God, those curs can never hold us,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Nor could the dogs of hell do such a thing!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">It isn’t just to see the hills beside me</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Grow fresh and green with every growing thing;</div> - <div class="verse">I only want the leaves to come and hide me,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To cover up my vengeful wandering.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I will not watch the floating clouds that hover</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Above the birds that warble on the wing;</div> - <div class="verse">I want to use this <span class="smcap">GUN</span> from under cover—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">O, Buddy, how I’m longing for the spring!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">You see them there, below, the damned scab-herders!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Those puppets on the greedy Owners’ String;</div> - <div class="verse">We’ll make them pay for all their dirty murders—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We’ll show them how a starveling’s hate can sting!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They riddled us with volley after volley;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We heard their speeding bullets zip and ring,</div> - <div class="verse">But soon we’ll make them suffer for their folly—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">O, Buddy, how I’m longing for the spring!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From Ecclesiastes</span></h3> - -<p>Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad.</p> - - -<h3>Political Violence</h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(From an Anarchist pamphlet published in London; -author unknown)</p> - -<p>Under miserable conditions of life, any vision of the -possibility of better things makes the present misery -more intolerable, and spurs those who suffer to the -most energetic struggles to improve their lot; and if<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span> -these struggles only result in sharper misery, the outcome -is sheer desperation. In our present society, for -instance, an exploited wage worker, who catches a glimpse -of what life and work ought to be, finds the toilsome -routine and the squalor of his existence almost intolerable; -and even when he has the resolution and courage to continue -steadily working his best, and waiting until new -ideas have so permeated society as to pave the way for -better times, the mere fact that he has such ideas and -tries to spread them, brings him into difficulties with his -employers. How many thousands of Socialists, and -above all Anarchists, have lost work and even the chance -of work, solely on the ground of their opinions. It is -only the specially gifted craftsman who, if he be a zealous -propagandist, can hope to retain permanent employment. -And what happens to a man with his brain working -actively with a ferment of new ideas, with a vision before -his eyes of a new hope dawning for toiling and agonizing -men, with the knowledge that his suffering and that of -his fellows in misery is not caused by the cruelty of fate, -but by the injustice of other human beings,—what happens -to such a man when he sees those dear to him -starving, when he himself is starved? Some natures in -such a plight, and those by no means the least social or -the least sensitive, will become violent, and will even feel -that their violence is social and not anti-social, that in -striking when and how they can, they are striking, not -for themselves, but for human nature, outraged and -despoiled in their persons and in those of their fellow -sufferers. And are we, who ourselves are not in this -horrible predicament, to stand by and coldly condemn -those piteous victims of the Furies and Fates? Are we -to decry as miscreants these human beings who act with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span> -heroic self-devotion, sacrificing their lives in protest, -where less social and less energetic natures would lie -down and grovel in abject submission to injustice and -wrong? Are we to join the ignorant and brutal outcry -which stigmatizes such men as monsters of wickedness, -gratuitously running amuck in a harmonious and innocently -peaceful society? No! We hate murder with a -hatred that may seem absurdly exaggerated to apologists -for Matabele massacres, to callous acquiescers in hangings -and bombardments; but we decline in such cases of homicide, -or attempted homicide, as those of which we are -treating, to be guilty of the cruel injustice of flinging the -whole responsibility of the deed upon the immediate perpetrator. -The guilt of these homicides lies upon every -man and woman who, intentionally or by cold indifference, -helps to keep up social conditions that drive human -beings to despair. The man who flings his whole life -into the attempt, at the cost of his own life, to protest -against the wrongs of his fellow-men, is a saint compared -to the active and passive upholders of cruelty and injustice, -even if his protest destroys other lives besides his -own. Let him who is without sin in society cast the first -stone at such an one.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Bomb</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Frank Harris</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(The English author, born 1855, author of “The Man Shakespeare,” -has in this novel told the inside story of the Haymarket -explosion in Chicago in 1886. The following passage describes the -treatment which the strikers received from the police)</p></div> - -<p>A meeting was called on a waste space in Packingtown, -and over a thousand workmen came together. -I went there out of curiosity. Lingg, I may say here, -always went alone to these strike meetings. Ida told me -once that he suffered so much at them that he could not -bear to be seen, and perhaps that was the explanation of -his solitary ways. Fielden, the Englishman, spoke first, -and was cheered to the echo; the workmen knew him as -a working-man and liked him; besides, he talked in a -homely way, and was easy to understand. Spies spoke -in German and was cheered also. The meeting was -perfectly orderly when three hundred police tried to disperse -it. The action was ill-advised, to say the best of -it, and tyrannical; the strikers were hurting no one and -interfering with no one. Without warning or reason the -police tried to push their way through the crowd to the -speakers; finding a sort of passive resistance and not -being able to overcome it, they used their clubs savagely. -One or two of the strikers, hot-headed, bared their knives, -and at once the police, led on by that madman, Schaack, -drew their revolvers and fired. It looked as if the police -had been waiting for the opportunity. Three strikers -were shot dead on the spot, and more than twenty were -wounded, several of them dangerously, before the mob -drew sullenly away from the horrible place. A leader,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span> -a word, and not one of the police would have escaped -alive; but the leader was not there, and the word was -not given, so the wrong was done, and went unpunished.</p> - -<p>I do not know how I reached my room that afternoon. -The sight of the dead men lying stark there in the snow -had excited me to madness. The picture of one man -followed me like an obsession; he was wounded to death, -shot through the lungs; he lifted himself up on his left -hand and shook the right at the police, crying in a sort -of frenzy till the spouting blood choked him—</p> - -<p>“Bestien! Bestien!” (“Beasts! Beasts!”)</p> - -<p>I can still see him wiping the blood-stained froth from -his lips; I went to help him; but all he could gasp was, -“Weib! Kinder! (Wife, children!)” Never shall I forget -the despair in his face. I supported him gently; again -and again I wiped the blood from his lips; every breath -brought up a flood; his poor eyes thanked me, though -he could not speak, and soon his eyes closed; flickered -out, as one might say, and he lay there still enough in -his own blood; “murdered,” as I said to myself when -I laid the poor body back; “murdered!”</p> - -<p>(<i>As a result of this police action, the narrator goes to -the next meeting of the strikers with a bomb in his pocket.</i>)</p> - -<p>The crowd began to drift away at the edges. I was -alone and curiously watchful. I saw the mayor and the -officials move off towards the business part of the town. -It looked for a few minutes as if everything was going -to pass over in peace; but I was not relieved. I could -hear my own heart beating, and suddenly I felt something -in the air; it was sentient with expectancy. I slowly -turned my head. I was on the very outskirts of the -crowd, and as I turned I saw that Bonfield had marched -out his police, and was minded to take his own way with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span> -the meeting now that the mayor had left. I felt personal -antagonism stiffen my muscles.... It grew darker -and darker every moment. Suddenly there came a flash, -and then a peal of thunder. At the end of the flash, as -it seemed to me, I saw the white clubs falling, saw the -police striking down the men running along the sidewalk. -At once my mind was made up. I put my left -hand on the outside of my trousers to hold the bomb -tight, and my right hand into the pocket, and drew the -tape. I heard a little rasp. I began to count slowly, -“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven;” as I got to -seven the police were quite close to me, bludgeoning -every one furiously. Two or three of the foremost had -drawn their revolvers. The crowd were flying in all -directions. Suddenly there was a shot, and then a dozen -shots, all, it seemed to me, fired by the police. Rage -blazed in me.</p> - -<p>I took the bomb out of my pocket, careless whether -I was seen or not, and looked for the right place to throw -it; then I hurled it over my shoulder high in the air, -towards the middle of the police, and at the same moment -I stumbled forward, just as if I had fallen, throwing -myself on my hands and face, for I had seen the spark. -It seemed as if I had been on my hands for an eternity, -when I was crushed to the ground, and my ears split -with the roar. I scrambled to my feet again, gasping. -Men were thrown down in front of me, and were getting -up on their hands. I heard groans and cries, and shrieks -behind me. I turned around; as I turned a strong arm -was thrust through mine, and I heard Lingg say—</p> - -<p>“Come, Rudolph, this way;” and he drew me to the -sidewalk, and we walked past where the police had been.</p> - -<p>“Don’t look,” he whispered suddenly; “don’t look.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span></p> - -<p>But before he spoke I had looked, and what I saw -will be before my eyes till I die. The street was one -shambles; in the very center of it a great pit yawned, -and round it men lying, or pieces of men, in every direction, -and close to me, near the side-walk as I passed, a -leg and foot torn off, and near by two huge pieces of -bleeding red meat, skewered together with a thigh-bone. -My soul sickened; my senses left me; but Lingg held -me up with superhuman strength, and drew me along.</p> - -<p>“Hold yourself up, Rudolph,” he whispered; “come on, -man,” and the next moment we had passed it all, and -I clung to him, trembling like a leaf. When we got to -the end of the block I realized that I was wet through -from head to foot, as if I had been plunged in cold water.</p> - -<p>“I must stop,” I gasped. “I cannot walk, Lingg.”</p> - -<p>“Nonsense,” he said; “take a drink of this,” and he -thrust a flask of brandy into my hand. The brandy -I poured down my throat set my heart beating again, -allowed me to breathe, and I walked on with him.</p> - -<p>“How you are shaking,” he said. “Strange, you -neurotic people; you do everything perfectly, splendidly, -and then break down like women. Come, I am not -going to leave you; but for God’s sake throw off that -shaken, white look. Drink some more.”</p> - -<p>I tried to; but the flask was empty. He put it back -in his pocket.</p> - -<p>“Here is the bottle,” he said. “I have brought enough; -but we must get to the depot.”</p> - -<p>We saw fire engines with police on them, galloping like -madmen in the direction whence we had come. The -streets were crowded with people, talking, gesticulating, -like actors. Every one seemed to know of the bomb -already, and to be talking about it. I noticed that even<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span> -here, fully a block away, the pavement was covered with -pieces of glass; all the windows had been broken by the -explosion.</p> - -<p>As we came in front of the depot, just before we passed -into the full glare of the arc-lamps, Lingg said—</p> - -<p>“Let me look at you,” and as he let go my arm, I -almost fell; my legs were like German sausages; they -felt as if they had no bones in them, and would bend in -any direction; in spite of every effort they would shake.</p> - -<p>“Come, Rudolph,” he said, “we’ll stop and talk; but -you must come to yourself. Take another drink, and -think of nothing. I will save you; you are too good to -lose. Come, dear friend, don’t let them crow over us.”</p> - -<p>My heart seemed to be in my mouth, but I swallowed -it down. I took another swig of brandy, and then a -long drink of it. It might have been water for all I tasted; -but it seemed to do me some little good. In a minute -or so I had got hold of myself.</p> - -<p>“I’m all right,” I said; “what is there to do now?”</p> - -<p>“Simply to go through the depot,” he said, “as if there -were nothing the matter, and take the train.”</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a><br /><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK VI</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><i>Martyrdom</i></p> - -<p>Messages and records of the heroes of past and present who -have sacrificed themselves for the sake of the future.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a><br /><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Social Ideals</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Vida D. Scudder</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Professor at Wellesley College, Mass.; born 1861)</p> - -<p>Deeper than all theories, apart from all discussion, -the mighty instinct for social justice shapes the -hearts that are ready to receive it. The personal types -thus created are the harbingers of the victory of the cause -of freedom. The heralds of freedom, they are also its -martyrs. The delicate vibrations of their consciousness -thrill through the larger social self which more stolid -people still ignore, and the pain of the world is their own. -Not for one instant can they know an undimmed joy -in art, in thought, in nature while part of their very life -throbs in the hunger of the dispossessed. All this by no -virtue, no choice of their own. So were they born: the -children of the new age, whom the new intuition governs. -In every country, out of every class, they gather: men -and women vowed to simplicity of life and to social -service; possessed by a force mightier than themselves, -over which they have no control; aware of the lack of -social harmony in our civilization, restless with pain, -perplexity, distress, yet filled with deep inward peace as -they obey the imperative claim of a widened consciousness. -By active ministry, and yet more by prayer and -fast and vigil, they seek to prepare the way for the -spiritual democracy on which their souls are set.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Le Père Perdrix</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charles-Louis Philippe</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(A poor and obscure clerk of the municipality of Paris, 1875-1909, -who wrote seven volumes of fiction which have placed his name -among the masters of French literature. He wrote of the poor -whose lives he knew, and his work is characterized by fidelity to truth, -beauty of sentiment, and rare charm of style. The following scene -is in the home of a workingman, who by heavy sacrifice has succeeded -in educating his only son. One day unexpectedly the son -returns home)</p></div> - -<p>Pierre Bousset said, “How does it happen that -you come to-day?”</p> - -<p>Jean sat down with slowness enough, and one saw -yet another thing sit down in the house. The mother -said, “I guess you haven’t eaten. I’ll make a little -chocolate before noon-time.”</p> - -<p>Jean’s tongue was loosed. “Here it is. There is something -new. It is necessary to tell you: I have left my -place!”</p> - -<p>“How! You have left your place!” They sat up all -three—Pierre Bousset with his apron and his back of -labor; and Jean saw that he had gray hair. The mother -held a saucepan in her hand, careful like a kitchen-servant, -but with feelings as if the saucepan were about to fall. -Marguerite, the sister, was already weeping: “Ah, my -God! I who was so proud!”</p> - -<p>Pierre Bousset said, “And how did you manage that -clever stroke?”</p> - -<p>It was then that Jean felt his soul wither, and there -rose up from the depths of his heart all the needs, all the -mists of love. It was necessary that they should live -side by side and understand one another, and it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span> -necessary that someone should begin to weaken. He -said, “Does one ever know what one does?”</p> - -<p>“Ah, indeed!” said the father. “You don’t know -what you do?”</p> - -<p>“There are moments,” answered Jean, “when one -loses his head, and afterwards I don’t say one should -not have regrets.”</p> - -<p>“For the matter of losing one’s head, I know only -one thing: It is that they pay you, and it is up to you -always to obey whatever they command.”</p> - -<p>The mother watched the chocolate, from which the -steam rose with a warmth of strong nutriment. They -loved that in the family, like a Sunday morning indulgence, -like a bourgeois chocolate for holiday folk. She -said, “Anyhow, let it be as it will, he’s got to eat.”</p> - -<p>Jean went on to speak. His blue eyes had undergone -the first transformation which comes in a man’s life, -when he is no longer Jean, son of Pierre, pupil at the -Central school, but Jean Bousset, engineer of applied -chemistry. There remained in them, however, the shining -of a young girl, that emotion which wakens two rays -of sunlight in a spring. And now they kept a sort of -supplication, like the sweetness of a naked infant.</p> - -<p>“Oh, I know everything that you are going to say. -You cannot excuse me, because you are not in my place, -and I cannot condemn a movement of my heart. You -know—I wrote it to you—the workers were about to go -on strike. At once I said to myself that these were matters -which did not concern me; because, when you are -taking care of yourself, it is not necessary to look any -farther. But Cousin François explained it all to me.”</p> - -<p>“Ah, I told you so!” cried Pierre Bousset. “When -you wanted to take Cousin François into your factory,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span> -I said to you: ‘Relatives, it is necessary always to keep -them at a distance. They push themselves forward, and -sometimes, to excuse them one is led to commit whole -heaps of lowness.’”</p> - -<p>“In truth,” said Jean, “I would never have had to -complain of him. On the contrary, he wore his heart -on his sleeve.”</p> - -<p>“Oh, all drunkards are like that. One says: ‘They -wear their hearts on their sleeve,’ and one does not count -all the times when they lead the others away.”</p> - -<p>“Ah, I have understood many things, father. How -can I explain everything that I have understood! There -are moments still when, to see and to realize—that makes -in my head a noise as if the world would not stay in place. -I tell you again it was François who made me understand. -I saw, in the evenings. I would say to him: ‘I am -bored, I haven’t even a comrade, and I eat at hotel-tables -a dinner too well served.’ He said: ‘Come to my -house. You don’t know what it is to eat good things, -because you don’t work, and because hunger makes a -part of work. You will have some soup with us, and -we will tell you at least that you are happy to be where -you are, and to look upon the workingman while playing -the amateur.’ I said to him: ‘But I work, also. To see, -to understand, to analyze, to be an engineer! You, it’s -your arms; me, it’s my head and my heart that ache.’ -He laughed: ‘Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! When I come home -in the evening with my throat dry and I eat my soup, -I also have a headache, and I laugh at you with your -heart-ache. I am as tired as a wolf. What’s that you -call your heart?’”</p> - -<p>“Yes, he was right there,” said Pierre Bousset. “For -my part, I don’t understand at all how you are going<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span> -to pull through. You have understood a lot of things! -As for me, I understand but one thing, which is you are -unhappy over being too happy.”</p> - -<p>Jean went on speaking, with his blue eyes, like a madness, -like a ribbon, like a rosette without any reason -which a young girl puts on her forehead. A sweetness -came out of his heart to spread itself in the room, where -the furniture gave off angular and waxy reflections. -Marguerite listened, with restlessness, listened to her -father, like a child whose habit it is to be guided by her -parents. The mother saw to the chocolate, in a state of -confusion, shaking her head.</p> - -<p>“Yesterday I was in the office of the superintendent. -It was then that the delegation arrived. It seems to me -that I see them again. There were three workingmen. -They had taken to white shirts, and they had just washed -their hands. You know how the poor come into the homes -of the rich. There was a great racket, and their steps -were put down with so much embarrassment that one felt -in the hearts of the three men the shame of crushed things. -I had already thought about that poverty which, knowing -that it soils, hides itself, and dares not even touch an -object. They said: ‘Well, Mr. Superintendent, we have -been sent to talk to you. For more than ten years now -we have worked in the factory. We get seventy cents -a day. That’s not much to tell about. We have wives -and children, and our seventy cents hardly carries us -farther than a glass of brandy and a little plate of soup. -We understand that you also have expenses. But we -should like to get eighty cents a day, and for us to explain -every thing to you, it is necessary that you should consent, -because money gives courage to the workingman.’ -The other received them with that assurance of the rich,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span> -sitting straight up in his chair and holding his head as -if it dominated your own. He would not have had much -trouble, with his education, his habits of a master, his -stability as a man of affairs, to put them all three ill at -ease. ‘Gentlemen, from the first word I say to you: -No. The company cannot take account of your wishes. -We pay you seventy cents a day, and we judge that it -is up to you to lower your life to your wages. As for -your insinuations, I shall employ such means as please -me to fortify your courage. For the rest, our profits -are not what you imagine, you who know neither our -efforts nor our disappointments.’ It was then, father, -that I felt myself your son, and that I recalled your -hands, your back which toils, and the carriage wheels -that you make. The three workingmen seemed three -children in their father’s home, with hearts that swell -and can feel no more. Ah, it was in vain I thought -myself an engineer! On the benches of the school I -imagined that my head was full of science, and that that -sufficed. But all the blood of my father, the days that -I passed in your shop, the storms which go to one’s head -and seem to come from far off, all that cried out like a -grimace, like a lock, like a key.<a name="FNanchor_17" id="FNanchor_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17" class="fnanchor">[Q]</a> I took up the argument. -‘Mr. Superintendent, I know these men. There is my -cousin who works in the factory. Do you understand -what it is, the life of acids, and that of charcoal?’ If -you could have seen him! He looked at me with eyes, -as if their pupils had turned to ice. ‘Mr. Engineer, I -don’t permit either you, who are a child, or these, who -are workingmen, a single word to discuss my sayings -and my actions! Gentlemen, you may retire.’ I went -straight off the handle. A door opened at a single burst.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span> -We have at least insolence, we poor, and blows of the -mouth, since their weapons stop our blows of the teeth. -I went away like them. They lowered their heads and -thought. For my part I cried out, I turned about and -cried, ‘You be hanged!’”</p> - -<p>“Ah, now, indeed! I didn’t expect anything like -that,” said Pierre Bousset. “One raises children to make -gentle-folk of them, so that they will work a little less -than you. Now then, in God’s name! go and demand -a place of those for whom you have lost your own!”</p> - - -<h3>The Duty of Civil Disobedience</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Henry David Thoreau</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(The New England essayist, 1817-1862, author of “Walden,” -went to prison because he refused to pay taxes to a government -which returned fugitive slaves to the South. It is narrated that -Emerson came to him and asked, “Henry, what are you doing in -here?” “Waldo,” was the answer, “what are you doing out of -here?”)</p></div> - -<p>Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, -the true place for a just man is also a prison. The -proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts -has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, -is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the -State by her own act, as they have already put themselves -out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive -slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the -Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find -them; on that separate but more free and honorable -ground, where the State places those who are not <em>with</em><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[296]</a></span> -her but <em>against</em> her—the only house in a slave State in -which a free man can abide with honor.</p> - -<p>If any think that their influence would be lost there, -and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that -they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do -not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor -how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat -injustice who has experienced a little in his own -person.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo296" id="illo296">[illo296]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_296f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>THE SURPRISE</p> - -<p>ILYÁ EFÍMOVITCH -REPIN</p> - -<p>(<i>Russian painter, -born 1844</i>)</p></div> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo297" id="illo297">[illo297]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_297f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>THE END</p> - -<p>KÄTHE KOLLWITZ</p> - -<p>(<i>Contemporary German -etching; from the -“Weaver-cycle”</i>)</p></div> -</div> - - -<h3>Address to the Jury</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Arturo M. Giovannitti</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Italian student and clergyman, born 1884, who left the Church -for the labor movement. During the strike at Lawrence, Mass., -he was arrested upon a charge of “constructive murder.” He -spoke in his own defense at Salem Court House, November 23, -1912)</p></div> - - -<p><span class="smcap">Mr. Foreman and Gentlemen of the Jury</span>:—</p> - -<p>It is the first time in my life that I speak publicly -in your wonderful language, and the most solemn -moment in my life. I know not if I will go to the end -of my remarks. The District Attorney and the other -gentlemen here who are used to measure all human emotions -with the yardstick may not understand the tumult -that is going on in my soul at this moment. But my -friends and my comrades before me, these gentlemen -here who have been with me for the last seven or eight -months, know exactly, and if my words will fail before -I reach the end of this short statement to you, it will -be because of the superabundance of sentiments that are -flooding to my heart.</p> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[297]</a></span></p> -<p>I speak to you not because I want to review this evidence -at all. I shall not enter into the evidence that has -been offered here, as I feel that you gentlemen of the jury -have by this time a firm and set conviction; by this -time you ought to know, you ought to have realized -whether I said or whether I did not say those words -that have been put into my mouth by those two detectives. -You ought to know whether it is possible, not for -a man like me but for any living human being to say -those atrocious, those flagitious words that have been -attributed to me. I say only this in regard to the evidence -that has been introduced in this case, that if there is or -ever has been murder in the heart of any man that is -in this courtroom today, gentlemen of the jury, that man -is not sitting in this cage. We had come to Lawrence, -as my noble comrade Mr. Ettor said, because we were -prompted by something higher and loftier than what the -District Attorney or any other man in this presence here -may understand and realize. Were I not afraid that -I was being somewhat sacrilegious, I would say that to -go and investigate into the motives that prompted and -actuated us to go into Lawrence would be the same as -to inquire, why did the Saviour come on earth, or why -was Lloyd Garrison in this very Commonwealth, in the -city of Boston, dragged through the streets with a rope -around his neck? Why did all the other great men and -masters of thought—why did they go to preach this new -gospel of fraternity and brotherhood? It is just that -truth should be ascertained, it is right that the criminal -should be brought before the bar of justice. But one -side alone of our story has been told here. There has -been brought only one side of this great industrial question, -the method and the tactics. But what about, I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[298]</a></span> -say, the ethical part of this question? What about the -human and humane part of our ideas? What about the -grand condition of tomorrow as we see it, and as we -foretell it now to the workers at large, here in this same -cage where the felon has sat, in this same cage where the -drunkard, where the prostitute, where the hired assassin -has been? What about the better and nobler humanity -where there shall be no more slaves, where no man will -ever be obliged to go on strike in order to obtain fifty -cents a week more, where children will not have to starve -any more, where women no more will have to go and -prostitute themselves; where at last there will not be -any more slaves, any more masters, but one great family -of friends and brothers. It may be, gentlemen of the -jury, that you do not believe in that. It may be that -we are dreamers; it may be that we are fanatics, Mr. -District Attorney. But so was a fanatic Socrates, who -instead of acknowledging the philosophy of the aristocrats -of Athens, preferred to drink the poison. And so was a -fanatic the Saviour Jesus Christ, who instead of acknowledging -that Pilate, or that Tiberius was emperor of Rome, -and instead of acknowledging his submission to all the -rulers of the time and all the priestcraft of the time, preferred -the cross between two thieves.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(German philosopher and poet, 1749-1832)</p> - -<p>All those who oppose intellectual truths merely stir -up the fire; the cinders fly about and set fire to -that which else they had not touched.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[299]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Essay on Liberty</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Stuart Mill</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English philosopher and economist, 1806-1873)</p> - -<p>Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that -there was once a man named Socrates, between -whom and the legal authorities and public opinion of his -time, there took place a memorable collision. Born in -an age and country abounding in individual greatness, -this man has been handed down to us by those who best -knew both him and the age, as the most virtuous man -in it; while <em>we</em> know him as the head and prototype -of all subsequent teachers of virtue, the source equally -of the lofty inspiration of Plato and the judicious utilitarianism -of Aristotle, the two headsprings of ethical as -of all other philosophy. This acknowledged master of -all the eminent thinkers who have since lived—whose -fame, still growing after more than two thousand years, -all but outweighs the whole remainder of the names which -make his native city illustrious—was put to death by -his countrymen, after a judicial conviction, for impiety -and immorality. Impiety, in denying the Gods recognized -by the State; indeed his accusers asserted (see the -“Apologia”) that he believed in no gods at all. Immorality, -in being, by his doctrines and instructions, a “corrupter -of youth.” Of these charges the tribunal, there -is every ground for believing, honestly found him guilty, -and condemned the man who probably of all then born -had deserved best of mankind to be put to death as a -criminal.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[300]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From The Epistle of James</span></h3> - -<p>So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by -the law of liberty.</p> - - -<h3>The Walker</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Arturo M. Giovannitti</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_296">296</a>)</p> - -<p>I hear footsteps over my head all night.</p> - -<p>They come and they go. Again they come and they -go all night.</p> - -<p>They come one eternity in four paces and they go one -eternity in four paces, and between the coming and the -going there is Silence and the Night and the Infinite.</p> - -<p>For infinite are the nine feet of a prison cell, and endless -is the march of him who walks between the yellow -brick wall and the red iron gate, thinking things that -cannot be chained and cannot be locked, but that wander -far away in the sunlit world, each in a wild pilgrimage -after a destined goal.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>Throughout the restless night I hear the footsteps over -my head.</p> - -<p>Who walks? I know not. It is the phantom of the -jail, the sleepless brain, a man, the man, the Walker.</p> - -<p>One—two—three—four: four paces and the wall.</p> - -<p>One—two—three—four: four paces and the iron gate.</p> - -<p>He has measured his space, he has measured it accurately, -scrupulously, minutely, as the hangman measures -the rope and the grave-digger the coffin—so many feet,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[301]</a></span> -so many inches, so many fractions of an inch for each of -the four paces.</p> - -<p>One—two—three—four. Each step sounds heavy and -hollow over my head, and the echo of each step sounds -hollow within my head as I count them in suspense and -in dread that once, perhaps, in the endless walk, there -may be five steps instead of four between the yellow -brick wall and the red iron gate.</p> - -<p>But he has measured the space so accurately, so -scrupulously, so minutely that nothing breaks the grave -rhythm of the slow, fantastic march....</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>All the sounds of the living beings and inanimate -things, and all the noises of the night I have heard in my -wistful vigil.</p> - -<p>I have heard the moans of him who bewails a thing -that is dead and the sighs of him who tries to smother -a thing that will not die;</p> - -<p>I have heard the stifled sobs of the one who weeps with -his head under the coarse blanket, and the whisperings -of the one who prays with his forehead on the hard, cold -stone of the floor;</p> - -<p>I have heard him who laughs the shrill, sinister laugh -of folly at the horror rampant on the yellow wall and at -the red eyes of the nightmare glaring through the iron -bars;</p> - -<p>I have heard in the sudden icy silence him who coughs -a dry, ringing cough, and wished madly that his throat -would not rattle so and that he would not spit on the -floor, for no sound was more atrocious than that of his -sputum upon the floor;</p> - -<p>I have heard him who swears fearsome oaths which I -listen to in reverence and awe, for they are holier than -the virgin’s prayer;</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[302]</a></span></p> - -<p>And I have heard, most terrible of all, the silence of -two hundred brains all possessed by one single, relentless, -unforgiving, desperate thought.</p> - -<p>All this I have heard in the watchful night,</p> - -<p>And the murmur of the wind beyond the walls,</p> - -<p>And the tolls of a distant bell,</p> - -<p>And the woeful dirge of the rain,</p> - -<p>And the remotest echoes of the sorrowful city,</p> - -<p>And the terrible beatings, wild beatings, mad beatings -of the One Heart which is nearest to my heart.</p> - -<p>All this have I heard in the still night;</p> - -<p>But nothing is louder, harder, drearier, mightier, more -awful than the footsteps I hear over my head all -night....</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>All through the night he walks and he thinks. Is it -more frightful because he walks and his footsteps sound -hollow over my head, or because he thinks and speaks -not his thoughts?</p> - -<p>But does he think? Why should he think? Do I think? -I only hear the footsteps and count them. Four steps -and the wall. Four steps and the gate. But beyond? -Beyond? Where goes he beyond the gate and the wall?</p> - -<p>He does not go beyond. His thought breaks there on -the iron gate. Perhaps it breaks like a wave of rage, -perhaps like a sudden flow of hope, but it always returns -to beat the wall like a billow of helplessness and despair.</p> - -<p>He walks to and fro within the narrow whirlpit of this -ever storming and furious thought. Only one thought—constant, -fixed, immovable, sinister, without power and -without voice.</p> - -<p>A thought of madness, frenzy, agony and despair, a -hell-brewed thought, for it is a natural thought. All<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[303]</a></span> -things natural are things impossible while there are jails -in the world—bread, work, happiness, peace, love.</p> - -<p>But he thinks not of this. As he walks he thinks of -the most superhuman, the most unattainable, the most -impossible thing in the world:</p> - -<p>He thinks of a small brass key that turns just half -around and throws open the red iron gate.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>That is all the Walker thinks, as he walks throughout -the night.</p> - -<p>And that is what two hundred minds drowned in the -darkness and the silence of the night think, and that is -also what I think.</p> - -<p>Wonderful is the supreme wisdom of the jail that makes -all think the same thought. Marvelous is the providence -of the law that equalizes all, even in mind and sentiment. -Fallen is the last barrier of privilege, the aristocracy of -the intellect. The democracy of reason has leveled all -the two hundred minds to the common surface of the -same thought.</p> - -<p>I, who have never killed, think like the murderer;</p> - -<p>I, who have never stolen, reason like the thief;</p> - -<p>I think, reason, wish, hope, doubt, wait like the hired -assassin, the embezzler, the forger, the counterfeiter, the -incestuous, the raper, the drunkard, the prostitute, the -pimp, I, I who used to think of love and life and flowers -and song and beauty and the ideal.</p> - -<p>A little key, a little key as little as my little finger, a -little key of shining brass.</p> - -<p>All my ideas, my thoughts, my dreams are congealed in -a little key of shiny brass.</p> - -<p>All my brain, all my soul, all the suddenly surging -latent powers of my deepest life are in the pocket of a -white-haired man dressed in blue.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[304]</a></span></p> - -<p>He is great, powerful, formidable, the man with the -white hair, for he has in his pocket the mighty talisman -which makes one man cry, and one man pray, and one -laugh, and one cough, and one walk, and all keep awake -and listen and think the same maddening thought.</p> - -<p>Greater than all men is the man with the white hair -and the small brass key, for no other man in the world -could compel two hundred men to think for so long the -same thought. Surely when the light breaks I will write -a hymn unto him which shall hail him greater than -Mohammed and Arbues and Torquemada and Mesmer, -and all the other masters of other men’s thoughts. I -shall call him Almighty, for he holds everything of all -and of me in a little brass key in his pocket.</p> - -<p>Everything of me he holds but the branding iron of -contempt and the claymore of hatred for the monstrous -cabala that can make the apostle and the murderer, the -poet and the procurer, think of the same gate, the same -key and the same exit on the different sunlit highways of -life.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>My brother, do not walk any more.</p> - -<p>It is wrong to walk on a grave. It is a sacrilege to -walk four steps from the headstone to the foot and four -steps from the foot to the headstone.</p> - -<p>If you stop walking, my brother, no longer will this -be a grave, for you will give me back that mind that is -chained to your feet and the right to think my own -thoughts.</p> - -<p>I implore you, my brother, for I am weary of the long -vigil, weary of counting your steps, and heavy with sleep.</p> - -<p>Stop, rest, sleep, my brother, for the dawn is well nigh -and it is not the key alone that can throw open the gate.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[305]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By George Washington</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(First president of the United States, 1732-1799)</p> - -<p>Government is not reason, it is not eloquence—it -is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a -fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to -irresponsible action.</p> - - -<h3>Forcible Feeding</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Suffragette”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By E. Sylvia Pankhurst</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English militant leader)</p> - -<p>She was then surrounded and held down, whilst the -chair was tilted backwards. She clenched her teeth, -but the doctor pulled her mouth away to form a pouch -and the wardress poured in milk and brandy, some of -which trickled in through the crevices. Later in the -day the doctors and wardresses again appeared. They -forced her down on to the bed and held her there. One -of the doctors then produced a tube two yards in length -with a glass junction in the center and a funnel at one -end. He forced the other end of the tube up her nostril, -hurting her so terribly that the matron and two of the -wardresses burst into tears and the second doctor interfered. -At last the tube was pushed down into the -stomach. She felt the pain of it to the end of the breast -bone. Then one of the doctors stood upon a chair -holding the funnel end of the tube at arm’s length, and -poured food down whilst the wardress and the other -doctor all gripped her tight. She felt as though she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[306]</a></span> -would suffocate. There was a rushing, burning sensation -in her head, the drums of her ears seemed to be bursting. -The agony of pain in the throat and breast bone continued. -The thing seemed to go on for hours. When at -last the tube was withdrawn, she felt as though all the -back of her nose and throat were being torn out with it.</p> - -<p>Then almost fainting she was carried back to the -punishment cell and put to bed. For hours the pain in -the chest, nose and ears continued and she felt terribly -sick and faint. Day after day the struggle continued; -she used no violence, but each time resisted and was overcome -by force of numbers. Often she vomited during -the operation. When the food did not go down quickly -enough the doctor pinched her nose with the tube in it, -causing her even greater pain.</p> - - -<h3>The Subjection of Women</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Stuart Mill</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>)</p> - -<p>In struggles for political emancipation, everybody -knows how often its champions are bought off by bribes, -or daunted by terrors. In the case of women, each -individual of the subject class is in a chronic state of -bribery and intimidation combined. In setting up the -standard of resistance, a large number of the leaders, and -still more of the followers, must make an almost complete -sacrifice of the pleasures or the alleviations of their own -individual lot. If ever any system of privilege and enforced -subjection had its yoke tightly riveted on the necks -of those who are kept down by it, this has.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[307]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Old Suffragist</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Margaret Widdemer</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_256">256</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">She could have loved—her woman-passions beat</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Deeper than theirs, or else she had not known</div> - <div class="verse">How to have dropped her heart beneath their feet</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A living stepping-stone:</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The little hands—did they not clutch her heart?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The guarding arms—was she not very tired?</div> - <div class="verse">Was it an easy thing to walk apart,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Unresting, undesired?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">She gave away her crown of woman-praise,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Her gentleness and silent girlhood grace</div> - <div class="verse">To be a merriment for idle days,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Scorn for the market-place:</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">She strove for an unvisioned, far-off good,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For one far hope she knew she should not see:</div> - <div class="verse">These—not <em>her</em> daughters—crowned with motherhood</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And love and beauty—free.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[308]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Going to the People</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Memoirs of a Revolutionist”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Peter Kropotkin</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(The Russian author and scientist, born 1842, who renounced the -title of prince and spent many years in a dungeon for -his faith, has here told his life story)</p> - -<p>“It is bitter, the bread that has been made by slaves,” -our poet Nekrasoff wrote. The young generation -actually refused to eat that bread, and to enjoy the riches -that had been accumulated in their fathers’ houses by -means of servile labor, whether the laborers were actual -serfs or slaves of the present industrial system.</p> - -<p>All Russia read with astonishment, in the indictment -which was produced at the court against Karakozoff and -his friends, that these young men, owners of considerable -fortunes, used to live three or four in the same room, -never spending more than ten roubles (five dollars) apiece -a month for all their needs, and giving at the same time -their fortunes for co-operative associations, co-operative -workshops (where they themselves worked), and the like. -Five years later, thousands and thousands of the Russian -youth—the best part of it—were doing the same. Their -watch-word was, “V naród!” (To the people; be the -people.) During the years 1860-65 in nearly every -wealthy family a bitter struggle was going on between -the fathers, who wanted to maintain the old traditions, -and the sons and daughters, who defended their right to -dispose of their life according to their own ideals. Young -men left the military service, the counter and the shop, and -flocked to the university towns. Girls, bred in the most -aristocratic families, rushed penniless to St. Petersburg,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[309]</a></span> -Moscow, and Kieff, eager to learn a profession which -would free them from the domestic yoke, and some day, -perhaps, also from the possible yoke of a husband. After -hard and bitter struggles, many of them won that personal -freedom. Now they wanted to utilize it, not for -their own personal enjoyment, but for carrying to the -people the knowledge that had emancipated them.</p> - -<p>In every town of Russia, in every quarter of St. Petersburg, -small groups were formed for self-improvement -and self-education; the works of the philosophers, the -writings of the economists, the researches of the young -Russian historical school, were carefully read in these -circles, and the reading was followed by endless discussions. -The aim of all that reading and discussion was -to solve the great question which rose before them: In -what way could they be useful to the masses? Gradually, -they came to the idea that the only way was to settle -among the people and to live the people’s life. Young -men went into the villages as doctors, doctors’ assistants, -teachers, village scribes, even as agricultural laborers, -blacksmiths, woodcutters, and so on, and tried to live -there in closest contact with the peasants. Girls passed -teachers’ examinations, learned midwifery or nursing, and -went by the hundred into the villages, devoting themselves -entirely to the poorest part of the population....</p> - -<p>Here and there, small groups of propagandists had -settled in towns and villages in various capacities. Blacksmiths’ -shops and small farms had been started, and -young men of the wealthier classes worked in the shops -or on the farms, to be in daily contact with the toiling -masses. At Moscow, a number of young girls, of rich -families, who had studied at the Zurich university and -had started a separate organization, went even so far<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[310]</a></span> -as to enter cotton factories, where they worked from -fourteen to sixteen hours a day, and lived in the factory -barracks the miserable life of the Russian factory girls. -It was a grand movement, in which, at the lowest estimate, -from two to three thousand persons took an active -part, while twice or thrice as many sympathizers and -supporters helped the active vanguard in various ways. -With a good half of that army our St. Petersburg circle -was in regular correspondence—always, of course, in -cipher.</p> - -<p>The literature which could be published in Russia -under a rigorous censorship—the faintest hint of Socialism -being prohibited—was soon found insufficient, and we -started a printing office of our own abroad. Pamphlets -for the workers and the peasants had to be written, and -our small “literary committee,” of which I was a member, -had its hands full of work. Serghei wrote a couple -of such pamphlets—one in the Lammenais style, and -another containing an exposition of Socialism in a fairy -tale—and both had a wide circulation. The books and -pamphlets which were printed abroad were smuggled -into Russia by thousands, stored at certain spots, and -sent out to the local circles, which distributed them -amongst the peasants and the workers. All this required -a vast organization as well as much traveling about, -and a colossal correspondence, particularly for protecting -our helpers and our bookstores from the police. We had -special ciphers for different provincial circles, and often, -after six or seven hours had been passed in discussing all -details, the women, who did not trust to our accuracy -in the cipher correspondence, spent all the night in covering -sheets of paper with cabalistic figures and fractions.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[311]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Revolutionist</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Ivan Turgénev</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Russian writer, 1818-1883, one of the masters of the novel form. -He was imprisoned and later exiled. In the original the present -extract is a prose poem. The versification is by Arthur Guiterman)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I saw a spacious house. O’erhung with pall,</div> - <div class="verse">A narrow doorway pierced the sombre wall.</div> - <div class="verse">Within was chill, impenetrable shade;</div> - <div class="verse">Without there stood a maid—a Russian maid,</div> - <div class="verse">To whom the icy dark sent forth a slow</div> - <div class="verse">And hollow-sounding Voice:</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent27">“And dost thou know,</div> - <div class="verse">When thou hast entered, what awaits thee here?”</div> - <div class="verse">“I know,” she said, “and knowing do not fear.”</div> - <div class="verse">“Cold, hunger, hatred, Slander’s blighting breath,”</div> - <div class="verse">The Voice still chanted, “suffering—and Death?”</div> - <div class="verse">“I know,” she said.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent20">“Undaunted, wilt thou dare</div> - <div class="verse">The sneers of kindred? Art thou steeled to bear</div> - <div class="verse">From those whom most thou lovest, spite and scorn?”</div> - <div class="verse">“Though Love be paid with Hate, that shall be borne,”</div> - <div class="verse">She answered.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent14">“Think! Thy doom may be to die</div> - <div class="verse">By thine own hand, with none to fathom why,</div> - <div class="verse">Unthanked, unhonored, desolate, alone,</div> - <div class="verse">Thy grave unmarked, thy toil, thy love unknown,</div> - <div class="verse">And none in days to come shall speak thy name.”</div> - <div class="verse">She said: “I ask no pity, thanks or fame.”</div> - <div class="verse">“Art thou prepared for crime?”</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[312]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent34">She bowed her head:</div> - <div class="verse">“Yes, crime, if that shall need,” the maiden said.</div> - <div class="verse">Now paused the Voice before it asked anew:</div> - <div class="verse">“But knowest thou that all thou holdest true</div> - <div class="verse">Thy soul may yet deny in bitter pain,</div> - <div class="verse">So thou shalt deem thy sacrifice in vain?”</div> - <div class="verse">“E’en this I know,” she said, “and yet again</div> - <div class="verse">I pray thee, let me enter.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent28">“Enter then!”</div> - <div class="verse">That hollow Voice replied. She passed the door.</div> - <div class="verse">A sable curtain fell—and nothing more.</div> - <div class="verse">“A fool!” snarled some one, gnashing. Like a prayer</div> - <div class="verse">“A saint!” the whispered answer thrilled the air.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>In a Russian Prison</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Memoirs of a Revolutionist”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Peter Kropotkin</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_308">308</a>)</p> - -<p>One day in the summer of 1875, in the cell that was -next to mine I distinctly heard the light steps of -heeled boots, and a few minutes later I caught fragments -of a conversation. A feminine voice spoke from the -cell, and a deep bass voice—evidently that of the sentry—grunted -something in reply. Then I recognized the -sound of the colonel’s spurs, his rapid steps, his swearing -at the sentry, and the click of the key in the lock. He -said something, and a feminine voice loudly replied: -“We did not talk. I only asked him to call the non<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[313]</a></span>-commissioned -officer.” Then the door was locked, and -I heard the colonel swearing in whispers at the sentry.</p> - -<p>So I was alone no more. I had a lady neighbor, who -at once broke down the severe discipline which had -hitherto reigned among the soldiers. From that day the -walls of the fortress, which had been mute during the -last fifteen months, became animated. From all sides -I heard knocks with the foot on the floor: one, two, three, -four, ... eleven knocks; twenty-four knocks, fifteen -knocks; then an interruption, followed by three knocks, -and a long succession of thirty-three knocks. Over and -over again these knocks were repeated in the same succession, -until the neighbor would guess at last that they -were meant for “Kto vy?” (Who are you?), the letter v -being the third letter in our alphabet. Thereupon conversation -was soon established, and usually was conducted -in the abridged alphabet; that is, the alphabet being -divided into six rows of five letters, each letter marked -by its row and its place in the row.</p> - -<p>I discovered with great pleasure that I had at my -left my friend Serdukóff, with whom I could soon talk -about everything, especially when we used our cipher. -But intercourse with men brought its sufferings as well -as its joys. Underneath me was lodged a peasant, whom -Serdukóff knew. He talked to him by means of knocks; -and even against my will, often unconsciously during -my work, I followed their conversations. I also spoke to -him. Now, if solitary confinement without any sort of -work is hard for educated men, it is infinitely harder for -a peasant who is accustomed to physical work, and not -at all wont to spend years in reading. Our peasant friend -felt quite miserable, and having been kept for nearly two -years in another prison before he was brought to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[314]</a></span> -fortress—his crime was that he had listened to Socialists—he -was already broken down. Soon I began to notice, -to my terror, that from time to time his mind wandered. -Gradually his thoughts grew more and more confused, -and we two perceived, step by step, day by day, evidences -that his reason was failing, until his talk became -at last that of a lunatic. Frightful noises and wild cries -came next from the lower story; our neighbor was mad, -but was still kept for several months in the casemate -before he was removed to an asylum, from which he -never emerged. To witness the destruction of a man’s -mind, under such conditions, was terrible. I am sure -it must have contributed to increase the nervous irritability -of my good and true friend Serdukóff. When, after -four years’ imprisonment, he was acquitted by the court -and released, he shot himself.</p> - - -<h3>Batuschka</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Bailey Aldrich</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(New England poet and journalist, 1836-1907)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">From yonder gilded minaret</div> - <div class="verse">Beside the steel-blue Neva set,</div> - <div class="verse">I faintly catch, from time to time,</div> - <div class="verse">The sweet, aerial midnight chime—</div> - <div class="verse indent6">“God save the Tsar!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Above the ravelins and the moats</div> - <div class="verse">Of the white citadel it floats;</div> - <div class="verse">And men in dungeons far beneath</div> - <div class="verse">Listen, and pray, and gnash their teeth—</div> - <div class="verse indent6">“God save the Tsar!”</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[315]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The soft reiterations sweep</div> - <div class="verse">Across the horror of their sleep,</div> - <div class="verse">As if some demon in his glee</div> - <div class="verse">Were mocking at their misery—</div> - <div class="verse indent6">“God save the Tsar!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In his red palace over there,</div> - <div class="verse">Wakeful, he needs must hear the prayer.</div> - <div class="verse">How can it drown the broken cries</div> - <div class="verse">Wrung from his children’s agonies?—</div> - <div class="verse indent6">“God save the Tsar!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Father they called him from of old—</div> - <div class="verse">Batuschka!... How his heart is cold!</div> - <div class="verse">Wait till a million scourgèd men</div> - <div class="verse">Rise in their awful might, and then—</div> - <div class="verse indent6">“God save the Tsar!”</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Breshkovskaya</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Elsa Barker</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Contemporary American poet and novelist. Catherine Breshkovsky, -called “Little Mother” by the Russian peasants, was sentenced -to a long term of exile in Siberia when seventy-seven years of -age)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">How narrow seems the round of ladies’ lives</div> - <div class="verse">And ladies’ duties in their smiling world,</div> - <div class="verse">The day this Titan woman, gray with years,</div> - <div class="verse">Goes out across the void to prove her soul!</div> - <div class="verse">Brief are the pains of motherhood that end</div> - <div class="verse">In motherhood’s long joy; but she has borne</div> - <div class="verse">The age-long travail of a cause that lies</div> - <div class="verse">Still-born at last on History’s cold lap.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[316]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And yet she rests not; yet she will not drink</div> - <div class="verse">The cup of peace held to her parching lips</div> - <div class="verse">By smug Dishonor’s hand. Nay, forth she fares,</div> - <div class="verse">Old and alone, on exile’s rocky road—</div> - <div class="verse">That well-worn road with snows incarnadined</div> - <div class="verse">By blood-drops from her feet long years agone.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Mother of power, my soul goes out to you</div> - <div class="verse">As a strong swimmer goes to meet the sea</div> - <div class="verse">Upon whose vastness he is like a leaf.</div> - <div class="verse">What are the ends and purposes of song,</div> - <div class="verse">Save as a bugle at the lips of Life</div> - <div class="verse">To sound reveille to a drowsing world</div> - <div class="verse">When some great deed is rising like the sun?</div> - <div class="verse">Where are those others whom your deeds inspired</div> - <div class="verse">To deeds and words that were themselves a deed?</div> - <div class="verse">Those who believe in death have gone with death</div> - <div class="verse">To the gray crags of immortality;</div> - <div class="verse">Those who believed in life have gone with life</div> - <div class="verse">To the red halls of spiritual death.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And you? But what is death or life to you?</div> - <div class="verse">Only a weapon in the hand of faith</div> - <div class="verse">To cleave a way for beings yet unborn</div> - <div class="verse">To a far freedom you will never share!</div> - <div class="verse">Freedom of body is an empty shell</div> - <div class="verse">Wherein men crawl whose souls are held with gyves;</div> - <div class="verse">For Freedom is a spirit, and she dwells</div> - <div class="verse">As often in a jail as on the hills.</div> - <div class="verse">In all the world this day there is no soul</div> - <div class="verse">Freer than you, Breshkovsky, as you stand</div> - <div class="verse">Facing the future in your narrow cell.</div> - <div class="verse">For you are free of self and free of fear,</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[317]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Those twin-born shades that lie in wait for man</div> - <div class="verse">When he steps out upon the wind-blown road</div> - <div class="verse">That leads to human greatness and to pain.</div> - <div class="verse">Take in your hand once more the pilgrim’s staff—</div> - <div class="verse">Your delicate hand misshapen from the nights</div> - <div class="verse">In Kara’s mines; bind on your unbent back</div> - <div class="verse">That long has borne the burdens of the race,</div> - <div class="verse">The exile’s bundle, and upon your feet</div> - <div class="verse">Strap the worn sandals of a tireless faith.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">You are too great for pity. After you</div> - <div class="verse">We send not sobs, but songs; and all our days</div> - <div class="verse">We shall walk bravelier knowing where you are.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>In Siberia</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Katherine Breshkovsky</span></p> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Reported by Ernest Poole</cite>)</p> - -<p>As punishment for my attempt at escape I was sentenced -to four years’ hard labor in Kara and to forty blows -of the lash. Into my cell a physician came to see if I were -strong enough to live through the agony. I saw at once -that, afraid to flog a woman “political” without precedent, -by this trick of declaring me too sick to be punished -they wished to establish the precedent of the sentence -in order that others might be flogged in the future. I -insisted that I was strong enough, and that the court had -no right to record such a sentence unless they flogged me -at once. The sentence was not carried out.</p> - -<p>A few weeks later eight of the men politicals escaped in -pairs, leaving dummies in their places. As the guards<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[318]</a></span> -never took more than a hasty look into that noisome cell, -they did not discover the ruse for weeks. Then mounted -Cossacks rode out. The man-hunt spread. Some of the -fugitives struggled through jungles, over mountains and -through swamps a thousand miles to Vladivostok, saw -the longed-for American vessels, and there on the docks -were re-captured. All were brought back to Kara.</p> - -<p>For this we were all punished. One morning the -Cossack guards entered our cells, seized us, tore off our -clothes, and dressed us in convict suits alive with vermin. -That scene cannot be described. One of us attempted -suicide. Taken to an old prison we were thrown into the -“black holes”—foul little stalls off a low grimy hall which -contained two big stoves and two little windows. Each of -us had a stall six feet by five. On winter nights the stall -doors were left open for heat, but in summer each was -locked at night in her own black hole. For three months -we did not use our bunks, but fought with candles and -pails of scalding water, until at last the vermin were all -killed. We had been put on the “black hole diet” of black -bread and water. For three years we never breathed the -outside air. We struggled constantly against the outrages -inflicted on us. After one outrage we lay like a row -of dead women for nine days without touching food, until -certain promises were finally exacted from the warden. -This “hunger strike” was used repeatedly. To thwart it -we were often bound hand and foot, while Cossacks tried -to force food down our throats.</p> - -<p>Kara grew worse after I left. To hint at what happened -I tell briefly the story of my dear friend Maria, a -woman of broad education and deep refinement. Shortly -after my going, Maria saw Madame Sigida strike an -official who had repeatedly insulted the women. Two<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[319]</a></span> -days later she watched Sigida die, moaning and bleeding -from the lash; that night she saw three women commit -suicide as a protest to the world; she knew that twenty -men attempted suicide on the night following, and she -determined to double the protest by assassinating the -Governor of Trans-Baikal, who had ordered Sigida’s -flogging. At this time Maria was pregnant. Her prison -term over, she left her husband and walked hundreds of -miles to the Governor’s house and shot him. She spent -three months in a cold, dirty, “secret cell” not long enough -to lie down in or high enough to stand up in, wearing the -cast-off suit of a convict, sleeping on the bare floor and -tormented by vermin. She was then sentenced to be -hanged. She hesitated now whether to save the life of -her unborn child. She knew that if she revealed her -condition her sentence would be changed to imprisonment. -She decided to keep silence and sacrifice her child, -that when the execution was over and her condition was -discovered, the effect on Russia might be still greater. -Her condition, however, became apparent, and she was -started off to the Irkutsk prison. It was midwinter, -forty degrees below zero. She walked. She was given -no overcoat and no boots, until some common criminals in -the column gave her theirs. Her child was born dead in -prison, and soon after she too died.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[320]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Alexander Berkman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(The life-story of a man who served a fourteen-year sentence in the -Western Penitentiary of Pennsylvania for an attempt -at assassination)</p> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Introduction by Hutchins Hapgood</cite>)</p> - -<p>Not only has this book the interest of the human -document, but it is also a striking proof of the -power of the human soul. Alexander Berkman spent -fourteen years in prison, under perhaps more than commonly -harsh and severe conditions. Prison life tends to -destroy the body, weaken the mind and pervert the -character. Berkman consciously struggled with these -adverse, destructive conditions. He took care of his -body. He took care of his mind. He did so strenuously. -It was a moral effort. He felt insane ideas trying to take -possession of him. Insanity is a natural result of prison -life. It always tends to come. This man felt it, consciously -struggled against it, and overcame it. That the -prison affected him is true. It always does. But he -saved himself, essentially. Society tried to destroy him, -but failed.</p> - -<p>If people will read this book carefully it will tend to -do away with prisons. The public, once vividly conscious -of what prison life is and must be, would not be -willing to maintain prisons. This is the only book that -I know which goes deeply into the corrupting, demoralizing -psychology of prison life. It shows, in picture after -picture, sketch after sketch, not only the obvious brutality, -stupidity, ugliness permeating the institution, but, -very touching, it shows the good qualities and instincts<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[321]</a></span> -of the human heart perverted, demoralized, helplessly -struggling for life; beautiful tendencies basely expressing -themselves. And the personality of Berkman goes -through it all; idealistic, courageous, uncompromising, sincere, -truthful; not untouched, as I have said, by his -surroundings, but remaining his essential self....</p> - -<p>The Russian Nihilistic origin of Berkman, his Anarchistic -experience in America, his attempt on the life of -Frick—an attempt made at a violent industrial crisis, an -attempt made as a result of a sincere if fanatical belief -that he was called on by his destiny to strike a psychological -blow for the oppressed of the community—this -part of the book will arouse extreme disagreement and -disapproval of his ideas and his act. But I see no reason -why this, with the rest, should not rather be regarded as -an integral part of a human document, as part of the -record of a life, with its social and psychological suggestions -and explanations. Why not try to understand an -honest man even if he feels called on to kill? There, too, -it may be deeply instructive. There, too, it has its lessons. -Read it not in a combative spirit. Read to understand. -Do not read to agree, of course, but read to see.</p> - - -<h4><i>The Dungeon</i></h4> - -<p>In the storeroom I am stripped of my suit of dark gray, -and clad in the hateful stripes. Coatless and shoeless, -I am led through hallways and corridors, down a steep -flight of stairs, and thrown into the dungeon.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>Total darkness. The blackness is massive, palpable—I -feel its hand upon my head, my face. I dare not move, -lest a misstep thrust me into the abyss. I hold my hand -close to my eyes—I feel the touch of my lashes upon it,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[322]</a></span> -but I cannot see its outline. Motionless I stand on the -spot, devoid of all sense of direction. The silence is sinister; -it seems to me I can hear it. Only now and then -the hasty scrambling of nimble feet suddenly rends the -stillness, and the gnawing of invisible river rats haunts the -fearful solitude.</p> - -<p>Slowly the blackness pales. It ebbs and melts; out -of the sombre gray, a wall looms above; the silhouette of -a door rises dimly before me, sloping upward and growing -compact and impenetrable.</p> - -<p>The hours drag in unbroken sameness. Not a sound -reaches me from the cell-house. In the maddening quiet -and darkness I am bereft of all consciousness of time, save -once a day when the heavy rattle of keys apprises me of -the morning: the dungeon is unlocked, and the silent -guards hand me a slice of bread and a cup of water. -The double doors fall heavily to, the steps grow fainter -and die in the distance, and all is dark again in the -dungeon.</p> - -<p>The numbness of death steals upon my soul. The -floor is cold and clammy, the gnawing grows louder and -nearer, and I am filled with dread lest the starving rats -attack my bare feet. I snatch a few unconscious moments -leaning against the door; and then again I pace the cell, -striving to keep awake, wondering whether it be night or -day, yearning for the sound of a human voice.</p> - -<p>Utterly forsaken! Cast into the stony bowels of the -underground, the world of man receding, leaving no -trace behind.... Eagerly I strain my ear—only the -ceaseless, fearful gnawing. I clutch the bars in desperation—a -hollow echo mocks the clanking iron. My hands -tear violently at the door—“Ho, there! Any one here?” -All is silent. Nameless terrors quiver in my mind, weav<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[323]</a></span>ing -nightmares of mortal dread and despair. Fear shapes -convulsive thoughts: they rage in wild tempest, then -become calm, and again rush through time and space in -a rapid succession of strangely familiar scenes, wakened -in my slumbering consciousness.</p> - -<p>Exhausted and weary I droop against the wall. A -slimy creeping on my face startles me in horror, and -again I pace the cell. I feel cold and hungry. Am I -forgotten? Three days must have passed, and more. -Have they forgotten me?...</p> - -<p>The clank of keys sends a thrill of joy to my heart. -My tomb will open—oh, to see the light, and breathe the -air again....</p> - -<p>“Officer, isn’t my time up yet?”</p> - -<p>“What’s your hurry? You’ve only been here one day.”</p> - -<p>The doors fall to. Ravenously I devour the bread, -so small and thin, just a bite. Only <em>one</em> day! Despair -enfolds me like a pall. Faint with anguish, I sink to the -floor....</p> - - -<h4><i>The Sick Line</i></h4> - -<p>One by one the men augment the row; they walk -slowly, bent and coughing, painfully limping down the -steep flights. From every range they come; the old and -decrepit, the young consumptives, the lame and asthmatic, -a tottering old negro, an idiotic white boy. All -look withered and dejected,—a ghastly line, palsied and -blear-eyed, blanched in the valley of death.</p> - -<p>The rotunda door opens noisily, and the doctor enters, -accompanied by Deputy Warden Graves and Assistant -Deputy Hopkins. Behind them is a prisoner, dressed in -dark gray and carrying a medicine box. Dr. Boyce -glances at the long line, and knits his brows. He looks<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[324]</a></span> -at his watch, and the frown deepens. He has much to -do. Since the death of the senior doctor, the young -graduate is the sole physician of the big prison. He -must make the rounds of the shops before noon, and visit -the hospital before the Warden or the Deputy drops in.</p> - -<p>Mr. Greaves sits down at the officers’ desk, near the -hall entrance. The Assistant Deputy, pad in hand, places -himself at the head of the sick line. The doctor leans -against the door of the rotunda, facing the Deputy. -The block officers stand within call, at respectful distances.</p> - -<p>“Two-fifty-five!” the Assistant Deputy calls out.</p> - -<p>A slender young man leaves the line and approaches -the doctor. He is tall and well featured, the large eyes -lustrous in the pale face. He speaks in a hoarse voice:</p> - -<p>“Doctor, there is something the matter with my side. -I have pains, and I cough bad at night, and in the -morning——”</p> - -<p>“All right,” the doctor interrupts, without looking up -from his note book. “Give him some salts,” he adds, -with a nod to his assistant.</p> - -<p>“Next!” the Deputy calls.</p> - -<p>“Will you please excuse me from the shop for a few -days?” the sick prisoner pleads, a tremor in his voice.</p> - -<p>The physician glances questioningly at the Deputy. -The latter cries, impatiently, “Next, next man!” striking -the desk twice, in quick succession, with the knuckles -of his hand.</p> - -<p>“Return to the shop,” the doctor says to the prisoner.</p> - -<p>“Next,” the Deputy calls, spurting a stream of tobacco -juice in the direction of the cuspidor. It strikes sidewise, -and splashes over the foot of the approaching new patient, -a young negro, his neck covered with bulging tumors.</p> - -<p>“Number?” the doctor inquires.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[325]</a></span></p> - -<p>“One-thirty-seven, A one-thirty-seven!” the Deputy -mumbles, his head thrown back to receive a fresh handful -of “scrap” tobacco.</p> - -<p>“Guess Ah’s got de big neck, Ah is, Mistah Boyce,” -the negro says hoarsely.</p> - -<p>“Salts. Return to work. Next!”</p> - -<p>“A one-twenty-six!”</p> - -<p>A young man with parchment-like face, sere and yellow, -walks painfully from the line.</p> - -<p>“Doctor, I seem to be gettin’ worser, and I’m afraid——”</p> - -<p>“What’s the trouble?”</p> - -<p>“Pains in the stomach. Gettin’ so turrible, I——”</p> - -<p>“Give him a plaster. Next!”</p> - -<p>“Plaster hell!” the prisoner breaks out in a fury, his -face growing livid. “Look at this, will you?” With -a quick motion he pulls his shirt up to his head. His -chest and back are entirely covered with porous plasters; -not an inch of skin is visible. “Damn your plasters,” he -cries with sudden sobs, “I ain’t got no more room for -plasters. I’m putty near dyin’, an’ you won’t do nothin’ -fer me.”</p> - -<p>The guards pounce upon the man, and drag him into -the rotunda.</p> - - -<h4><i>The Keepers</i></h4> - -<p>The comparative freedom of the range familiarizes me -with the workings of the institution, and brings me in -close contact with the authorities. The personnel of the -guards is of very inferior character. I find their average -intelligence considerably lower than that of the inmates. -Especially does the element recruited from the police -and the detective service lack sympathy with the unfor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[326]</a></span>tunates -in their charge. They are mostly men discharged -from city employment because of habitual drunkenness, -or flagrant brutality and corruption. Their attitude -toward the prisoners is summed up in coercion and suppression. -They look upon the men as will-less objects of -iron-handed discipline, exact unquestioning obedience and -absolute submissiveness to peremptory whims, and harbor -personal animosity toward the less pliant. The more -intelligent among the officers scorn inferior duties, and -crave advancement. The authority and remuneration of -a Deputy Wardenship is alluring to them, and every -keeper considers himself the fittest for the vacancy. But -the coveted prize is awarded to the guard most feared -by the inmates, and most subservient to the Warden,—a -direct incitement to brutality on the one hand, to -sycophancy on the other....</p> - -<p>Daily I behold the machinery at work, grinding and -pulverizing, brutalizing the officers, dehumanizing the -inmates. Far removed from the strife and struggle of -the larger world, I yet witness its miniature replica, more -agonizing and merciless within the walls. A perfected -model it is, this prison life, with its apparent uniformity -and dull passivity. But beneath the torpid surface -smolder the fires of being, now crackling faintly under a -dun smothering smoke, now blazing forth with the ruthlessness -of despair. Hidden by the veil of discipline rages -the struggle of fiercely contending wills, and intricate -meshes are woven in the quagmire of darkness and -suppression.</p> - -<p>Intrigue and counter-plot, violence and corruption, are -rampant in cell-house and shop. The prisoners spy upon -each other, and in turn upon the officers. The latter -encourage the trusties in unearthing the secret doings of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[327]</a></span> -the inmates, and the stools enviously compete with each -other in supplying information to the keepers. Often -they deliberately inveigle the trustful prisoner into a -fake plot to escape, help and encourage him in the preparations, -and at the critical moment denounce him to the -authorities. The luckless man is severely punished, -usually remaining in utter ignorance of the intrigue. -The <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">provocateur</i> is rewarded with greater liberty and -special privileges. Frequently his treachery proves the -stepping-stone to freedom, aided by the Warden’s official -recommendation of the “model prisoner” to the State -Board of Pardons.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Frederic Harrison</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(English philosopher, born 1831)</p> - -<p>Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; -it never forgives the preaching of a new gospel.</p> - - -<h3>The Seven That Were Hanged</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Leonid Andreyev</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p class="poemintro">(One of the most famous of the Russian writer’s stories, in which -he describes the execution of a group of Terrorists, analyzing their -sensations in their separate cells, and on their journey together to -the foot of the gallows)</p></div> - -<p>The Unknown, surnamed Werner, was a man fatigued -by struggle. He had loved life, the theatre, society, -art, literature, passionately. Endowed with an excellent -memory, he spoke several languages perfectly. He was -fond of dress, and had excellent manners. Of the whole<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[328]</a></span> -group of terrorists he was the only one who was able to -appear in society without risk of recognition.</p> - -<p>For a long time already, and without his comrades -having noticed it, he had entertained a profound contempt -for men. More of a mathematician than a poet, -ecstasy and inspiration had remained so far things unknown -to him; at times he would look upon himself as a -madman seeking to square the circle in seas of human -blood. The enemy against which he daily struggled -could not inspire him with respect; it was nothing but a -compact network of stupidities, treasons, falsehoods, base -deceits....</p> - -<p>Werner understood that the execution was not simply -death, but also something more. In any case, he was -determined to meet it calmly, to live until the end as if -nothing had happened or would happen. Only in this -way could he repress the profoundest contempt for the -execution and preserve his liberty of mind. His comrades, -although knowing well his cold and haughty intrepidity, -would perhaps not have believed it themselves; -but in the courtroom he thought not of life or of death: -he played in his mind a difficult game of chess, giving it -his deepest and quietest attention. An excellent player, -he had begun this game on the very day of his imprisonment, -and he had kept it up continually. And the verdict -that condemned him did not displace a single piece on the -invisible board.</p> - -<p>Now he was shrugging his shoulders and feeling his -pulse. His heart beat fast, but tranquilly and regularly, -with a sonorous force. Like a novice thrown into prison -for the first time, he examined attentively the cell, the -bolts, the chair screwed to the wall, and said to himself:</p> - -<p>“Why have I such a sensation of joy, of liberty? Yes,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[329]</a></span> -of liberty; I think of to-morrow’s execution, and it seems -to me it does not exist. I look at the walls, and they seem -to me not to exist either. And I feel as free as if, instead -of being in prison, I had just come out of another cell in -which I had been confined all my life.”</p> - -<p>Werner’s hands began to tremble, a thing unknown to -him. His thought became more and more vibrant. It -seemed to him that tongues of fire were moving in his -head, trying to escape from his brain to lighten the still -obscure distance. Finally the flame darted forth, and the -horizon was brilliantly illuminated.</p> - -<p>The vague lassitude that had tortured Werner during -the last two years had disappeared at sight of death; his -beautiful youth came back. It was even something more -than beautiful youth. With the astonishing clearness of -mind that sometimes lifts man to the supreme heights of -meditation, Werner saw suddenly both life and death; and -the majesty of this new spectacle struck him. He seemed -to be following a path as narrow as the edge of a blade, -on the crest of the loftiest mountain. On one side he saw -life, and on the other he saw death; and they were like -two seas, sparkling and beautiful, melting into each other -at the horizon in a single infinite extension.</p> - -<p>“What is this, then? What a divine spectacle!” said -he slowly.</p> - -<p>He arose involuntarily and straightened up, as if in -presence of the Supreme Being. And, annihilating the -walls, annihilating space and time, by the force of his all-penetrating -look, he cast his eyes into the depths of the -life that he had quitted.</p> - -<p>And life took on a new aspect. He no longer tried, as of -old, to translate into words that he was; moreover, in the -whole range of human language, still so poor and miserly,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[330]</a></span> -he found no words adequate. The paltry, dirty and evil -things that suggested to him contempt and sometimes even -disgust at the sight of men had completely disappeared, -just as, to people rising in a balloon, the mud and filth of the -narrow streets become invisible, and ugliness changes into -beauty.</p> - -<p>With an unconscious movement Werner walked toward -the table and leaned upon it with his right arm. Haughty -and authoritative by nature, he had never been seen in a -prouder, freer, and more imperious attitude; never had -his face worn such a look, never had he so lifted up his -head, for at no previous time had he been as free and -powerful as now, in this prison, on the eve of execution, -at the threshold of death.</p> - -<p>In his illuminated eyes men wore a new aspect, an -unknown beauty and charm. He hovered above time, -and never had this humanity, which only the night before -was howling like a wild beast in the forest, appeared to -him so young. What had heretofore seemed to him terrible, -unpardonable and base, became suddenly touching and -naïve, just as we cherish in the child the awkwardness of -its behavior, the incoherent stammerings in which its -unconscious genius glimmers, its laughable errors and -blunders, its cruel bruises.</p> - -<p>“My dear friends!” ...</p> - -<p>What mysterious path had he followed to pass from a -feeling of unlimited and haughty liberty to this passionate -and moving pity? He did not know. Did he really pity -his comrades, or did his tears hide something more passionate, -something really greater? His heart, which had -suddenly revived and reblossomed, could not tell him. -Werner wept, and whispered:</p> - -<p>“My dear comrades! My dear comrades!”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[331]</a></span></p> - -<p>And in this man who wept, and who smiled through his -tears, no one—not the judges, or his comrades, or himself—would -have recognized the cold and haughty Werner, -sceptical and insolent.</p> - - -<h3>A Woman’s Execution</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edward King</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(After the Paris Commune of 1871, the leaders of the people were -led out and slaughtered by thousands. The author of this -poem was an American journalist, 1848-1896)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Sweet-breathed and young,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The people’s daughter,</div> - <div class="verse">No nerves unstrung,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Going to slaughter!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Good morning, friends,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">You’ll love us better,—</div> - <div class="verse">Make us amends:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We’ve burst your fetter!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”How the sun gleams!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">(Women are snarling):</div> - <div class="verse">Give me your beams,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Liberty’s darling!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Marie’s my name;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Christ’s mother bore it.</div> - <div class="verse">The badge? No shame:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Glad that I wore it!”</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[332]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">(Hair to the waist,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Limbs like a Venus):</div> - <div class="verse">Robes are displaced:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“Soldiers, please screen us!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”He at the front?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That is my lover:</div> - <div class="verse">Stood all the brunt;—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Now—the fight’s over.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Powder and bread</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Gave out together:</div> - <div class="verse">Droll to be dead</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In this bright weather!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”Jean, boy, we might</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Have married in June!</div> - <div class="verse">This is the wall? Right!</div> - <div class="verse indent2"><i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Vive la Commune!</i>“</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Jefferson</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_228">228</a>)</p> - -<p>The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to -time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is -its natural manure.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[333]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>These Shifting Scenes</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charles Edward Russell</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American editor and Socialist lecturer, born 1860. In the following -paragraphs he has given a newspaper reporter’s -reminiscences of the Chicago Anarchists)</p> - -<p>After so many years the passions and prejudices of -the half-forgotten struggle ought to have died away, -and men may now speak candidly and without restraint -of these things as they really were. Let me then record -my deliberate conviction that Albert Parsons never entertained -the thought of harm against any human being, -for I have seldom met a man of a more genuine kindness -of heart; and if the men he denounced in his speeches -had been in actual danger before him I am certain he -would have been the first to rush to their defense from -physical harm. And while I am on this subject, I may -add an expression of a wonder growing upon me for -many years, that no one has ever paid an adequate tribute -to this man. I have not the slightest sympathy with -his doctrines, if he believed in the violence he seemed -sometimes to preach, which I could never tell. I have -lived in the world long enough to know that the social -wrongs that moved him to protest can never be cured by -violence. Say, then, that the man erred grievously; if -his error had been ten times as great it ought to have -been wiped from human recollection by his sacrifice, and -there should remain but the one image of him, leaving -his place of safety and voluntarily entering the prisoner’s -dock. I doubt if that magnanimous act has its parallel -in history. A hundred men have been elevated to be -national heroes for deeds far less heroic. The fact that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[334]</a></span> -after all these years it is still obscured and men hesitate -to speak about it is marvelous testimony to the power -of the press to produce enduring impressions. Even the -other staggering fact that in the history of American -courts this is the only man that ever came voluntarily -and gave himself up and then was hanged, even that -seems to be eliminated from the little consideration that -is ever bestowed upon a figure of courage so extraordinary.</p> - -<p>Similarly I wondered while all these events were passing -before me and wonder now, that no one ever stopped -to inquire why such men as Parsons and Fielden were in -revolt. Granted freely that their idea of the best manner -of making a protest was utterly wrong and impossible; -granted that they went not the best way to work. But -what was it that drove them into attack against the -social order as they found it? They and thousands of -other men that stood with them were not bad men, nor -depraved, nor bloodthirsty, nor hard-hearted, nor criminal, -nor selfish, nor crazy. Then what was it that -evoked a complaint so bitter and deep-seated? In all -the clamor that filled the press for the execution of the -law and the supremacy of order not one writer ever stopped -to ask this obvious question. No one ever contemplated -the simple fact that men do not band themselves together -to make a protest without the belief that they have something -to protest about, and that in any organized state -of society a widespread protest is something for grave -inquiry. I thought then and I think now that a few -words devoted to this suggestion would have been of far -greater service to society than the insensate demand for -blood and more blood with which the journals of Chicago -were mostly filled.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[335]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Eagle that is Forgotten</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Vachel Lindsay</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Poet and minstrel of Springfield, Illinois, born 1879; has tramped -over many parts of the United States with his leaflet of “Rhymes -to be Traded for Bread.” He has rediscovered the Homeric chant, -and poured into it the life of the Middle West. The following -poem is addressed to John P. Altgeld, once Governor of Illinois, -who, having convinced himself that the so-called Chicago Anarchists -were innocent of the crime charged against them, pardoned them, -and thereby sacrificed his political career)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Sleep softly ... eagle forgotten ... under the stone.</div> - <div class="verse">Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.</div> - <div class="verse">“We have buried him now,” thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced.</div> - <div class="verse">They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced.</div> - <div class="verse">They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you, day after day,</div> - <div class="verse">Now you were ended. They praised you ... and laid you away.</div> - <div class="verse">The others, that mourned you in silence and terror and truth,</div> - <div class="verse">The widow bereft of her crust, and the boy without youth,</div> - <div class="verse">The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor,</div> - <div class="verse">That should have remembered forever ... remember no more.</div> - <div class="verse">Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call,</div> - <div class="verse">The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall?</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[336]</a></span> - <div class="verse">They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones,</div> - <div class="verse">A hundred white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons.</div> - <div class="verse">The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began,</div> - <div class="verse">The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man.</div> - <div class="verse">Sleep softly ... eagle forgotten ... under the stone.</div> - <div class="verse">Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.</div> - <div class="verse">Sleep on, O brave-hearted, O wise man that kindled the flame—</div> - <div class="verse">To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name,</div> - <div class="verse">To live in mankind, far, far more ... than to live in a name.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Immortality</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the Will of Francisco Ferrer</cite>)</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p class="poemintro">(Spanish educator and radical, 1859-1909, executed after the -Barcelona riots by a plot of his clerical enemies)</p></div> - -<p>I also wish my friends to speak little or not at all -about me, because idols are created when men are -praised, and this is very bad for the future of the human -race. Acts alone, no matter by whom committed, ought -to be studied, praised, or blamed. Let them be praised -in order that they may be imitated when they seem to -contribute to the common weal; let them be censured -when they are regarded as injurious to the general well-being, -so that they may not to be repeated.</p> - -<p>I desire that on no occasion, whether near or remote, -nor for any reason whatsoever, shall demonstrations of -a political or religious character be made before my -remains, as I consider the time devoted to the dead would -be better employed in improving the condition of the -living, most of whom stand in great need of this.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[337]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Light Upon Waldheim</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Voltairine de Cleyre</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p class="poemintro">(American anarchist writer, 1866-1912. Waldheim is a cemetery -in Chicago, where the executed Anarchists were buried. Upon -the monument is the figure of a woman holding a dying man upon -her knees, with one hand pressing a crown upon his forehead, and -with the other drawing a dagger)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Light upon Waldheim! And the earth is gray;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A bitter wind is driving from the north;</div> - <div class="verse">The stone is cold, and strange cold whispers say:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“What do ye here with Death? Go forth! Go forth!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Is this thy word, O Mother, with stern eyes,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Crowning thy dead with stone-caressing touch?</div> - <div class="verse">May we not weep o’er him that martyred lies,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Slain in our name, for that he loved us much?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">May we not linger till the day is broad?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Nay, none are stirring in this stinging dawn—</div> - <div class="verse">None but poor wretches that make no moan to God:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">What use are these, O thou with dagger drawn?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Go forth, go forth! Stand not to weep for these,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Till, weakened with your weeping, like the snow</div> - <div class="verse">Ye melt, dissolving in a coward peace!”</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Light upon Waldheim! Brother, let us go!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[338]</a></span></p> - -<p>Assassination</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Auguste Vaillant</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(From the speech before the French Chamber of Deputies, 1894, -prior to receiving sentence of death for a political crime)</p> - -<p>Ah, gentlemen, if the governing classes could go down -among the unfortunates! But no, they prefer to -remain deaf to their appeals. It seems that a fatality -impels them, like the royalty of the eighteenth century, -toward the precipice which will engulf them; for woe be -to those who remain deaf to the cries of the starving, -woe to those who, believing themselves of superior essence, -assume the right to exploit those beneath them! There -comes a time when the people no longer reason; they -rise like a hurricane, and rush onward like a torrent. -Then we see bleeding heads impaled on pikes.</p> - -<p>Among the exploited, gentlemen, there are two classes -of individuals. Those of one class, not realizing what -they are and what they might be, take life as it comes, -believe that they are born to be slaves, and content -themselves with the little that is given them in exchange -for their labor. But there are others, on the contrary, -who think, who study and, looking about them, discover -social iniquities. Is it their fault if they see clearly and -suffer at seeing others suffer? Then they throw themselves -into the struggle, and make themselves the bearers -of the popular claims.</p> - -<p>I know very well that I shall be told that I ought to -have confined myself to speech for the vindication of the -people’s claims. But what can you expect! It takes a -loud voice to make the deaf hear. Too long have they -answered our voices by imprisonment, the rope, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[339]</a></span> -rifle-volleys. Make no mistake; the explosion of my -bomb is not only the cry of the rebel Vaillant, but the -cry of an entire class which vindicates its rights, and -which will soon add acts to words. For, be sure of it, -in vain will they pass laws. The ideas of the thinkers -will not halt!</p> - - -<h3>Beyond Human Might</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Björnstjerne Björnson</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(A drama of modern industry. See page <a href="#Page_221">221</a>. The masters meet -in a great castle, the home of one of them, to plan the destruction -of the labor unions; whereupon a group of conspirators blow up the -castle with dynamite. In the scene following the author gives his -reflections upon this event, in the words of the grief-stricken sister -of the chief conspirator)</p></div> - -<p><span class="smcap">Halden</span>:—Suppose what has happened should -arouse the conscience of the people?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Rachel</span>:—Why, that’s what he was saying—his very -words, I think—Arouse the conscience of the people! -After all these thousands of years that we have been -subject to the influence of the family and of religion, -can it be possible that we are unable to arouse the people’s -conscience except by—O ye silent and exalted witnesses, -who hear without answering and see without reflecting -what you see, why don’t you show me how to reach the -upward road? For in the midst of all this misery there -is no road that leads upward—nothing but an endless -circling around the same spot, by which I perish!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Halden</span>:—Upward means forward.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Rachel</span>:—But there is no forward in this! We have -been thrown back into sheer barbarism! Once more all -faith in a happy future has been wiped out. Just ask<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[340]</a></span> -a few questions around here!... And then the sun, -the spring—ever since that dreadful night—nothing but -fine weather, night and day—a stretch of it the like of -which I cannot recall. Is it not as if nature itself were -crying out to us: “Shame! shame! You sprinkle my -leaves with blood, and mingle death-cries with my song. -You darken the air for me with your gruesome complaints.” -That’s what it is saying to us. “You are -soiling the spring for me. Your diseases and your evil -thoughts are crouching in the woods and on the greenswards. -Everywhere a stink of misery is following you -like that of rotting waters.” That’s what it is telling us. -“Your greed and your envy are a pair of sisters who -have fought each other since they were born”—that’s -what it says. “Only my highest mountain peaks, only -my sandy wastes and icy deserts, have not seen those -sisters; every other part of the earth has been filled by -them with blood and brutal bawling. In the midst of -eternal glory mankind has invented Hell and manages to -keep it filled. And men, who should stand for perfection, -harbor among them what is worthless and foul.”</p> - - -<h3>Chillon</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Lord Byron</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Bonnivard, a patriot of Switzerland, was imprisoned with his -sons in Chillon Castle. The story is told in Byron’s -longer poem, “The Prisoner of Chillon”)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Brightest in dungeons, Liberty, thou art—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For there thy habitation is the heart—</div> - <div class="verse">The heart which love of thee alone can bind;</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[341]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And when thy sons to fetters are consign’d—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To fetters, and the damp vault’s dayless gloom—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their country conquers with their martyrdom,</div> - <div class="verse">And Freedom’s fame finds wings on every wind.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Chillon! thy prison is a holy place,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And thy sad floor an altar; for ’twas trod</div> - <div class="verse">Until his very steps have left a trace</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod,</div> - <div class="verse">By Bonnivard! May none those marks efface!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For they appeal from tyranny to God.</div> -</div></div></div> -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[342]</a><br /><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[343]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK VII</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><i>Jesus</i></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“The martyred Christ of the working class, the inspired evangel -of the downtrodden masses, the world’s supreme revolutionary -leader, whose love for the poor and the children of the poor -hallowed all the days of his consecrated life, lighted up and -made forever holy the dark tragedy of his death, and gave to the -ages his divine inspiration and his deathless name.”—<i>Debs.</i></p></div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[344]</a><br /><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[345]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Jesus</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Eugene V. Debs</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_144">144</a>)</p> - -<p>The martyred Christ of the working class, the inspired -evangel of the downtrodden masses, the world’s -supreme revolutionary leader, whose love for the poor -and the children of the poor hallowed all the days of his -consecrated life, lighted up and made forever holy the -dark tragedy of his death, and gave to the ages his divine -inspiration and his deathless name.</p> - - -<h3>Crusaders</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Elizabeth Waddell</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American writer)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They have taken the tomb of our Comrade Christ—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Infidel hordes that believe not in Man;</div> - <div class="verse">Stable and stall for his birth sufficed,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But his tomb is built on a kingly plan.</div> - <div class="verse">They have hedged him round with pomp and parade,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They have buried him deep under steel and stone—</div> - <div class="verse">But we come leading the great Crusade</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To give our Comrade back to his own.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[346]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Jesus the Revolutionist</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Christianity and the Social Crisis”</cite><a name="FNanchor_18" id="FNanchor_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18" class="fnanchor">[R]</a>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Walter Rauschenbusch</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Theologian, born 1861; professor in Rochester Theological -Seminary)</p> - -<p>There was a revolutionary consciousness in Jesus; -not, of course, in the common use of the word -“revolutionary,” which connects it with violence and -bloodshed. But Jesus knew that he had come to kindle -a fire on earth. Much as he loved peace, he knew that -the actual result of his work would be not peace but the -sword. His mother in her song had recognized in her own -experience the settled custom of God to “put down the -proud and exalt them of low degree,” to “fill the hungry -with good things and to send the rich empty away.” -King Robert of Sicily recognized the revolutionary ring -in those phrases, and thought it well that the Magnificat -was sung only in Latin. The son of Mary expected a -great reversal of values. The first would be last and the -last would be first. He saw that what was exalted among -man was an abomination before God, and therefore these -exalted things had no glamour for his eye. This revolutionary -note runs even through the beatitudes, where we -should least expect it. The point of them is that henceforth -those were to be blessed whom the world had not -blessed, for the kingdom of God would reverse their -relative standing. Now the poor and the hungry and -sad were to be satisfied and comforted; the meek who -had been shouldered aside by the ruthless would get<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[347]</a></span> -their chance to inherit the earth, and conflict and persecution -would be inevitable in the process.</p> - -<p>We are apt to forget that his attack on the religious -leaders and authorities of his day was of revolutionary -boldness and thoroughness. He called the ecclesiastical -leaders hypocrites, blind leaders who fumbled in their -casuistry, and everywhere missed the decisive facts in -teaching right and wrong. Their piety was no piety; -their law was inadequate; they harmed the men whom -they wanted to convert. Even the publicans and harlots -had a truer piety than theirs. If we remember that -religion was still the foundation of the Jewish State, and -that the religious authorities were the pillars of existing -society, much as in mediæval Catholic Europe, we shall -realize how revolutionary were his invectives. It was -like Luther anathematizing the Catholic hierarchy.</p> - -<p>His mind was similarly liberated from spiritual subjection -to the existing civil powers. He called Herod, -his own liege sovereign, “that fox.” When the mother -of James and John tried to steal a march on the others -and secure for her sons a pledge of the highest places in -the Messianic kingdom, Jesus felt that this was a backsliding -into the scrambling methods of the present social -order, in which each tries to make the others serve him, -and he is greatest who can compel service from most. -In the new social order, which was expressed in his own -life, each must seek to give the maximum of service, and -he would be greatest who would serve utterly. In that -connection he sketched with a few strokes the pseudo-greatness -of the present aristocracy: “Ye know that -they which are supposed to rule over the nations lord -it over them, and their great ones tyrannize over them. -Thus shall it not be among you.” The monarchies and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[348]</a></span> -aristocracies have always lived on the fiction that they -exist for the good of the people, and yet it is an appalling -fact how few kings have loved their people and have lived -to serve. Usually the great ones have regarded the people -as their oyster. In a similar saying reported by Luke, -Jesus wittily adds that these selfish exploiters of the -people graciously allow themselves to be called “Benefactors.” -His eyes were open to the unintentional irony -of the titles in which the “majesties,” “excellencies,” -and “holinesses” of the world have always decked themselves. -Every time the inbred instinct to seek precedence -cropped up among his disciples he sternly suppressed it. -They must not allow themselves to be called Rabbi or -Father or Master, “for all ye are brothers.” Christ’s -ideal of society involved the abolition of rank and the -extinction of those badges of rank in which former inequality -was incrusted. The only title to greatness was -to be distinguished service at cost to self. All this shows -the keenest insight into the masked selfishness of those -who hold power, and involves a revolutionary consciousness, -emancipated from reverence for things as they are.</p> - - -<h3>To the “Christians”</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Francis Adams</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Take, then, your paltry Christ,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Your gentleman God.</div> - <div class="verse">We want the carpenter’s son,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With his saw and hod.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[349]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><em>We</em> want the man who loved</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The poor and the oppressed,</div> - <div class="verse">Who hated the Rich man and King</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the Scribe and the Priest.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><em>We</em> want the Galilean</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Who knew cross and rod.</div> - <div class="verse">It’s your “good taste” that prefers</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A bastard “God!”</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Life of Jesus</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Ernest Renan</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(French philosopher and historian, 1823-1892)</p> - -<p>The chosen flock presented in fact a very mixed -character, and one likely to astonish rigorous moralists. -It counted in its fold men with whom a Jew, respecting -himself, would not have associated. Perhaps Jesus -found in this society, unrestrained by ordinary rules, -more mind and heart than in a pedantic and formal -middle class, proud of its apparent morality.... He -appreciated conditions of soul only in proportion to the -love mingled therein. Women with tearful hearts, and -disposed through their sins to feelings of humanity, were -nearer to his kingdom than ordinary natures, who often -have little merit in not having fallen. We may conceive -on the other hand that these tender souls, finding in their -conversion to the sect an easy means of restoration, -would passionately attach themselves to Him. Far from -seeking to soothe the murmurs stirred up by his disdain -for the social susceptibilities of the time, He seemed to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[350]</a></span> -take pleasure in exciting them. Never did anyone avow -more loftily this contempt for the “world,” which is the -essential condition of great things and great originality. -He pardoned a rich man, but only when the rich man, -in consequence of some prejudice, was disliked by society. -He greatly preferred men of equivocal life and of small -consideration in the eyes of the orthodox leaders. “The -publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God -before you. For John came unto you and ye believed -him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed -him.” We can understand how galling the reproach of -not having followed the good example set by prostitutes -must have been to men making a profession of seriousness -and rigid morality.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From the Gospel According to Luke</span></h3> - -<p>And as he spake, a certain Pharisee besought him to -dine with him: and he went in, and sat down to -meat. And when the Pharisee saw it, he marvelled that -he had not first washed before dinner.</p> - -<p>And the Lord said unto him, “Now do ye Pharisees -make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but -your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness. -Ye fools, did not he, that made that which is without, -make that which is within also? But rather give alms of -such things as ye have; and, behold, all things are clean -unto you. But woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye tithe -mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over -judgment and the love of God; these ought ye to have -done, and not to leave the other undone. Woe unto -you, Pharisees! for ye love the uppermost seats in the -synagogues, and greetings in the markets. Woe unto<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[351]</a></span> -you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are as graves -which appear not, and the men that walk over them are -not aware of them.”</p> - -<p>Then answered one of the lawyers, and said unto him, -“Master, thus saying thou reproachest us also.”</p> - -<p>And he said, “Woe unto you, also, ye lawyers, for ye -lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye -yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers. -Woe unto you! for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, -and your fathers killed them.... Woe unto you, lawyers! -for ye have taken away the key of knowledge; ye -entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering -in ye hindered.”</p> - -<p>And as he said these things unto them, the scribes -and the Pharisees began to urge him vehemently, and to -provoke him to speak of many things: laying wait for -him, and seeking to catch something out of his mouth, -that they might accuse him.</p> - - -<h3>A Tramp’s Confession</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Cry of Youth”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Harry Kemp</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_37">37</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We huddled in the mission</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Fer it was cold outside,</div> - <div class="verse">An’ listened to the preacher</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Tell of the Crucified;</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Without, a sleety drizzle</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Cut deep each ragged form,—</div> - <div class="verse">An’ so we stood the talkin’</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Fer shelter from the storm</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[352]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They sang of God an’ angels,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">An’ heaven’s eternal joy,</div> - <div class="verse">An’ things I stopped believin’</div> - <div class="verse indent2">When I was still a boy;</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They spoke of good an’ evil,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">An’ offered savin’ grace—</div> - <div class="verse">An’ some showed love for mankin’</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A-shinin’ in their face,</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">An’ some their graft was workin’</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The same as me an’ you:</div> - <div class="verse">But most was urgin’ on us</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Wot they believed was true.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We sang an’ dozed an’ listened,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But only feared, us men,</div> - <div class="verse">The time when, service over,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We’d have to mooch again</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">An’ walk the icy pavements</div> - <div class="verse indent2">An’ breast the snowstorm gray</div> - <div class="verse">Till the saloons was opened</div> - <div class="verse indent2">An’ there was hints of day.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">So, when they called out “Sinners,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Won’t you come!” I came ...</div> - <div class="verse">But in my face was pallor</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And in my heart was shame ...</div> - <div class="verse">An’ so forgive me, Jesus,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Fer mockin’ of thy name—</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[353]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Fer I was cold an’ hungry!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They gave me grub an’ bed</div> - <div class="verse">After I kneeled there with them</div> - <div class="verse indent2">An’ many prayers was said.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">An’ so fergive me, Jesus,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I didn’t mean no harm—</div> - <div class="verse">An’ outside it was zero,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">An’ inside it was warm....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Yes, I was cold an’ hungry,—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">An’, O Thou Crucified,</div> - <div class="verse">Thou friend of all the Lowly,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Fergive the lie I lied!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Call of the Carpenter<a name="FNanchor_19" id="FNanchor_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19" class="fnanchor">[S]</a></h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Bouck White</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American Congregational clergyman, born 1874; imprisoned for -protesting in a church against the Colorado massacres)</p> - -<p>Jesus held that self-respect required of the rich young -man that he refuse to accept too long a handicap -over his fellows in the race of life, and start as near as -may be from the same mark with them. But he went -also a step further. He exacted of the young man that -he de-class himself. “Come, follow me.” This was the -staggerer. To stay in his own set and invest his fortune -in works of charity, would have been comparatively easy. -Philanthropy has been fashionable in every age. Charity -takes the insurrectionary edge off of poverty. Therefore -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[354]</a></span>the philanthropic rich man is a benefactor to his fellow -magnates, and is made to feel their gratitude; to him -all doors of fashion swing. But Jesus issued a veto. He -denied the legitimacy of alms-giving as a plaster for the -deep-lying sore in the social tissue. Neighborly help, man -to man, was acceptable to him, and he commended it. -But philanthropy as a substitute for justice—he would -have none of it. Charity is twice cursed—it hardens him -that gives and softens him that takes. It does more -harm to the poor than exploitation, because it makes -them willing to be exploited. It breeds slavishness, -which is moral suicide. The only thing Jesus would -permit a swollen fortune to do was to give itself to revolutionary -propaganda, in order that swollen fortunes -might be forever after impossible. Patchwork reformers -are but hewing at a hydra. Confronted with this imperative, -the rich young ruler made the great refusal. -To give up his fashionable set and join himself to this -company of working-class Galileans, was a moral heroism -to which he was unequal. Therefore he was sorrowful; -he went away, for he had a great social standing.</p> - -<p>Something of the same brand of atonement was evidently -in the mind of Dives when he awoke to the mistake -he had made—desirous to send from hell and tell his -five brothers to use the family fortune in erecting a -“Dives Home for the Hungry,” belike with the family -name and coat of arms over the front portal. Jesus would -concede no such privilege. He referred those “five -brethren” to “Moses and the prophets; let them hear -them”—Moses being the leader of the labor movement -which had given to the slaves in the Goshen brick-yards -their long-deferred rights; and the prophets being those -ardent Old Testament tribunes of the people who had so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[355]</a></span> -hotly contended for the family idea of society against the -exploiters and graspers at the top. Dante’s idea that -each sin on earth fashions its own proper punishment -in hell receives confirmation in this parable. “The great -gulf fixed,” which constituted Dives’s hell, was the gulf -which he himself had brought about. For the private -fortune he amassed had broken up the solidarity of -society—had introduced into it a chasm both broad and -deep. The gulf between him and Lazarus in this world -exists in the world to come to plague him. The thirst -which parched Dives’s tongue, “being in torments,” was -the thirst for companionship, the healing contact once -more with his fellows, from whom his fortune had sundered -him like a butcher’s cleaver. Jesus had so exalted -a notion of the working class, their absence of cant, their -rugged facing of the facts, their elemental simplicities, -their first-hand contact with the realities of life, that he -regarded any man who should draw himself off from them -in a fancied superiority, as immeasurably the loser thereby, -and as putting himself “in torments.”</p> - - -<h3>Lazarus</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the London “Spectator”</cite>)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Anonymous</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Still he lingers, where wealth and fashion</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Meet together to dine or play—</div> - <div class="verse">Lingers, a matter of vague compassion,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Out in the darkness across the way;</div> - <div class="verse">Out beyond the warmth and the glitter,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The light where luxury’s laughter rings,</div> - <div class="verse">Lazarus waits, where the wind is bitter,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Receiving his evil things.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[356]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Still ye find him when, breathless, burning,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Summer flames upon square and street,</div> - <div class="verse">When the fortunate ones of the earth are turning</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their thoughts to meadows and meadow-sweet;</div> - <div class="verse">Far away from the wide green valley,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The bramble patch where the white-throat sings,</div> - <div class="verse">Lazarus sweats in his crowded alley,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Receiving his evil things....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In the name of Knowledge the race grows healthier,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In the name of Freedom the world grows great;</div> - <div class="verse">And men are wiser, and men are wealthier,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But—Lazarus lies at the rich man’s gate.</div> - <div class="verse">Lies as he lay through human history,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Fame of heroes and pomp of kings,</div> - <div class="verse">At the rich man’s gate, an abiding mystery,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Receiving his evil things.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>A Parable</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By James Russell Lowell</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_189">189</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Said Christ our Lord, “I will go and see</div> - <div class="verse">How the men, my brethren, believe in me.”</div> - <div class="verse">He passed not again through the gate of birth,</div> - <div class="verse">But made himself known to the children of earth.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Then said the chief priests, and rulers, and kings,</div> - <div class="verse">“Behold, now, the Giver of all good things;</div> - <div class="verse">Go to, let us welcome with pomp and state</div> - <div class="verse">Him who alone is mighty and great.”</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[357]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With carpets of gold the ground they spread</div> - <div class="verse">Wherever the Son of Man should tread,</div> - <div class="verse">And in palace chambers lofty and rare</div> - <div class="verse">They lodged him, and served him with kingly fare.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Great organs surged through arches dim</div> - <div class="verse">Their jubilant floods in praise of him;</div> - <div class="verse">And in church, and palace, and judgment-hall,</div> - <div class="verse">He saw his image high over all.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But still, wherever his steps they led,</div> - <div class="verse">The Lord in sorrow bent down his head,</div> - <div class="verse">And from under the heavy foundation-stones</div> - <div class="verse">The son of Mary heard bitter groans.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And in church, and palace, and judgment-hall,</div> - <div class="verse">He marked great fissures that rent the wall,</div> - <div class="verse">And opened wider and yet more wide</div> - <div class="verse">As the living foundation heaved and sighed.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Have ye founded your thrones and altars, then,</div> - <div class="verse">On the bodies and souls of living men?</div> - <div class="verse">And think ye that building shall endure,</div> - <div class="verse">Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”With gates of silver and bars of gold</div> - <div class="verse">Ye have fenced my sheep from their Father’s fold;</div> - <div class="verse">I have heard the dropping of their tears</div> - <div class="verse">In heaven these eighteen hundred years.“</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,</div> - <div class="verse">We build but as our fathers built;</div> - <div class="verse">Behold thine images, how they stand,</div> - <div class="verse">Sovereign and sole, through all our land.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[358]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Our task is hard,—with sword and flame</div> - <div class="verse">To hold thine earth forever the same,</div> - <div class="verse">And with sharp crooks of steel to keep</div> - <div class="verse">Still, as thou leftest them, thy sheep.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Then Christ sought out an artisan,</div> - <div class="verse">A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,</div> - <div class="verse">And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin</div> - <div class="verse">Pushed from her faintly want and sin.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">These set he in the midst of them,</div> - <div class="verse">And as they drew back their garment-hem,</div> - <div class="verse">For fear of defilement, “Lo, here,” said he,</div> - <div class="verse">“The images ye have made of me!”</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From the Gospel According to Matthew</span></h3> - -<p>Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, -“Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom -prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For -I was a hungered, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, -and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me -in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited -me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”</p> - -<p>Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, “Lord, -when saw we thee a hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, -and gave thee drink? when saw we thee a stranger, and -took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? or when saw -we thee sick or in prison, and came unto thee?”</p> - -<p>And the King shall answer and say unto them, “Verily -I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one -of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto -me.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[359]</a></span></p> - -<p>Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, -“Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared -for the devil and his angels: for I was a hungered, -and ye gave me no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me -no drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me not in; -naked, and ye clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and -ye visited me not.”</p> - -<p>Then shall they also answer him, saying, “Lord, when -saw we thee a hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or -naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto -thee?”</p> - -<p>Then shall he answer them, saying, “Verily I say unto -you, inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, -ye did it not to me.”</p> - - -<h3>The Easter Children</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Frozen Grail and other Poems”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Elsa Barker</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_315">315</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Christ the Lord is risen!”</div> - <div class="verse">Chant the Easter children,</div> - <div class="verse">Their love-moulded faces</div> - <div class="verse">Luminous with gladness,</div> - <div class="verse">And their costly raiment</div> - <div class="verse">Gleaming like the lilies.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But last night I wandered</div> - <div class="verse">Where Christ had not risen,</div> - <div class="verse">Where love knows no gladness,</div> - <div class="verse">Where the lord of Hunger</div> - <div class="verse">Leaves no room for lilies,</div> - <div class="verse">And no time for childhood.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[360]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And today I wonder</div> - <div class="verse">Whether I am dreaming;</div> - <div class="verse">For above the swelling</div> - <div class="verse">Of their Easter music</div> - <div class="verse">I can hear the murmur,</div> - <div class="verse">“Suffer <em>all</em> the children.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Nay, the world is dreaming!</div> - <div class="verse">And my seeing spirit</div> - <div class="verse">Trembles for its waking,</div> - <div class="verse">When their Saviour rises</div> - <div class="verse">To restore the lilies</div> - <div class="verse">To the outcast children.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Quest</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Frederik van Eeden</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p class="poemintro">(The most widely read of modern Dutch novels, this story of the -life of “Little Johannes” is perhaps the most successful of the many -attempts that have been made to portray the coming of Jesus into -the modern world. Johannes is a boy of good family, who meets -a strange, homeless workingman, to whom he becomes devoted, and -whom he calls his “Brother.” The present selection narrates how -Johannes was taken to church.)</p></div> - -<p>“You see, Father,” said the countess, “we have -come to seek Jesus. Johannes, also.”</p> - -<p>“He is waiting for you,” replied the priest, solemnly, -pointing out the great crucifix above the altar. Then -he disappeared into the sacristy.</p> - -<p>Johannes immediately fastened his eyes upon that -figure, and continued to contemplate it while the people -were taking their places.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[361]</a></span></p> - -<p>It hung in the strongest light of the shadowy church. -Apparently it was of wood stained to a pale rose, with -peculiar blue and brown shadows. The wounds in the -side and under the thorns on the forehead were distinct -to exaggeration—all purple and swollen, with great -streaks of blood like dark-red sealing-wax. The face, -with its closed eyes, wore a look of distress, and a large -circle of gold and precious stones waggishly adorned the -usual russet-colored, cork-screwy, woodeny locks. The -cross itself was of shining gold, and each of its four -extremities was ornamented, while a nice, wavy paper -above the head bore the letters I. N. R. I. One could -see that it was all brand-new, and freshly gilded and -painted. Wreaths and bouquets of paper flowers embellished -the altar.</p> - -<p>For a long time—perhaps a quarter of an hour—Johannes -continued to look at the image. “That is -Jesus,” he muttered to himself, “He of whom I have -so often heard. Now I am going to learn about Him, -and He is to comfort me. He it is who has redeemed -the world.”</p> - -<p>But however often he might repeat this, trying seriously -to convince himself—because he would have been glad -to be convinced and also to be redeemed—he could nevertheless -see nothing except a repulsive, ugly, bloody, -prinked-up wooden doll. And this made him feel doubly -sorrowful and disheartened. Fully fifteen minutes had -he sat there, looking and musing, hearing the people -around him chatting—about the price they had paid for -their places, about the keeping on or taking off of women’s -hats, and about the reserved seats for the first families. -Then the door of the sacristy opened, and the choir-boys -with their swinging censers, and the sacristan, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[362]</a></span> -priests in their beautiful, gold-bordered garments, came -slowly and majestically in. And as the congregation -kneeled, Johannes kneeled with them.</p> - -<p>And when Johannes, as well as the others, looked at -the incoming procession, and then again turned his eyes -to the high altar, behold! there, to his amazement, kneeling -before the white altar, he saw a dark form. It was -in plain sight, bending forward in the twilight, the arms -upon the altar, and the face hidden in the arms. A man -it was, in the customary dark clothes of a laborer. No -one—neither Johannes nor probably any one else in the -church—had seen whence he came. But he was now -in the full sight of all, and one could hear whisperings and -a subdued excitement run along the rows of people and -pass on to the rear, like a gust of wind over a grain-field.</p> - -<p>As soon as the procession of choir-boys and priests came -within sight of the altar, the sacristan stepped hastily -out of line and went forward to the stranger, to assure -him that, possibly from too deep absorption in devotion, -or from lack of familiarity with ecclesiastical ceremony, -he was guilty of intrusion.</p> - -<p>He touched the man’s shoulder, but the man did not -stir. In the breathless stillness that followed, while -everyone expectantly awaited the outcome, a deep, heartrending -sob was heard.</p> - -<p>“A penitent!” “A drunken man!” “A convert!” -were some of the whispered comments of the people.</p> - -<p>The perplexed sacristan turned round, and beckoned -Father Canisius, who, with impressive bearing, stepped -up in his white, gold-threaded garb, as imposingly as a -full-sailed frigate moves.</p> - -<p>“Your place is not here,” said the priest, in his deep<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[363]</a></span> -voice. He spoke kindly, and not particularly loudly. -“Go to the back of the church.”</p> - -<p>There was no reply, and the man did not move; yet, -in the still more profound silence, his weeping was so -audible that many people shuddered.</p> - -<p>“Do you not hear me?” said the priest, raising his -voice a little, and speaking with some impatience. “It -is well that you are repentant, but only the consecrated -belong here—not penitents.”</p> - -<p>So saying, he grasped the shoulder of the stranger with -his large, strong hand.</p> - -<p>Then, slowly, very slowly, the kneeling man raised his -head from his arms, and turned his face toward the priest.</p> - -<p>What followed, perhaps each one of the hundreds of -witnesses would tell differently; and of those who heard -about it later, each had a different idea. But I am -going to tell you what Johannes saw and heard—heard -quite as clearly as you have seen and heard the members -of your own household, today.</p> - -<p>He saw his Brother’s face, pale and illumined, as if his -head were shone upon by beams of clearest sunlight. -And the sadness of that face was so deep and unutterable, -so bitter and yet so gentle, that Johannes felt forced, -through pain, to press both hands upon his heart, and to -set his teeth, while he gazed with wide, tear-filled eyes, -forgetting everything save that shining face so full of -grief.</p> - -<p>For a time it was as still as death, while man and priest -regarded each other. At last the man spoke, and said:</p> - -<p>“Who are you, and in whose name are you here?”</p> - -<p>When two men stand thus, face to face, and address -each other with all earnestness in the hearing of many -others, one of them is always immediately recognized to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[364]</a></span> -be the superior—even if the listeners are unable to gauge -the force of the argument. Every one feels that superiority, -although later many forget or deny it. If that -dominance is not very great, it arouses spitefulness and -fury; but if it is indeed great, it brings, betimes, repose -and submissiveness.</p> - -<p>In this case the ascendency was so great that the priest -lost even the air of authority and assurance with which -he had come forward, and did that for which, later, he -reproached himself—he stopped to explain:</p> - -<p>“I am a consecrated priest of the Triune God, and I -speak in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—our Saviour -and Redeemer.”</p> - -<p>There ensued a long silence, and Johannes saw nothing -but the shining, human face and the eyes, which, full of -sorrow and compassion, continued to regard the richly -robed priest with a bitter smile. The priest stood motionless, -with hanging hands and staring eyes, as if uncertain -what next to say or do; but he listened silently for what -was coming, as did Johannes and all the others in the -church—as if under an overpowering spell.</p> - -<p>Then came the following words, and so long as they -sounded no one could think of anything else—neither -of the humble garb of him who spoke, nor of the incomprehensible -subjection of his gorgeously arrayed listener:</p> - -<p>“But you are not yet a man! Would you be a priest -of the Most High?</p> - -<p>“You are not yet redeemed, nor are these others with -you redeemed, although you make bold to say so in the -name of the Redeemer.</p> - -<p>“Did your Saviour when upon earth wear cloth of -silver and of gold?</p> - -<p>“There is no redemption yet—neither for you nor for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[365]</a></span> -any of yours. The time is not come for the wearing of -garments of gold.</p> - -<p>“Mock not, nor slander. Your ostentation is a travesty -of the Most High, and a defamation of your Saviour.</p> - -<p>“Do you esteem the kingdom of God a trifle, that you -array yourself and rejoice, while the world still lies in -despair and in shackles?...</p> - -<p>“You are so commanded to serve your Father in spirit -and in truth, and you have served Him with the letter -and with lies.</p> - -<p>“His prophets, who loved the truth better than their -lives, you have burned at the stake, and have made them -martyrs....</p> - -<p>“You pull the carriage of prince and moneyed man, and -make grimaces before the powerful.</p> - -<p>“They build your churches, and you say masses for -them, although they be Satan himself....</p> - -<p>“What have you done for the sheep committed to your -care—for the poor and bereaved—for the oppressed and -the disinherited?</p> - -<p>“Submission you have taught them—ay—submission -to Mammon. You have taught them to bow meekly to -Satan.</p> - -<p>“God’s light—the light of knowledge—you have withheld -from them. Woe be to you!</p> - -<p>“You have taught them to beg, and to kiss the rod -that smote them. You have cloaked the shame of alms-receiving, -and have prated of honor in servitude.</p> - -<p>“Thus have you humbled man, and disfigured the -human soul....</p> - -<p>“Of the love of the Father you have made commerce—a -sinful merchandise. Not because you love virtue do -you preach it, but because of the sweet profit. You<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[366]</a></span> -promise deliverance to all who follow your counsel; but -as well can you make a present of moon and stars.</p> - -<p>“Are you not told to recompense evil with good? And -is God less than man that He should do otherwise?</p> - -<p>“It is well for you that He does not do otherwise, for -where then were your salvation?</p> - -<p>“For you, and you only, are the brood of vipers against -whom is kindled the wrath of Him who was gentle with -adulterers and murderers.”</p> - -<p>While speaking, the man had risen to his full height, -and he now appeared, to all there assembled, impressively -tall.</p> - -<p>When he had spoken, reaching his right hand backward -he grasped the foot of the great golden crucifix. It -snapped off like glass, and he threw it on the marble -floor at the feet of the priest. The fragment broke into -many bits. It was apparently not wood, but plaster.</p> - -<p>“Sacrilege!” cried the priest, in a stifled voice, as if -the sound were wrung from his throat. His eyes seemed -to be starting out of his great purple face.</p> - -<p>The man quietly replied:</p> - -<p>“No, but my right; for you are the sacrilegist and the -blasphemer who makes of the Son of man a hideous -caricature.”</p> - -<p>Then the priest stepped forward, and gripped Markus -by the wrist. The latter made no resistance, but cried -in a loud voice that reverberated through the church:</p> - -<p>“Do your work, Caiaphas!”</p> - -<p>After that he suffered himself to be led away to the -sacristy.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[367]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Image in the Forum</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Buchanan</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English novelist and dramatist, 1814-1901)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Not Baal, but Christus-Jingo! Heir</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of him who once was crucified!</div> - <div class="verse">The red stigmata still are there,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The crimson spear-wounds in the side;</div> - <div class="verse">But raised aloft as God and Lord,</div> - <div class="verse">He holds the Money-bag and Sword.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">See, underneath the Crown of Thorn,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The eye-balls fierce, the features grim!</div> - <div class="verse">And merrily from night to morn</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We chaunt his praise and worship him</div> - <div class="verse">Great Christus-Jingo, at whose feet</div> - <div class="verse">Christian and Jew and Atheist meet!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">A wondrous god! most fit for those</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Who cheat on ‘Change, then creep to prayer;</div> - <div class="verse">Blood on his heavenly altar flows,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Hell’s burning incense fills the air,</div> - <div class="verse">And Death attests in street and lane</div> - <div class="verse">The hideous glory of his reign.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O gentle Jew, from age to age</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Walking the waves thou could’st not tame,</div> - <div class="verse">This god hath ta’en thy heritage,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And stolen thy sweet and stainless Name!</div> - <div class="verse">To him we crawl and bend the knee,</div> - <div class="verse">Naming thy Name, but scorning Thee!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[368]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Quest</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Frederik van Eeden</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Sequel to the scene quoted on page 360. Jesus has been held for -examination as to his sanity)</p> - -<p>“Does he often have those whims, Johannes,” -asked Dr. Cijfer, “when he will not speak?”</p> - -<p>“He has no whims,” said Johannes, stoutly.</p> - -<p>“Why, then, will he not reply?”</p> - -<p>“I think you would not answer me,” returned Johannes, -“if I were to ask you if you were mad.”</p> - -<p>The two learned men exchanged smiles.</p> - -<p>“That is a somewhat different situation,” said Bommeldoos, -haughtily.</p> - -<p>“He was not questioned in such a blunt manner as -that,” explained Doctor Cijfer. “I asked about his -extraction, his age, the health of his father and mother, -about his own youth, and so forth—the usual memory -promptings. Will you not give us some further information -concerning him? Remember, it is of real importance -to your brother.”</p> - -<p>“Mijnheer,” said Johannes, “I know as little as yourself -about all that....”</p> - -<p>There was a knock at the door. The nurse came -and said, “Here is the patient.” Then he let Markus -in....</p> - -<p>Markus had on a dark-blue linen blouse, such as all -the patients of the working-class wear. He stood tall -and erect, and Johannes observed that his face was less -pale and sad than usual. The blue became his dark curling -hair, and Johannes felt happy and confident as he -looked at him—standing there so proud and calm and -handsome.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[369]</a></span></p> - -<p>“Take a seat,” said Dr. Cijfer.</p> - -<p>But Markus seemed not to have heard, and remained -standing, while he nodded kindly and reassuringly to -Johannes.</p> - -<p>“Observe his pride,” said Professor Bommeldoos, in -Latin to Dr. Cijfer.</p> - -<p>“The proud find pride, and the gloomy, gloom; but -the glad find gladness, and the lowly, humility,” said -Markus.</p> - -<p>Dr. Cijfer stood up, and took his measuring instrument -from the table. Then, in a quiet, courteous tone, he said:</p> - -<p>“Will you not permit us, Mijnheer, to take your head -measure? It is for a scientific purpose?”</p> - -<p>“It gives no pain,” added Bommeldoos.</p> - -<p>“Not to the body,” said Markus.</p> - -<p>Said Dr. Cijfer, “There is nothing in it to offend one. -I have had it done to myself many a time.”</p> - -<p>“There is a kind of opinionativeness and denseness -that offend.”</p> - -<p>Bommeldoos flushed. “Opinionativeness and denseness! -Mine, perchance? Am I such an ignoramus? -Opinionated and stupid!”</p> - -<p>“Colleague!” exclaimed Dr. Cijfer, in gentle expostulation. -And then, as he enclosed Markus’s head with -the shining craniometer, he gave the measurement figures. -A considerable time passed, nothing being heard save the -low voice of the doctor dictating the figures. Then, as -if proceeding with his present occupation, taking advantage -of what he considered a compliant mood of the -patient, the crafty doctor fancied he saw his opportunity, -and said:</p> - -<p>“Your parents certainly dwelt in another country—one -more southerly and more mountainous.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[370]</a></span></p> - -<p>But Markus removed the doctor’s hand, with the -instrument, from his head, and looked at him piercingly.</p> - -<p>“Why are you not sincere?” he then asked, with gentle -stress. “How can truth be found through untruth?”</p> - -<p>Dr. Cijfer hesitated, and then did exactly what Father -Canisius had done—something which, later, he was of -the opinion he ought not to have done: he argued with -him.</p> - -<p>“But if you will not give me a direct reply I am obliged -to get the truth circuitously.”</p> - -<p>Said Markus, “A curved sword will not go far into a -straight scabbard.”</p> - -<p>Professor Bommeldoos grew impatient, and snapped -at the doctor aside, in a smothered voice: “Do not -argue, Colleague, do not argue! Megalomaniacs are -smarter, and sometimes have subtler dialectic faculties -than you have. Just let <em>me</em> conduct the examination.”</p> - -<p>And then, after a loud “h’m! h’m!” he said to Markus:</p> - -<p>“ ... Now just tell me, frankly, my friend, are you -a prophet? An apostle? Are you perhaps the King? -Or are you God himself?”</p> - -<p>Markus was silent.</p> - -<p>“Why do you not answer now?”</p> - -<p>“Because I am not being questioned.”</p> - -<p>“Not being questioned! What, then, am I now doing?”</p> - -<p>“Raving,” said Markus.</p> - -<p>Bommeldoos flushed, and lost his composure.</p> - -<p>“Be careful, my friend. You must not be impertinent. -Remember that we may decide your fate here.”</p> - -<p>Markus lifted his head, with a questioning air, so -earnest that the professor held his peace.</p> - -<p>“With whom rests the decision of our fate?” asked -Markus. Then, pointing with his finger: “Do you consider -yourself the one to decide?”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[371]</a></span></p> - -<p>After that he uttered not a word. Dr. Cijfer questioned -with gentle stress, Professor Bommeldoos with vehement -energy; but Markus was silent, and seemed not to notice -that there were others in the room.</p> - -<p>“I adhere to my diagnosis, Colleague,” said Bommeldoos.</p> - -<p>Dr. Cijfer rang, and ordered the nurse to come.</p> - -<p>“Take the patient to his ward again. He will remain, -for the present, under observation.”</p> - -<p>Markus went, after making a short but kindly inclination -of the head to Johannes.</p> - -<p>“Will you not tell us now, Johannes, what you know -of this person?” asked Dr. Cijfer.</p> - -<p>“Mijnheer,” replied Johannes, “I know but little -more of him than you do yourself. I met him two years -ago, and he is my dearest friend; but I have seen him -rarely, and have never inquired about his life nor his -origin.”</p> - -<p>“Remarkable!” exclaimed Dr. Cijfer.</p> - -<p>“Once again, Colleague, I stand by my diagnosis,” -said Bommeldoos. “Initial paranoia, with megalomaniacal -symptoms, on the basis of hereditary inferiority, with -vicarious genius.”</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 363px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo368" id="illo368">[illo368]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_368f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>ECCE HOMO</p> - -<p>CONSTANTIN MEUNIER</p> - -<p>(<i>Belgian sculptor, 1831-1905</i>)</p></div> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 413px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo369" id="illo369">[illo369]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_369f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>DESPISED AND REJECTED OF MEN</p> - -<p>SIGISMUND GOETZE</p> - -<p>(<i>Contemporary German painter</i>)</p></div> -</div> - - -<h3>The Swordless Christ</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Percy Adams Hutchison</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet, born 1875)</p> - -<p>“<i>Vicisti Galilaee</i>”</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ay, down the years behold he rides,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The lowly Christ, upon an ass;</div> - <div class="verse">But conquering? Ten shall heed the call,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A thousand idly watch him pass:</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[372]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They watch him pass, or lightly hold</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In mock lip-loyalty his name:</div> - <div class="verse">A thousand—were they his to lead!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But meek, without a sword, he came.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">A myriad horsemen swept the field</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With Attila, the whirlwind Hun;</div> - <div class="verse">A myriad cannon spake for him,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The silent, dread Napoleon.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">For these had ready spoil to give,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Had reeking spoil for savage hands;</div> - <div class="verse">Slaves, and fair wives, and pillage rare:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The wealth of cities: teeming lands.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And if the world, once drunk with blood,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Sated, has turned from arms to peace,</div> - <div class="verse">Man hath not lost his ancient lusts;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The weapons change; war doth not cease.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The mother in the stifling den,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The brain-dulled child beside the loom,</div> - <div class="verse">The hordes that swarm and toil and starve—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We laugh, and tread them to their doom.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They shriek, and cry their prayers to Christ;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And lift wan faces, hands that bleed:</div> - <div class="verse">In vain they pray, for what is Christ?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A leader—without men to lead.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ah, piteous Christ afar he rides!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We see him, but the face is dim;</div> - <div class="verse">We that would leap at crash of drums</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Are slow to rise and follow him.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[373]</a></span></p> - -<h3>How Long, O Lord</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Hall Caine</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English novelist and dramatist, born 1853)</p> - -<p>Look down, O Lord, look down. Are the centuries -a waste? Nigh upon two thousand years have gone -since Thou didst walk the world, and the face of things -is not unchanged. In <em>Thy</em> Name now doth the Pharisee -give alms in the street to the sound of a trumpet going -before him. In Thy Name now doth the Levite pass by -on the other side when a man hath fallen among thieves. -In Thy Name now doth the lawyer lay on the poor burdens -grievous to be borne. In Thy Name now doth the -priest buy and sell the glad tidings of the kingdom, -giving for the gospel of God the commandments of men, -living in rich men’s houses, faring sumptuously every day, -praying with his lips, “Give us this day our daily bread,” -but saying to his soul, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid -up for many years: take thine ease, eat, drink, and be -merry.”</p> - -<p>Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? -Is it this Thy gospel that yields that Thy fruit? Then -will the master of the vineyard come shortly and say, -“Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[374]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>In a Siberian Prison Church</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Resurrection”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Leo Tolstoy</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>)</p> - -<p>The service began.</p> - -<p>It consisted of the following. The priest, having -dressed himself up in a strange and very inconvenient -garb of gold cloth, cut and arranged little bits of bread -on a saucer and then put most of them in a cup with wine, -repeating at the same time different names and prayers. -Meanwhile the deacon first read Slavonic prayers, difficult -to understand in themselves, and rendered still more -incomprehensible by being read very fast; he then sang -them turn and turn about with the convicts.</p> - -<p>The essence of the service consisted in the supposition -that the bits of bread cut up by the priest and put into the -wine, when manipulated and prayed over in a certain -way, turned into the flesh and blood of God.</p> - -<p>These manipulations consisted in the priest, hampered -by the gold cloth sack he had on, regularly lifting and -holding up his arms and then sinking to his knees and -kissing the table and all that was on it; but chiefly in his -taking a cloth by two of its corners and waving it rhythmically -and softly over the silver saucer and the golden cup. -It was supposed that at this point the bread and the wine -turned into flesh and blood; therefore this part of the -service was performed with the utmost solemnity. And -the convicts made the sign of the cross, and bowed, first -at each sentence, then after every two, and then after -three; and all were very glad when the glorification ended<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[375]</a></span> -and the priest shut the book with a sigh of relief and -retired behind the partition. One last act remained. The -priest took from a table a large gilt cross with enamel -medallions at the ends, and came out into the center of -the church with it. First the inspector came up and -kissed the cross, then the jailers, and then the convicts, -pushing and jostling, and abusing each other in whispers. -The priest, talking to the inspector, pushed the cross and -his hand, now against the mouths and now against the -noses of the convicts, who were trying to kiss both the -cross and the hand of the priest. And thus ended the -Christian service, intended for the comfort and edification -of these brothers who had gone astray.</p> - -<p>And none of these present, from the inspector down, -seemed conscious of the fact that this Jesus, whose name -the priest repeated such a great number of times, whom he -praised with all these curious expressions, had forbidden -the very things that were being done there; that he had -not only prohibited this meaningless much-speaking and -the blasphemous incantation over the bread and wine, -but had also, in the clearest words, forbidden men to call -other men their master or to pray in temples; had taught -that every one should pray in solitude; had forbidden to -erect temples, saying that he had come to destroy them, -and that one should worship not in a temple, but in spirit -and in truth; and, above all, that not only had he forbidden -to judge, to imprison, to torment, to execute men, as -was done here, but had even prohibited any kind of -violence, saying that he had come to give freedom to the -captives.</p> - -<p>No one present seemed conscious that all that was going -on here was the greatest blasphemy, and a mockery of -that same Christ in whose name it was being done. No<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[376]</a></span> -one seemed to realize that the gilt cross with the enamel -medallions at the ends, which the priest held out to the -people to be kissed, was nothing but the emblem of that -gallows on which Christ had been executed for denouncing -just what was going on here. That these priests, who -imagined they were eating and drinking the body and -blood of Christ in the form of bread and wine, did in -reality eat and drink his flesh and his blood, only not as -wine and bits of bread, but by ensnaring “these little -ones” with whom he identified himself, by depriving them -of the greatest blessings and submitting them to most -cruel torments, and by hiding from men the tidings of -great joy which he had brought—that thought did not -enter the mind of any one present.</p> - - -<h3>Before a Crucifix</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Algernon Charles Swinburne</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet of nature and liberty, 1837-1909)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Here, down between the dusty trees,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">At this lank edge of haggard wood,</div> - <div class="verse">Women with labor-loosened knees,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With gaunt backs bowed by servitude,</div> - <div class="verse">Stop, shift their loads, and pray, and fare</div> - <div class="verse">Forth with souls easier for the prayer.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The suns have branded black, the rains</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Striped gray this piteous God of theirs;</div> - <div class="verse">The face is full of prayers and pains,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To which they bring their pains and prayers;</div> - <div class="verse">Lean limbs that shew the laboring bones,</div> - <div class="verse">And ghastly mouth that gapes and groans.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[377]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">God of this grievous people, wrought</div> - <div class="verse indent2">After the likeness of their race,</div> - <div class="verse">By faces like thine own besought,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Thine own blind helpless, eyeless face,</div> - <div class="verse">I too, that have nor tongue nor knee</div> - <div class="verse">For prayer, I have a word to thee.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">It was for this then, that thy speech</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Was blown about the world in flame</div> - <div class="verse">And men’s souls shot up out of reach</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of fear or lust or thwarting shame—</div> - <div class="verse">That thy faith over souls should pass</div> - <div class="verse">As sea-winds burning the grey grass?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">It was for this, that prayers like these</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Should spend themselves about thy feet,</div> - <div class="verse">And with hard overlabored knees</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Kneeling, these slaves of men should beat</div> - <div class="verse">Bosoms too lean to suckle sons</div> - <div class="verse">And fruitless as their orisons?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">It was for this, that men should make</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Thy name a fetter on men’s necks,</div> - <div class="verse">Poor men made poorer for thy sake,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And women withered out of sex?</div> - <div class="verse">It was for this, that slaves should be,</div> - <div class="verse">Thy word was passed to set men free?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The nineteenth wave of the ages rolls</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Now deathward since thy death and birth.</div> - <div class="verse">Hast thou fed full men’s starved-out souls?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Hast thou brought freedom upon earth?</div> - <div class="verse">Or are there less oppressions done</div> - <div class="verse">In this wild world under the sun?</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[378]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Nay, if indeed thou be not dead,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Before thy terrene shrine be shaken,</div> - <div class="verse">Look down, turn usward, bow thine head;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">O thou that wast of God forsaken,</div> - <div class="verse">Look on thine household here, and see</div> - <div class="verse">These that have not forsaken thee.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Thy faith is fire upon their lips,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Thy kingdom golden in their hands;</div> - <div class="verse">They scourge us with thy words for whips,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They brand us with thy words for brands;</div> - <div class="verse">The thirst that made thy dry throat shrink</div> - <div class="verse">To their moist mouths commends the drink....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O sacred head, O desecrate,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">O labor-wounded feet and hands,</div> - <div class="verse">O blood poured forth in pledge to fate</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of nameless lives in divers lands,</div> - <div class="verse">O slain and spent and sacrificed</div> - <div class="verse">People, the grey-grown speechless Christ!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Is there a gospel in the red</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Old witness of thy wide-mouthed wounds?</div> - <div class="verse">From thy blind stricken tongueless head</div> - <div class="verse indent2">What desolate evangel sounds</div> - <div class="verse">A hopeless note of hope deferred?</div> - <div class="verse">What word, if there be any word?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O son of man, beneath man’s feet</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Cast down, O common face of man</div> - <div class="verse">Whereon all blows and buffets meet,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">O royal, O republican</div> - <div class="verse">Face of the people bruised and dumb</div> - <div class="verse">And longing till thy kingdom come!...</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[379]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The tree of faith ingraft by priests</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Puts its foul foliage out above thee,</div> - <div class="verse">And round it feed man-eating beasts</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Because of whom we dare not love thee;</div> - <div class="verse">Though hearts reach back and memories ache,</div> - <div class="verse">We cannot praise thee for their sake....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Nay, if their God and thou be one,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">If thou and this thing be the same,</div> - <div class="verse">Thou shouldst not look upon the sun;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The sun grows haggard at thy name.</div> - <div class="verse">Come down, be done with, cease, give o’er;</div> - <div class="verse">Hide thyself, strive not, be no more.</div> -</div></div></div> -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[380]</a><br /><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[381]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK VIII</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><i>The Church</i></p> - -<p>Contains passages, both of exhortation and denunciation, dealing -with the relation of the church toward modern problems, and -the effort to bring back a property-strangled institution to the -revolutionary gospel of its founder.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[382]</a><br /><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[383]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>God and My Neighbor</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Blatchford</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>)</p> - -<p>“For all that, Robert, you’re a notorious Infidel.” I -paused—just opposite the Tivoli—and gazed moodily -up and down the Strand.</p> - -<p>As I have remarked elsewhere, I like the Strand. It is -a very human place. But I own that the Strand lacks -dignity and beauty, and that amongst its varied odors -the odor of sanctity is scarcely perceptible.</p> - -<p>There are no trees in the Strand. The thoroughfare -should be wider. The architecture is, for the most part, -banal. For a chief street in a Christian capital, the -Strand is not eloquent of high national ideals.</p> - -<p>There are derelict churches in the Strand, and dingy, -blatant taverns, and strident signs and hoardings; and -there are slums hard by.</p> - -<p>There are thieves in the Strand, and prowling vagrants, -and gaunt hawkers, and touts, and gamblers, and loitering -failures, with tragic eyes and wilted garments; and prostitutes -plying for hire.</p> - -<p>And east and west, and north and south of the Strand, -there is London. Is there a man amongst all London’s -millions brave enough to tell the naked truth about the -vice and crime, the misery and meanness, the hypocrisies -and shames of the great, rich, heathen city? Were such -a man to arise amongst us and voice the awful truth, what -would his reception be? How would he fare at the hands -of the Press, and the Public—and the Church?</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[384]</a></span></p> - -<p>As London is, so is England. This is a Christian country. -What would Christ think of Park Lane, and the -slums, and the hooligans? What would He think of the -Stock Exchange, and the music hall, and the race-course? -What would He think of our national ideals? What -would He think of the House of Peers, and the Bench -of Bishops, and the Yellow Press?</p> - -<p>Pausing again, over against Exeter Hall, I mentally -apostrophize the Christian British people. “Ladies and -Gentlemen,” I say, “you are Christians in name, but I -discern little of Christ in your ideals, your institutions, or -your daily lives. You are a mercenary, self-indulgent, -frivolous, boastful, blood-guilty mob of heathen. I like -you very much, but that is what you are. And it is you—<em>you</em> -who call men ‘Infidels.’ You ridiculous creatures, -what do you mean by it?”</p> - -<p>If to praise Christ in words, and deny Him in deeds, be -Christianity, then London is a Christian city, and England -is a Christian nation. For it is very evident that our -common English ideals are anti-Christian, and that our -commercial, foreign, and social affairs are run on anti-Christian -lines.</p> - -<p>Renan says, in his <cite>Life of Jesus</cite>, that “were Jesus to -return amongst us He would recognize as His disciples, -not those who imagine they can compress Him into a few -catechismal phrases, but those who labour to carry on his -work.”</p> - -<p>My Christian friends, I am a Socialist, and as such -believe in, and work for, universal freedom, and universal -brotherhood, and universal peace.</p> - -<p>And you are Christians, and I am an “Infidel.” -Well, be it even so.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[385]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From the Gospel of Luke</span></h3> - -<p>When he was come near, he beheld the city, and -wept over it, saying, if thou hadst known, even -thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto -thy peace!</p> - - -<h3>From the Bottom Up</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Alexander Irvine</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(The life-story of an Irish peasant lad, born 1863, who became in -turn stableman, man-of-war’s-man, slum-missionary, -clergyman, and Socialist agitator)</p> - -<p>After some years’ experience in missions and mission -churches, I would find it very hard if I were a workingman -living in a tenement not to be antagonistic to -them; for, in large measure, such work is done on the -assumption that people are poor and degraded through -laxity in morals. The scheme of salvation is a salvation -for the individual; social salvation is out of the question. -Social conditions cannot be touched, because in all rotten -social conditions, there is a thin red line which always leads -to the rich man or woman who is responsible for them.</p> - -<p>Coming in contact with these ugly social facts continuously, -led me to this belief. It came very slowly; as did -also the opinion that the missionary himself or the pastor, -be he as wise as Solomon, as eloquent as Demosthenes, as -virtuous as St. Francis, has no social standing whatever -among the people whose alms support the institutions, -religious and philanthropic, of which he is the executive -head. The fellowship of the saints is a pure fiction, has -absolutely no foundation in fact in a city like New York -except as the poor saints have it by themselves.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[386]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From the Gospel of John</span></h3> - -<p>If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a -liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath -seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? -And this commandment have we from him, that he who -loveth God love his brother also.</p> - - -<h3>The Inside of the Cup<a name="FNanchor_20" id="FNanchor_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20" class="fnanchor">[T]</a></h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Winston Churchill</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(One of the most popular of American novelists, born 1871. This -story has for its theme the failure of the Church in the face of -modern social problems. In the following scene a rich man is -rebuked by his pastor)</p></div> - -<p>The perceptions of the banker were keen, and his sense -of security was brief. Somehow, as he met the searching -eye of the rector, he was unable to see the man as -a visionary, but beheld and,—to do him justice—felt a -twinge of respect for an adversary worthy of his steel. He, -who was accustomed to prepare for clouds when they were -mere specks on his horizon, paused even now to marvel why -he had not dealt with this. Here was a man—a fanatic, -if he liked—but still a man who positively did not fear -him, to whom his wrath and power were as nothing! A -new and startling and complicated sensation—but Eldon -Parr was no coward. If he had, consciously or unconsciously, -formerly looked upon the clergyman as a dependent, -Hodder appeared to be one no more. The very ruggedness -of the man had enhanced, expanded—as it -were—until it filled the room. And Hodder had, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[387]</a></span> -an audacity unparalleled in the banker’s experience, -arraigned by implication his whole life, managed to put -him on the defensive.</p> - -<p>“But if that has become your philosophy,” the rector -said—“that a man must look out for himself—what is it -in you that impels you to give these large sums for the -public good?”</p> - -<p>“I should suppose that you, as a clergyman, might -understand that my motive is a Christian one.”</p> - -<p>Hodder sat very still, but a higher light came into his -eyes.</p> - -<p>“Mr. Parr,” he replied, “I have been a friend of yours, -and I am a friend still. And what I am going to tell you -is not only in the hope that others may benefit, but that -your own soul may be saved. I mean that literally—your -own soul. You are under the impression that you are a -Christian, but you are not and never have been one. And -you will not be one until your whole life is transformed, -until you become a different man. If you do not change, -it is my duty to warn you that sorrow and suffering, the -uneasiness which you now know, and which drive you on, -in search of distraction, to adding useless sums of money to -your fortune—this suffering, I say, will become intensified. -You will die in the knowledge of it, and live on after, in -the knowledge of it.”</p> - -<p>In spite of himself, the financier drew back before this -unexpected blast, the very intensity of which had struck -a chill of terror in his inmost being. He had been taken -off his guard,—for he had supposed the day long past—if -it had ever existed—when a spiritual rebuke would -upset him; the day long past when a minister <em>could</em> pronounce -one with any force. That the Church should ever -again presume to take herself seriously had never occurred<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[388]</a></span> -to him. And yet—the man had denounced him in a -moment of depression, of nervous irritation and exasperation -against a government which had begun to interfere -with the sacred liberty of its citizens, against political -agitators who had spurred that government on. The -world was mad. No element, it seemed, was now content -to remain in its proper place. His voice, as he answered, -shook with rage,—all the greater because the undaunted -sternness by which it was confronted seemed to reduce -it to futility.</p> - -<p>“Take care!” he cried, “take care! You, nor any other -man, clergyman or no clergyman, have any right to be the -judge of my conduct.”</p> - -<p>“On the contrary,” said Hodder, “if your conduct -affects the welfare, the progress, the reputation of the -church of which I am rector, I have the right. And I -intend to exercise it. It becomes my duty, however -painful, to tell you, as a member of the Church, wherein -you have wronged the Church and wronged yourself.”</p> - -<p>He didn’t raise his tone, and there was in it more of -sorrow than of indignation. The banker turned an -ashen gray.... A moment elapsed before he spoke, -a transforming moment. He suddenly became ice.</p> - -<p>“Very well,” he said. “I can’t pretend to account for -these astounding views you have acquired—and I am -using a mild term. Let me say this” (he leaned forward -a little, across the desk): “I demand that you be specific. -I am a busy man, I have little time to waste, I have certain -matters before me which must be attended to to-night. I -warn you that I will not listen any longer to vague accusations.”</p> - -<p>It was Hodder’s turn to marvel. Did Eldon Parr, after -all, have no sense of guilt? Instantaneously, automatically, -his own anger rose.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[389]</a></span></p> - -<p>“You may be sure, Mr. Parr, that I should not be here -unless I were prepared to be specific. And what I am -going to say to you I have reserved for your ear alone, in -the hope that you will take it to heart while it is not yet -too late, and amend your life accordingly....”</p> - -<p>(The clergyman tells the banker of lives that have been -ruined by his financial dishonesties.)</p> - -<p>“I am not talking about the imperfect code of human -justice under which we live, Mr. Parr,” he cried. “This -is not a case in which a court of law may exonerate you, it -is between you and your God. But I have taken the -trouble to find out, from unquestioned sources, the truth -about the Consolidated Tractions Company—I shall not -go into the details at length—they are doubtless familiar -to you. I know that the legal genius of Mr. Langmaid, -one of my vestry, made possible the organization of the -company, and thereby evaded the plain spirit of the law -of the state. I know that one branch line was bought for -two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and capitalized -for three millions, and that most of the others were -scandalously over-capitalized. I know that while the -coming transaction was still a secret, you and other -gentlemen connected with the matter bought up large -interests in other lines, which you proceeded to lease <em>to -yourselves</em> at guaranteed dividends which these lines do not -earn. I know that the first large dividend was paid out of -capital. And the stock which you sold to poor Garvin was -so hopelessly watered that it never could have been anything -but worthless. If, in spite of these facts, you do not -deem yourself responsible for the misery which has been -caused, if your conscience is now clear, it is my duty to tell -you that there is a higher bar of justice.”</p> - -<p>The intensity of the fire of the denunciation had, indeed,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[390]</a></span> -a momentary yet visible effect in the banker’s expression. -Whatever the emotions thus lashed to self-betrayal, -anger, hatred,—fear, perhaps, Hodder could not detect a -trace of penitence; and he was aware, on the part of the -other, of a supreme, almost spasmodic effort for self-control. -The constitutional reluctance of Eldon Parr to fight -openly could not have been more clearly demonstrated.</p> - -<p>“Because you are a clergyman, Mr. Hodder,” he began, -“because you are the rector of St. John’s, I have allowed -you to say things to me which I would not have permitted -from any other man. I have tried to take into account -your point of view, which is naturally restricted, your -pardonable ignorance of what business men, who wish -to do their duty by Church and State, have to contend -with. When you came to this parish you seemed to have -a sensible, a proportional view of things; you were content -to confine your activities to your own sphere, content -not to meddle with politics and business, which you -could, at first hand, know nothing about. The modern -desire of clergymen to interfere in these matters has -ruined the usefulness of many of them.</p> - -<p>“I repeat, I have tried to be patient. I venture to hope, -still, that this extraordinary change in you may not be -permanent, but merely the result of a natural sympathy -with the weak and unwise and unfortunate who are -always to be found in a complex civilization. I can even -conceive how such a discovery must have shocked you, -temporarily aroused your indignation, as a clergyman, -against the world as it is—and, I may add, as it has always -been. My personal friendship for you, and my interest -in your future welfare impel me to make a final appeal to -you not to ruin a career which is full of promise....”</p> - -<p>“I hinted to you awhile ago of a project I have con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[391]</a></span>ceived -and almost perfected of gifts on a much larger scale -than I have ever attempted.” The financier stared at him -meaningly. “And I had you in mind as one of the three -men whom I should consult, whom I should associate with -myself in the matter. We cannot change human nature, -but we can better conditions by wise giving. I do not -refer now to the settlement house, which I am ready to -help make and maintain as the best in the country, but -I have in mind a system to be carried out with the consent -and aid of the municipal government, of playgrounds, -baths, parks, places of recreation, and hospitals, for the -benefit of the people, which will put our city in the very -forefront of progress. And I believe, as a practical man, -I can convince you that the betterment which you and I -so earnestly desire can be brought about in no other way. -Agitation can only result in anarchy and misery for all.”</p> - -<p>Hodder’s wrath, as he rose from his chair, was of the -sort that appears incredibly to add to the physical stature,—the -bewildering spiritual wrath which is rare indeed, -and carries all before it.</p> - -<p>“Don’t tempt me, Mr. Parr!” he said. “Now that I -know the truth, I tell you frankly I would face poverty and -persecution rather than consent to your offer. And I warn -you once more not to flatter yourself that existence ends -here, that you will not be called to answer for every wrong -act you have committed in accumulating your fortune, -that what you call business is an affair of which God takes -no account. What I say may seem foolishness to you, -but I tell you, in the words of that Foolishness, that it -will not profit you to gain the whole world and lose your -own soul. You remind me that the Church in old time -accepted gifts from the spoils of war, and I will add of -rapine and murder. And the Church today, to repeat your<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[392]</a></span> -own parallel, grows rich with money wrongfully got. -Legally? Ah, yes, legally, perhaps. But that will not -avail you. And the kind of church you speak of—to -which I, to my shame, once consented—Our Lord repudiates. -It is none of his. I warn you, Mr. Parr, in his -Name, first to make your peace with your brothers -before you presume to lay another gift on the altar.”</p> - -<p>During this withering condemnation of himself Eldon -Parr sat motionless, his face grown livid, an expression on -it that continued to haunt Hodder long afterwards. An -expression, indeed, which made the banker almost unrecognizable.</p> - -<p>“Go,” he whispered, his hand trembling visibly as he -pointed towards the door. “Go—I have had enough of -this.”</p> - - -<h3>Trinity Church</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edwin Davies Schoonmaker</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American poet)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In vain she points her finger to the sky</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And sends her voice along the famous street,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Admonishing how the mortal hours fleet</div> - <div class="verse">And bidding men bethink that they must die.</div> - <div class="verse">Tearing the coat of Christ they jostle by</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And ply their gambling at her very feet.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“Prepare, prepare, prepare thy God to meet!”</div> - <div class="verse">She loudly calls. They do not heed her. Why?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Thou, stuffed with tithes of them that traffic here,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Flesh of their flesh, and with thy spotted hand</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[393]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Buying and selling, fattening year by year,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">How darest thou rebuke this venal band?</div> - <div class="verse">Thou mocker of the man of Galilee,</div> - <div class="verse">Prepare to meet thy God, thou Pharisee.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo392" id="illo392">[illo392]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_392f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>TO SUSTAIN THE BODY -OF THE CHURCH, IF -YOU PLEASE</p> - -<p>DENIS AUGUSTE MARIE RAFFET</p> - -<p>(<i>French illustrator, -1804-1860</i>)</p></div> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo393" id="illo393">[illo393]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_393f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>CHRIST</p> - -<p>JOHN MOWBRAY-CLARKE</p> - -<p>(<i>Contemporary -American sculptor</i>)</p></div> -</div> - - -<h3>The Church and the Workers</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Walter Rauschenbusch</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_346">346</a>)</p> - -<p>The stratification of society is becoming more definite -in our country, and the people are becoming more -conscious of it. The industrial conflicts make them -realize how their interests diverge from those of the -commercial class. As that consciousness increases, it -becomes harder for the two classes to meet in the expression -of Christian faith and love—in prayer meetings, for -instance. When the Christian business man is presented -as a model Christian, working people are coming to look -with suspicion on these samples of our Christianity. -I am not justifying that, but simply stating the fact. -They disapprove of the Christianity of the churches, not -because it is too good, but because it is not good enough. -The working people are now developing the principle and -practice of solidarity, which promises to be one of the -most potent ethical forces of the future, and which is -essentially more Christian than the covetousness and -selfishness which we regard as the indispensable basis of -commerce. If this is a correct diagnosis of our condition, -is it strange that the Church is unable to evangelize a -class alienated from it by divergent class interests and -class morality?</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[394]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Tainted Wealth</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_298">298</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Capacious is the Church’s belly;</div> - <div class="verse">Whole nations it has swallowed down,</div> - <div class="verse">Yet no dyspepsia ‘neath its gown;</div> - <div class="verse">The Church alone, in jewels drest,</div> - <div class="verse">Your “tainted wealth” can quite digest.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Collection</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Ernest Howard Crosby</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American writer and social reformer, 1856-1907)</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>I passed the plate in church.</p> - -<p>There was little silver, but the crisp bank-notes heaped -themselves up high before me;</p> - -<p>And ever as the pile grew, the plate became warmer and -warmer until it burned my fingers, and a smell of -scorching flesh rose from it, and I perceived that -some of the notes were beginning to smoulder and -curl, half-browned, at the edges.</p> - -<p>And then I saw thru the smoke into the very substance of -the money, and I beheld what it really was;</p> - -<p>I saw the stolen earnings of the poor, the wide margins of -wages pared down to starvation;</p> - -<p>I saw the underpaid factory girl eking out her living on the -street, and the overworked child, and the suicide -of the discharged miner;</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[395]</a></span></p> - -<p>I saw poisonous gases from great manufactories spreading -disease and death; ...</p> - -<p>I saw hideousness extending itself from coal mine and -foundry over forest and river and field;</p> - -<p>I saw money grabbed from fellow grabbers and swindlers, -and underneath them the workman forever spinning -it out of his vitals....</p> - -<p>I saw all this, and the plate burned my fingers so that I -had to hold it first in one hand and then in the other; -and I was glad when the parson in his white robes -took the smoking pile from me on the chancel steps -and, turning about, lifted it up and laid it on the -altar.</p> - -<p>It was an old-time altar indeed, for it bore a burnt offering -of flesh and blood—a sweet savor unto the Moloch -whom these people worship with their daily round -of human sacrifices.</p> - -<p>The shambles are in the temple as of yore, and the tables -of the money-changers, waiting to be overturned.</p></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Émile de Lavelaye</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Belgian economist, 1822-1892)</p> - -<p>If Christianity were taught and understood conformably -to the spirit of its Founder, the existing social -organism could not last a day.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[396]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Voice of the Early Church</h3> - -<h4><span class="smcap">By Clement of Alexandria</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek Church; 150-215)</p> - -<p>I know that God has given us the use of goods, -but only as far as is necessary; and He has determined -that the use be common. It is absurd and disgraceful -for one to live magnificently and luxuriously -when so many are hungry.</p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">By Tertullian</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Earliest of the Latin fathers; 155-222)</p> - -<p>All is common with us except women. Jesus was our -man, God and brother. He restored unto all men what -cruel murderers took from them by the sword. Christians -have no master and no Christian shall be bound for bread -and raiment. The land is no man’s inheritance; none -shall possess it as property.</p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">By St. Cyprian</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Latin; 200-258)</p> - -<p>No man shall be received into our commune who sayeth -that the land may be sold. God’s footstool is not -property.</p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">By St. Basil</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek Church; 329-379)</p> - -<p>Which things, tell me, are yours? Whence have you -brought your goods into life? You are like one occupying -a place in a theatre, who should prohibit others from enter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[397]</a></span>ing, -treating that as his own which was designed for the -common use of all. Such are the rich. Because they preoccupy -common goods, they take these goods as their -own. If each one would take that which is sufficient for -his needs, leaving what is superfluous to those in distress, -no one would be rich, no one poor.... The rich man -is a thief.</p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">By St. Ambrose</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Latin; 340-397)</p> - -<p>How far, O rich, do you extend your senseless avarice? -Do you intend to be the sole inhabitants of the earth? -Why do you drive out the fellow sharers of nature, and -claim it all for yourselves? The earth was made for all, -rich and poor, in common. Why do you rich claim it as -your exclusive right? The soil was given to the rich and -poor in common—wherefore, oh, ye rich, do you unjustly -claim it for yourselves alone? Nature gave all things in -common for the use of all; usurpation created private -rights. Property hath no rights. The earth is the Lord’s, -and we are his offspring. The pagans hold earth as property. -They do blaspheme God.</p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">By St. Jerome</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Latin; 340-420)</p> - -<p>All riches come from iniquity, and unless one has lost, -another cannot gain. Hence that common opinion -seems to me to be very true, “the rich man is unjust, or the -heir an unjust one.” Opulence is always the result of -theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his -predecessor.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[398]</a></span></p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">By St. John Chrysostom</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek Church; 347-407)</p> - -<p>Tell me, whence are you rich? From whom have you -received? From your grandfather, you say; from -your father. Are you able to show, ascending in the order -of generation, that that possession is just throughout the -whole series of preceding generations? Its beginning and -root grew necessarily out of injustice. Why? Because -God did not make this man rich and that man poor from -the beginning. Nor, when He created the world, did He -allot much treasure to one man, and forbid another to -seek any. He gave the same earth to be cultivated by all. -Since, therefore, His bounty is common, how comes it that -you have so many fields, and your neighbor not even a clod -of earth?... The idea we should have of the rich and -covetous—they are truly as robbers, who, standing in the -public highway, despoil the passers.</p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">By St. Augustine</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Latin; 354-430)</p> - -<p>The superfluities of the rich are the necessaries of the -poor. They who possess superfluities, possess the goods of -others.</p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">By St. Gregory the Great</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Latin; 540-604)</p> - -<p>They must be admonished who do not seek another’s -goods, yet do not give of their own, that they may know -that the earth from which they have received is common to -all men, and therefore its products are given in common to -all. They, therefore, wrongly think they are innocent who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[399]</a></span> -claim for themselves the common gift of God. When they -do not give what they have received, they assist in the -death of neighbors, because daily almost as many of the -poor perish as have been deprived of means which the -rich have kept to themselves. When we give necessaries -to the needy we do not bestow upon them our goods; we -return to them their own; we pay a debt of justice rather -than fulfil a work of mercy.</p> - - -<h3>The Annexing of Christianity<a name="FNanchor_21" id="FNanchor_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21" class="fnanchor">[U]</a></h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Call of the Carpenter”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Bouck White</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_353">353</a>)</p> - -<p>The annexing process was started by a Roman citizen -named Saul. Formerly a Jew, he deserted his nationality -and with it his former name, and called himself thereafter -Paul. Paul was undeniably sincere. He believed -that in reinterpreting the Christian faith so as to make it -acceptable to the Romans he was doing that faith a service. -His make-up was imperial rather than democratic. -Both by birth and training he was unfitted to enter into -the working-class consciousness of Galileans. He was in -culture a Hellenist, in religion a Pharisee, in citizenship a -Roman. From the first strain, Hellenism, he received a -bias in the direction of philosophy rather than economics; -from the second, his Pharisaism, he received a bias toward -aloofness, otherworldliness; and from the third, his Romanism, -he received a bias toward political acquiescence -and the preservation of the status quo....</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[400]</a></span></p> - -<p>Paul planned to make Christianity the religion of the -Roman Empire. It needed a religion badly. The catalogue -of its vices, in the forepart of the Epistle to the Romans, -is proof. Paul the Roman citizen saw nothing but excellence -in Rome’s world-wide empire. Only, it must be -redeemed from its laxity of morals. Therefore he would -bring to it the Christ as its cleanser and thereby its perpetuator. -It was the test of loyal citizenship among the -Romans to seek out in every part of the world that which -was most rare and valued, and bring it back to Rome as a -gift. Thus her sons went forth and returned laden with -richest trophies to lay at her feet. They brought to her -pearls from India, gold chariots from Babylon, elephants -from interior Africa, high-breasted virgins from the -Greek isles, Phidian marbles from Athens. Paul also -would be a bringer of gifts to the Rome that had honored -him and his fathers with the high honor of citizenship. -And the gift he would bring and lay at her feet would be -the richest of them all—a religion....</p> - -<p>Paul was a stockholder in Rome’s world corporation. -And that stock by slow degrees had blinded him to the -injustice of a social system in whose dividends he himself -shared. This explains in large part why he accepted the -political status quo, and preached its acceptance by -others. Students of ethics have difficulty in reconciling -Aristotle’s defence of human servitude, “slavery is a law -of nature which is advantageous and just,” with his -insight and logic in other matters. The difficulty resolves -itself when it is recalled that Aristotle possessed thirteen -slaves, and therefore had exactly thirteen arguments for -the righteousness of slavery. Seneca, gifted in other -things with fine powers of moral philosophy, saw no -monstrousness in Nero that he should rebuke—Seneca<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[401]</a></span> -was a favorite with Nero, and was using that favoritism -to amass an enormous fortune. Paul was too highly -educated—using the term in its academic sense—to be at -one with the unbookish Galileans, and he was personally -too much the gainer from Rome’s empire of privilege to -share the insurrectionary spirit of the Son of Mary....</p> - -<p>Paul was under the spell of Rome’s material greatness. -His heart was secretly enticed by her triumphal arches, -her literature, her palaces on the Palatine, her baths, -porticos of philosophy, gymnasia, schools of rhetoric, her -athletic games in the arena. He thought of her history, -her jurisprudence, her military might, the starry names -in her roll of glory, her sweep of empire from the Thames -to the Tigris, and from the Rhine to the deserts of Africa; -and when, to this summary, came the pleasant reflection -that he was a part of this world corporation, one of the -privileged few to share in its profits, it was not hard for -him to find reasons to justify his desertion of that poverty-stricken -and fanatically democratic race of Israel off there -in unimportant Palestine.</p> - -<p>A true Roman, Paul preaches to the proletariat the -duty of political passivity. To the Carpenter, with his -splendid worldliness, the premier qualification for character -was self-respect, and the alertness and mastery of -environment which go with self-respect. But to Paul the -primate virtue is submissiveness—“the powers that be!” -He sought to cure the seditiousness of the working class by -drawing off their gaze to a crown of righteousness reserved -in heaven for them—a gaseous felicity beyond the stars. -Israel, holding fast to the enrichment of the present life, -had kept its religion from getting off into fog lands, by -seeking “a city that hath foundations.” But Paul sought -to hush all these “worldly” aims; he wooed the toiling<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[402]</a></span> -masses to desire “a building of God, a house not made with -hands, eternal in the heavens.” He was a true yoke-fellow -of Pylades, the Roman play-actor, who, wishing to justify -his usefulness to the master class, said to Augustus that -“it was for the emperor’s advantage that the people should -have their attention fixed on the playhouse rather than -on politics.”</p> - - -<h3>Preface to “Major Barbara”</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By G. Bernard Shaw</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>)</p> - -<p>Churches are suffered to exist only on condition -that they preach submission to the State as at -present capitalistically organized. The Church of England -itself is compelled to add to the thirty-six articles in -which it formulates its religious tenets, three more in -which it apologetically protests that the moment any of -these articles comes in conflict with the State it is to be -entirely renounced, abjured, violated, abrogated and -abhorred, the policeman being a much more important -person than any of the Persons of the Trinity. And this -is why no tolerated Church nor Salvation Army can ever -win the entire confidence of the poor. It must be on the -side of the police and the military, no matter what it -believes or disbelieves; and as the police and the military -are the instruments by which the rich rob and oppress the -poor (on legal and moral principles made for the purpose), -it is not possible to be on the side of the poor and of the -police at the same time. Indeed the religious bodies, as -the almoners of the rich, become a sort of auxiliary police,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[403]</a></span> -taking off the insurrectionary edge of poverty with coals -and blankets, bread and treacle, and soothing and cheering -the victims with hopes of immense and inexpensive happiness -in another world, when the process of working them -to premature death in the service of the rich is complete -in this.</p> - - -<h3>Prince Hagen</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Upton Sinclair</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p class="poemintro">(Prince Hagen, ruler of the Nibelungs, a race of gold-hoarding -gnomes, comes up to visit the land of the earth-men, and study -Christian civilization. He finds a number of ideas worth taking -back to his underground home)</p></div> - -<p>Prince Hagen paused for a moment and puffed in -silence; then suddenly he remarked: “Do you know -that it is a very wonderful idea—that immortality? Did -you ever think about it?”</p> - -<p>“Yes,” I said, “a little.”</p> - -<p>“I tell you, the man who got that up was a world-genius. -When I saw how it worked, it was something -almost too much for me to believe; and still I find myself -wondering if it can last. For you know if you can once -get a man believing in immortality, there is no more left -for you to desire; you can take everything in the world he -owns—you can skin him alive if it pleases you—and he -will bear it all with perfect good humor. I tell you what, -I lie awake at night and dream about the chances of -getting the Nibelungs to believe in immortality; I don’t -think I can manage it, but it is a stake worth playing for. -I say the phrases over to myself—you know them all—‘It -is better to give than to receive’—‘Lay not up for your<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[404]</a></span>self -treasures on earth’—‘Take no heed, saying what shall -ye eat!’ As a matter of fact, I fancy the Nibelungs will -prove pretty tough at reforming, but it is worth any -amount of labor. Suppose I could ever get them to the -self-renouncing point! Just fancy the self-renunciation of -a man with a seventy-mile tunnel full of gold!”</p> - -<p>Prince Hagen’s eyes danced; his face was a study. I -watched him wonderingly. “Why do you go to all that -bother?” I demanded, suddenly. “If you want the gold, -why don’t you simply kill the Nibelungs and take it?”</p> - -<p>“I have thought of that,” he replied; “I might easily -manage it all with a single revolver. But why should I -kill the geese that lay me golden eggs? I want not only -the gold they have, but the gold that they will dig through -the centuries that are to come; for I know that the -resources of Nibelheim, if they could only be properly -developed, would be simply infinite. So I have made up -my mind to civilize the people and develop their souls.”</p> - -<p>“Explain to me just how you expect to get their gold,” -I said.</p> - -<p>“Just as the capitalist is getting it in New York,” -was the response. “At present the Nibelungs hide their -wealth; I mean to broaden their minds, and establish -a system of credit. I mean to teach them ideals of usefulness -and service, to establish the arts and sciences, to -introduce machinery and all the modern improvements -that tend to increase the centralization of power; I shall -be master—just as I am here—because I am the strongest, -and because I am not a dupe.”</p> - -<p>“I see,” I said; “but all this will take a long time.”</p> - -<p>“Yes,” said he, “I know; it is the whole course of -history to be lived over again. But there will be no -mistakes and no groping in this case, for I know the way,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[405]</a></span> -and I am king. It will be a sort of benevolent despotism—the -ideal form of government, as I believe.”</p> - -<p>“And you are sure there is no chance of your plans -failing?”</p> - -<p>“Failing!” he laughed. “You should have seen how -they have worked so far.”</p> - -<p>“You have begun applying them?”</p> - -<p>“I have been down to Nibelheim twice since the death -of dear grandpa,” said the prince. “The first time, as you -imagine, there was tremendous excitement, for all Nibelheim -knew what a bad person I had been, and stood in -terror of my return. I got them all together and told them -the truth—that I had become wise and virtuous, that I -meant to respect every man’s property, and that I meant -to consecrate my whole endeavor to the developing of the -resources of my native land. And then you should have -witnessed the scene! They went half wild with rejoicing; -they fell down on their knees and thanked me with tears -in their eyes: I played the <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">pater patriae</i> in a fashion to -take away your breath. And afterwards I went on to -explain to them that I had discovered very many wonderful -things up on the earth; that I was going to make a law -forbidding any of them to go there, because it was so -dangerous, but that I myself was going to brave all the -perils for their sakes. I told them about a wonderful -animal that was called a steam-drill, and that ate fire, -and dug out gold with swiftness beyond anything they -could imagine. I said that I was going to empty all my -royal treasure caves, and take my fortune and some of -theirs to the earth to buy a few thousand of these wonderful -creatures; and I promised them that I would give -them to the Nibelungs to use, and they might have twice -as much gold as they would have dug with their hands,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[406]</a></span> -provided they would give me the balance. Of course they -agreed to it with shouts of delight, and the contracts were -signed then and there. They helped me get out all my -gold, and I took them down the steam-drills, and showed -them how to manage them; so before very long I expect to -have quite a snug little income.”</p> - - -<h3>The Prince</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Niccolo Machiavelli</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Italian courtier, author of a famous treatise on statecraft: -1469-1527)</p> - -<p>A prince has to have particular care that, to see and -to hear him, he appears all goodness, integrity, -humanity and religion, which last he ought to pretend to -more than ordinarily. For everybody sees, but few -understand; everybody sees how you appear, but few -know what in reality you are, and those few dare not -oppose the opinion of the multitude, who have the majesty -of their prince to defend them.</p> - - -<h3>Children of the Dead End<a name="FNanchor_22" id="FNanchor_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22" class="fnanchor">[V]</a></h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Patrick MacGill</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>)</p> - -<p>Nearly every second year the potatoes went bad; -then we were always hungry, although Farley -McKeown, a rich merchant in the neighboring village, let -my father have a great many bags of Indian meal on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[407]</a></span> -credit. A bag contained sixteen stone of meal and cost a -shilling a stone. On the bag of meal Farley McKeown -charged sixpence a month interest; and fourpence a -month on a sack of flour which cost twelve shillings. All -the people round about were very honest, and paid up -their debts when they were able. Usually when the young -went off to Scotland or England they sent home money to -their fathers and mothers, and with this money the parents -paid for the meal to Farley McKeown. “What doesn’t -go to the landlord goes to Farley McKeown,” was a Glenmornan -saying.</p> - -<p>The merchant was a great friend of the parish priest, -who always told the people if they did not pay their debts -they would burn for ever and ever in hell. “The fires of -eternity will make you sorry for the debts that you did not -pay,” said the priest. “What is eternity?” he would ask -in a solemn voice from the altar steps. “If a man tried to -count the sands on the sea-shore and took a million years -to count every single grain, how long would it take him -to count them all? A long time, you’ll say. But that -time is nothing to eternity. Just think of it! Burning -in hell while a man, taking a million years to count a grain -of sand, counts all the sand on the sea-shore. And this -because you did not pay Farley McKeown his lawful debts, -his lawful debts within the letter of the law.” That concluding -phrase, “within the letter of the law,” struck terror -into all who listened, and no one, maybe not even the -priest himself, knew what it meant.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[408]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Incantations</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Max Eastman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Editor of “The Masses,” born 1883)</p> - -<p>I remember a vesper service at Ravello in Italy. -I remember that the exquisite and pathetically resplendent -little chapel was filled with ragged and dirty-smelling -and sweet, sad-eyed mothers. Some carried -in their arms their babies, some carried only a memory -in their haggard eyes. They were all poor. They were -all sad in that place. They were mothers. Mothers -wrinkle-eyed, stooped, worn old, but yet gentle—O, so -gentle and eager to believe that it would all be made up -to them and their beloved in Heaven! I see their bodies -swaying to the chant of meaningless long syllables of -Latin magic, I see them worked upon by those dark -agencies of candle, and minor chord, and incense, and the -unknown tongue, and I see that this little dirt-colored -coin clutched so tight in their five fingers is going to be -given up, with a kind of desperate haste, ere the climax -of these incantations is past. Poor, anguished dupes of -the hope of Heaven, poor mothers, pinching your own -children’s bellies to fatten the wallets of those fat priests!</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[409]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Exit Salvatore</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Clement Wood</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet, born 1888)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Salvatore’s dead—a gap</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where he worked in the ditch-edge, shovelling mud;</div> - <div class="verse">Slanting brow; a head mayhap</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Rather small, like a bullet; hot southern blood;</div> - <div class="verse">Surly now, now riotous</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With the flow of his joy; and his hovel bare,</div> - <div class="verse">As his whole life is to us—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A stone in his belly the whole of his share.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Body starved, but the soul secure,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Masses to save it from Purgatory,</div> - <div class="verse">And to dwell with the Son and the Virgin pure—</div> - <div class="verse indent11">Lucky Salvatore!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Salvatore’s glad, for see</div> - <div class="verse indent2">On the hearse and the coffin, purple and black,</div> - <div class="verse">Tassels, ribbons, broidery</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Fit for the Priest’s or the Pope’s own back;</div> - <div class="verse">Flowers costly, waxen, gay,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the mates from the ditch-edge, pair after pair;</div> - <div class="verse">Dirging band, and the Priest to pray,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the soul of the dead one pleasuring there.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Body starved, and the mind as well.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Peace—let him rot in his costly glory,</div> - <div class="verse">Cheated no more with a Heaven or Hell—</div> - <div class="verse indent12">Exit Salvatore.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[410]</a></span></p> - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From Micah</span></h3> - -<p>Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob, -and rulers of the house of Israel, that abhor judgment, -and pervert all equity. They build up Zion with -blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity. The heads thereof -judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, -and the prophets divine for money.... Therefore -shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem -shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as -the high places of a forest.</p> - - -<h3>The Saint</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Antonio Fogazzaro</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p class="poemintro">(Italian poet and novelist, 1842-1911. A devout Catholic, he -endeavored to reform the Church from within. The present novel -created a tremendous sensation in Italy, and was placed upon the -“Index.” In this scene “the Saint” pleads with the Pope)</p></div> - -<p>“May I continue, Your Holiness?”</p> - -<p>The Pope, who while Benedetto had been -speaking had kept his eyes fixed on his face, now bowed his -head slightly, in answer.</p> - -<p>“The third evil spirit which is corrupting the Church -does not disguise itself as an angel of light, for it well knows -it cannot deceive; it is satisfied with the garb of common, -human honesty. This is the spirit of avarice. The Vicar -of Christ dwells in this royal palace as he dwelt in his -episcopal palace, with the pure heart of poverty. Many -venerable pastors dwell in the Church with the same heart, -but the spirit of poverty is not preached sufficiently, not -preached as Christ preached it. The lips of Christ’s min<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[411]</a></span>isters -are too often over-complaisant to those who seek -riches. There are those among them who bow the head -respectfully before the man who has much, simply because -he has much; there are those who let their tongues flatter -the greedy, and too many preachers of the word and of the -example of Christ deem it just for them to revel in the -pomp and honors attending on riches, to cleave with -their souls to the luxury riches bring. Father, exhort the -clergy to show those greedy for gain, be they rich or poor, -more of that charity which admonishes, which threatens, -which rebukes. Holy Father!—--”</p> - -<p>Benedetto ceased speaking. There was an expression -of fervent appeal in the gaze fixed upon the Pope.</p> - -<p>“Well?” the Pontiff murmured.</p> - -<p>Benedetto spread wide his arms, and continued:</p> - -<p>“The Spirit urges me to say more. It is not the work -of a day, but let us prepare for the day—not leaving this -task to the enemies of God and of the Church—let us -prepare for the day on which the priests of Christ shall set -the example of true poverty; when it shall be their duty -to live in poverty, as it is their duty to live in chastity; and -let the words of Christ to the Seventy-two serve them as a -guide in this. Then the Lord will surround the least of -them with such honors, with such reverence as does not -to-day exist in the hearts of the people for the princes of -the Church. They will be few in number, but they will be -the light of the world. Holy Father, are they that to-day? -Some among them are, but the majority shed neither light -nor darkness.”</p> - -<p>At this point the Pontiff for the first time bowed his -head in sorrowful acquiescence.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[412]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The New Rome</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Buchanan</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_367">367</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">A thousand starve, a few are fed,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Legions of robbers rack the poor,</div> - <div class="verse">The rich man steals the widow’s bread,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And Lazarus dies at Dives’ door;</div> - <div class="verse">The Lawyer and the Priest adjust</div> - <div class="verse">The claims of Luxury and Lust</div> - <div class="verse">To seize the earth and hold the soil,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To store the grain they never reap;</div> - <div class="verse">Under their heels the white slaves toil,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">While children wail and women weep!—</div> - <div class="verse">The gods are dead, but in their name</div> - <div class="verse">Humanity is sold to shame,</div> - <div class="verse">While (then as now!) the tinsel’d Priest</div> - <div class="verse">Sitteth with robbers at the feast,</div> - <div class="verse">Blesses the laden blood-stain’d board,</div> - <div class="verse">Weaves garlands round the butcher’s sword,</div> - <div class="verse">And poureth freely (now as then)</div> - <div class="verse">The sacramental blood of Men!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Priest and the Devil</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Féodor Dostoyevsky</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(The Russian realist, 1821-1881, wrote this little story upon the -wall of his Siberian prison)</p> - -<p>“Hello, you little fat father!” the devil said to the -priest. “What made you lie so to those poor, -misled people? What tortures of hell did you depict? -Don’t you know they are already suffering the tortures of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[413]</a></span> -hell in their earthly lives? Don’t you know that you and -the authorities of the State are my representatives on -earth? It is you that make them suffer the pains of hell -with which you threaten them. Don’t you know this? -Well, then, come with me!”</p> - -<p>The devil grabbed the priest by the collar, lifted him -high in the air, and carried him to a factory, to an iron -foundry. He saw the workmen there running and hurrying -to and fro, and toiling in the scorching heat. Very -soon the thick, heavy air and the heat are too much for -the priest. With tears in his eyes, he pleads with the -devil: “Let me go! Let me leave this hell!”</p> - -<p>“Oh, my dear friend, I must show you many more -places.” The devil gets hold of him again and drags him -off to a farm. There he sees workmen threshing the grain. -The dust and heat are insufferable. The overseer carries -a knout, and unmercifully beats anyone who falls to the -ground overcome by hard toil or hunger.</p> - -<p>Next the priest is taken to the huts where these same -workers live with their families—dirty, cold, smoky, ill-smelling -holes. The devil grins. He points out the -poverty and hardships which are at home here.</p> - -<p>“Well, isn’t this enough?” he asks. And it seems as if -even he, the devil, pities the people. The pious servant of -God can hardly bear it. With uplifted hands he begs: -“Let me go away from here. Yes, yes! This is hell on -earth!”</p> - -<p>“Well, then, you see. And you still promise them -another hell. You torment them, torture them to death -mentally when they are already all but dead physically. -Come on! I will show you one more hell—one more, the -very worst.”</p> - -<p>He took him to a prison and showed him a dungeon,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[414]</a></span> -with its foul air and the many human forms, robbed of all -health and energy, lying on the floor, covered with vermin -that were devouring their poor, naked, emaciated bodies.</p> - -<p>“Take off your silken clothes,” said the devil to the -priest, “put on your ankles heavy chains such as these -poor unfortunates wear; lie down on the cold and filthy -floor—and then talk to them about a hell that still awaits -them!”</p> - -<p>“No, no!” answered the priest, “I cannot think of -anything more dreadful than this. I entreat you, let me -go away from here!”</p> - -<p>“Yes, this is hell. There can be no worse hell than -this. Did you not know it? Did you not know that -these men and women whom you are frightening with the -picture of a hell hereafter—did you not know that they are -in hell right here, before they die?”</p> - - -<h3>Work According to the Bible</h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(A pamphlet written by T. M. Bondareff, a Siberian peasant and -ex-serf, at the age of sixty-seven)</p> - -<p>They often arrest thieves in the world; but these culprits -are rather rogues than thieves. I have laid -hands on the real thief, who has robbed God and the -church. He has stolen the primal commandment which -belongs to us who till the fields. I will point him out. It -is he who does not produce his bread with his own hands, -but eats the fruit of others’ toil. Seize him and lead him -away to judgment. All crimes such as robberies, murders, -frauds and the like arise from the fact that this commandment -is hidden from man. The rich do all they can to -avoid working with their hands, and the poor to rid them<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[415]</a></span>selves -of the necessity. The poor man says, “There are -people who can live on others’ labor; why should not I?” -and he kills, steals and cheats in consequence. Behold -now what harm can be done by white hands, more than -all that good grimy hands can repair upon the earth! -You spread out before the laborer the idleness of your life, -and thus take away the force from his hands. Your way of -living is for us the most cruel of offences, and a shame -withal. You are a hundred-fold more wise and learned than -I am, and for that reason you take my bread. But -because you are wise you ought rather to have pity on me -who am weak. It is said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” -I am your neighbor, and you are mine. Why are we -coarse and untaught? Because we produce our own bread, -and yours too! Have we any time to study and educate -ourselves? You have stolen our brains as well as our -bread by trickery and violence.</p> - -<p>How blind thou art, O wise man; thou that readest the -scriptures, and seest not the way in which thou mightest -free thyself, and the flock committed to thee, from the -burden of sin! Thy blindness is like unto that of Balaam, -who, astride his ass, saw not the angel of God armed with a -sword of fire standing in the way before him. Thou art -Balaam, I am the ass, and thou hast ridden upon my back -from childhood!</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[416]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Resurrection</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Leo Tolstoy</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(In this novel the greatest of modern religious teachers has -presented his indictment of the government and church of his -country. The hero is a Russian prince who in early youth seduces -a peasant girl, and in after life meets her, a prostitute on trial for -murder. He follows her to Siberia, in an effort to reclaim her. -Near the end of his story Tolstoi introduces this scene. The Englishman -may be said to represent modern science, which asks questions -and accumulates futile statistics; while the old man voices the -peculiar Christian Anarchism of the author, who at the age of -eighty-two left his home and wandered out into the steppes to die)</p></div> - -<p>In one of the exiles’ wards, Nehlúdof [the prince] -recognized the strange old man he had seen crossing -the ferry that morning. This tattered and wrinkled old -man was sitting on the floor by the beds, barefooted, -wearing only a dirty cinder-colored shirt, torn on one -shoulder, and similar trousers. He looked severely and -inquiringly at the new-comers. His emaciated body, -visible through the holes in his dirty shirt, looked miserably -weak, but in his face was more concentrated seriousness -and animation than even when Nehlúdof saw him -crossing the ferry. As in all the other wards, so here also -the prisoners jumped up and stood erect when the official -entered; but the old man remained sitting. His eyes -glittered and his brow frowned wrathfully.</p> - -<p>“Get up!” the inspector called out to him.</p> - -<p>The old man did not rise, but only smiled contemptuously.</p> - -<p>“Thy servants are standing before thee, I am not thy -servant. Thou bearest the seal....” said the old man, -pointing to the inspector’s forehead.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[417]</a></span></p> - -<p>“Wha—a—t?” said the inspector threateningly, and -made a step towards him.</p> - -<p>“I know this man,” said Nehlúdof. “What is he -imprisoned for?”</p> - -<p>“The police have sent him here because he has no passport. -We ask them not to send such, but they will do it,” -said the inspector, casting an angry side glance at the old -man.</p> - -<p>“And so it seems thou, too, art one of Antichrist’s -army?” said the old man to Nehlúdof.</p> - -<p>“No, I am a visitor,” said Nehlúdof.</p> - -<p>“What, hast thou come to see how Antichrist tortures -men? Here, see. He has locked them up in a cage, a -whole army of them. Men should eat bread in the sweat -of their brow. But He has locked them up with no work -to do, and feeds them like swine, so that they should turn -into beasts.”</p> - -<p>“What is he saying?” asked the Englishman.</p> - -<p>Nehlúdof told him the old man was blaming the inspector -for keeping men imprisoned.</p> - -<p>“Ask him how he thinks one should treat those who do -not keep the laws,” said the Englishman.</p> - -<p>Nehlúdof translated the question.</p> - -<p>The old man laughed strangely, showing his regular teeth.</p> - -<p>“The laws?” he repeated with contempt. “First -Antichrist robbed everybody, took all the earth, and all -rights away from them—took them all for himself—killed -all those who were against him—and then He wrote -laws forbidding to rob and to kill. He should have -written those laws sooner.”</p> - -<p>Nehlúdof translated. The Englishman smiled.</p> - -<p>“Well, anyhow, ask him how one should treat thieves -and murderers now?”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[418]</a></span></p> - -<p>Nehlúdof again translated the question.</p> - -<p>“Tell him he should take the seal of Antichrist off from -himself,” the old man said, frowning severely; “then he -will know neither thieves nor murderers. Tell him so.”</p> - -<p>“He is crazy,” said the Englishman, when Nehlúdof had -translated the old man’s words; and shrugging his shoulders -he left the cell.</p> - -<p>“Do thine own task and leave others alone. Every -one for himself. God knows whom to execute, whom to -pardon, but we do not know,” said the old man. “Be -your own chief, then chiefs will not be wanted. Go, go,” -he added, frowning angrily, and looking with glittering -eyes at Nehlúdof, who lingered in the ward. “Hast thou -not gazed enough on how the servants of Antichrist feed -lice on men? Go! Go!”</p> - - -<h3>Sunday</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Challenge”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Louis Untermeyer</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">It was Sunday—</div> - <div class="verse">Eleven in the morning; people were at church—</div> - <div class="verse">Prayers were in the making; God was near at hand—</div> - <div class="verse">Down the cramped and narrow streets of quiet Lawrence</div> - <div class="verse">Came the tramp of workers marching in their hundreds;</div> - <div class="verse">Marching in the morning, marching to the grave-yard,</div> - <div class="verse">Where, no longer fiery, underneath the grasses,</div> - <div class="verse">Callous and uncaring, lay their friend and sister.</div> - <div class="verse">In their hands they carried wreaths and drooping flowers,</div> - <div class="verse">Overhead their banners dipped and soared like eagles—</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[419]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Aye, but eagles bleeding, stained with their own heart’s blood—</div> - <div class="verse">Red, but not for glory—red, with wounds and travail,</div> - <div class="verse">Red, the buoyant symbol of the blood of all the world.</div> - <div class="verse">So they bore their banners, singing toward the grave-yard,</div> - <div class="verse">So they marched and chanted, mingling tears and tributes,</div> - <div class="verse">So, with flowers, the dying went to deck the dead.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent6">Within the churches people heard</div> - <div class="verse indent8">The sound, and much concern was theirs—</div> - <div class="verse indent6">God might not hear the Sacred Word—</div> - <div class="verse indent8">God might not hear their prayers!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent6"><em>Should such things be allowed these slaves—</em></div> - <div class="verse indent8"><em>To vex the Sabbath peace with Song,</em></div> - <div class="verse indent6"><em>To come with chants, like marching waves,</em></div> - <div class="verse indent8"><em>That proudly swept along.</em></div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent6"><em>Suppose God turned to these—and heard!</em></div> - <div class="verse indent8"><em>Suppose He listened unawares—</em></div> - <div class="verse indent6"><em>God might forget the Sacred Word,</em></div> - <div class="verse indent8"><em>God might forget their prayers!</em></div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent6">And so (the tragic irony)</div> - <div class="verse indent8">The blue-clad Guardians of the Peace</div> - <div class="verse indent6">Were sent to sweep them back—to see</div> - <div class="verse indent8">The ribald Song should cease;</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent6">To scatter those who came and vexed</div> - <div class="verse indent8">God with their troubled cries and cares.</div> - <div class="verse indent6">Quiet—so God might hear the text;</div> - <div class="verse indent8">The sleek and unctuous prayers!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[420]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Up the rapt and singing streets of little Lawrence</div> - <div class="verse">Came the stolid soldiers; and, behind the bluecoats,</div> - <div class="verse">Grinning and invisible, bearing unseen torches,</div> - <div class="verse">Rode red hordes of anger, sweeping all before them.</div> - <div class="verse">Lust and Evil joined them—Terror rode among them;</div> - <div class="verse">Fury fired its pistols; Madness stabbed and yelled.</div> - <div class="verse">Through the wild and bleeding streets of shuddering Lawrence,</div> - <div class="verse">Raged the heedless panic, hour-long and bitter.</div> - <div class="verse">Passion tore and trampled; men once mild and peaceful,</div> - <div class="verse">Fought with savage hatred in the name of Law and Order.</div> - <div class="verse">And, below the outcry, like the sea beneath the breakers,</div> - <div class="verse">Mingling with the anguish, rolled the solemn organ....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Eleven in the morning—people were at church—</div> - <div class="verse">Prayers were in the making—God was near at hand—</div> - <div class="verse">It was Sunday!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Isaiah</span></h3> - -<p>Hear the word of the Lord, ye rulers of Sodom; give -ear unto the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah. -To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto -me? saith the Lord.... Bring no more vain oblations.... -When ye spread forth your hands, I will -hide mine eyes from you; yea when ye make many prayers -I will not hear; your hands are full of blood.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[421]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>To the Preacher</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “In This Our World”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charlotte Perkins Gilman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Preach about yesterday, Preacher!</div> - <div class="verse indent4">The time so far away:</div> - <div class="verse">When the hand of Deity smote and slew,</div> - <div class="verse">And the heathen plagued the stiff-necked Jew;</div> - <div class="verse">Or when the Man of Sorrow came,</div> - <div class="verse">And blessed the people who cursed his name—</div> - <div class="verse">Preach about yesterday, Preacher,</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Not about today!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Preach about tomorrow, Preacher!</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Beyond this world’s decay:</div> - <div class="verse">Of the sheepfold Paradise we priced</div> - <div class="verse">When we pinned our faith to Jesus Christ;</div> - <div class="verse">Of those hot depths that shall receive</div> - <div class="verse">The goats who would not so believe—</div> - <div class="verse">Preach about tomorrow, Preacher,</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Not about today!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Preach about the old sins, Preacher!</div> - <div class="verse indent4">And the old virtues, too:</div> - <div class="verse">You must not steal nor take man’s life,</div> - <div class="verse">You must not covet your neighbor’s wife,</div> - <div class="verse">And woman must cling at every cost</div> - <div class="verse">To her one virtue, or she is lost—</div> - <div class="verse">Preach about the old sins, Preacher!</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Not about the new!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[422]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Preach about the other man, Preacher!</div> - <div class="verse indent4">The man we all can see!</div> - <div class="verse">The man of oaths, the man of strife,</div> - <div class="verse">The man who drinks and beats his wife,</div> - <div class="verse">Who helps his mates to fret and shirk</div> - <div class="verse">When all they need is to keep at work—</div> - <div class="verse">Preach about the other man, Preacher!</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Not about me!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Reluctant Briber</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Lincoln Steffens</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(The president of a powerful public service corporation has -become disturbed in conscience, and calls in a student -of social conditions)</p> - -<p>“You’re unhappy because you are bribing and -corrupting, and you ask my advice. Why? -I’m no ethical teacher. You’re a churchman. Why -don’t you go to your pastor?”</p> - -<p>“Pastor!” he exclaimed, and he laughed. The scorn -of that laugh! “Pastor!”</p> - -<p>He turned and walked away, to get control, no doubt. -I kept after him.</p> - -<p>“Yes,” I insisted, “you should go to the head of your -church for moral counsel, and—for economic advice you -should go to the professor of economics in——”</p> - -<p>He stopped me, facing about. “Professor!” he echoed, -and he didn’t reflect my tone.</p> - -<p>I was serious. I wanted to get something from him. -I wanted to know why our practical men do not go to -these professions for help, as they go to lawyers and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[423]</a></span> -engineers. And this man had given time and money to -the university in his town and to his church, as I reminded -him.</p> - -<p>“You support colleges and churches, you and your -kind do,” I said. “What for?”</p> - -<p>“For women and children,” he snapped from his -distance.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Savonarola</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Italian religious reformer, 1452-1498; hanged and burned by his -enemies)</p> - -<p>But dost thou know what I would tell thee? In the -primitive church, the chalices were of wood, the -prelates of gold. In these days the church hath chalices -of gold and prelates of wood.</p> - - -<h3>The Preacher</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Canterbury Tales”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Geoffrey Chaucer</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Early English poet, 1340-1400)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Than peyne I me to strecche forth my necke,</div> - <div class="verse">And est and west upon the people I bekke,</div> - <div class="verse">As doth a pigeon, syttyng on a loft;</div> - <div class="verse">Myn hondes and my tonge move so oft,</div> - <div class="verse">That it is joye to see my busynesse.</div> - <div class="verse">Of avarice and of suche cursedness</div> - <div class="verse">Is al my preching, for to make hem free</div> - <div class="verse">To give their pence, and namely unto me....</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[424]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Therfor my theem is yit, and ever was,</div> - <div class="verse">The root of evils is cupidity.</div> - <div class="verse">Thus can I preche agayn the same vice</div> - <div class="verse">Which that I use, and that is avarice.</div> - <div class="verse">But though myself be gilty in the same,</div> - <div class="verse">Yit can I maken other folks to blame.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Twentieth Century Socialism</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edmond Kelly</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American lawyer and Socialist, 1851-1909)</p> - -<p>It seems inconceivable that the same civilization should -include two bodies of men living in apparent harmony -and yet holding such opposite and inconsistent views of -man as economists on the one hand and theologians on the -other. To these last, man has no economic needs; this -world does not count; it is merely a place of probation, -mitigated sometimes, it is true, by ecclesiastical pomp and -episcopal palaces; but serving for the most part as a mere -preparation for a future existence which will satisfy the -aspirations of the human soul—the only thing that does -count, in this world or the next. So while to the economist -man is all hog, to the theologian he is all soul; and between -the two the devil secures the vast majority.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[425]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The True Faith</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “A Lay Sermon to Preachers”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Henry Arthur Jones</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English dramatist, born 1851)</p> - -<p>I believe—I stand accountant for the words to That -which gave me the power of thinking and writing -them—I believe that if the time and money and thought -now given in England to the propagation of wholly -incredible doctrines, which are no sooner uttered in one -pulpit than they are repudiated in another—if this time -and money and thought were given to the understanding -and scattering abroad of the simplest laws of national -economy, of physiology, of health and beauty, in another -generation our England would be greater and mightier -than she has ever been. I believe a knowledge of the -necessity of fresh air, of the value of beauty, of the certain -disease and national corruption and deathfulness hidden -in our present commercial system, to be worth far more -than all the books on theology ever written. I believe -faith in constant ventilation and constant outdoor exercise -to be a greater religious necessity than faith in any doctrine -of any sect in England today.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[426]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>God in the World</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Gitanjali”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Rabindranath Tagore</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Most popular of Hindoo poets, who recently achieved international -fame, and received the Nobel prize)</p> - -<p>Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! -Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner -of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see -thy God is not before thee!</p> - -<p>He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and -where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them -in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. -Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the -dusty soil!</p> - -<p>Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? -Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds -of creation; he is bound with us all for ever.</p> - -<p>Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy -flowers and incense! What harm is there if thy clothes -become tattered and stained? Meet him and stand by -him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.</p> - - -<h3>Priests</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Songs for the New Age”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By James Oppenheim</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Priests are in bad odor,</div> - <div class="verse">And yet there shall be no lack of them.</div> - <div class="verse">The skies shall not lack a spokesman,</div> - <div class="verse">Nor the spirit of man a voice and a gesture.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[427]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Not garbed nor churched,</div> - <div class="verse">Yet, as of old, in loneliness and anguish,</div> - <div class="verse">They shall come eating and drinking among us,</div> - <div class="verse">With scourge, pity, and prayer.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Brotherhood</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Book of The People”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert de Lamennais</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(French philosopher and religious reformer, 1782-1854)</p> - -<p>Your task is to form the universal family, to build the -City of God, and by a continuous labor gradually -to translate His work in Humanity into fact.</p> - -<p>When you love one another as brothers, and treat each -other reciprocally as such; when each one, seeking his -own good in the good of all, shall identify his own life -with the life of all, his own interests with the interests of -all, and shall be always ready to sacrifice himself for all -the members of the common family—then most of the -ills which weigh upon the human race will vanish, as thick -mists gathered upon the horizon vanish at the rising of the -sun.</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[428]</a><br /><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[429]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK IX</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><i>The Voice of the Ages</i></p> - -<p>Records from all the past history of mankind from twenty-five -different races; the earliest being about 3500 B. C.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[430]</a><br /><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[431]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Suppressions of History</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Ancient Lowly”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By C. Osborne Ward</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American historian, who was forced to publish at his own expense -the results of his life-time researches into the early -history of the working class)</p> - -<p>The great strikes and uprisings of the working people -of the ancient world are almost unknown to the living -age. It matters little how accounts of five immense -strike-wars, involving destruction of property and mutual -slaughter of millions of people, have been suppressed, or -have otherwise failed to reach us; the fact remains that -people are absolutely ignorant of these great events. -A meagre sketch of Spartacus may be seen in the encyclopedias, -but it is always ruined and its interest pinched and -blighted by being classed with crime, its heroes with -criminals, its theme with desecration. Yet Spartacus -was one of the great generals of history; fully equal to -Hannibal and Napoleon, while his cause was much more -just and infinitely nobler, his life a model of the beautiful -and virtuous, his death an episode of surpassing grandeur.</p> - -<p>Still more strange is it, that the great ten-years’ war -of Eunus should be unknown. He marshalled at one time -an army of two hundred thousand soldiers. He manœuvered -them and fought for ten full years for liberty, -defeating army after army of Rome. Why is the world -ignorant of this fierce, epochal rebellion? Almost the -whole matter is passed over in silence by our histories of -Rome. In these pages it will be read as news, yet should -a similar war rage in our day, against a similar condition<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[432]</a></span> -of slavery, its cause would not only be considered just, -but the combatants would have the sympathy and support -of the civilized world.</p> - -<p>The great system of labor organization explained in -these pages must likewise be regarded as a chapter of news. -The portentous fact has lain in abeyance century after -century, with the human family in profound ignorance -of an organization of trades and other labor unions so -powerful that for hundreds of years they undertook and -successfully conducted the business of manufacture, of -distribution, of purveying provisions to armies, of feeding -the inhabitants of the largest cities in the world, of inventing, -supplying and working the huge engines of war, and -of collecting customs and taxes—tasks confided to their -care by the state.</p> - -<p>Our civilization has a blushingly poor excuse for its -profound ignorance of these facts; for the evidences have -existed from much before the beginning of our era.... -They are growing fewer and dimmer as their value rises -higher in the estimation of a thinking, appreciative, -gradually awakening world.</p> - - -<h3>Agis</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Plutarch</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek historian, A. D. 50-120; author of numerous biographical -sketches. It has been said: He stands before us as the legate, -the ambassador, and the orator on behalf of those institutions -whereby the old-time men were rendered wise and virtuous)</p></div> - -<p>When the love of gold and silver had once gained -admittance into the Lacedæmonian commonwealth, -it was quickly followed by avarice and baseness of spirit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[433]</a></span> -in the pursuit of it, and by luxury, effeminacy and prodigality -in the use. Then Sparta fell from almost all her -former virtue and repute....</p> - -<p>For the rich men without scruple drew the estate into -their own hands, excluding the rightful heirs from their -succession; and all the wealth being centered upon the -few, the generality were poor and miserable. Honorable -pursuits, for which there was no longer leisure, were -neglected; the state was filled with sordid business, and -with hatred and envy of the rich....</p> - -<p>Agis, therefore, believing it a glorious action, as in truth -it was, to equalize and repeople the state, began to sound -the inclinations of the citizens. He found the young men -disposed beyond his expectation; they were eager to -enter with him upon the contest in the cause of virtue, -and to fling aside, for freedom’s sake, their old manner of -life, as readily as the wrestler does his garment. But -the old men, habituated and confirmed in their vices, were -most of them alarmed. These men could not endure to -hear Agis continually deploring the present state of -Sparta, and wishing she might be restored to her ancient -glory....</p> - -<p>Agis, nevertheless, little regarding these rumours, took -the first occasion of proposing his measure to the council, -the chief articles of which were these: That every one -should be free from their debts; all the lands to be divided -into equal portions....</p> - -<p>The people were transported with admiration of the -young man’s generosity, and with joy that, after three -hundred years’ interval, at last there had appeared a -king worthy of Sparta. But, on the other side, Leonidas -was now more than ever averse, being sensible that he -and his friends would be obliged to contribute with their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[434]</a></span> -riches, and yet all the honour and obligation would redound -to Agis. [Sparta had two kings, Leonidas and Agis.]</p> - -<p>From this time forward, as the common people followed -Agis, so the rich men adhered to Leonidas. They besought -him not to forsake their cause; and with persuasions and -entreaties so far prevailed with the council of Elders, -whose power consisted in preparing all laws before they -were proposed to the people, that the designed measure -was rejected, though but by one vote.</p> - -<p>[Attacked by his enemies, Agis sought refuge in a -temple.] Leonidas proceeded also to displace the ephors, -and to choose others in their stead; then he began to -consider how he might entrap Agis. At first, he endeavored -by fair means to persuade him to leave the sanctuary, -and partake with him in the kingdom. The people, he -said, would easily pardon the errors of a young man, -ambitious of glory. But finding Agis was suspicious, and -not to be prevailed with to quit his sanctuary, he gave up -that design; yet what could not then be effected by the -dissimulation of an enemy, was soon after brought to -pass by the treachery of friends.</p> - -<p>Amphares, Damochares, and Arcesilaus often visited -Agis, and he was so confident of their fidelity that after -a while he was prevailed on to accompany them to the -baths, which were not far distant, they constantly returning -to see him safe again in the temple. They were all -three his familiars; and Amphares had borrowed a great -deal of plate and rich household stuff from the mother of -Agis, and hoped if he could destroy her and the whole -family, he might peaceably enjoy those goods. And he, -it is said, was the readiest of all to serve the purposes of -Leonidas, and being one of the ephors, did all he could to -incense the rest of his colleagues against Agis. These men,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[435]</a></span> -therefore, finding that Agis would not quit his sanctuary, -but on occasion would venture from it to go to the bath, -resolved to seize him on the opportunity thus given them. -And one day as he was returning, they met and saluted -him as formerly, conversing pleasantly by the way, and -jesting, as youthful friends might, till coming to the turning -of the street which led to the prison, Amphares, by -virtue of his office, laid his hand on Agis, and told him, -“You must go with me, Agis, before the other ephors, -to answer for your misdemeanors.” At the same time -Damochares, who was a tall, strong man, drew his cloak -tight around his neck, and dragged him after by it, whilst -the others went behind to thrust him on. So that none of -Agis’ friends being near to assist him, nor any one by, -they easily got him into the prison, where Leonidas was -already arrived, with a company of soldiers, who strongly -guarded all the avenues; the ephors also came in, with as -many of the Elders as they knew to be true to their party, -being desirous to proceed with some semblance of justice. -And thus they bade him give an account of his actions. -To which Agis, smiling at their dissimulation, answered -not a word. Amphares told him it was more seasonable -for him to weep, for now the time was come in which he -should be punished for his presumption. Another of the -ephors, as though he would be more favorable, and offering -as it were an excuse, asked him whether he was not forced -to what he did by Agesilaus and Lysander. But Agis -answered, he had not been constrained by any man, nor -had any other intent in what he did but to follow the -example of Lycurgus, and to govern conformably to his -laws. The same ephor asked him whether now at least -he did not repent his rashness. To which the young man -answered that though he were to suffer the extremest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[436]</a></span> -penalty for it, yet he could never repent of so just and -glorious a design. Upon this they passed sentence of -death on him, and bade the officers carry him to the -Dechas, as it is called, a place in the prison where they -strangle malefactors. And when the officers would not -venture to lay hands on him, and the very mercenary -soldiers declined it, believing it an illegal and a wicked -act to lay violent hands on a king, Damochares, threatening -and reviling them for it, himself thrust him into the -room.</p> - -<p>For by this time the news of his being seized had reached -many parts of the city, and there was a concourse of people -with lights and torches about the prison gates, and in the -midst of them the mother and the grandmother of Agis, -crying out with a loud voice that their king ought to -appear, and to be heard and judged by the people. But -this clamour, instead of preventing, hastened his death; -his enemies fearing, if the tumult should increase, he -might be rescued during the night out of their hands.</p> - -<p>Agis, being now at the point to die, perceived one of -the officers bitterly bewailing his misfortune. “Weep -not, friend,” said he, “for me, who die innocent, by the -lawless act of wicked men. My condition is much better -than theirs.” As soon as he had spoken these words, not -showing the least sign of fear, he offered his neck to the -noose.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[437]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Labor Problem in Egypt</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the Book of Exodus</cite>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew, B. C. Fourteenth Century; a record of one of the -earliest of labor disputes)</p> - -<p>Pharaoh said, “Who is the Lord, that I should -hearken unto his voice to let Israel go? I know not -the Lord, and moreover I will not let Israel go.... -Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, loose the people from -their work? get you unto your burdens.... Let -heavier work be laid upon the men, that they may labour -therein; and let them not regard lying words.... -Ye are idle, ye are idle; therefore ye say, Let us go and -sacrifice to the Lord. Go therefore now, and work; -for there shall no straw be given you, yet shall ye deliver -the tale of bricks.”</p> - -<p>And the officers of the children of Israel did see that -they were in evil case, when it was said, “Ye shall not -minish aught from your bricks, your daily task.”</p> - -<p>And they met Moses and Aaron, who stood in the way, -as they came forth from Pharaoh: and they said unto -them, “The Lord look upon you and judge; because -you have made our savour to be abhorred in the eyes of -Pharaoh, and in the eyes of his servants, to put a sword -in their hand to slay us.”</p> - -<p>And Moses returned unto the Lord, and said, “Lord, -wherefore hast thou evil entreated this people? Why is it -that thou hast sent me? For since I came to Pharaoh to -speak in thy name, he hath evil entreated this people; -neither hast thou delivered thy people at all.”</p> - -<p>Then the Lord said unto Moses, “Now shalt thou see -what I will do to Pharaoh: for with a strong hand shall -he let them go, and with a strong hand shall he drive them -out of his land.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[438]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The People</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Tommaso Campanella</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Italian philosopher, 1568-1639. Translation by John Addington -Symonds)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The people is a beast of muddy brain</div> - <div class="verse">That knows not its own strength, and therefore stands</div> - <div class="verse">Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands</div> - <div class="verse">Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein;</div> - <div class="verse">One kick would be enough to break the chain,</div> - <div class="verse">But the beast fears, and what the child demands</div> - <div class="verse">It does; nor its own terror understands,</div> - <div class="verse">Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.</div> - <div class="verse">Most wonderful! With its own hand it ties</div> - <div class="verse">And gags itself—gives itself death and war</div> - <div class="verse">For pence doled out by kings from its own store.</div> - <div class="verse">Its own are all things between earth and heaven;</div> - <div class="verse">But this it knows not; and if one arise</div> - <div class="verse">To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From Ecclesiastes</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew, B.C. 200)</p> - -<p>Then I returned and saw all oppressions that are -done under the sun: and behold, the tears of such as -were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the -side of their oppressors there was power, but they had no -comforter. Wherefore I praised the dead which are -already dead more than the living which are yet alive; -yea, better than them both did I esteem him which hath -not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done -under the sun.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[439]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Tiberius Gracchus</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Tribune of the Roman People</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Plutarch</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek, A.D. 50-120)</p> - -<p>Tiberius, maintaining an honorable and just cause, -and possessed of eloquence sufficient to have made a -less creditable action appear plausible, was no safe or -easy antagonist, when, with the people crowding around -the hustings, he took his place and spoke in behalf of the -poor. “The savage beasts,” said he, “in Italy, have their -particular dens, they have their places of repose and -refuge; but the men who bear arms, and expose their -lives for the safety of their country, enjoy in the meantime -nothing in it but the air and light; and, having no -houses or settlements of their own, are constrained to -wander from place to place with their wives and children.” -He told them that the commanders were guilty of a ridiculous -error, when, at the head of their armies, they exhorted -the common soldiers to fight for their sepulchers and -altars; when not any amongst so many Romans is possessed -of either altar or monument, neither have they any -houses of their own, or hearths of their ancestors to defend. -They fought indeed and were slain, but it was to maintain -the luxury and the wealth of other men. They were -styled the masters of the world, but had not one foot of -ground they could call their own.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[440]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Captive Good Attending Captain Ill</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Euripides</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Athenian tragic poet, B.C. 480-406; the most modern of ancient -writers. Translation by John Addington Symonds)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Doth some one say that there be gods above?</div> - <div class="verse">There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool,</div> - <div class="verse">Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.</div> - <div class="verse">Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words</div> - <div class="verse">No undue credence; for I say that kings</div> - <div class="verse">Kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud,</div> - <div class="verse">And doing thus are happier than those</div> - <div class="verse">Who live calm pious lives day after day.</div> - <div class="verse">How many little states that serve the gods</div> - <div class="verse">Are subject to the godless but more strong,</div> - <div class="verse">Made slaves by might of a superior army!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Poverty</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Alcaeus</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek lyric poet, B.C. 611-580; banished for his resistance to -tyrants. Translation by Sir William Jones)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The worst of ills, and hardest to endure,</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Past hope, past cure,</div> - <div class="verse">Is Penury, who, with her sister-mate</div> - <div class="verse">Disorder, soon brings down the loftiest state,</div> - <div class="verse indent4">And makes it desolate.</div> - <div class="verse">This truth the sage of Sparta told,</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Aristodemus old,—</div> - <div class="verse">”Wealth makes the man.“ On him that’s poor</div> - <div class="verse">Proud Worth looks down, and Honor shuts the door.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">[441]</a></span></p> - -<p>The Beggar’s Complaint</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Ancient Japanese classic)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The heaven and earth they call so great,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For me are very small;</div> - <div class="verse">The sun and moon they call so bright,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For me ne’er shine at all.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Are all men sad, or only I?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And what have I obtained—</div> - <div class="verse">What good the gift of mortal life,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That prize so rarely gained—</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">If nought my chilly back protects</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But one thin grass-cloth coat,</div> - <div class="verse">In tatters hanging like the weeds</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That on the billows float?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">If here in smoke-stained, darksome hut,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Upon the bare cold ground,</div> - <div class="verse">I make my wretched bed of straw,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And hear the mournful sound—</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Hear how mine aged parents groan,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And wife and children cry,</div> - <div class="verse">Father and mother, children, wife,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Huddling in misery—</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">If in the rice-pan, nigh forgot,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The spider hangs its nest,</div> - <div class="verse">And from the hearth no smoke goes up</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where all is so unblest?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Shame and despair are mine from day to day,</div> - <div class="verse">But, being no bird, I cannot fly away.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">[442]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Free Labor</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Haggai</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew prophet, B.C. 515)</p> - -<p>He that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a -bag with holes.</p> - - -<h3>Plutus</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Aristophanes</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Greek comedy writer and satirist; B.C. 450-380. There is -probably not a Socialist in the world who has not been asked the -question: “Who will do the dirty work?” It is interesting to see -this difficulty set forth in a comedy which was staged in Athens in -the year 408 B.C. Chremylus and Blepsidemus, two citizens, have -taken in charge Plutus, the god of wealth, who is blind. They have -undertaken to cure him of his blindness; but an old hag by the name -of Poverty appears, and offers to convince them that their success -would mean a calamity to the human race)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><span class="smcap">Chremylus</span>:—As matters now stand (who will dare contradict it?) the life of us men is compos’d</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of a system where folly, absurdity, madness, ay, raving downright is disclosed;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Since, how many a knave we see revel in wealth—the rich heap of his ill-gotten store—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And how many a good man, by fortune unblest, with thee begging bread at the door! (<i>Turns to Poverty.</i>)</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I say, then, there is but one thing to be done, and if we succeed, what a prize</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Will we bring to mankind! That thing it will be—to give Plutus the use of his eyes.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[443]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><span class="smcap">Poverty</span>:—A pest on your prate, and palavering stuff! back! begone with ye, blockheads, to school!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">You pair of old dotards, you drivelling comrades in trifling and playing the fool!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">If the plan ye propose be accomplish’d at last nothing worse could mankind e’er befall,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Than that Plutus should have the full use of his eyes, and bestow himself equal on all!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">See you not, that at once, to all arts there would be, to each craft that you reckon, an end?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">If these were exploded (so much to your joy), say who <em>then</em> should there be, who would lend</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To the forge, to the hammer, the adze or the loom—to the rule or the mallet—his hand?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Not a soul! The mechanic, the carpenter, shipwright—would all be expelled from the land.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where would tailor, or cobbler, or dyer of leather, or bricklay’r, or tanner be found?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Who would e’er condescend in this golden vacation, to till, for his bread’s sake, the ground?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><span class="smcap">Blepsidemus</span>:—Hold, hold, jade! Whatever essentials of life in your catalogue’s column you string,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Our servants, of course, shall provide us.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><span class="smcap">Poverty</span>:—Your servants? and whence do you think <em>they</em> shall spring?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><span class="smcap">Blepsidemus</span>:—We shall buy them with cash—</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><span class="smcap">Poverty</span>:—But with cash all the world as well as yourself is supplied!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Who will care about selling?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><span class="smcap">Blepsidemus</span>:—Some dealer, no doubt, coming down from the Thessaly side,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">(A rare kidnapping nest) who may wish to secure a good bargain to profit the trade.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[444]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><span class="smcap">Poverty</span> (<i>impatiently</i>):—You will not understand! In the lots of mankind when this grand revolution is made</div> - <div class="verse">‘Twill at once put an end to all wants—and of course then, the kidnapper’s business will cease:</div> - <div class="verse">For who will court danger, and hazard his life, when, grown rich, he may live at his ease?</div> - <div class="verse">Thus each for himself will be forced to turn plowman, to dig and to delve and to sweat;</div> - <div class="verse">Wearing out an existence more grievous by far than he ever experienced yet.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><span class="smcap">Chremylus</span>:—Curses on you!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><span class="smcap">Poverty</span>:—You’ll not have a bed to lie down on—no goods of the sort will be seen!</div> - <div class="verse">Not a carpet to tread on—for who, pray, will weave one, when well stock’d his coffers have been?</div> - <div class="verse">Farewell to your essences, perfumes, pastilles! When you lead to the altar your bride</div> - <div class="verse">Farewell to your roseate veil’s drooping folds, the bright hues of its glittering pride!</div> - <div class="verse">Yet forsooth “to be rich”—say what is it, without all these gew-gaws to swell the detail?</div> - <div class="verse">Now with me, every item that wish can suggest springs abundant and never can fail;</div> - <div class="verse">For who, but myself, urges on to his toil, like a mistress, and drives the mechanic?</div> - <div class="verse">If he flags, I but show him my face at the door, and he hies to his work in a panic!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><span class="smcap">Chremylus</span>:—Pshaw! What good can <em>you</em> bring but sores, blisters and blains, on the wretch as he shivering goes</div> - <div class="verse">From the baths’ genial clime driv’n forth to the cold, at the certain expense of his toes?</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">[445]</a></span> - <div class="verse">What, but poor little urchins, whose stomachs are craving, and little old beldames in shoals;</div> - <div class="verse">And lice by the thousand, mosquitoes and flies? (I can’t count you the cloud as it rolls!)</div> - <div class="verse">Which keep humming and buzzing about one, a language denying the respite of sleep,</div> - <div class="verse">In a strain thus consoling—“Poor starveling, awake, tho to hunger!”—yet up you must leap!</div> - <div class="verse">Add to this, that you treat us with rags to our backs and a bundle of straw for a bed</div> - <div class="verse">(Woe betide the poor wretch on whose carcass the bugs of that ravenous pallet have fed!)</div> - <div class="verse">For a carpet, a rotten old mat—for a pillow, a great stone picked out of the street—</div> - <div class="verse">And for porridge, or bread, a mere leaf of radish, or stem of a mallow, to eat.</div> - <div class="verse">The head that remains of some wreck of a pitcher, by way of a seat you provide;</div> - <div class="verse">For the trough we make use of in kneading, we’re driven to shift with a wine barrel’s side,—</div> - <div class="verse">And this, too, all broken and split:—in a word, your magnificent gifts to conclude,</div> - <div class="verse">(<i>Ironically</i>) To mankind you indeed are a blessed dispenser of mighty and manifold good!...</div> - <div class="verse">On my word, dame, your fav’rites are happily off, after striving and toiling to save,</div> - <div class="verse">If at last they are able to levy enough to procure them a cheque to the grave!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">[446]</a></span></p> - -<p>The Lawyer and the Farmer</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Egyptian; B.C. 1400, or earlier. A letter from a father to his son, -exhorting him to stick to the study of his profession)</p> - -<p>It is told to me that thou hast cast aside learning, and -givest thyself to dancing; thou turnest thy face to -the work in the fields, and castest the divine words behind -thee.</p> - -<p>Behold, thou rememberest not the condition of the -fellah (farmer) when the harvest is taken over. The -worms carry off half the corn, and the hippopotamus -devours the rest; mice abound in the fields, and locusts -arrive; the cattle devour, the sparrows steal. How -miserable is the lot of the fellah! What remains on the -threshing-floor, robbers finish it up. The bronze ... -are worn out, the horses die with threshing and plowing. -Then the scribe (lawyer) moors at the bank, who is to -take over the harvest for the government; the attendants -bear staves, the negroes carry palm sticks. They say, -“Give corn!” But there is none. They beat the fellah -prostrate; they bind him and cast him into the canal, -throwing him headlong. His wife is bound before him, -his children are swung off; his neighbors let them go, and -flee to look after their corn.</p> - -<p>But the scribe is the leader of labor for all; he reckons -to himself the produce in winter, and there is none that -appoints him his tale of produce. Behold, now thou -knowest!</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[447]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Farmer and Lawyer Again</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Vision of Piers Plowman”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Langland</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(One of the earliest of English social protests, a picture of the misery -of the workers of the fourteenth century)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Some were for ploughing, and played full seldom,</div> - <div class="verse">Set their seed and sowed their seed and sweated hard,</div> - <div class="verse">To win what wastrels with gluttony destroy....</div> - <div class="verse">There wandered a hundred in hoods of silk,</div> - <div class="verse">Serjeants they seemed, and served at the Bar,</div> - <div class="verse">Pleading the Law for pennies and for pounds,</div> - <div class="verse">Unlocking their lips never for love of our Lord.</div> - <div class="verse">Thou mightest better mete the mist on Malvern hills</div> - <div class="verse">Than get a mutter from their mouths—save thou show thy money!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Agitator</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Isaiah</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew prophet, B.C. 740)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace,</div> - <div class="verse">And for Jerusalem’s sake will I not rest,</div> - <div class="verse">Until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness,</div> - <div class="verse">And the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth.</div> - <div class="verse">Upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, have I set watchmen,</div> - <div class="verse">Who shall never hold their peace, day and night.</div> - <div class="verse">Go through, go through the gates;</div> - <div class="verse">Prepare ye the way of the people!</div> - <div class="verse">Lift up a standard to the peoples!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[448]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Muckraker in Persia</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Nizami</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Persian poet, A.D. 1200)</p> - -<p>There was a king who oppressed his subjects. An -informer came to him, and said, “A certain old man -has in private called thee a tyrant, a disturber, and bloodthirsty.” -The king, enraged, said, “Even now I put him -to death.” While the king made preparations for the -execution, a youth ran to the old man, and said, “The -king is ill-disposed to thee; hasten to assuage his wrath.” -The sage performed his ablutions, took his shroud, and -went to the king. The tyrant, seeing him, clapped his -hands together, and with eye hungry for revenge, cried, -“I hear thou hast given loose to thy speech; thou hast -called me revengeful, an oppressive demon.” The sage -replied, “I have said worse of thee than what thou repeatest. -Old and young are in peril from thy action; -town and village are injured by thy ministry. Apply thy -understanding, and see if it be true; if it be not, slay me -on a gibbet. I am holding a mirror before thee; when it -shows thy blemishes truly, it is a folly to break the -mirror. Break thyself!”</p> - -<p>The king saw the rectitude of the sage, and his own -crookedness. He said, “Remove his burial spices, and -his shroud; bring to him sweet perfumes, and the robe -of honor.” He became a just prince, cherishing his -subjects. Bring forward thy rough truth; truth from thee -is victory; it shall shine as a pearl.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[449]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The System</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Jeremiah</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew prophet, B.C. 630)</p> - -<p>For among my people are found wicked men; they -lay wait, as he that setteth snares; they set a trap, -they catch men. As a cage is full of birds, so are their -houses full of deceit; therefore they are become great, -and waxen rich. They are waxen fat, they shine; yea, -they overpass the deeds of the wicked; they judge not the -cause, the cause of the fatherless, yet they prosper; and -the right of the needy do they not judge. Shall I not visit -them for these things? saith the Lord; shall not my soul -be avenged on such a nation as this? A wonderful and -horrible thing is committed in the land; the prophets -prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; -and my people love to have it so; and what will ye do in -the end thereof?</p> - - -<h3>Grafters in Athens</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Frogs”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Aristophanes</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek comedy, produced B.C. 405)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Keep silence—keep peace—and let all the profane</div> - <div class="verse">From our holy solemnity duly refrain;</div> - <div class="verse">Whose souls unenlightened by taste, are obscure;</div> - <div class="verse">Whose poetical notions are dark and impure;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Whose theatrical conscience</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Is sullied by nonsense;</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[450]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Who never were train’d by the mighty Cratinus</div> - <div class="verse">In mystical orgies poetic and vinous;</div> - <div class="verse">Who delight in buffooning and jests out of season;</div> - <div class="verse">Who promote the designs of oppression and treason;</div> - <div class="verse">Who foster sedition, and strife, and debate;</div> - <div class="verse">All traitors, in short, to the stage and the state;</div> - <div class="verse">Who surrender a fort, or in private, export</div> - <div class="verse">To places and harbors of hostile resort,</div> - <div class="verse">Clandestine consignments of cables and pitch;</div> - <div class="verse">In the way the Thorycion grew to be rich</div> - <div class="verse">From a scoundrelly dirty collector of tribute!</div> - <div class="verse">All such we reject and severely prohibit:</div> - <div class="verse">All statesmen retrenching the fees and the salaries</div> - <div class="verse">Of theatrical bards, in revenge for the railleries,</div> - <div class="verse">And jests, and lampoons, of this holy solemnity,</div> - <div class="verse">Profanely pursuing their personal enmity,</div> - <div class="verse">For having been flouted, and scoff’d, and scorn’d,</div> - <div class="verse">All such are admonish’d and heartily warn’d!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We warn them once,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We warn them twice,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We warn and admonish—we warn them thrice,</div> - <div class="verse">To conform to the law,</div> - <div class="verse">To retire and withdraw—</div> - <div class="verse">While the Chorus again with the formal saw</div> - <div class="verse">(Fixt and assign’d to the festive day)</div> - <div class="verse">Move to the measure and march away!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">[451]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Pure Food Agitation</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Martin Luther</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(German religious reformer, 1483-1564)</p> - -<p>They have learned the trick of placing such commodities -as pepper, ginger, saffron, in damp vaults or -cellars in order to increase the weight.... Nor is there -a single article of trade whatever out of which they -cannot make unfair profit by false measuring, counting -or weighing. They produce artificial colors, or they put -the pretty things at the top and bottom and the ugly -ones in the middle; and indeed there is no end to their -trickery, and no one tradesman will trust another, for -they know each other’s ways.</p> - - -<h3>Wall Street</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Habakkuk</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew prophet. B.C. 600)</p> - -<p>They take up all of them with the angle, they catch -them in their net, and gather them in their drag; -therefore they sacrifice unto their nets, and burn incense -unto their drags; because by them their portion is fat, -and their meat plenteous.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Martial</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Latin poet, A.D. 43-104)</p> - -<p>If you are a poor man now, Aemilianus, a poor man -you will always be. Nowadays, riches are bestowed -on no one but the rich.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452">[452]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Cato, the Censor</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Latin, B.C. 234-149)</p> - -<p>Small thieves lie in towers fastened to wooden -blocks; big ones strut about in gold and silver.</p> - - -<h3>Prosperity</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the Book of Job</cite>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew, B.C. Fourth Century)</p> - -<p>Thou hast taken pledges of thy brother for nought, -and stripped the naked of their clothing. Thou hast -not given water to the weary to drink, and thou hast -withholden bread from the hungry. But as for the mighty -man, he had the earth; and the honourable man, he dwelt -in it. Thou hast sent widows away empty, and the arms -of the fatherless have been broken.</p> - - -<h3>The Leading Citizen</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Horace</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Latin poet, B.C. 65-8. Translation by John Milton)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Whom do we count a good man? Whom but he</div> - <div class="verse">Who keeps the laws and statutes of the senate,</div> - <div class="verse">Who judges in great suits and controversies,</div> - <div class="verse">Whose witness and opinion wins the cause?</div> - <div class="verse">But his own house, and the whole neighborhood,</div> - <div class="verse">Sees his foul inside through his whited skin.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_453" id="Page_453">[453]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Hong’s Experiences in Hades</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Im Bang</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Korean poet, 1640-1722)</p> - -<p>The next hell had inscribed on it, “Deceivers.” I saw -in it many scores of people, with ogres that cut the -flesh from their bodies, and fed it to starving demons. -These ate and ate, and the flesh was cut and cut till only -the bones remained. When the winds of hell blew, -then flesh returned to them; then metal snakes and copper -dogs crowded in to bite them and suck their blood. Their -screams of pain made the earth to tremble. The guides -said to me, “When these offenders were on earth they held -high office, and while they pretended to be true and good -they received bribes in secret and were doers of all evil. -As Ministers of State they ate the fat of the land and -sucked the blood of the people, and yet advertised themselves -as benefactors and were highly applauded. While -in reality they lived as thieves, they pretended to be -holy, as Confucius and Mencius were holy. They were -deceivers of the world, and robbers, and so are punished -thus.”</p> - - -<h3>Monopolies</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Martin Luther</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A picture of the conditions which brought on the Peasants’ War -in Germany, 1525)</p> - -<p>Before all, if the princes and lords wish to fulfill the -duties of their office they must prohibit and banish -the vicious system of monopolies, which is altogether unendurable -in town or country. As for the trading companies,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454">[454]</a></span> -they are thoroughly corrupt and made up of great injustices. -They have every sort of commodity in their own -power and they do with them just as they please, raise -or lower the prices at their own convenience and crush -and ruin all the small shop people—just as the pike does -with the small fish in the water—as if they were lords over -God’s creatures and exempt from all laws of authority -and religion.... How can it be godly and just that in -so short a time a man should grow so rich that he can -outbid kings and emperors? They have brought things -to such a pass that all the rest of the world must carry -on business with risk and damage, gaining today, losing -tomorrow, while they continually grow richer and richer, -and make up for their losses by higher profits; so it is -no wonder that they are appropriating to themselves the -riches of the whole world.</p> - - -<h3>Intemperate Speech</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the Epistle of James</cite>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A.D. 100 to 120)</p> - -<p>Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your -miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches -are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your -gold and silver are cankered; and the rust of them shall -be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it -were fire. Ye have heaped treasures together for the last -days. Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped -down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, -crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are -entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. Ye have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455">[455]</a></span> -lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have -nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. Ye have -condemned and killed the just: and he doth not resist -you. Be patient, therefore, brethren, unto the coming of -the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the -precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, -until he receive the early and latter rain. Be ye also -patient; stablish your hearts; for the coming of the Lord -draweth nigh.</p> - - -<h3>Government</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Marcus Aurelius</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Roman emperor and philosopher, A.D. 121-180)</p> - -<p>And these your professed politicians, the only true -practical philosophers of the world (as they think -themselves) so full of affected gravity, or such professed -lovers of virtue and honesty, what wretches be they in -very deed; how vile and contemptible in themselves! -O man, what ado dost thou make!</p> - - -<h3>Murder by Statute</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Sayings of Mencius”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Chinese classic, B.C. 300)</p> - -<p>King Hwuy of Leang said, “I wish quietly to receive -your instructions.” Mencius replied, ”Is there any -difference between killing a man with a stick, and with a -sword?“ ”There is not,“ was the answer.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456">[456]</a></span></p> - -<p>Mencius continued, “Is there any difference between -doing it with a sword and with government measures?” -“There is not,” was the answer again.</p> - -<p>Mencius then said, “In your stalls there are fat beasts; -in your stables there are fat horses. But your people -have the look of hunger, and in the fields are those who -have died of famine. This is leading on beasts to devour -men. Beasts devour one another, and men hate them for -doing so. When he who is called the parent of the people -conducts his government so as to be chargeable with -leading on beasts to devour men, where is that parental -relation to the people?”</p> - - -<h3>Rebuking a Tyrant</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Sadi</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Persian poet, A.D. 1200)</p> - -<p>In a certain year I was sitting retired in the great -mosque at Damascus, at the head of the tomb of -Yahiya the prophet (on whom be peace!). One of the -kings of Arabia, who was notorious for his injustice, -happened to come on a pilgrimage, and having performed -his devotions, he uttered the following words: “The poor -and the rich are servants of this earth, and those who are -richest have the greatest wants.” He then looked towards -me, and said, “Because dervishes are strenuous and sincere -in their commerce with heaven, unite your prayers -with mine, for I am in dread of a powerful enemy.”</p> - -<p>I replied, “Show mercy to the weak peasant, that you -may not experience difficulty from a strong enemy. -It is criminal to crush the poor and defenceless subjects<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457">[457]</a></span> -with the arm of power. He liveth in dread who befriendeth -not the poor; for should his foot slip, no one layeth hold -of his hand. Whosoever soweth bad seed, and looketh -for good fruit, tortureth his imagination in vain, making -a false judgment of things. Take the cotton out of thine -ear, and distribute justice to mankind; for if thou refusest -justice, there will be a day of retribution.</p> - -<p>“The children of Adam are limbs of one another, and -are all produced from the same substance; when the world -gives pain to one member, the others also suffer uneasiness. -Thou who art indifferent to the sufferings of others deservest -not to be called a man.”</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo456" id="illo456">[illo456]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_456f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>THE DESPOTIC AGE</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">ISIDORE KONTI</span> (<i>American sculptor, born 1862; group from the Buffalo Exposition</i>)</p></div> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 527px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo457" id="illo457">[illo457]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_457f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>THE SEA OF BLOOD</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">Courage, Your Majesty, only one step more</span>”</p> - -<p>(<i>Example of Russian cartooning, published at the height of the -Revolution of 1905</i>)</p></div> -</div> - - -<h3>The Eloquent Peasant</h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Egyptian, B.C. 2000 or earlier)</p> - -<p>An interesting primitive protest against injustice is the -story of the Eloquent Peasant, which was one of the -most popular of ancient Egyptian tales, and is found in -scores of different papyri. The story narrates how a -peasant named Rensi was robbed of his asses by the -henchmen of a certain grand steward. In spite of all -threats the peasant persisted in appealing against the -robber to the grand steward himself. The scene is described -in “Social Forces and Religion in Ancient Egypt,” -by James Henry Breasted, as follows:</p> - -<p>“It is a tableau which epitomizes ages of social history -in the East: on the one hand, the brilliant group of the -great man’s sleek and subservient suite, the universal -type of the official class; and, on the other, the friendless -and forlorn figure of the despoiled peasant, the pathetic -personification of the cry for social justice. This scene<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_458" id="Page_458">[458]</a></span> -is one of the earliest examples of that Oriental skill in -setting forth abstract principles, so wonderfully illustrated -later in the parables of Jesus. Seeing that the grand -steward makes no reply, the peasant makes another -effort to save his family and himself from the starvation -which threatens them. He steps forward and with -amazing eloquence addresses the great man in whose -hands his case now rests, promising him a fair voyage as -he embarks on the canal, and voicing the fame of the -grand steward’s benevolence, on which he had reckoned. -‘For thou art the father of the orphan, the husband of -the widow, the brother of the forsaken, the kilt of the -motherless. Let me put thy name in this land above -every good law, O leader free from avarice, great man free -from littleness, who destroys falsehood and brings about -truth. Respond to the cry which my mouth utters; -when I speak, hear thou. Do justice, thou who art -praised, whom the praised praise. Relieve my misery. -Behold me, I am heavy laden; prove me, lo I am in -sorrow.’”</p> - -<p>To follow the account of the incident in other records, -the grand steward is so much pleased with the peasant’s -eloquence that he goes to the king and tells him about it. -“My Lord, I have found one of these peasants, excellent -of speech, in very truth; stolen are his goods, and he has -come to complain to me of the matter.”</p> - -<p>His majesty says, “As thou wishest that I may see -health, lengthen out his complaint, without reply to any -of his speeches! He who desireth him to continue speaking -should be silent; behold, bring us his words in writing -that we may listen to them.”</p> - -<p>So he keeps the peasant pleading for many days. The -story quotes nine separate speeches, of constantly increas<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459">[459]</a></span>ing -bitterness and pathos. The peasant is beaten by the -servants of the grand steward, but still he comes. “Thou -art appointed to hear causes, to judge two litigants, to -ward off the robber. But thou makest common cause -with the thief.... Thou art instructed, thou art -educated, thou art taught—but not for robbery. Thou -art accustomed to do like all men, and thy kin are likewise -ensnared. Thou the rectitude of all men, art the chief -transgressor of the whole land. The gardener of evil -waters his domain with iniquity that his domain may -bring forth falsehood, in order to flood the estate with -wickedness.”</p> - -<p>In spite of his eloquence, the grand steward remains -unmoved. The peasant appeals to the gods of Justice; -and in the ninth address he threatens to make his plea -to the god Anubis, who is the god of the dead—meaning -thereby that he will commit suicide. None of the extant -papyri informs us as to the outcome of the whole proceedings.</p> - - -<h3>Prayers Without Answer</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From The Iliad</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Homer</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek epic poet, B.C. 700?)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Prayers are Jove’s daughters of celestial race,</div> - <div class="verse">Lame are their feet, and wrinkled is their face;</div> - <div class="verse">With homely mien and with dejected eyes,</div> - <div class="verse">Constant they follow where injustice flies.</div> - <div class="verse">Injustice, suave, erect, and unconfined,</div> - <div class="verse">Sweeps the wide earth, and tramples o’er mankind—</div> - <div class="verse">While prayers to heal her wrongs move slow behind.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460">[460]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Suffering of Women</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Herbert Spencer</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English philosopher, 1820-1903)</p> - -<p>In the history of humanity as written, the saddest part -concerns the treatment of women; and had we before -us its unwritten history we should find this part still -sadder. I say the saddest part because there have been -many things more conspicuously dreadful—cannibalism, -the torturing of prisoners, the sacrifice of victims to ghosts -and gods—these have been but occasionally; whereas -the brutal treatment of woman has been universal and -constant. If looking first at their state of subjection -among the semi-civilized we pass to the uncivilized, and -observe the lives of hardship borne by nearly all of them; -if we then think what must have gone on among those -still ruder peoples who, for so many thousands of years -roamed over the uncultivated earth; we shall infer that -the amount of suffering which has been and is borne by -women is utterly beyond imagination.</p> - - -<h3>Divorce in Ancient Babylon</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the Code of Hammurabi</cite>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(B.C. 2250)</p> - -<p>Anu and Baal called me, Hammurabi, the exalted -prince, the worshipper of the gods, to cause justice -to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and evil, -to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, to -enlighten the land and to further the welfare of the people.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461">[461]</a></span> -Hammurabi, the governor named by Baal am I, who -brought about plenty and abundance.</p> - -<p>§ 142: If a woman shall hate her husband and say: -“Thou shalt not have me,” they shall inquire into her -antecedents for her defects.... If she have not been a -careful mistress, have gadded about, have neglected her -house and have belittled her husband, they shall throw -that woman into the water.</p> - - -<h3>The Parable of the Hungry Dog</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the Gospel of Buddha</cite>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hindu Bible, B.C. 600)</p> - -<p>There was a wicked tyrant; and the god Indra, -assuming the shape of a hunter, came down upon -earth with the demon Matali, the latter appearing as a -dog of enormous size. Hunter and dog entered the palace, -and the dog howled so woefully that the royal buildings -shook with the sound to their very foundations. The -tyrant had the awe-inspiring hunter brought before his -throne and inquired after the cause of the terrible bark. -The hunter said, “The dog is hungry,” whereupon the -frightened king ordered food for him. All the food prepared -at the royal banquet disappeared rapidly in the dog’s -jaws, and still he howled with portentous significance. -More food was sent for, and all the royal store-houses -were emptied, but in vain. Then the tyrant grew desperate -and asked: “Will nothing satisfy the cravings of -that woeful beast?” “Nothing,” replied the hunter, -“nothing except perhaps the flesh of all his enemies.” -“And who are his enemies?” anxiously asked the tyrant. -The hunter replied: “The dog will howl as long as there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_462" id="Page_462">[462]</a></span> -are people hungry in the kingdom, and his enemies are -those that practice injustice and oppress the poor.” The -oppressor of the people, remembering his evil deeds, was -seized with remorse, and for the first time in his life he -began to listen to the teachings of righteousness.</p> - - -<h3>The Nature of Kings</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the First Book of Samuel</cite>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew, B.C. Eleventh Century)</p> - -<p>And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the -people that asked of him a king. And he said: -“This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over -you; he will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, -for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some -shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him -captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and -will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, -and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of -his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be -confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And -he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your -oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his -servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and -of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his -servants. And he will take your menservants, and your -maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your -asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth -of your sheep; and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall -cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall -have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that -day.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_463" id="Page_463">[463]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>King Yu’s Misgovernment</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the She-ching</cite>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Chinese classic, B.C. 1000)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">A fish in some translucent lake</div> - <div class="verse">Must ever live to fear a prey</div> - <div class="verse">He cannot hide himself away</div> - <div class="verse">From those who come the fish to take.</div> - <div class="verse">I, too, may not escape the eyes</div> - <div class="verse">Of those who cause these miseries;</div> - <div class="verse">My sorrowing heart must grieve to know</div> - <div class="verse">My country’s deep distress and woe.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Slavery</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the Edda</cite>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Scandinavian legends of great antiquity, collected, A.D. 1100, by -Saemund)</p> - -<p>King Frothi called his slaves renowned for strength, -Fenia and Menia, and bade them grind for gold. -The maidens ground through many years, they ground -endless treasures; but at last they grew weary. Then -Frothi said, “Grind on! Rest ye not, sleep ye not, longer -than the cuckoo is silent, or a verse can be sung.” The -weary slaves ground on, till lo! from the mighty mill is -poured forth an army of men. Now lies Frothi slain -amid his gold. Now is Frothi’s peace forever ended.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_464" id="Page_464">[464]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Power of Justice</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Manu</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hindu poet, B.C. 1200)</p> - -<p>Iniquity, committed in this world, produces not -fruit immediately, but, like the earth, in due season, -and advancing by little and little, it eradicates the man -who committed it.</p> - -<p>He grows rich for a while through unrighteousness; -then he beholds good things; then it is that he vanquishes -his foes; but he perishes at length from his whole root -upwards.</p> - -<p>Justice, being destroyed, will destroy; being preserved, -will preserve; it must never therefore be violated. Beware, -O judge! lest justice, being overturned, overturn -both us and thyself.</p> - - -<h3>Legislators</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Isaiah</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew prophet, B.C. 740)</p> - -<p>Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and -that write grievousness which they have prescribed; -to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away -the right from the poor of my people, that widows may be -their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless! And -what will ye do in the day of visitation, and in the desolation -which shall come from far? to whom will ye flee for -help? and where will ye leave your glory? Without me -they shall bow down under the prisoners, and they shall -fall under the slain. For all this his anger is not turned -away, but his hand is stretched out still.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_465" id="Page_465">[465]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Concerning Wealth</h3> - -<p><span class="smcap">Hesiod</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek poet, B.C. 650)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Who, or by open force, or secret stealth,</div> - <div class="verse">Or perjured wiles, amasses wealth,</div> - <div class="verse">(Such many are, whom thirst of gain betrays)</div> - <div class="verse">The gods, all seeing, shall o’ercloud his days;</div> - <div class="verse">His wife, his children, and his friends shall die,</div> - <div class="verse">And, like a dream, his ill-got riches fly.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng">(<cite>From the Instructions of Ptah-Hotep</cite>)</h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Egyptian, B.C. 3550; the oldest book in the world)</p> - -<p>If thou be great, after being of no account, and hast -gotten riches after squalor, being foremost in these in -the city, and hast knowledge concerning useful matters, -so that promotion is come unto thee; then swathe not -thine heart in thine hoard, for thou art become a steward -of the endowment of the God. Thou art not the last, -others shall be thine equal, and to them shall come what -has come to thee.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng">(<cite>From the Icelandic, Eleventh Century</cite>)</h3> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I saw the well-filled barns</div> - <div class="verse">Of the child of wealth;</div> - <div class="verse">Now leans he on the staff of the beggar.</div> - <div class="verse">Thus are riches,</div> - <div class="verse">As the glance of an eye,</div> - <div class="verse">They are an inconstant friend.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_466" id="Page_466">[466]</a></span></p> - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Virgil</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Latin epic poet, B.C. 70-19)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Curst greed of gold, what crimes thy tyrant power has caused!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h4>(<cite>From the “Antigone” of Sophocles</cite>)</h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek tragic poet, B.C. 440)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">No such ill device</div> - <div class="verse">Ever appeared, as money to mankind:</div> - <div class="verse">This is it that sacks cities, this routs out</div> - <div class="verse">Men from their homes, and trains and turns astray</div> - <div class="verse">The minds of honest mortals, setting them</div> - <div class="verse">Upon base actions; this revealed to men</div> - <div class="verse">Habits of all misdoing, and cognizance</div> - <div class="verse">Of every work of wickedness.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h4>(<cite>From the Book of Good Counsels</cite>)</h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Sanscrit, B.C. 300)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Wealth is friends, home, father, brother, title to respect, and fame;</div> - <div class="verse">Yea, and wealth is held for wisdom—that it should be so is shame.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h4>(<cite>From the “Medea” of Euripides</cite>)</h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek tragic poet, B.C. 431)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Speak not so hastily: the gods themselves</div> - <div class="verse">By gifts are swayed, as fame relates; and gold</div> - <div class="verse">Hath a far greater influence o’er the souls</div> - <div class="verse">Of mortals than the most persuasive words.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_467" id="Page_467">[467]</a></span></p> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Convivio” of Dante Alighieri</cite>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Italian epic poet, 1265-1321)</p> - -<p>I affirm that gain is precisely that which comes oftener -to the bad than to the good; for illegitimate gains -never come to the good at all, because they reject them. -And lawful gains rarely come to the good, because, since -much anxious care is needful thereto, and the anxious -care of the good man is directed to weightier matters, -rarely does the good man give sufficient attention thereto. -Wherefore it is clear that in every way the advent of these -riches is iniquitous....</p> - -<p>Let us give heed to the life of them who chase riches, -and see in what security they live when they have gathered -of them, how content they are, how reposeful! And -what else, day by day, imperils and slays cities, countries -and single persons so much as the new amassing of -wealth by anyone? Which amassing reveals new longings, -the goal of which may not be reached without -wrong to someone....</p> - -<p>Wherefore the baseness of riches is manifest enough by -reason of all their characteristics, and so a man of right -appetite and of true knowledge never loves them; and not -loving them does not unite himself to them, but ever -wishes them to be far removed from him, save as they be -ordained to some necessary service....</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_468" id="Page_468">[468]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Perfect City</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Republic” of Plato</cite>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek philosopher, B.C. 429-347)</p> - -<p>We have, it seems, discovered other things, which our -guardians must by all means watch against, that -they may nowise escape their notice and steal into the -city.</p> - -<p>What kinds of things are these?</p> - -<p>Riches, said I, and poverty.</p> - - -<h3>Concerning Independence</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Lucretius</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Latin poet, B.C. 95-52)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But if men would live up to reason’s rules,</div> - <div class="verse">They would not bow and scrape to wealthy fools.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h4>(<cite>From The Hitopadesa</cite>)</h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hindu religious work, B.C. 250)</p> - -<p>It is better to abandon life than flatter the base. Impoverishment -is better than luxury through another’s -wealth. Not to attend at the door of the wealthy, and -not to use the voice of petition, these imply the best life -of a man.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_469" id="Page_469">[469]</a></span></p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">By Xenophon</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek historian, B.C. Fourth Century)</p> - -<p>If you perfume a slave and a freeman, the difference of -their birth produces none in the smell; and the scent -is perceived as soon in the one as the other; but the odor -of honorable toil, as it is acquired with great pains -and application, is ever sweet and worthy of a brave -man.</p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">By Dante Alighieri</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Italian epic poet, 1265-1321)</p> - -<p>What! You say a horse is noble because it is good -in itself, and the same you say of a falcon or a -pearl; but a man shall be called noble because his ancestors -were so? Not with words, but with knives must one -answer such a beastly notion.</p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">By Omar Khayyam</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Persian poet, Eleventh Century)</p> - -<p>In this world he who possesses a morsel of bread, and -some nest in which to shelter himself, who is master -or slave of no man, tell that man to live content; he -possesses a very sweet existence.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_470" id="Page_470">[470]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Oh! Freedom</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Negro Slave Song</cite>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Oh! Freedom, oh! Freedom,</div> - <div class="verse">Oh! Freedom, over me;</div> - <div class="verse">And before I’ll be a slave</div> - <div class="verse">I’ll be buried in my grave,</div> - <div class="verse">And go home to my God</div> - <div class="verse">And be free.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Fredome</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Barbour</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet, Fourteenth Century)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">A! fredome is a nobill thing!</div> - <div class="verse">Fredome mayse man to haiff liking!</div> - <div class="verse">Fredome all solace to man giffis:</div> - <div class="verse">He levys at ese that frely levys;</div> - <div class="verse">A noble hart may haiff nane ease,</div> - <div class="verse">Na ellys nocht that may him plese,</div> - <div class="verse">Gyff fredome failythe: for fre liking</div> - <div class="verse">Is yearnyt ow’r all othir thing</div> - <div class="verse">Na he, that ay hase levyt fre,</div> - <div class="verse">May nocht knaw weill the propyrte,</div> - <div class="verse">The angry, na the wretchyt dome,</div> - <div class="verse">That is cowplyt to foule thyrldome.</div> - <div class="verse">Bot gyff he had assayit it,</div> - <div class="verse">Than all perquer he suld it wyt;</div> - <div class="verse">And suld think fredome mar to pryse</div> - <div class="verse">Than all the gold in warld that is.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_471" id="Page_471">[471]</a></span></p> - -<h3>A Home of Righteousness</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Ancient Greek Inscription</cite>)</p> - -<p>Piety has raised this house from the first foundation -even to the lofty roof; for Macedonius fashioned not -his wealth by heaping up from the possessions of others -with plundering sword, nor has any poor man here wept -over his vain and profitless toil, being robbed of just hire; -and as rest from labor is kept inviolate by the just man, so -let the works of pious mortals endure.</p> - - -<h3>Palaces</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the Book of Enoch</cite>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew work of the Second Century, B.C., preserved only in the -Ethiopic tongue)</p> - -<p>Woe unto you who despise the humble dwelling and -inheritance of your fathers! Woe unto you who -build your palaces with the sweat of others! Each stone, -each brick of which it is built, is a sin!</p> - - -<h3>Pride in Poverty</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Confucius</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Chinese philosopher, B. C. 500)</p> - -<p>Riches and honor are what men desire; but if they -attain to them by improper ways, they should not -continue to hold them. Poverty and low estate are what -men dislike; but if they are brought to such condition by -improper ways, they should not feel shame for it.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_472" id="Page_472">[472]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Millionaires in Rome</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Cicero</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Latin statesman and orator, B. C. 106-43)</p> - -<p>As to their money, and their splendid mansions, and their -wealth, and their lordship, and the delights by which -they are chiefly attracted, never in truth have I ranked -them amongst things good or desirable; inasmuch as I -saw for a certainty that in the abundance of these things -men longed most for the very things wherein they -abounded. For never is the thirst of cupidity filled nor -sated. And not only are they tortured by the longing to -increase their possessions, but they are also tortured by -fear of losing them.</p> - - -<h3>The Ruling Classes</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Ezekiel</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew prophet, B. C. 600)</p> - -<p>The word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of -man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, -prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God -unto the shepherds: Woe be to the shepherds of Israel -that do feed themselves! Should not the shepherds feed -the flocks? Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the -wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock. -The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye -healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that -which was broken, neither have ye brought again that -which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which -was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_473" id="Page_473">[473]</a></span> -them. And they were scattered, because there is no shepherd.... -My sheep wandered through all the mountains, -and upon every high hill; yea, my flock was scattered -upon all the face of the earth, and none did search or seek -after them. Therefore ye shepherds, hear the word of -the Lord; as I live, saith the Lord God, ... Behold, I -am against the shepherds; and I will require my flock at -their hand.... I will feed my flock, and I will cause them -to lie down.... And they shall no more be a prey to the -heathen, neither shall the beast of the land devour them; -but they shall dwell safely, and none shall make them -afraid. And ye my flock, the flock of my pasture, are -men, and I am your God, saith the Lord God.</p> - - -<h3>Ladies of Fashion</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Isaiah</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew prophet, B.C. 740)</p> - -<p>The Lord standeth up to plead, and standeth to judge -the people. The Lord will enter into judgment with -the ancients of his people, and the princes thereof; for ye -have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in -your houses. What mean ye that ye beat my people to -pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord -God of Hosts. Moreover the Lord saith, Because the -daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched -forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as -they go, and making a tinkling with their feet; therefore -the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of -the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their -secret parts. In that day the Lord will take away the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_474" id="Page_474">[474]</a></span> -bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and -their cauls, and their round tires like the moon, the chains, -and the bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets, and the -ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, -and the earrings, the rings, and nose jewels, the changeable -suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and -the crisping pins, the glasses, and the fine linen, and the -hoods, and the veils. And it shall come to pass that -instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of -a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair, baldness; -and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and -burning instead of beauty. Thy men shall fall by the -sword, and thy mighty in the war. And her gates shall -lament and mourn; and she being desolate shall sit upon -the ground.</p> - - -<h3>Concerning Justice</h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Ancient Hindu Proverb)</p> - -<p>Justice is so dear to the heart of Nature, that if in -the last day one atom of injustice were found, the -universe would shrivel like a snake-skin to cast it off -forever.</p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">By Marcus Aurelius</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Roman emperor, A.D. 121-180)</p> - -<p>In the whole constitution of man, I see not any virtue -contrary to justice, whereby it may be resisted and -opposed.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_475" id="Page_475">[475]</a></span></p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">By Sadi</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Persian poet, A.D. 1200)</p> - -<p>Take heed that he weep not; for the throne of the -Almighty is shaken to and fro when the orphan sets -a-crying. Beware of the groans of the wounded souls, -since the hidden sore will at length break out; oppress -not to the utmost a single heart, for a single sigh has -power to overset a whole world.</p> - - -<h4>(<cite>From “The Koran”</cite>)</h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Bible of Mohammedanism; Arabic, A.D. 600)</p> - -<p>Justice is an unassailable fortress, built on the brow -of a mountain which cannot be overthrown by the -violence of torrents, nor demolished by the force of -armies.</p> - -<p>“Do you desire,” said Abdallah, “to bring the praise -of mankind upon your action? Then desire not unjustly, -or even by your right, to grasp that which belongs to -another.”</p> - - -<h4>(Arabian proverb, Sixteenth Century)</h4> - -<p>The exercise of equity for one day is equal to sixty -years spent in prayer.</p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">By Nintoku</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Japanese emperor, Fourth Century)</p> - -<p>If the people are poor, I am the poorest.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_476" id="Page_476">[476]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Solon</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Plutarch</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek historian, A.D. 50-120)</p> - -<p>The Athenians fell into their old quarrels about the -government, there being as many different parties -as there were diversities in the country. The Hill quarter -favoured democracy, the Plain, oligarchy, and those -that lived by the Seaside stood for a mixed sort of government, -and so hindered either of the other parties from -prevailing. And the disparity of fortune between the -rich and the poor at that time also reached its height; -so that the city seemed to be in a truly dangerous condition, -and there appeared no other means for freeing it -from disturbances and settling it but a despotic power. -All the people were indebted to the rich; and either they -tilled their land for their creditors, paying them a sixth -part of the increase, or else they engaged their body for -the debt, and might be seized, and either sent into slavery -at home, or sold to strangers; some (for no law forbade it) -were forced to sell their children, or fly their country to -avoid the cruelty of their creditors; but the most part -and the bravest of them began to combine together and -encourage one another to stand it, to choose a leader, to -liberate the condemned debtors, divide the land, and -change the government.</p> - -<p>Then the wisest of the Athenians, perceiving Solon was -of all men the only one not implicated in the troubles, -that he had not joined in the exactions of the rich, and was -not involved in the necessities of the poor, pressed him -to succour the commonwealth and compose the differences....</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_477" id="Page_477">[477]</a></span></p> - -<p>The first thing which he settled was, that what debts -remained should be forgiven, and no man, for the future, -should engage the body of his debtor for security.</p> - - -<h3>Concerning Land</h3> - -<h4><span class="smcap">By Solon</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek lawgiver, B.C. 639-559)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The mortgage stones that covered her, by me</div> - <div class="verse">Removed, the land that was a slave is free.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">Deuteronomy</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew, B.C. 700?)</p> - -<p>These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall -observe to do in the land, which the Lord God of thy -fathers giveth thee to possess it, all the days that ye live -upon the earth.... At the end of every seven years -thou shalt make a release. And this is the manner of -the release: Every creditor that lendeth ought unto -his neighbor shall release it, he shall not exact it of his -neighbor, or of his brother; because it is called the Lord’s -release.</p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">Leviticus</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew law-book, B.C. 700?)</p> - -<p>And the Lord spake unto Moses in Mount Sinai, -saying: ... “The land shall not be sold for ever; -for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners -with me.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_478" id="Page_478">[478]</a></span></p> - - -<h4>(<cite>From, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality”</cite>)</h4> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Jean Jacques Rousseau</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(French novelist and philosopher, 1712-1778; father of the French -Revolution)</p> - -<p>The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, -bethought himself of saying, <em>This is mine</em>, and found -people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder -of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and -murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might -not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, -or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware -of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once -forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and -the earth itself to nobody.”</p> - - -<h3>Radicalism</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Confucius</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Chinese philosopher, B.C. 500)</p> - -<p>Things have their root and their completion. It -cannot be that when the root is neglected, what -springs from it will be well ordered.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_479" id="Page_479">[479]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Seeking Causes</h3> - -<h4><span class="smcap">By Plato</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek philosopher and poet, B.C. 428-347)</p> - -<p>Neither drugs nor charms nor burnings will touch -a deep-lying political sore any more than a deep -bodily one; but only right and utter change of constitution; -and they do but lose their labor who think that by -any tricks of law they can get the better of those mischiefs -of commerce, and see not that they hew at a hydra.</p> - - -<h3>Concerning Usury<a name="FNanchor_23" id="FNanchor_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23" class="fnanchor">[W]</a></h3> - -<h4>(<cite>From “The Koran”</cite>)</h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Arabic, A.D. 600)</p> - -<p>To him who is of kin to thee give his due, and to the -poor and to the wayfarer: this will be best for those -who seek the face of God; and with them it shall be well.</p> - -<p>Whatever ye put out at usury to increase it with the -substance of others shall have no increase from God: -but whatever ye shall give in alms, as seeking the face of -God, shall be doubled to you.</p> - - -<h4>(<cite>From the Psalms</cite>)</h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew, B.C. 200)</p> - -<p>Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? Who shall -dwell in thy holy hill?</p> - -<p>He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, -and speaketh the truth in his heart....</p> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_480" id="Page_480">[480]</a></span></p> -<p>He that putteth his money not out to usury, nor taketh -reward against the innocent. He that doeth these things -shall never be moved.</p> - - -<h4><span class="smcap">By Aristotle</span></h4> - -<p class="poemintro">(Greek philosopher, B.C. Fourth Century)</p> - -<p>Usury is the most reasonably detested of all forms of -money-making; it is most against nature.</p> - - -<h4>(<cite>From “Essay on Riches”</cite>)</h4> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English philosopher and statesman, 1561-1626)</p> - -<p>The ways to enrich are many, and most of them -foul....</p> - -<p>Usury is the certainest means of gain, though one of -the worst; as that whereby a man doth eat his bread with -sweat of another’s face, and besides, doth plough upon -Sundays.</p> - - -<h3>Solidarity</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Marcus Aurelius</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Roman emperor, A.D. 121-180)</p> - -<p>As thou thyself, whoever thou art, wert made for the -perfection and consummation of a common society; -so must every action of thine tend to the perfection and -consummation of a life that is truly sociable. Whatever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_481" id="Page_481">[481]</a></span> -action of thine that, either immediately or afar off, hath -not reference to the common good, that is an exorbitant -and disorderly action; yea, it is seditious; as one among -the people who from a general consent and unity should -factiously divide and separate himself.</p> - - -<h3>Socialism</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Wang-An-Shih</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Chinese statesman, Eleventh Century)</p> - -<p>The State should take the entire management of -commerce, industry, and agriculture into its own -hands, with a view to succoring the working classes and -preventing their being ground to the dust by the rich.</p> - - -<h3>The Promise</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the Psalms</cite>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew, B.C. 200)</p> - -<p>The Lord shall deliver the needy when he crieth; the -poor also, and him that hath no helper. He shall -spare the poor and needy, and shall save the souls of the -needy. He shall redeem their soul from deceit and -violence; and precious shall their blood be in his sight.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_482" id="Page_482">[482]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Co-operative Commonwealth</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Isaiah II, the Prophet of the Exile</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(B.C. 550)</p> - -<p>And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and -they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. -They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not -plant, and another eat; for as the days of a tree are the -days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the -work of their hands.</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_483" id="Page_483">[483]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK X</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><i>Mammon</i></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>Wealth, and the crimes that are committed in its name, and -the protests of the spirit of humanity against its power in society.</p></div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_484" id="Page_484">[484]</a><br /><a name="Page_485" id="Page_485">[485]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Paradise Lost</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Milton</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English lyric and epic poet, 1608-1674)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Mammon led them on—</div> - <div class="verse">Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell</div> - <div class="verse">From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts</div> - <div class="verse">Were always downward bent, admiring more</div> - <div class="verse">The riches of Heaven’s pavement, trodden gold,</div> - <div class="verse">Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed</div> - <div class="verse">In vision beatific. By him first</div> - <div class="verse">Men also, and by his suggestion taught,</div> - <div class="verse">Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands</div> - <div class="verse">Rifled the bowels of their mother earth</div> - <div class="verse">For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew</div> - <div class="verse">Opened into the hill a spacious wound,</div> - <div class="verse">And digged out ribs of gold. Let none admire</div> - <div class="verse">That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best</div> - <div class="verse">Deserve the precious bane.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Miss Kilmansegg: Her Moral</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Hood</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!</div> - <div class="verse">Bright and yellow, hard and cold,</div> - <div class="verse">Molten, graven, hammer’d, and roll’d;</div> - <div class="verse">Heavy to get, and light to hold;</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_486" id="Page_486">[486]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Hoarded, barter’d, bought, and sold,</div> - <div class="verse">Stolen, borrow’d, squander’d, doled:</div> - <div class="verse">Spurn’d by the young, but hugg’d by the old</div> - <div class="verse">To the very verge of the churchyard mould;</div> - <div class="verse">Price of many a crime untold:</div> - <div class="verse">Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!</div> - <div class="verse">Good or bad a thousand-fold!</div> - <div class="verse">How widely its agencies vary—</div> - <div class="verse">To save—to ruin—to curse—to bless—</div> - <div class="verse">As even its minted coins express,</div> - <div class="verse">Now stamp’d with the image of Good Queen Bess,</div> - <div class="verse">And now of a bloody Mary.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Northern Farmer: New Style</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Alfred Tennyson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_77">77</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Dosn’t thou ‘ear my ‘erse’s legs, as they canters awaäy,</div> - <div class="verse">Proputty, proputty, proputty—that’s what I ‘ears ’em saäy.</div> - <div class="verse">Proputty, proputty, proputty—Sam, thou’s an ass for thy paäins,</div> - <div class="verse">Theer’s moor sense i’ one o’ ‘is legs nor in all thy braäins.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Me an’ thy muther, Sammy, ‘as beän a-talkin’ o’ thee;</div> - <div class="verse">Thou’s beän talkin’ to muther, an’ she beän a tellin’ it me.</div> - <div class="verse">Thou’ll not marry for munny—thou’s sweet upo’ parson’s lass—</div> - <div class="verse">Noä—thou’ll marry for luvv—an’ we boäth on us thinks tha an ass.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_487" id="Page_487">[487]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Seeä’d her todaäy goä by—Saäint’s daäy—they was ringing the bells.</div> - <div class="verse">She’s a beauty thou thinks—an’ soä is scoors o’ gells,</div> - <div class="verse">Them as ‘as munny an’ all—wot’s a beauty?—the flower as blaws.</div> - <div class="verse">But proputty, proputty sticks, an’ proputty, proputty graws.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Doänt’t be stunt: taäke time: I knaws what maäkes tha sa mad.</div> - <div class="verse">Warn’t I craäzed fur the lasses mysén when I wur a lad?</div> - <div class="verse">But I knaw’d a Quaäker feller as often ‘as towd ma this:</div> - <div class="verse">“Doän’t thou marry for munny, but goä wheer munny is!”</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John D. Rockefeller</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American capitalist, born 1839)</p> - -<p>Then, and indeed for many years after, it seemed as -though there was no end to the money needed to -carry on and develop the business. As our successes -began to come, I seldom put my head upon the pillow -at night without speaking a few words to myself in this -wise:</p> - -<p>“Now a little success, soon you will fall down, soon -you will be overthrown. Because you have got a start, -you think you are quite a merchant; look out, or you -will lose your head—go steady.” These intimate conversations -with myself, I am sure, had a great influence -on my life.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_488" id="Page_488">[488]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng">From Ecclesiasticus</h3> - -<p>A merchant shall hardly keep himself from -wrong-doing; and a huckster shall not be acquitted -of sin.</p> - - -<h3>Past and Present</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Carlyle</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>)</p> - -<p>What is it, if you pierce through his Cants, his oft-repeated -Hearsays, what he calls his Worships -and so forth,—what is it that the modern English soul -does, in very truth, dread infinitely, and contemplate -with entire despair? What <em>is</em> his Hell, after all these -reputable, oft-repeated Hearsays, what is it? With hesitation, -with astonishment, I pronounce it to be: The -terror of “Not succeeding”; of not making money, -fame, or some other figure in the world,—chiefly of not -making money! Is not that a somewhat singular Hell?</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 381px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo488" id="illo488">[illo488]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_488f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>MAMMON</p> - -<p>GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS</p> - -<p>(<i>English painter, member of the Royal Academy, 1817-1904</i>)</p></div> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo489" id="illo489">[illo489]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_489f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>MARRIAGE À LA -MODE</p> - -<p>WILLIAM HOGARTH</p> - -<p>(<i>Old English artist, -1697-1764.</i></p> - -<p><i>Famous painting, -representing an alliance -between the son of a -broken-down old -nobleman and the -daughter of a rich -city merchant</i>)</p></div> -</div> - - -<h3>Dipsychus</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Arthur Hugh Clough</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet and scholar, friend of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, -1819-1861)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">As I sat at the café, I said to myself,</div> - <div class="verse">They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,</div> - <div class="verse">They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_489" id="Page_489">[489]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">How pleasant it is to have money.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I sit at my table <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">en grand seigneur</i>,</div> - <div class="verse">And when I have done, throw a crust to the poor;</div> - <div class="verse">Not only the pleasure, one’s self, of good living,</div> - <div class="verse">But also the pleasure of now and then giving.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">So pleasant it is to have money....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I drive through the streets, and I care not a d—n;</div> - <div class="verse">The people they stare, and they ask who I am;</div> - <div class="verse">And if I should chance to run over a cad,</div> - <div class="verse">I can pay for the damage if ever so bad.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">So pleasant it is to have money.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We stroll to our box and look down on the pit,</div> - <div class="verse">And if it weren’t low should be tempted to spit;</div> - <div class="verse">We loll and we talk until people look up,</div> - <div class="verse">And when it’s half over we go out to sup.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">So pleasant it is to have money.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The best of the tables and best of the fare—</div> - <div class="verse">And as for the others, the devil may care;</div> - <div class="verse">It isn’t our fault if they dare not afford</div> - <div class="verse">To sup like a prince and be drunk as a lord.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">So pleasant it is to have money.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_490" id="Page_490">[490]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Utopia</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Sir Thomas More</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_160">160</a>)</p> - -<p>They marveile also that golde, whych of the owne -nature is a thinge so unprofytable, is nowe amonge -all people in so hyghe estimation, that man him selfe, by -whome, yea and for the use of whome it is so much set -by, is in muche lesse estimation, then the golde it selfe. -In so muche that a lumpyshe blockehedded churle, and -whyche hathe no more wytte then an asse, yea and as -ful of noughtynes as of follye, shall have nevertheless -manye wyse and good men in subjectyon and bondage, -only for this, bycause he hath a greate heape of golde. -Whyche yf it shoulde be taken from hym by anye fortune, -or by some subtyll wyle and cautele of the lawe, -(whyche no lesse then fortune dothe bothe raise up the -lowe, and plucke downe the highe) and be geven to the -moste vile slave and abject dryvell of all his housholde, -then shortely after he shal goo into the service of his -servaunt, as an augmentation or overplus beside his -money. But they muche more marvell at and detest -the madnes of them, whyche to those riche men, in whose -debte and daunger they be not, do give almost divine -honoures, for none other consideration, but bicause they -be riche: and yet knowing them to bee suche nigeshe -penny fathers, that they be sure as longe as they live, -not the worthe of one farthinge of that heape of gold -shall come to them. These and such like opinions have -they conceaved, partely by education, beinge brought up -in that common wealthe, whose lawes and customes be -farre different from these kindes of folly, and partely by -good litterature and learning.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_491" id="Page_491">[491]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Crown of Wild Olive</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Ruskin</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_106">106</a>)</p> - -<p>It is physically impossible for a well-educated, intellectual, -or brave man to make money the chief object -of his thoughts; as physically impossible as it is for him -to make his dinner the principal object of them. All -healthy people like their dinners, but their dinner is not -the main object of their lives. So all healthily minded -people like making money—ought to like it, and to enjoy -the sensation of winning it: but the main object of their -life is not money; it is something better than money.</p> - - -<h3>Don Juan</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Lord Byron</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Oh, Gold! Why call we misers miserable?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Theirs is the pleasure that can never pall;</div> - <div class="verse">Theirs is the best bower-anchor, the chain-cable</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Which holds fast other pleasures great and small.</div> - <div class="verse">Ye who but see the saving man at table</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And scorn his temperate board, as none at all,</div> - <div class="verse">And wonder how the wealthy can be sparing,</div> - <div class="verse">Know not what visions spring from each cheese-paring....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Perhaps he hath great projects in his mind</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To build a college, or to found a race,</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_492" id="Page_492">[492]</a></span> - <div class="verse">An hospital, a church—and leave behind</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Some dome surmounted by his meagre face;</div> - <div class="verse">Perhaps he fain would liberate mankind,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Even with the very ore that makes them base;</div> - <div class="verse">Perhaps he would be wealthiest of his nation,</div> - <div class="verse">Or revel in the joys of calculation....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Love rules the camp, the court, the grove—for love</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Is heaven, and heaven is love:” so sings the bard;</div> - <div class="verse">Which it were rather difficult to prove</div> - <div class="verse indent2">(A thing with poetry in general hard).</div> - <div class="verse">Perhaps there may be something in “the grove,”</div> - <div class="verse indent2">At least it rhymes to “love”; but I’m prepared</div> - <div class="verse">To doubt (no less than landlords of their rental)</div> - <div class="verse">If “courts” and “camps” be quite so sentimental.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But if Love don’t, <em>Cash</em> does, and Cash alone:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Cash rules the grove, and fells it too besides;</div> - <div class="verse">Without cash, camps were thin, and courts were none;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Without cash, Malthus tells you, “take no brides.”</div> - <div class="verse">So Cash rules Love the ruler, on his own</div> - <div class="verse indent2">High ground, as virgin Cynthia sways the tides:</div> - <div class="verse">And as for “Heaven being Love,” why not say honey</div> - <div class="verse">Is wax? Heaven is not Love, ’tis Matrimony.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By William Shakespeare</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_181">181</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold?...</div> - <div class="verse">This yellow slave</div> - <div class="verse">Will knit and break religions; bless the accursed;</div> - <div class="verse">Make the hoar leprosy adored; place thieves,</div> - <div class="verse">And give them title, knee and approbation</div> - <div class="verse">With senators on the bench.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_493" id="Page_493">[493]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Cave of Mammon</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Faerie Queene”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edmund Spenser</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Old English poet, 1552-1599)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">At last he came unto a gloomy glade</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Cover’d with boughs and shrubs from heavens light,</div> - <div class="verse">Whereas he sitting found in secret shade</div> - <div class="verse indent2">An uncouth, salvage, and uncivile wight,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of griesly hew and fowle ill-favour’d sight;</div> - <div class="verse">His face with smoke was tand, and eies were bleard,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">His head and beard with sout were ill bedight,</div> - <div class="verse">His cole-blacke hands did seem to have ben seard</div> - <div class="verse">In smythes fire-spitting forge, and nayles like clawes appeard....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And round about him lay on every side</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Great heapes of gold that never could be spent;</div> - <div class="verse">Of which some were rude owre, not purifide,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of Mulcibers devouring element;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Some others were new driven, and distent</div> - <div class="verse">Into great ingowes and to wedges square;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Some in round plates withouten moniment;</div> - <div class="verse">But most were stampt, and in their metal bare</div> - <div class="verse">The antique shapes of kings and kesars straung and rare....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“What secret place,” quoth he, “can safely hold</div> - <div class="verse indent2">So huge a mass, and hide from heavens eie?</div> - <div class="verse">Or where hast thou thy wonne, that so much gold</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Thou canst preserve from wrong and robbery?”</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“Come thou,” quoth he, “and see.” So by and by</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_494" id="Page_494">[494]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Through that black covert he him led, and fownd</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A darksome way, which no man could descry,</div> - <div class="verse">That deep descended through the hollow grownd,</div> - <div class="verse">And was with dread and horror compassèd arownd....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">So soon as Mammon there arrived, the dore</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To him did open and affoorded way:</div> - <div class="verse">Him followed eke Sir Guyon evermore,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ne darknesse him ne daunger might dismay.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Soone as he entred was, the dore streightway</div> - <div class="verse">Did shutt, and from behind it forth there lept</div> - <div class="verse indent2">An ugly feend, more fowle then dismall day:</div> - <div class="verse">The which with monstrous stalke behind him stept,</div> - <div class="verse">And ever as he went dew watch upon him kept.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Well hopèd hee, ere long that hardy guest,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">If ever covetous hand, or lustfull eye,</div> - <div class="verse">Or lips he layd on thing that likte him best,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Or ever sleepe his eie-strings did untye,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Should be his pray: and therefore still on hye</div> - <div class="verse">He over him did hold his cruell clawes,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Threatning with greedy gripe to doe him dye,</div> - <div class="verse">And rend in peeces with his ravenous pawes,</div> - <div class="verse">If ever he transgrest the fatall Stygian lawes.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In all that rowme was nothing to be seene</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But huge great yron chests, and coffers strong,</div> - <div class="verse">All bard with double bends, that none could weene</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Them to efforce by violence or wrong;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">On every side they placèd were along.</div> - <div class="verse">But all the grownd with sculs was scattered</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And dead mens bones, which round about were flong;</div> - <div class="verse">Whose lives, it seemed, whilome there was shed,</div> - <div class="verse">And their vile carcases now left unburièd.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_495" id="Page_495">[495]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Mammon Marriage</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George MacDonald</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Scotch novelist and clergyman, 1824-1905)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The croak of a raven hoar!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A dog’s howl, kennel-tied!</div> - <div class="verse">Loud shuts the carriage-door:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The two are away on their ghastly ride</div> - <div class="verse">To Death’s salt shore!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Where are the love and the grace?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The bridegroom is thirsty and cold!</div> - <div class="verse">The bride’s skull sharpens her face!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But the coachman is driving, jubilant, bold,</div> - <div class="verse">The devil’s pace.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The horses shiver’d and shook</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Waiting gaunt and haggard</div> - <div class="verse">With sorry and evil look;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But swift as a drunken wind they stagger’d</div> - <div class="verse">‘Longst Lethe brook.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Long since, they ran no more;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Heavily pulling they died</div> - <div class="verse">On the sand of the hopeless shore</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where never swell’d or sank a tide,</div> - <div class="verse">And the salt burns sore.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Flat their skeletons lie,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">White shadows on shining sand;</div> - <div class="verse">The crusted reins go high</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To the crumbling coachman’s bony hand</div> - <div class="verse">On his knees awry.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_496" id="Page_496">[496]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Side by side, jarring no more,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Day and night side by side,</div> - <div class="verse">Each by a doorless door,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Motionless sit the bridegroom and bride</div> - <div class="verse">On the Dead-Sea-shore.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Snobs and Marriage</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Book of Snobs”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Makepeace Thackeray</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English novelist and satirist of manners, 1811-1863)</p> - -<p>People dare not be happy for fear of Snobs. People -dare not love for fear of Snobs. People pine away -lonely under the tyranny of Snobs. Honest kindly hearts -dry up and die. Gallant generous lads, blooming with -hearty youth, swell into bloated old bachelorhood, and -burst and tumble over. Tender girls wither into shrunken -decay, and perish solitary, from whom Snobbishness has -cut off the common claim to happiness and affection with -which Nature endowed us all. My heart grows sad as -I see the blundering tyrant’s handiwork. As I behold -it I swell with cheap rage, and glow with fury against -the Snob. Come down, I say, thou skulking dullness. -Come down, thou stupid bully, and give up thy brutal -ghost! And I arm myself with the sword and spear, -and taking leave of my family, go forth to do battle -with that hideous ogre and giant, that brutal despot in -Snob Castle, who holds so many gentle hearts in torture -and thrall.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_497" id="Page_497">[497]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>In Bohemia</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Boyle O’Reilly</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Irish-born American journalist, 1844-1890)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The thirsty of soul soon learn to know</div> - <div class="verse">The moistureless froth of the social show,</div> - <div class="verse">The vulgar sham of the pompous feast</div> - <div class="verse">Where the heaviest purse is the highest priest;</div> - <div class="verse">The organized charity, scrimped and iced,</div> - <div class="verse">In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Vanity Fair</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Pilgrim’s Progress”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Bunyan</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English thinker and religious rebel, who was put in prison and there -wrote one of the world’s great allegories; 1628-1688)</p> - -<p>Then I saw in my dream, that when they were got -out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town -before them, and the name of that town is Vanity; and -at the town there is a fair kept, called Vanity Fair. It -is kept all the year long.... At this fair are all such -merchandise sold as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, -preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures; -and delights of all sorts, such as harlots, wives, husbands, -children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, -silver, gold, precious stones, and what not.</p> - -<p>And moreover, at this fair there are at all times to be -seen jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, -and rogues, and that of every kind.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_498" id="Page_498">[498]</a></span></p> - -<p>Here are to be seen, too, and that for nothing, thefts, -murders, adulteries, false-swearers, and that of a blood-red -color.</p> - - -<h3>The Sins of Society</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Bernard Vaughan</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(The sermons of a Jesuit priest, in Mayfair, London, which caused -great excitement among the “Smart Set”)</p> - -<p>Society nowadays, as we all know, is every bit as -material as it was when Dives was alive. It still -cares very little, indeed, for what it cannot either put on -or into itself. It is self-centred. Its fair votaries must -be set up by the best man-milliner, and fed up by the -best man-cook; and then, provided they are known at -the opera by their diamonds, in Mayfair by their motors, -and at Cowes by their yacht, nothing else matters, especially -if they happen to have a house at Ascot and a -launch at Henley for the racing weeks.</p> - -<p>It is not so much persons as things that count in this -age of materialism. Hence there is but one sin less -pardonable than that of being dull, and that is being -poor. After all, there may be some excuse for dulness -if you have money, but there is simply none at all for -poverty, which like dirt on one’s shoes, or dust on one’s -gown, must be brushed away from sight as soon as possible. -Not even poor relatives are tolerated or recognized, -except occasionally on an “off-day,” when, like -some unfortunate governesses in such households, they -may be asked to look in at tea-time, when nobody is -there. Surely all this is very contemptible, and altogether -unworthy of old English traditions. Yes, but old<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_499" id="Page_499">[499]</a></span> -English traditions, with rare exceptions, are being swept -away by the incoming tide of millionaire wealth, so that, -nowadays, it matters little what you are, but much, nay, -everything, what you have. If you command money, -you command the world. If you have none, you are -nobody, though you be a prince.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng">(<cite>From a leading London newspaper</cite>)</h3> - -<p>Father Vaughan’s knotted lash is sharp, and he -wields it sternly, but it does not raise one weal on -the delicate flesh of these massaged and manicured Salomes -and Phrynes. His scorn is savage, but it does not produce -more than a polite smile on these soft, faultless -faces. His contempt is bitter, but it does not make a -single modish harlot blush. They are dimly amused by -the excitement of the good man. They are not in the -least annoyed. They are, on the contrary, eager to ask -him to dinner. What a piquant sensation to serve -adultery with the sauce of asceticism!</p> - -<p>Father Vaughan says that if King Herod and Herodias -and Salome were to arrive in Mayfair they would be -petted by the Smart Set. The good father, in the innocence -of his heart, underacts the role of Sa-vaughan-rola. -Herod and Herodias and Salome have arrived. They -are here. We know them. We see them daily. Their -names are in the newspapers. They were at Ascot. -They are present at the smartest weddings at St. George’s, -Hanover Square. Do we despise them? Do we boycott -them? Do we cut them. By no means. We honor -and reverence them. We may talk about their bestialities -in the privacy of the boudoir and the smoking-room, but -in public the theme is discreetly evaded.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_500" id="Page_500">[500]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Fifth Avenue, 1915</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Hermann Hagedorn</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet, born 1882. The following poem is a <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">rondel</i>, an -interesting case of the use of an artificial old French -verse-form in a vital way)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The motor cars go up and down,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The painted ladies sit and smile.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Along the sidewalks, mile on mile,</div> - <div class="verse">Parade the dandies of the town.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The latest hat, the latest gown,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The tedium of their souls beguile.</div> - <div class="verse">The motor cars go up and down,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The painted ladies sit and smile.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In wild and icy waters drown</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A thousand for a rock-bound isle.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ten thousand in a black defile</div> - <div class="verse">Perish for justice or a crown.</div> - <div class="verse">The motor cars go up and down....</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Hotel Life<a name="FNanchor_24" id="FNanchor_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24" class="fnanchor">[X]</a></h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The House of Mirth”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edith Wharton</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American novelist)</p> - -<p>The environment in which Lily found herself was as -strange to her as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted -with the world of the fashionable New York -hotel—a world over-heated, over-upholstered, and over<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_501" id="Page_501">[501]</a></span>fitted -with mechanical appliances for the gratification of -fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized -life were as unattainable as in a desert. Through this -atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as -richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite -pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a -languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to concert-hall, -from palm-garden to music-room, from “art-exhibit” to -dressmaker’s opening. High-stepping horses or elaborately -equipped motors waited to carry these ladies into -vague metropolitan distances, whence they returned, still -more wan from the weight of their sables, to be sucked -back into the stifling inertia of the hotel routine. Somewhere -behind them in the background of their lives, there -was doubtless a real past, peopled by real human activities: -they themselves were probably the product of strong -ambitions, persistent energies, diversified contacts with -the wholesome roughness of life; yet they had no more -real existence than the poet’s shades in limbo.</p> - -<p>Lily had not been long in this pallid world without -discovering that Mrs. Hatch was its most substantial -figure.... The daily details of her existence were as -strange to Lily as its general tenor. The lady’s habits -were marked by an Oriental indolence and disorder peculiarly -trying to her companion. Mrs. Hatch and her -friends seemed to float together outside the bounds of -time and space. No definite hours were kept; no fixed -obligations existed: night and day floated into one another -in a blur of confused and retarded engagements, so that -one had the impression of lunching at the tea-hour, while -dinner was often merged in the noisy after-theatre supper -which prolonged Mrs. Hatch’s vigil until daylight. -Through this jumble of futile activities came and went a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_502" id="Page_502">[502]</a></span> -strange throng of hangers-on—manicures, beauty-doctors, -hair-dressers, teachers of bridge, of French, of “physical -development.” ... Mrs. Hatch swam in a haze of -indeterminate enthusiasms, of aspirations culled from the -stage, the newspapers, the fashion-journals, and a gaudy -world of sport still more completely beyond her companion’s -ken.</p> - - -<h3>The Parasitic Female</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Woman and Labor”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Olive Schreiner</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(In the preface to this book, it is explained that it is only a faint -sketch from memory of part of a great work, the manuscript -of which was destroyed during the Boer war)</p> - -<p>In place of the active laboring woman, upholding -society by her toil, had come the effete wife, concubine -or prostitute, clad in fine raiment, the work of others’ -fingers; fed on luxurious viands, the result of others’ toil, -waited on and tended by the labor of others. The need -for her physical labor having gone, and mental industry -not having taken its place, she bedecked and scented her -person, or had it bedecked and scented for her, she lay -upon her sofa, or drove or was carried out in her vehicle, -and, loaded with jewels, she sought by dissipations and -amusements to fill up the inordinate blank left by the -lack of productive activity. And the hand whitened and -the frame softened, till at last, the very duties of motherhood, -which were all the constitution of her life left her, -became distasteful, and, from the instant when her infant -came damp from her womb, it passed into the hands of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_503" id="Page_503">[503]</a></span> -others, to be tended and reared by them; and from youth -to age her offspring often owed nothing to her personal -toil. In many cases so complete was her enervation, that -at last the very joy of giving life, the glory and beatitude -of a virile womanhood, became distasteful; and she -sought to evade it, not because of its interference with -more imperious duties to those already born of her, or to -her society, but because her existence of inactivity had -robbed her of all joy in strenuous exertion and endurance -in any form. Finely clad, tenderly housed, life became for -her merely the gratification of her own physical and sexual -appetites, and the appetites of the male, through the -stimulation of which she could maintain herself. And, -whether as kept wife, kept mistress, or prostitute, she contributed -nothing to the active and sustaining labors of her -society. She had attained to the full development of that -type which, whether in modern Paris or New York or -London, or in ancient Greece, Assyria, or Rome, is essentially -one in its features, its nature, and its results. She -was the “fine lady,” the human female parasite—the most -deadly microbe which can make its appearance on the -surface of any social organism.</p> - -<p>Wherever in the history of the past this type has reached -its full development and has comprised the bulk of the -females belonging to any dominant class or race, it has -heralded its decay. In Assyria, Greece, Rome, Persia, as -in Turkey today, the same material conditions have produced -the same social disease among the wealthy and -dominant races; and again and again, when the nation -so affected has come into contact with nations more -healthily constituted, this diseased condition has contributed -to its destruction.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_504" id="Page_504">[504]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>In the Market-Place</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Beyond the Breakers”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George Sterling</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(California poet, born 1869)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In Babylon, high Babylon,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">What gear is bought and sold?</div> - <div class="verse">All merchandise beneath the sun</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That bartered is for gold;</div> - <div class="verse">Amber and oils from far beyond</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The desert and the fen,</div> - <div class="verse">And wines whereof our throats are fond—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Yea! and the souls of men!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In Babylon, grey Babylon,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">What goods are sold and bought?</div> - <div class="verse">Vesture of linen subtly spun,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And cups from agate wrought;</div> - <div class="verse">Raiment of many-colored silk</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For some fair denizen,</div> - <div class="verse">And ivory more white than milk—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Yea! and the souls of men!...</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In Babylon, sad Babylon,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">What chattels shall invite?</div> - <div class="verse">A wife whenas your youth is done,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Or leman for a night.</div> - <div class="verse">Before Astarte’s portico</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The torches flare again;</div> - <div class="verse">The shadows come, the shadows go—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Yea! and the souls of men!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_505" id="Page_505">[505]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In Babylon, dark Babylon,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Who take the wage of shame?</div> - <div class="verse">The scribe and singer, one by one,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That toil for gold and fame.</div> - <div class="verse">They grovel to their masters’ mood</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The blood upon the pen</div> - <div class="verse">Assigns their souls to servitude—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Yea! and the souls of men!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Dinner à la Tango</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edwin Björkman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American critic, born in Sweden 1866)</p> - -<p>It is after eight o’clock in one of the smaller dining-rooms -of a fashionable New York hotel. The middle -of the room is cleared for dancing. At one end a small -orchestra is working furiously at a melody that affects -the mind like the triple-distilled essence of nervous unrest. -Every table is occupied by merry groups of men and -women in evening dress. Above our heads are strung -almost invisible wires, to which are attached colored -lanterns, gaudy mechanical butterflies, and huge red -and green toy balloons. Just as we enter, a stoutish, -heavy-faced chap with a monocle slaps the next man -on the back and cries out:</p> - -<p>“We must be gay, old boy!”</p> - -<p>The open square in the middle is filled with dancers. -They trip and slide and dip. They side-step and back-step -and gyrate. They wave their arms like pump-handles, -or raise them skyward, palm to palm, as if in -prayer. There are among them young girls with shining<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_506" id="Page_506">[506]</a></span> -faces full of inarticulate desire; simpering young men -with a leer lurking at the bottom of their vacant stares; -stiff-legged and white-haired old men with drooping eyelids; -and stern-jawed matrons with hand-made faces of a -startling purple hue. But on every face, young or old, -bright or dull, there beams a smile or clings a smirk, for -the spirit of the place demands gaiety at any price.</p> - -<p>On the tables are strewn gaily trimmed packages that -open with a report, and yield up gaily colored paper -caps. Rubicund gentlemen place the caps over their -bald spots, while women pick the big butterflies to pieces, -and put the fragments into their hair until they look -like barbarous princesses. Men and women drink and -dance, feast and flirt, sing and laugh and shout....</p> - -<p>Gay is the scene indeed: gay the music and the laughter; -gay the wine that sparkles in the glasses; gay the swirling, -swaying maze of dancing couples; gay the bright balloons -and brilliant dresses of the women. And it is as if my -mind’s eye saw these words written in burning letters on -the wall:</p> - -<p> -<em>Leave care behind, all ye that enter here!</em> -</p> - -<p>But out there on Fifth Avenue a lot of unkempt, -unreasonable men and women are marching savagely -behind a black flag.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_507" id="Page_507">[507]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Evils of Gold</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Shakespeare</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_492">492</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O thou sweet king killer, and dear divorce</div> - <div class="verse">’Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler</div> - <div class="verse">Of Hymen’s purest bed! thou valiant Mars;</div> - <div class="verse">Thou ever young, fresh, loved, and delicate wooer,</div> - <div class="verse">Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow</div> - <div class="verse">That lies on Dian’s lap! thou visible god,</div> - <div class="verse">That solder’st close impossibilities,</div> - <div class="verse">And mak’st them kiss; that speak’st with every tongue,</div> - <div class="verse">To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!</div> - <div class="verse">Think, thy slave, man, rebels; and by thy virtue</div> - <div class="verse">Set them into confounding odds, that beasts</div> - <div class="verse">May have the world in empire.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Theory of the Leisure Class<a name="FNanchor_25" id="FNanchor_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25" class="fnanchor">[Y]</a></h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thorstein Veblen</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American university professor)</p> - -<p>The function of dress as an evidence of ability to -pay does not end with simply showing that the -wearer consumes valuable goods in excess of what is required -for physical comfort. Simple conspicuous waste -of goods is effective and gratifying as far as it goes; it -is good <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">prima facie</i> evidence of pecuniary success, and -consequently <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">prima facie</i> evidence of social worth. But -dress has subtler and more far-reaching possibilities than<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_508" id="Page_508">[508]</a></span> -this crude, first-hand evidence of wasteful consumption -only. If, in addition to showing that the wearer can -afford to consume freely and uneconomically, it can also -be shown in the same stroke that he or she is not under -the necessity of earning a livelihood, the evidence of social -worth is enhanced in a very considerable degree. Our -dress, therefore, in order to serve its purpose effectually, -should not only be expensive, but it should also make -plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in -any kind of productive labor. In the evolutionary process -by which our system of dress has been elaborated -into its present admirably perfect adaptation to its -purpose, this subsidiary line of evidence has received due -attention. A detailed examination of what passes in -popular apprehension for elegant apparel will show that -it is contrived at every point to convey the impression -that the wearer does not habitually put forth any useful -effort. It goes without saying that no apparel can be -considered elegant, or even decent, if it shows the effect -of manual labor on the part of the wearer, in the way -of soil or wear. The pleasing effect of neat and spotless -garments is chiefly, if not altogether, due to their carrying -the suggestion of leisure—exemption from personal contact -with industrial processes of any kind. Much of the -charm that invests the patent-leather shoe, the stainless -linen, the lustrous cylindrical hat, and the walking-stick, -which so greatly enhance the native dignity of a gentleman, -comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer -cannot when so attired bear a hand in any employment -that is directly and immediately of any human use....</p> - -<p>The dress of women goes even farther than that of -men in the way of demonstrating the wearer’s abstinence -from productive employment. It needs no argument to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_509" id="Page_509">[509]</a></span> -enforce the generalization that the more elegant styles of -feminine bonnets go even farther towards making work -impossible than does the man’s high hat. The woman’s -shoe adds the so-called French heel to the evidence of -enforced leisure afforded by its polish; because this high -heel obviously makes any, even the simplest and most -necessary manual work extremely difficult. The like is -true even in a higher degree of the skirt and the rest -of the drapery which characterizes woman’s dress. The -substantial reason for our tenacious attachment to the -skirt is just this: it is expensive and it hampers the wearer -at every turn and incapacitates her for all useful exertion. -The like is true of the feminine custom of wearing the hair -excessively long.</p> - -<p>But the woman’s apparel not only goes beyond that of -the modern man in the degree in which it argues exemption -from labor; it also adds a peculiar and highly characteristic -feature which differs in kind from anything -habitually practiced by the men. This feature is the -class of contrivances of which the corset is the typical -example. The corset is, in economic theory, substantially -a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the -subject’s vitality and rendering her permanently and -obviously unfit for work. It is true, the corset impairs the -personal attractions of the wearer, but the loss suffered -on that score is offset by the gain in reputability which -comes of her visibly increased expensiveness and infirmity. -It may broadly be set down that the womanliness of -woman’s apparel resolves itself, in point of substantial -fact, into the more effective hindrance to useful exertion -offered by the garments peculiar to women.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_510" id="Page_510">[510]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Vanity of Human Wishes</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Samuel Johnson</span></p> - -<p>(English essayist and poet, 1709-1784. The poem from which -these lines are taken is a paraphrase of the Roman poet -Juvenal)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But, scarce observed, the knowing and the bold</div> - <div class="verse">Fall in the general massacre of gold;</div> - <div class="verse">Wide wasting pest! that rages unconfined,</div> - <div class="verse">And crowds with crimes the records of mankind;</div> - <div class="verse">For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws,</div> - <div class="verse">For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws;</div> - <div class="verse">Wealth heaped on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys,</div> - <div class="verse">The dangers gather as the treasures rise.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Letters from a Chinese Official</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By G. Lowes Dickinson</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p class="poemintro">(This little book, published anonymously, was taken for a genuine -document by many critics, among others, Mr. William Jennings -Bryan, who wrote an elaborate answer to it. The writer is an -English university lecturer)</p></div> - -<p>When I review my impressions of the average English -citizen, impressions based on many years’ -study, what kind of man do I see? I see one divorced -from Nature, but unreclaimed by Art; instructed, but -not educated; assimilative, but incapable of thought. -Trained in the tenets of a religion in which he does not -believe—for he sees it flatly contradicted in every relation -of life—he dimly feels that it is prudent to conceal under -a mask of piety the atheism he is hardly intelligent enough<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_511" id="Page_511">[511]</a></span> -to avow. His religion is conventional; and, what is -more important, his morals are as conventional as his -creed. Charity, chastity, self-abnegation, contempt of -the world and its prizes—these are the words on which -he has been fed from his childhood upward. And words -they have remained, for neither has he anywhere seen -them practiced by others, nor has it ever occurred to him -to practice them himself. Their influence, while it is -strong enough to make him a chronic hypocrite, is not -so strong as to show him the hypocrite he is. Deprived -on the one hand of the support of a true ethical standard, -embodied in the life of the society of which he is a member, -he is duped, on the other, by lip-worship of an impotent -ideal. Abandoned thus to his instinct, he is content -to do as others do, and, ignoring the things of the -spirit, to devote himself to material ends. He becomes -a mere tool; and of such your society is composed. By -your works you may be known. Your triumphs in the -mechanical arts are the obverse of your failure in all -that calls for spiritual insight.</p> - - -<h3>Stupidity Street</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Ralph Hodgson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary English poet, who publishes his work in tiny -pamphlets with quaint illustrations)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I saw with open eyes</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Singing birds sweet</div> - <div class="verse">Sold in the shops</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For the people to eat,</div> - <div class="verse">Sold in the shops of</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Stupidity Street.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_512" id="Page_512">[512]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I saw in vision</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The worm in the wheat;</div> - <div class="verse">And in the shops nothing</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For people to eat;</div> - <div class="verse">Nothing for sale in</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Stupidity Street.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Souls of Black Folk</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By W. E. Burghardt Du Bois</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Professor in the University of Atlanta, born 1868; a prominent -advocate of the rights of his race)</p> - -<p>In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied -once the ideals of this people,—the strife for another -and a juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the -mystery of knowing; but today the danger is that these -ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration, -will suddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust for -gold. Here stands this black young Atalanta, girding -herself for the race that must be run; and if her eyes -be still toward the hills and sky as in the days of old, -then we may look for noble running; but what if some -ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay -golden apples before her? What if the negro people be -wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of -knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and the end-all -of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be -added the rising Mammonism of the re-born South, and -the Mammonism of this South be reinforced by the -budding Mammonism of its half-awakened black millions? -Whither, then, is the new-world quest of Goodness and -Beauty and Truth gone glimmering?</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_513" id="Page_513">[513]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Co-operation and Nationality</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By “A.E.”</span> (<span class="smcap">George W. Russell</span>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_252">252</a>)</p> - -<p>When steam first began to puff and wheels go round -at so many revolutions per minute, the wild child -humanity, who had hitherto developed his civilization in -picturesque unconsciousness of where he was going, and -without any set plan, was caught and put in harness. -What are called business habits were invented to make -the life of man run in harmony with the steam engine, -and his movements rival the train in punctuality. The -factory system was invented, and it was an instantaneous -success. Men were clothed with cheapness and uniformity. -Their minds grew numerously alike, cheap and -uniform also. They were at their desks at nine o’clock, -or at their looms at six. They adjusted themselves to the -punctual wheels. The rapid piston acted as pacemaker, -and in England, which started first in the modern race -for wealth, it was an enormous advantage to have tireless -machines of superhuman activity to make the pace, -and nerve men, women and children to the fullest activity -possible. Business methods had a long start in England, -and irregularity and want of uniformity became -after a while such exceptions that they were regarded as -deadly sins. The grocer whose supplies of butter did not -arrive week after week by the same train, at the same -hour, and of the same quality, of the same color, the -same saltness, and in the same kind of box, quarrelled with -the wholesaler, who in his turn quarrelled with the producer. -Only the most machine-like race could win custom. -After a while every country felt it had to be drilled or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_514" id="Page_514">[514]</a></span> -become extinct. Some made themselves into machines -to enter the English market, some to preserve their own -markets. Even the indolent Oriental is getting keyed up, -and in another fifty years the Bedouin of the desert will -be at his desk and the wild horseman of Tartary will be -oiling his engines.</p> - - -<h3>The Communist Manifesto</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Karl Marx and Frederick Engels</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Published in 1848, the charter of the modern Socialist movement)</p> - -<p>The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, -has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic -relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal -ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has -left remaining no other nexus between man and man -than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” -It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious -fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, -in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has -resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place -of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set -up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_515" id="Page_515">[515]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Portrait of an American</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Louis Untermeyer</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">He slobbers over sentimental plays</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And sniffles over sentimental songs.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">He tells you often how he sadly longs</div> - <div class="verse">For the ideals of the dear old days.</div> - <div class="verse">In gatherings he is the first to raise</div> - <div class="verse indent2">His voice against “our country’s shameful wrongs.”</div> - <div class="verse indent2">He storms at greed. His hard, flat tone prolongs</div> - <div class="verse">The hymns and mumbled platitudes of praise.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I heard him in his office Friday past.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“Look here,” he said, “their talk is all a bluff;</div> - <div class="verse">You mark my words, this thing will never last.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Let them walk out—they’ll come back quick enough.</div> - <div class="verse">We’ll have all hands at work—and working fast!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">How do they think we’re running this—for <em>love</em>?”</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>A Living Wage</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By J. Pierpont Morgan</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American banker; testimony before the United States Commission -on Industrial Relations)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Question</span>: Do you consider ten dollars a week -enough for a ‘longshoreman with a family to support?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Answer</span>: If that’s all he can get, and he takes it, I -should say it’s enough.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_516" id="Page_516">[516]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Impressions</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Harold Monro</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary English poet)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">He’s something in the city. Who shall say</div> - <div class="verse indent2">His fortune was not honorably won?</div> - <div class="verse">Few people can afford to give away</div> - <div class="verse indent2">As he, or help the poor as he has done.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Neat in his habits, temperate in his life:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Oh, who shall dare his character besmirch?</div> - <div class="verse">He scarcely ever quarrels with his wife,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And every Sabbath strictly goes to church.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">He helps the village club, and in the town</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Attends parochial meetings once a week,</div> - <div class="verse">Pays for each purchase ready-money down:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Is anyone against him?—Who will speak?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">There is a widow somewhere in the north,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">On whom slow ruin gradually fell,</div> - <div class="verse">While she, believing that her God was wroth,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Suffered without a word—or she might tell.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And there’s a beggar somewhere in the west,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Whose fortune vanished gradually away:</div> - <div class="verse">Now he but drags his limbs in horror lest</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Starvation feed on them—or he might say.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And there are children stricken with disease,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Too ignorant to curse him, or too weak.</div> - <div class="verse">In a true portrait of him all of these</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Must figure in the background—they shall speak.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_517" id="Page_517">[517]</a></span></p> - -<h3>New Varieties of Sin</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Sin and Society”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edward Alsworth Ross</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American college professor, born 1866, a prominent advocate of -academic freedom)</p> - -<p>Today the sacrifice of life incidental to quick success -rarely calls for the actual spilling of blood. -How decent are the pale slayings of the quack, the -adulterator, and the purveyor of polluted water, compared -with the red slayings of the vulgar bandit or assassin! -Even if there is blood-letting, the long-range, tentacular -nature of modern homicide eliminates all personal collision. -What an abyss between the knife-play of brawlers -and the law-defying neglect to fence dangerous machinery -in a mill, or to furnish cars with safety couplers! The providing -of unsuspecting passengers with “cork” life-preservers -secretly loaded with bars of iron to make up for -their deficiency in weight of cork, is spiritually akin to -the treachery of Joab, who, taking Amasa by the beard -“to kiss him,” smote Amasa “in the fifth rib”; but it -wears a very different aspect. The current methods of -annexing the property of others are characterized by a -pleasing indirectness and refinement. The furtive, apprehensive -manner of the till-tapper or the porch-climber -would jar disagreeably upon the tax-dodger “swearing -off” his property, or the city official concealing a “rake-off” -in his specifications for a public building. The work -of the card-sharp and the thimblerigger shocks a type of -man that will not stick at the massive “artistic swindling” -of the contemporary promoter....</p> - -<p>One might suppose that an exasperated public would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_518" id="Page_518">[518]</a></span> -sternly castigate these modern sins. But the fact is, -the very qualities that lull the conscience of the sinner -blind the eyes of the on-lookers. People are sentimental, -and bastinado wrong-doing not according to its harmfulness, -but according to the infamy that has come to attach -to it. Undiscerning, they chastise with scorpions the -old authentic sins, but spare the new. They do not see -that boodling is treason, that blackmail is piracy, that -embezzlement is theft, that speculation is gambling, that -tax dodging is larceny, that railroad discrimination is -treachery, that the factory labor of children is slavery, -that deleterious adulteration is murder. It has not come -home to them that the fraudulent promoter “devours -widows’ houses,” that the monopolist “grinds the faces -of the poor,” that mercenary editors and spellbinders -“put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” The cloven -hoof hides in patent leather; and to-day, as in Hosea’s -time, the people “are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” -The mob lynches the red-handed slayer, when it ought -to keep a gallows Haman-high for the venal mine inspector, -the seller of infected milk, the maintainer of a -fire-trap theatre. The child-beater is forever blasted in -reputation, but the exploiter of infant toil, or the concocter -of a soothing syrup for the drugging of babies, -stands a pillar of society. The petty shoplifter is more -abhorred than the stealer of a franchise, and the wife-whipper -is outcast long before the man who sends his -over-insured ship to founder with its crew.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_519" id="Page_519">[519]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Jack London</span></h3> - -<p>Far better to have the front of one’s face pushed in -by the fist of an honest prize-fighter than to have -the lining of one’s stomach corroded by the embalmed -beef of a dishonest manufacturer.</p> - - -<h3>Tono-Bungay</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By H. G. Wells</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(English novelist, born 1866; author of many strange romances -of modern science, and later, of penetrating studies of social injustice -and hypocrisy. The present novel tells of the career of a financial -potentate who begins life with a patent-medicine business)</p></div> - -<p>It was my uncle’s genius that did it. No doubt he -needed me—I was, I will admit, his indispensable -right hand; but his was the brain to conceive. He -wrote every advertisement; some of them even he -sketched. You must remember that his were the days -before the <cite>Times</cite> took to enterprise and the vociferous -hawking of that antiquated <cite>Encyclopædia</cite>. That alluring, -button-holing, let-me-just-tell-you-quite-soberly-something-you-ought-to-know -style of newspaper advertisement, -with every now and then a convulsive jump of -some attractive phrase into capitals, was then almost -a novelty. “Many people who are MODERATELY -well think they are QUITE well,” was one of his early -efforts. The jerks in capitals were, “DO NOT NEED -DRUGS OR MEDICINE,” and “SIMPLY A PROPER -REGIMEN TO GET YOU IN TONE.” One was -warned against the chemist or druggist who pushed -“much-advertised nostrums” on one’s attention. That<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_520" id="Page_520">[520]</a></span> -trash did more harm than good. The thing needed was -regimen—and Tono-Bungay!</p> - -<p>Very early, too, was that bright little quarter column, -at least it was usually a quarter column in the evening -papers: “HILARITY—TONO-BUNGAY. Like Mountain -Air in the Veins.” The penetrating trio of questions: -“Are you bored with your Business? Are you -bored with your Dinner? Are you bored with your Wife?”—that, -too, was in our Gower Street days. Both these -we had in our first campaign when we worked London -south, central, and west; and then, too, we had our first -poster,—the HEALTH, BEAUTY AND STRENGTH -one. That was his design; I happen still to have got -by me the first sketch he made for it....</p> - -<p>By all modern standards the business was, as my uncle -would say, “absolutely <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">bona fide</i>.” We sold our stuff -and got the money, and spent the money honestly in -lies and clamor to sell more stuff. Section by section -we spread it over the whole of the British Isles; first -working the middle-class London suburbs, then the outer -suburbs, then the home counties, then going (with new -bills and a more pious style of “ad”) into Wales, a great -field always for a new patent-medicine, and then into -Lancashire. My uncle had in his inner office a big map -of England, and as we took up fresh sections of the local -press and our consignments invaded new areas, flags for -advertisements and pink underlines for orders showed our -progress.</p> - -<p>“The romance of modern commerce, George!” my uncle -would say, rubbing his hands together and drawing in -air through his teeth. “The romance of modern commerce, -eh? Conquest. Province by Province. Like -sogers.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_521" id="Page_521">[521]</a></span></p> - -<p>We subjugated England and Wales; we rolled over -the Cheviots with a special adaptation containing eleven -per cent. of absolute alcohol; “Tono-Bungay: Thistle -Brand.” We also had the Fog poster adapted to a kilted -Briton in a misty Highland scene....</p> - -<p>As I look back at them now, those energetic years -seem all compacted to a year or so; from the days of -our first hazardous beginning in Farrington Street with -barely a thousand pounds’ worth of stuff or credit all -told—and that got by something perilously like snatching—to -the days when my uncle went to the public on -behalf of himself and me (one-tenth share) and our silent -partners, the drug wholesalers and the printing people -and the owner of that group of magazines and newspapers, -to ask with honest confidence for £150,000. Those silent -partners were remarkably sorry, I know, that they had -not taken larger shares and given us longer credit when -the subscriptions came pouring in. My uncle had a -clear half to play with (including the one-tenth understood -to be mine).</p> - -<p>£150,000—think of it!—for the goodwill in a string -of lies and a trade in bottles of mitigated water! Do -you realize the madness of the world that sanctions such -a thing? Perhaps you don’t. At times use and wont -certainly blinded me. If it had not been for Ewart, -I don’t think I should have had an inkling of the wonderfulness -of this development of my fortunes; I should -have grown accustomed to it, fallen in with all its delusions -as completely as my uncle presently did. He was -immensely proud of the flotation. “They’ve never been -given such value,” he said, “for a dozen years.” But -Ewart, with his gesticulating hairy hands and bony -wrists, is single-handed chorus to all this as it plays<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_522" id="Page_522">[522]</a></span> -itself over again in my memory, and he kept my fundamental -absurdity illuminated for me during all this astonishing -time.</p> - -<p>“It’s just on all fours with the rest of things,” he -remarked; “only more so. You needn’t think you’re -anything out of the way.”</p> - - -<h3>Man the Reformer</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Ralph Waldo Emerson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_235">235</a>)</p> - -<p>It is only necessary to ask a few questions as to the -progress of the articles of commerce from the fields -where they grew, to our houses, to become aware that -we eat and drink and wear perjury and fraud in a hundred -commodities. We are all implicated in this charge. -The sins of our trade belong to no class, to no individual. -Everybody partakes, everybody confesses, yet none feels -himself accountable. The trail of the serpent reaches -into all the lucrative professions and practices of man. -Nay, the evil custom reaches into the whole institution -of property, until our laws which establish and protect it -seem not to be the issue of love and reason, but of -selfishness.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_523" id="Page_523">[523]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>To a Certain Rich Young Ruler</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Clement Wood</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A sonnet which was widely circulated at the time of the Colorado -coal-strike of 1913-14)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">White-fingered lord of murderous events,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Well are you guarding what your father gained;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With torch and rifle you have well maintained</div> - <div class="verse">The lot to which a heavenly providence</div> - <div class="verse">Has called you; laborers, risen in defense</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of liberty and life, lie charred and brained</div> - <div class="verse indent2">About your mines, whose gutted hills are stained</div> - <div class="verse">With slaughter of these newer innocents.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ah, but your bloody fingers clenched in prayer!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Your piety, which all the world has seen!</div> - <div class="verse">The godly odor spreading through the air</div> - <div class="verse indent2">From your efficient charity machine!</div> - <div class="verse">Thus you rehearse for your high rôle up there,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ruling beside the lowly Nazarene!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From the Politics of Aristotle</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_480">480</a>)</p> - -<p>A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon -devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive -of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider godfearing -and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily -move against him, believing that he has the gods on his -side.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_524" id="Page_524">[524]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Amos</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew prophet, B. C. 760)</p> - -<p>I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will take no -delight in your solemn assemblies. Yea, though you -offer me your burnt offerings and meal offerings, I will -not accept them; neither will I regard the peace offerings -of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise -of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. -But let judgment roll down as waters, and righteousness -as a mighty stream.</p> - - -<h3>Concerning Charity</h3> - -<p><span class="smcap">BY JOHN R. LAWSON</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Part of a statement before the United States Commission on -Industrial Relations, 1915. The writer was the representative of -the miners in charge of the Colorado strike, and went to work as a -pit-boy at the age of eight)</p></div> - -<p>There is another cause of industrial discontent. -This is the skillful attempt that is being made to -substitute Philanthropy for Justice. There is not one of -these foundations, now spreading their millions over the -world in showy generosity, that does not draw those -millions from some form of industrial injustice. It is -not <em>their</em> money that these lords of commercialized virtue -are spending, but the withheld wages of the American -working-class.</p> - -<p>I sat in this room and heard a great philanthropist -read the list of activities of his Foundation “to promote -the well-being of mankind.” An international health -commission to extend to foreign countries and peoples<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_525" id="Page_525">[525]</a></span> -the work of eradicating the hookworm; the promotion -of medical education and health in China; the investigations -of vice conditions in Europe; one hundred thousand -dollars for the American Academy in Rome, twenty -thousand a year for widows’ pensions in New York, one -million for the relief of Belgians, thirty-four millions for -the University of Chicago, thirty-four millions for a General -Education Board. A wave of horror swept over me -during that reading, and I say to you that that same -wave is now rushing over the entire working-class of the -United States. Health for China, a refuge for birds in -Louisiana, food for the Belgians, pensions for New York -widows, university training for the elect—and never a -thought or a dollar for the many thousands of men, -women and children who starved in Colorado, for the -widows robbed of husbands and children of their fathers, -by law-violating conditions in the mines. There are -thousands of this great philanthropist’s former employees -in Colorado today who wish to God that they were in -Belgium to be fed, or birds to be cared for tenderly.</p> - - -<h3>Crowds</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Gerald Stanley Lee</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American author and lecturer, formerly a clergyman)</p> - -<p>As I have watched my fellow human beings, what I -have come to want most of all in this world is the -inspired employer—or what I have called the inspired -millionaire or organizer; the man who can take the machines -off the backs of the people, and take the machines -out of their wits, and make the machines free their bodies -and serve their souls.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_526" id="Page_526">[526]</a></span></p> - -<p>If we ever have the inspired employer, he will have to be -made by the social imagination of the people, by creating -the spirit of expectation and challenge toward the rich -among the masses of the people....</p> - -<p>Nothing is more visionary than trying to run a world -without dreams, especially an economic world. It is -because even bad dreams are better in this world than -having no dreams at all that bad people so-called are so -largely allowed to run it.</p> - -<p>In the final and practical sense, the one factor in economics -to be reckoned with is Desire.</p> - - -<h3>The Dying Boss</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Lincoln Steffens</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(American writer upon social problems, born 1866. A story of the -political leader of a corrupt city, who lies upon his death-bed, and -has asked to have the meaning of his own career made plain to him)</p></div> - -<p>“What kind of a kid were you, Boss?” I began.</p> - -<p>“Pretty tough, I guess,” he answered.</p> - -<p>“Born here?”</p> - -<p>“Yes; in the Third Ward.”</p> - -<p>“Tough then as it is now?”</p> - -<p>“Tougher,” he said.</p> - -<p>“Produces toughness the way Kansas produces corn,” -I remarked. “Father?” I asked.</p> - -<p>“Kept a saloon; a driver before that.”</p> - -<p>“Mother a girl of the ward?”</p> - -<p>“Yes,” he said. “She was brought up there; but -she came to this country with her father from England, -as a baby.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_527" id="Page_527">[527]</a></span></p> - -<p>“What sort of woman was she?”</p> - -<p>“Quiet,” he said; “always still; silent-like; a worker. -Kept the old man straight—some; and me too—‘s well -as she could. She’s th’ one that got him off th’ wagon -and started in th’ liquor business.”</p> - -<p>“You were poor people?”</p> - -<p>“Yes.”</p> - -<p>“And common?”</p> - -<p>“Y-yes-s.”</p> - -<p>“A child of the people,” I commented: “the common -people.”</p> - -<p>He nodded, wondering.</p> - -<p>“One of the great, friendless mass of helpless humanity?”</p> - -<p>He nodded.</p> - -<p>“That wasn’t your fault, was it?” I said. “Not to -blame for that? That’s not your sin, is it?”</p> - -<p>He shook his head, staring, and he was so mystified -that I said that most people were “pretty terribly punished -for being born poor and common.” He nodded, -but he wasn’t interested or enlightened, apparently. -“And you learned, somehow, that the thing to do was -to get yourself on, get up out of it, make a success of -your life?”</p> - -<p>“Yes,” he said slowly. “I don’t know how, but I did -get that, somehow.”</p> - -<p>“That was the ideal they taught you,” I said. “Never -heard of getting everybody on and making a success of -society; of the city and State?”</p> - -<p>But this line of questioning was beyond him. I changed -my tack....</p> - -<p>“In that first interview we had,” I said, “you insisted -that, while the business boss was the real boss, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_528" id="Page_528">[528]</a></span> -sovereign, you had some power of your own. And you -described it today as the backing of your own ward, -which, you said, you had in your pocket. When you -became boss, you got the backing, the personal support, -of other wards, didn’t you?”</p> - -<p>“Seven of ’em,” he counted. “Made th’ leaders -myself.”</p> - -<p>“And you developed a big personal following in other -wards, too?”</p> - -<p>“Sure,” he said; “in every one of them. I was a -popular leader; not only a boss, but a friend with friends, -lots of ’em. The people liked me.”</p> - -<p>“That’s the point,” I said. “The people liked you.”</p> - -<p>He nodded warmly.</p> - -<p>“The common people,” I went on, and he was about -to nod, but he didn’t. And his fingers became still. -“Your own people—the great helpless mass of the friendless -mob—liked you.” His eyes were fixed on mine. -“They followed you; they trusted you.”</p> - -<p>I paused a moment, then I asked: “Didn’t they, -Boss?”</p> - -<p>“Yes,” he said with his lips alone.</p> - -<p>“They didn’t set a watch on you, did they?” I continued. -“They voted as you bade them vote, elected -the fellows you put on the tickets of their party for them. -And, after they elected them, they left it to them, and -to you, to be true to them; to stick to them; to be -loyal.”</p> - -<p>His eyes fell to his fingers, and his fingers began again -to pick.</p> - -<p>“And when your enemies got after you and accused -you,” I said, “the people stuck by you?”</p> - -<p>No answer; only the fingers picked.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_529" id="Page_529">[529]</a></span></p> - -<p>“The great, friendless mass—the hopeful, hopeless -majority—they were true to you and the party, and they -re-elected you.”</p> - -<p>His eyes were on mine again, and there was light in -them; but it was the reflected light of fire, and it burned.</p> - -<p>“And you—you betrayed them,” I said; and I hurried -on, piling on the fuel, all I had. “They have power, -the people have, and they have needs, great common -needs; and they have great common wealth. All your -fat, rich franchises, all your great social values, the values -added to land and franchise by the presence of the great, -common, numerous mass, all the city’s public property—all -are theirs, their common property. They own enough -in common to meet all their great common needs, and -they have an organization to keep for them and to -develop for their use and profit all these great needed -social values. It is the city; the city government; city, -State, and national. And they have, they breed in their -own ranks, men like you, natural political leaders, to go -into public life and lead them, teach them, represent -them. And they leave it all to you, trusting you. And -you, all of you—not you alone, Boss, but all of you: -ward leaders; State leaders; all the national political -bosses—you all betray them. You receive from them -their votes, so faithfully given, and you transform them -into office-holders whom you teach or corrupt and compel -to obey you. So you reorganize the city government. -You, not the Mayor, are the head of it; you, not the -council, are its legislature; you, not the heads of departments, -are the administrators of the property and the -powers of the people of your city; the common, helpless, -friendless people. And, having thus organized and taken -over all this power and property and—this beautiful faith,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_530" id="Page_530">[530]</a></span> -you do not protect their rights and their property. What -do you do with it, Boss?”</p> - -<p>He started. He could not answer. I answered for -him:</p> - -<p>“You sell ’em out; you turn over the whole thing—the -city, its property, and its people—to Business, to the -big fellows; to the business leaders of the people. You -deliver, not only franchises, privileges, private rights and -public properties, and values, Boss: you—all of you -together—have delivered the government itself to these -men, so that today this city, this State, and the national -government represent, normally, not the people, not the -great mass of common folk, who need protection, but—Business; -preferably bad business; privileged business; -a class; a privileged class.”</p> - -<p>He had sunk back among the pillows, his eyes closed, -his fingers still. I sounded him.</p> - -<p>“That’s the system,” I repeated. “It’s an organization -of social treason, and the political boss is the chief -traitor. It couldn’t stand without the submission of the -people; the real bosses have to get that. They can’t -buy the people—too many of them; so they buy the -people’s leaders, and the disloyalty of the political boss -is the key to the whole thing.”</p> - -<p>These was no response. I plumbed him again.</p> - -<p>“And you—you believe in loyalty, Boss,” I said—“in -being true to your own.” His eyes opened. “That’s -your virtue, you say, and you said, too, that you have -practiced it.”</p> - -<p>“Don’t,” he murmured.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_531" id="Page_531">[531]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>A Ballad of Dead Girls</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Dana Burnet</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet, born 1888)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Scarce had they brought the bodies down</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Across the withered floor,</div> - <div class="verse">Than Max Rogosky thundered at</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The District Leader’s door.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Scarce had the white-lipped mothers come</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To search the fearful noon,</div> - <div class="verse">Than little Max stood shivering</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In Tom McTodd’s saloon!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In Tom McTodd’s saloon he stood,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Beside the silver bar,</div> - <div class="verse">Where any honest lad may stand,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And sell his vote at par.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Ten years I’ve paid the System’s tax,”</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The words fell, quivering, raw;</div> - <div class="verse">“And now I want the thing I bought—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Protection from the law!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The Leader smiled a twisted smile:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“Your doors were locked,” he said.</div> - <div class="verse">“You’ve overstepped the limit, Max—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A hundred women ... dead!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Then Max Rogosky gripped the bar</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And shivered where he stood.</div> - <div class="verse">“You listen now to me,” he cried,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“Like business fellers should!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_532" id="Page_532">[532]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”I’ve paid for all my hundred dead,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I’ve paid, I’ve paid, I’ve paid.“</div> - <div class="verse">His ragged laughter rang, and died—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For he was sore afraid.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”I’ve paid for wooden hall and stair,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I’ve paid to strain my floors,</div> - <div class="verse">I’ve paid for rotten fire-escapes,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For all my bolted doors.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Your fat inspectors came and came—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I crossed their hands with gold.</div> - <div class="verse">And now I want the thing I bought,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The thing the System sold.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The District Leader filled a glass</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With whiskey from the bar,</div> - <div class="verse">(The little silver counter where</div> - <div class="verse indent2">He bought men’s souls at par.)</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And well he knew that he must give</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The thing that he had sold,</div> - <div class="verse">Else men should doubt the System’s word,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Keep back the System’s gold.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The whiskey burned beneath his tongue:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“A hundred women dead!</div> - <div class="verse">I guess the Boss can fix it up,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Go home—and hide,” he said.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"> - -<hr class="tb" /></div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">All day they brought the bodies down</div> - <div class="verse indent2">From Max Rogosky’s place—</div> - <div class="verse">And oh, the fearful touch of flame</div> - <div class="verse indent2">On hand and breast and face!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_533" id="Page_533">[533]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">All day the white-lipped mothers came</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To search the sheeted dead;</div> - <div class="verse">And Horror strode the blackened walls.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where Death had walked in red.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But Max Rogosky did not weep.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">(He knew that tears were vain.)</div> - <div class="verse">He paid the System’s price, and lived</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To lock his doors again.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By William Shakespeare</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_492">492</a>, <a href="#Page_507">507</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The strongest castle, tower and town,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The golden bullet beats it down.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Miner’s Tale</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By May Beals</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A tragedy at Coal Creek, Tennessee, May 19, 1902)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The lord of us he lay in his bed—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Good right had he, good right!</div> - <div class="verse">But we were up before night had fled,</div> - <div class="verse">Out to the mine in the dawning red;</div> - <div class="verse">Slaves were we all, by hunger led</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Into the land of night.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The master knew of our danger well,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We also knew—we knew.</div> - <div class="verse">His greed for profits had served him well,</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_534" id="Page_534">[534]</a></span> - <div class="verse">But he over-reached him, as fate befell,</div> - <div class="verse">And I alone am left to tell,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Death’s horrors I lived through</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The master dreamed, mayhap, of his gold,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But we were awake—awake,</div> - <div class="verse">Buried alive in the black earth’s mold;</div> - <div class="verse">And some who yet could a pencil hold,</div> - <div class="verse">Wrote till their hands in death grew cold,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For wife or sweetheart’s sake.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Letters they wrote of farewell—farewell,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To mother, sweetheart, wife:</div> - <div class="verse">What words of comfort could they tell—</div> - <div class="verse">Comfort for those who loved them well,</div> - <div class="verse">Up from the jaws of the earth’s black hell</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That was crushing out their life.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The master cursed, as masters do—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Good right had he, good right!</div> - <div class="verse">But the fear of our vengeance stirred him, too;</div> - <div class="verse">He sailed, with some of his pirate crew,</div> - <div class="verse">To Europe, and reveled a year or two;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Great might has he—great might!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_535" id="Page_535">[535]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Romance</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Seymour Deming</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American writer)</p> - -<p>The old idea of romance: The country boy goes to -the city, marries his employer’s daughter, enslaves -some hundreds of his fellow humans, gets rich, and -leaves a public library to his home town.</p> - -<p>The new idea of romance: To undo some of the -mischief done by the old idea of romance.</p> - - -<h3>The Soul’s Errand</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Sir Walter Raleigh</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Written by the English soldier and statesman, 1552-1618, just -before his execution)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Go, Soul, the body’s guest,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Upon a thankless errand;</div> - <div class="verse">Fear not to touch the best;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The truth shall be thy warrant:</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Go, since I needs must die,</div> - <div class="verse indent4">And give them all the lie.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Go tell the Court it glows</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And shines like rotten wood;</div> - <div class="verse">Go tell the Church it shows</div> - <div class="verse indent2">What’s good, but does no good:</div> - <div class="verse indent4">If Court and Church reply</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Give Court and Church the lie.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_536" id="Page_536">[536]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Tell Potentates they live</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Acting, but oh! their actions;</div> - <div class="verse">Not loved, unless they give,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Nor strong but by their factions:</div> - <div class="verse indent4">If Potentates reply,</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Give Potentates the lie.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Tell men of high condition,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That rule affairs of state,</div> - <div class="verse">Their purpose is ambition;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their practice only hate:</div> - <div class="verse indent4">And if they do reply,</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Then give them all the lie....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Tell Physic of her boldness;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Tell Skill it is pretension;</div> - <div class="verse">Tell Charity of coldness;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Tell Law it is contention:</div> - <div class="verse indent4">And if they yield reply,</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Then give them all the lie....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">So when thou hast, as I</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Commanded thee, done blabbing;</div> - <div class="verse">Although to give the lie</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Deserves no less than stabbing:</div> - <div class="verse indent4">Yet stab at thee who will,</div> - <div class="verse indent4">No stab the Soul can kill.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_537" id="Page_537">[537]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>December 31st</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Lascelles Abercrombie</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary English poet)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">What is he hammering there,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That devil swinking in Hell?</div> - <div class="verse">Oh, he forges a cunning New Year,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">God knows he does it well.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Mill and harrow and rake,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A restless enginery</div> - <div class="verse">Of men and women to make</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Cruelty, Harlotry.</div> -</div></div></div> - - - - -<h3>Sisters of the Cross of Shame</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Dana Burnet</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_531">531</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The Sisters of the Cross of Shame,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They smile along the night;</div> - <div class="verse">Their houses stand with shuttered souls</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And painted eyes of light.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Their houses look with scarlet eyes</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Upon a world of sin;</div> - <div class="verse">And every man cries, “Woe, alas!”</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And every man goes in.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The sober Senate meets at noon,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To pass the Woman’s Law,</div> - <div class="verse">The portly Churchmen vote to stem</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The torrent with a straw.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_538" id="Page_538">[538]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The Sister of the Cross of Shame,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">She smiles beneath her cloud—</div> - <div class="verse">(She does not laugh till ten o’clock,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And then she laughs too loud.)</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And still she hears the throb of feet</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Upon the scarlet stair,</div> - <div class="verse">And still she dons the cloak of shame</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That is not hers to wear.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The sons of saintly women come</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To kiss the Cross of Shame;</div> - <div class="verse">Before them, in another time,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their worthy fathers came....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And no man tells his son the truth,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Lest he should speak of sin;</div> - <div class="verse">And every man cries, “Woe, alas!”</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And every man goes in.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Bringing the Light</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “A Bed of Roses”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By W. L. George</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Contemporary English novelist. The life-story of a woman -wage-earner who is driven by the pressure of want to a career of -shame. In the following scene she argues with a suffrage-worker, -who has called upon her, in ignorance of her true character)</p></div> - -<p>The woman’s eyes were rapt, her hands tightly -clenched, her lips parted, her cheeks a little flushed. -But Victoria’s face had hardened suddenly.</p> - -<p>“Miss Welkin,” she said quietly, “has anything struck -you about this house, about me?”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_539" id="Page_539">[539]</a></span></p> - -<p>The suffragist looked at her uneasily.</p> - -<p>“You ought to know whom you are talking to,” Victoria -went on, “I am a.... I am a what you would -probably call ... well, not respectable.”</p> - -<p>A dull red flush spread over Miss Welkin’s face, from -the line of her tightly pulled hair to her stiff white collar; -even her ears went red. She looked away into a corner.</p> - -<p>“You see,” said Victoria, “it’s a shock, isn’t it? I -ought not to have let you in. It wasn’t quite fair, was it?”</p> - -<p>“Oh, it isn’t that, Mrs. Ferris,” burst out the suffragist, -“I’m not thinking of myself.... Our cause is not the -cause of rich women or poor women, of good women or -bad; it’s the cause of woman. Thus, it doesn’t matter -who she is, so long as there is a woman who stands aloof -from us there is still work to do. I know that yours is not -a happy life; and we are bringing the light.”</p> - -<p>“The light!” echoed Victoria bitterly. “You have no -idea, I see, of how many people there are who are bringing -the light to women like me. There are various -religious organizations who wish to rescue us and house -us comfortably under the patronage of the police, to keep -us nicely and feed us on what is suitable for the fallen; -they expect us to sew ten hours a day for these privileges, -but that is by the way. There are also many kindly -souls who offer little jobs as charwomen to those of us -who are too worn out to pursue our calling; we are -offered emigration as servants in exchange for the power -of commanding a household; we are offered poverty for -luxury, service for domination, slavery to women instead -of slavery to men. How tempting it is!” ...</p> - -<p>The suffragist said nothing for a second. She felt -shaken by Victoria’s bitterness.... “The vote does -not mean everything,” she said reluctantly. “It will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_540" id="Page_540">[540]</a></span> -merely ensure that we rise like the men when we are -fit.”</p> - -<p>“Well, Miss Welkin, I won’t press that. But now, -tell me, if women got the vote to-morrow, what would -it do for my class?”</p> - -<p>“It would be raised....”</p> - -<p>“No, no, we can’t wait to be raised. We’ve got to -live, and if you ‘raise’ us we lose our means of livelihood. -How are you going to get to the root cause and lift us, -not the next generation, at once out of the lower depths?”</p> - -<p>The suffragist’s face contracted.</p> - -<p>“Everything takes time,” she faltered. “Just as I -couldn’t promise a charwoman that her hours would go -down and her wages go up the next day, I can’t say -that ... of course your case is more difficult than any -other, because ... because....”</p> - -<p>“Because,” said Victoria coldly, “I represent a social -necessity. So long as your economic system is such that -there is not work for the asking for every human being—work, -mark you, fitted to strength and ability—so long -on the other hand as there is such uncertainty as prevents -men from marrying, so long as there is a leisure -class who draw luxury from the labor of other men; -so long will my class endure as it endured in Athens, in -Rome, in Alexandria, as it does now from St. John’s -Wood to Pekin.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_541" id="Page_541">[541]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Selling of Love</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Love’s Coming of Age”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edward Carpenter</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_186">186</a>)</p> - -<p>The commercial prostitution of love is the last outcome -of our whole social system, and its most clear condemnation. -It flaunts in our streets, it hides itself in the -garment of respectability under the name of matrimony, -it eats in actual physical disease and death right through -our midst; it is fed by the oppression and the ignorance -of women, by their poverty and denied means of livelihood, -and by the hypocritical puritanism which forbids -them by millions not only to gratify but even to speak -of their natural desires; and it is encouraged by the -callousness of an age which has accustomed men to buy -and sell for money every most precious thing—even the -life-long labor of their brothers, therefore why not also -the very bodies of their sisters?</p> - - -<h3>The Butcher’s Stall</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Les Villes Tentaculaires:” The Octopus Cities</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Émile Verhaeren</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Belgian poet, born 1855. When Maurice Maeterlinck was -suggested as a member of the French Academy, he recommended -that the honor should be conferred upon Verhaeren instead. Beginning -his career as a decadent and victim of disease, Verhaeren -evolved into a rhapsodist of modern civilization. No poet has ever -approached him in the portrayal and interpretation of factories, -forges, railroads, and all the phenomena of industrialism. Of late -he has become an ardent Socialist. The poem here quoted is from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_542" id="Page_542">[542]</a></span> -a book portraying the sins and agonies of great cities. Only portions -of the poem could be printed in a work intended for general circulation -in English; but even of these passages the editor will venture -the assertion that never before has the horror of prostitution been so -packed into human speech)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Hard by the docks, soon as the shadows fold</div> - <div class="verse">The dizzy mansion-fronts that soar aloft,</div> - <div class="verse">When eyes of lamps are burning soft,</div> - <div class="verse">The shy, dark quarter lights again its old</div> - <div class="verse">Allurement of red vice and gold.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Women, blocks of heaped, blown meat,</div> - <div class="verse">Stand on low thresholds down the narrow street,</div> - <div class="verse">Calling to every man that passes;</div> - <div class="verse">Behind them, at the end of corridors,</div> - <div class="verse">Shine fires, a curtain stirs</div> - <div class="verse">And gives a glimpse of masses</div> - <div class="verse">Of mad and naked flesh in looking-glasses.</div> - <div class="verse">Hard by the docks</div> - <div class="verse">The street upon the left is ended by</div> - <div class="verse">A tangle of high masts and shrouds that blocks</div> - <div class="verse">A sheet of sky;</div> - <div class="verse">Upon the right a net of grovelling alleys</div> - <div class="verse">Falls from the town—and here the black crowd rallies</div> - <div class="verse">And reels to rotten revelry.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">It is the flabby, fulsome butcher’s stall of luxury,</div> - <div class="verse">Time out of mind erected on the frontiers</div> - <div class="verse">Of the city and the sea.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Far-sailing melancholy mariners</div> - <div class="verse">Who, wet with spray, thru grey mists peer,</div> - <div class="verse">Cabin-boys cradled among the rigging, and they who steer</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_543" id="Page_543">[543]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Hallucinated by the blue eyes of the vast sea-spaces,</div> - <div class="verse">All dream of it, evoke it when the evening falls;</div> - <div class="verse">Their raw desire to madness galls;</div> - <div class="verse">The wind’s soft kisses hover on their faces;</div> - <div class="verse">The wave awakens rolling images of soft embraces;</div> - <div class="verse">And their two arms implore</div> - <div class="verse">Stretched in a frantic cry towards the shore.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And they of offices and shops, the city tribes,</div> - <div class="verse">Merchants precise, keen reckoners, haggard scribes,</div> - <div class="verse">Who sell their brains for hire, and tame their brows,</div> - <div class="verse">When the keys of desks are hanging on the wall,</div> - <div class="verse">Feel the same galling rut at even-fall,</div> - <div class="verse">And run like hunted dogs to the carouse.</div> - <div class="verse">Out of the depths of dusk come their dark flocks,</div> - <div class="verse">And in their hearts debauch so rudely shocks</div> - <div class="verse">Their ingrained greed and old accustomed care,</div> - <div class="verse">That they are racked and ruined by despair.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">It is the flabby, fulsome butcher’s stall of luxury,</div> - <div class="verse">Time out of mind erected on the frontiers</div> - <div class="verse">Of the city and the sea.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Come from what far sea-isles or pestilent parts?</div> - <div class="verse">Come from what feverish or methodic marts?</div> - <div class="verse">Their eyes are filled with bitter, cunning hate,</div> - <div class="verse">They fight their instincts that they cannot sate;</div> - <div class="verse">Around red females who befool them, they</div> - <div class="verse">Herd frenzied till the dawn of sober day.</div> - <div class="verse">The panelling is fiery with lewd art;</div> - <div class="verse">Out of the wall nitescent knick-knacks dart;</div> - <div class="verse">Fat Bacchuses and leaping satyrs in</div> - <div class="verse">Wan mirrors freeze an unremitting grin....</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_544" id="Page_544">[544]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And women with spent loins and sleeping croups</div> - <div class="verse">Are piled on sofas and arm-chairs in groups,</div> - <div class="verse">With sodden flesh grown vague, and black and blue</div> - <div class="verse">With the first trampling of the evening’s crew.</div> - <div class="verse">One of them slides a gold coin in her stocking;</div> - <div class="verse">Another yawns, and some their knees are rocking;</div> - <div class="verse">Others by bacchanalia worn out,</div> - <div class="verse">Feeling old age, and, sniffing them, Death’s snout,</div> - <div class="verse">Stare with wide-open eyes, torches extinct,</div> - <div class="verse">And smooth their legs with hands together linked....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">It is the flabby, fulsome butcher’s stall of luxury,</div> - <div class="verse">Wherein Crime plants his knives that bleed,</div> - <div class="verse">Where lightning madness stains</div> - <div class="verse">Foreheads with rotting pains,</div> - <div class="verse">Time out of mind erected on frontiers that feed</div> - <div class="verse">The city and the sea.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Fomá Gordyéeff</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Maxim Gorky</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Perhaps the most famous novel of the Russian writer, the life-story -of the son of a prosperous merchant, a youth who wrecks himself -in a vain search for some outlet for his energies, and at the end -commits suicide)</p></div> - -<p>“Where is the merchant to spend his energy? -He cannot spend much of it on the Exchange, -so he squanders the excess of his muscular capital in -drinking-bouts in <i lang="ru" xml:lang="ru">kabaky</i>; for he has no conception of -other applications of his strength, which are more productive, -more valuable to life. He is still a beast, and -life has already become to him a cage, and it is too nar<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_545" id="Page_545">[545]</a></span>row -for him with his splendid health and predilection for -licentiousness. Hampered by culture, he at once starts -to lead a dissolute life. The debauch of a merchant is -always the revolt of a captive beast. Of course this is -bad. But, ah! it will be worse yet, when this beast -shall have gathered some sense and shall have disciplined -it. Believe me, even then he will not cease to create -scandals, but they will be historical events. For they -will emanate from the merchant’s thirst for power; their -aim will be the omnipotence of one class, and the merchant -will not be particular about the means toward the -attainment of this aim.</p> - -<p>“Where am I to make use of my strength, since there -is no demand for it? I ought to fight with robbers, or -turn a robber myself. In general I ought to do something -big. And that would be done, not with the head, -but with the arms and breast. While here we have to -go to the Exchange and try to aim well to make a rouble. -What do we need it for? And what is it, anyway? Has -life been arranged in this form forever? What sort of -life is it, if everyone finds it too narrow for him? Life -ought to be according to the taste of man. If it is narrow -for me; I must move it asunder that I may have -more room. I must break it and reconstruct it. But -how? That’s where the trouble lies! What ought to -be done that life may be freer? That I don’t understand, -and that’s all there is to it!”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_546" id="Page_546">[546]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Venus Pandemos</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Richard Dehmel</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary German poet, born 1863)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">This was the last time. I was lounging in</div> - <div class="verse">The night-café that lights the suburb gloom,</div> - <div class="verse">Tired with the reek of sultry sofa plush,</div> - <div class="verse">And with my glowing toddy, and the steam</div> - <div class="verse">Of women sweating in their gowns: tired, lustful.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Clouds of tobacco smoke were wavering through</div> - <div class="verse">The laughter and the haggling cries and shrieks</div> - <div class="verse">Of painted women and the men they drew.</div> - <div class="verse">The rattling at the sideboard of the spoons</div> - <div class="verse">Cheered on the hubbub of the mart of love</div> - <div class="verse">Uninterrupted like a tambourine....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I was about to choose, when, where I sate,</div> - <div class="verse">The crimson curtain of the door was split,</div> - <div class="verse">And a fresh couple entered. A cold draught</div> - <div class="verse">Cut through the heated room, and some one swore;</div> - <div class="verse">But through the crowd the pair stepped noiselessly.</div> - <div class="verse">Over against me at the transverse end</div> - <div class="verse">Of the corridor, whence they could sweep the room,</div> - <div class="verse">They took their seats. The chandelier of bronze</div> - <div class="verse">Hung o’er them like an awning heavy, old.</div> - <div class="verse">And no one seemed to know the couple, but</div> - <div class="verse">At my right hand I heard a hoarse voice pipe:</div> - <div class="verse">“I must have come across that pair before.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">He sat quite still. The loud gray of the air</div> - <div class="verse">Almost recoiled before his callous brow,</div> - <div class="verse">Which wan as wax rose into his sparse hair.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_547" id="Page_547">[547]</a></span> - <div class="verse">His great pale eye-lids hung down deep and shut,</div> - <div class="verse">On both sides lay around his sunken nose</div> - <div class="verse">Their shadows, and through his thin beard shone the skin.</div> - <div class="verse">And only when the woman at his side,</div> - <div class="verse">Less tall than he, and of a lissom shape,</div> - <div class="verse">Hissed, giggling, in his ear some obscene word,</div> - <div class="verse">Half rose of one black eye the heavy lid,</div> - <div class="verse">And slowly round he turned his long, thin neck,</div> - <div class="verse">As when a vulture lunges at a corpse.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And silent and more silent grew the room;</div> - <div class="verse">All eyes were fixed upon the silent guest,</div> - <div class="verse">And on the woman squatted, strange to see.</div> - <div class="verse">“She is quite young”—a whispering round me went;</div> - <div class="verse">And with a child’s greed she was drinking milk.</div> - <div class="verse">Yet almost old she seemed to me, whenever</div> - <div class="verse">Her tongue shot through a gap in her black teeth,</div> - <div class="verse">Her pointed tongue out of her hissing mouth,</div> - <div class="verse">While her gray, eager glance took in the room;</div> - <div class="verse">The gaslight in it shone like poisonous green.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And now she rose. He had not touched his glass;</div> - <div class="verse">A great coin lit the table. She went out;</div> - <div class="verse">He automatically followed her.</div> - <div class="verse">The crimson curtain round the door fell to,</div> - <div class="verse">Once more the cold draught shivered through the heat,</div> - <div class="verse">But no one cursed. Through me a shiver ran.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I did not choose a partner—suddenly</div> - <div class="verse">I knew them: it was Syphilis and Death.</div> -</div></div></div> -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_548" id="Page_548">[548]</a><br /><a name="Page_549" id="Page_549">[549]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK XI</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><i>War</i></p> - -<p>Pictures of a terrible evil, and denunciations of it, which will -be found especially timely at the present hour.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_550" id="Page_550">[550]</a><br /><a name="Page_551" id="Page_551">[551]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>I Sing the Battle</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Cry of Youth”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Harry Kemp</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I sing the song of the great clean guns that belch forth death at will.</div> - <div class="verse">Ah, but the wailing mothers, the lifeless forms and still!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I sing the songs of the billowing flags, the bugles that cry before.</div> - <div class="verse">Ah, but the skeletons flapping rags, the lips that speak no more!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I sing the clash of bayonets and sabres that flash and cleave.</div> - <div class="verse">And wilt thou sing the maimed ones, too, that go with pinned-up sleeve?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I sing acclaimèd generals that bring the victory home.</div> - <div class="verse">Ah, but the broken bodies that drip like honey-comb!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I sing of hearts triumphant, long ranks of marching men.</div> - <div class="verse">And wilt thou sing the shadowy hosts that never march again?</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_552" id="Page_552">[552]</a></span></p> - -<h3>War</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Beyond the Breakers”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George Sterling</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_504">504</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The night was on the world, and in my sleep</div> - <div class="verse">I heard a voice that cried across the dark:</div> - <div class="verse">“Give steel!” And gazing I beheld a red,</div> - <div class="verse">Infernal stithy. There were Titans five</div> - <div class="verse">Assembled, thewed and naked and malign</div> - <div class="verse">Against the glare. One to the furnace throat,</div> - <div class="verse">Whence issued screams, fed shapes of human use—</div> - <div class="verse">The hammer, axe and plow. Those molten soon,</div> - <div class="verse">Another haled the dazzling ingot forth</div> - <div class="verse">With tongs, and gave it to the anvil. Two,</div> - <div class="verse">With massy sledges throbbing at the task,</div> - <div class="verse">Harried the gloom with unenduring stars</div> - <div class="verse">And poured a clangorous music on the dark,</div> - <div class="verse">With loud, astounding shock and counter-shock</div> - <div class="verse">Incessant. And the fifth colossus stood</div> - <div class="verse">The captain of that labor. From his form</div> - <div class="verse">Spread wings more black than Hell’s high-altar—ribbed</div> - <div class="verse">As are the vampire-bat’s. The night grew old,</div> - <div class="verse">And I was then aware they shaped a sword....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In that domain and interval of dream</div> - <div class="verse">’Twas dawn upon the headlands of the world,</div> - <div class="verse">And I, appalled, beheld how men had reared</div> - <div class="verse">A mountain, dark below the morning star—</div> - <div class="verse">A peak made up of houses and of herds,</div> - <div class="verse">Of cradles, yokes and all the handiwork</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_553" id="Page_553">[553]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Of man. Upon its crest were gems and gold,</div> - <div class="verse">Rare fabrics, and the woof of humble looms.</div> - <div class="verse">Harvests and groves and battlements were made</div> - <div class="verse">Part of its ramparts, and the whole was drenched</div> - <div class="verse">With oil and wine and honey. Then thereon</div> - <div class="verse">Men bound their sons, the fair, alert and strong,</div> - <div class="verse">Sparing no household. And when all were bound,</div> - <div class="verse">Brands were brought forth: the mount became a pyre.</div> - <div class="verse">Black from that red immensity of flame,</div> - <div class="verse">A tower of smoke, upcoiling to the sky,</div> - <div class="verse">Was shapen by the winds, and took the form</div> - <div class="verse">Of him who in the stithy gave command.</div> - <div class="verse">A shadow between day and men he stood;</div> - <div class="verse">His eyes looked forth on nothingness; his wings</div> - <div class="verse">Domed desolations, and the scarlet sun</div> - <div class="verse">Glowed through their darkness like a seal that God</div> - <div class="verse">Might set on Hell forever. Then the pyre</div> - <div class="verse">Shrank, and he reeled. Whereat, to save that shape</div> - <div class="verse">Their madness had evoked in death and pain,</div> - <div class="verse">Men rose and made a second sacrifice.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Sartor Resartus</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Carlyle</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_488">488</a>)</p> - -<p>What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the -net-purport and upshot of war? To my own -knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the -British village of Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred -souls. From these, by certain “Natural Enemies” of -the French, there are successfully selected, during the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_554" id="Page_554">[554]</a></span> -French war, say thirty able-bodied men: Dumdrudge, -at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them: she -has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to -manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one -can weave, another build, another hammer, and the -weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, -amid much weeping and swearing, they are -selected; all dressed in red, and shipped away, at the -public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only -to the south of Spain; and fed there till wanted. And -now to that same spot, in the south of Spain, are thirty -similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in -like manner wending; till at length, after infinite effort, -the two parties come into actual juxtaposition, and -Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his -hand. Straightway the word “Fire!” is given and they -blow the souls out of one another, and in place of sixty -brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, -which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these -men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest! -They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; -nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even, unconsciously, -by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. -How then? Simpleton! their Governors had fallen out; -and, instead of shooting one another, had the cunning -to make these poor blockheads shoot.—Alas, so is it in -Deutschland, and hitherto in all other lands; still as of -old, “what devilry soever Kings do, the Greeks must -pay the piper!”—In that fiction of the English Smollett, -it is true, the final Cessation of War is perhaps prophetically -shadowed forth; where the two Natural Enemies, -in person, take each a Tobacco-pipe, filled with Brimstone; -light the same, and smoke in one another’s faces,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_555" id="Page_555">[555]</a></span> -till the weaker gives in: but from such predicted Peace-Era, -what blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, -may still divide us!</p> - - -<h3>The Soldier’s Oath</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Speech delivered in 1891)</p> - -<p>Recruits! Before the altar and the servant of -God you have given me the oath of allegiance. -You are too young to know the full meaning of what -you have said, but your first care must be to obey implicitly -all orders and directions. You have sworn -fidelity to me, you are the children of my guard, you are -my soldiers, you have surrendered yourselves to me, body -and soul. Only one enemy can exist for you—my enemy. -With the present Socialist machinations, it may happen -that I shall order you to shoot your own relatives, your -brothers, or even your parents—which God forbid—and -then you are bound in duty implicitly to obey my orders.</p> - - -<h3>The Coming of War</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Leo Tolstoy</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>)</p> - -<p>The bells will peal, long-haired men will dress in golden -sacks to pray for successful slaughter. And the old -story will begin again, the awful customary acts.</p> - -<p>The editors of the daily Press will begin virulently to -stir men up to hatred and manslaughter in the name of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_556" id="Page_556">[556]</a></span> -patriotism, happy in the receipt of an increased income. -Manufacturers, merchants, contractors for military stores, -will hurry joyously about their business, in the hope of -double receipts.</p> - -<p>All sorts of Government officials will buzz about, foreseeing -a possibility of purloining something more than -usual. The military authorities will hurry hither and -thither, drawing double pay and rations, and with the -expectation of receiving for the slaughter of other men -various silly little ornaments which they so highly prize, -as ribbons, crosses, orders, and stars. Idle ladies and -gentlemen will make a great fuss, entering their names in -advance for the Red Cross Society, and ready to bind -up the wounds of those whom their husbands and brothers -will mutilate; and they will imagine that in so doing -they are performing a most Christian work.</p> - -<p>And, smothering despair within their souls by songs, -licentiousness, and wine, men will trail along, torn from -peaceful labor, from their wives, mothers and children—hundreds -of thousands of simple-minded, good-natured -men with murderous weapons in their hands—anywhere -they may be driven.</p> - -<p>They will march, freeze, hunger, suffer sickness, and -die from it, or finally come to some place where they will -be slain by thousands or kill thousands themselves with -no reason—men whom they have never seen before, and -who neither have done nor could do them any mischief.</p> - -<p>And when the number of sick, wounded, and killed -becomes so great that there are not hands enough left -to pick them up, and when the air is so infected with the -putrefying scent of the “food for powder” that even the -authorities find it disagreeable, a truce will be made, -the wounded will be picked up anyhow, the sick will be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_557" id="Page_557">[557]</a></span> -brought in and huddled together in heaps, the killed will -be covered with earth and lime, and once more all the -crowd of deluded men will be led on and on till those -who have devised the project, weary of it, or till those -who thought to find it profitable receive their spoil.</p> - -<p>And so once more men will be made savage, fierce, and -brutal, and love will wane in the world, and the Christianizing -of mankind, which has already begun, will lapse for -scores and hundreds of years. And so once more the -men who reaped profit from it all, will assert with assurance -that since there has been a war there must needs -have been one, and that other wars must follow, and -they will again prepare future generations for a continuance -of slaughter, depraving them from their birth.</p> - - -<h3>Slavery</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Cowper</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet, 1731-1800)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O for a lodge in some vast wilderness,</div> - <div class="verse">Some boundless contiguity of shade,</div> - <div class="verse">Where rumor of oppression and deceit,</div> - <div class="verse">Of unsuccessful or successful war,</div> - <div class="verse">Might never reach me more. My ear is pained,</div> - <div class="verse">My soul is sick, with every day’s report</div> - <div class="verse">Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.</div> - <div class="verse">There is no flesh in man’s obdurate heart,</div> - <div class="verse">It does not feel for man; the natural bond</div> - <div class="verse">Of brotherhood is severed as the flax</div> - <div class="verse">That falls asunder at the touch of fire.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_558" id="Page_558">[558]</a></span> - <div class="verse">He finds his fellow guilty of a skin</div> - <div class="verse">Not colored like his own; and having power</div> - <div class="verse">To enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause</div> - <div class="verse">Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.</div> - <div class="verse">Lands intersected by a narrow frith</div> - <div class="verse">Abhor each other. Mountains interposed</div> - <div class="verse">Make enemies of nations, who had else</div> - <div class="verse">Like kindred drops been mingled into one.</div> - <div class="verse">Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys;</div> - <div class="verse">And, worse than all, and most to be deplored,</div> - <div class="verse">As human nature’s broadest, foulest blot,</div> - <div class="verse">Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat</div> - <div class="verse">With stripes, that Mercy, with a bleeding heart,</div> - <div class="verse">Weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Biglow Papers</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By James Russell Lowell</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(These poems, first published in the <cite>Atlantic Monthly</cite> in 1846, -voiced the bitter opposition of New England to the Mexican -war as a slave-holders’ enterprise)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Thrash away, you’ll <em>hev</em> to rattle</div> - <div class="verse indent2">On them kittle-drums o’ yourn,—</div> - <div class="verse">‘Tain’t a knowin’ kind o’ cattle</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Thet is ketched with mouldy corn;</div> - <div class="verse">Put in stiff, you fifer feller,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Let folks see how spry you be,—</div> - <div class="verse">Guess you’ll toot till you are yeller</div> - <div class="verse indent2">‘Fore you git ahold o’ me!...</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_559" id="Page_559">[559]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ez fer war, I call it murder,—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">There you hev it plain an’ flat;</div> - <div class="verse">I don’t want to go no furder</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Than my Testyment fer that;</div> - <div class="verse">God hez sed so plump an’ fairly,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">It’s ez long ez it is broad,</div> - <div class="verse">An’ you’ve got to git up airly</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ef you want to take in God.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">‘Tain’t your eppyletts an’ feathers</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Make the thing a grain more right;</div> - <div class="verse">‘Tain’t afollerin’ your bell-wethers</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Will excuse ye in His sight;</div> - <div class="verse">Ef you take a sword an’ dror it,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">An’ go stick a feller thru,</div> - <div class="verse">Guv’mint ain’t to answer for it,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">God’ll send the bill to you.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Wut’s the use o’ meetin’-goin’</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Every Sabbath, wet or dry,</div> - <div class="verse">Ef it’s right to go amowin’</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Feller-men like oats an’ rye?</div> - <div class="verse">I dunno but wut it’s pooty</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Trainin’ round in bobtail coats,—</div> - <div class="verse">But it’s curus Christian dooty</div> - <div class="verse indent2">This ‘ere cuttin’ folks’s throats....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Tell ye jest the eend I’ve come to</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Arter cipherin’ plaguey smart,</div> - <div class="verse">An’ it makes a handy sum, tu,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Any gump could larn by heart;</div> - <div class="verse">Laborin’ man an’ laborin’ woman</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Hev one glory an’ one shame.</div> - <div class="verse">Ev’y thin’ thet’s done inhuman</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Injers all on ’em the same.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_560" id="Page_560">[560]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">‘Tain’t by turnin’ out to hack folks</div> - <div class="verse indent2">You’re agoin’ to git your right,</div> - <div class="verse">Nor by lookin’ down on black folks</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Coz you’re put upon by white;</div> - <div class="verse">Slavery ain’t o’ nary color,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">‘Tain’t the hide thet makes it wus,</div> - <div class="verse">All it keers fer in a feller</div> - <div class="verse indent2">‘S jest to make him fill its pus.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>To a Nine-inch Gun</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By P. F. McCarthy</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(This poem came to the New York <cite>World</cite> office on a crumpled -piece of soiled paper. The author’s address was given as -Fourth Bench, City Hall Park)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Whether your shell hits the target or not,</div> - <div class="verse">Your cost is Five Hundred Dollars a Shot.</div> - <div class="verse">You thing of noise and flame and power,</div> - <div class="verse">We feed you a hundred barrels of flour</div> - <div class="verse">Each time you roar. Your flame is fed</div> - <div class="verse">With twenty thousand loaves of bread.</div> - <div class="verse">Silence! A million hungry men</div> - <div class="verse">Seek bread to fill their mouths again.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_561" id="Page_561">[561]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Kruppism</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Present Hour”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Percy Mackaye</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet and dramatist, born 1875)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Crowned on the twilight battlefield, there bends</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A crooked iron dwarf, and delves for gold,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Chuckling: “One hundred thousand gatlings—sold!”</div> - <div class="verse">And the moon rises, and a moaning rends</div> - <div class="verse">The mangled living, and the dead distends,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And a child cowers on the chartless wold,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where, searching in his safety vault of mold,</div> - <div class="verse">The kobold kaiser cuts his dividends.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We, who still wage his battles, are his thralls,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And dying do him homage; yea, and give</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Daily our living souls to be enticed</div> - <div class="verse">Into his power. So long as on war’s walls</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We build engines of death that he may live,</div> - <div class="verse">So long shall we serve Krupp instead of Christ.</div> -</div></div></div> - - - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By The Empress Catherine II of Russia</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(1729-1796)</p> - -<p>The only way to save our empires from the encroachment -of the people is to engage in war, -and thus substitute national passions for social aspirations.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_562" id="Page_562">[562]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Frederick the Great of Prussia</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(1712-1786)</p> - -<p>If my soldiers were to begin to reflect, not one of them -would remain in the ranks.</p> - - -<h3>Our Father Which Art in Heaven</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Human Slaughter-House”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Wilhelm Lamszus</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A novel by a Hamburg school-teacher, published in 1913. Although -banned by the authorities in some places, over 100,000 copies -were sold in Germany in a few weeks)</p> - -<p>We rejoined the Colors on Friday. On Monday we -are to move out. Today, being Sunday, is full-dress -Church Parade.</p> - -<p>I slept badly last night, and am feeling uneasy and limp.</p> - -<p>And now we are sitting close-packed in church.</p> - -<p>The organ is playing a voluntary.</p> - -<p>I am leaning back and straining my ears for the sounds -in the dim twilight of the building. Childhood’s days -rise before my eyes again. I am watching a little solemn-faced -boy sitting crouched in a corner and listening to -the divine service. The priest is standing in front of the -altar, and is intoning the Exhortation devoutly. The -choir in the gallery is chanting the responses. The -organ thunders out and floods through the building majestically. -I am rapt in an ecstasy of sweet terror, for the -Lord God is coming down upon us. He is standing before -me and touching my body, so that I have to close my eyes -in a terror of shuddering ecstasy....</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_563" id="Page_563">[563]</a></span></p> - -<p>That is long, long ago, and is all past and done with, -as youth itself is past and done with....</p> - -<p>Strange! After all these years of doubt and unbelief, -at this moment of lucid consciousness, the atmosphere -of devoutness, long since dead, possesses me, and thrills -me so passionately that I can hardly resist it. This is -the same heavy twilight—these are the same yearning -angel voices—the same fearful sense of rapture—</p> - -<p>I pull myself together, and sit bolt upright on the hard -wooden pew.</p> - -<p>In the main and the side aisles below, and in the galleries -above, nothing but soldiers in uniform, and all, with level -faces, turned toward the altar, toward that pale man in his -long dignified black gown, toward that sonorous, unctuous -mouth, from whose lips flows the name of God.</p> - -<p>Look! He is now stretching forth his hands. We -incline our heads. He is pronouncing the Benediction -over us in a voice that echoes from the tomb. He is -blessing us in the name of God, the Merciful. He is -blessing our rifles that they may not fail us; he is blessing -the wire-drawn guns on their patent recoilless carriages; -he is blessing every precious cartridge, lest a single bullet -be wasted, lest any pass idly through the air; that each -one may account for a hundred human beings, may shatter -a hundred human beings simultaneously.</p> - -<p>Father in Heaven! Thou art gazing down at us in -such terrible silence. Dost Thou shudder at these sons -of men? Thou poor and slight God! Thou couldst only -rain Thy paltry pitch and sulphur on Sodom and Gomorrah. -But we, Thy children, whom Thou hast created, -we are going to exterminate them by high-pressure machinery, -and butcher whole cities in factories. Here we stand, -and while we stretch our hands to Thy Son in prayer,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_564" id="Page_564">[564]</a></span> -and cry Hosannah! we are hurling shells and shrapnel -in the face of Thy Image, and shooting the Son of Man -down from His Cross like a target at the rifle-butts.</p> - -<p>And now the Holy Communion is being celebrated. -The organ is playing mysteriously from afar off, and the -flesh and blood of the Redeemer is mingling with our -flesh and blood.</p> - -<p>There He is hanging on the Cross above me, and gazing -down upon me.</p> - -<p>How pale those cheeks look! And those eyes are the -eyes as of one dead! Who was this Christ Who is to aid -us, and Whose blood we drink? What was it they once -taught us at school? Didst Thou not love mankind? -And didst Thou not die for the whole human race? Stretch -out Thine arms toward me. There is something I would -fain ask of Thee.... Ah! they have nailed Thy arms -to the Cross, so that Thou canst not stretch out a finger -toward us.</p> - -<p>Shuddering, I fix my eyes on the corpse-like face and -see that He died long ago, that He is nothing more than -wood, nothing other than a puppet. Christ, it is no -longer Thee to whom we pray. Look there! Look there! -It is he. The new patron saint of a Christian State! -Look there! It is he, the great Genghis Khan. Of him we -know that he swept through the history of the world with -fire and sword, and piled up pyramids of skulls. Yes, -that is he. Let us heap up mountains of human heads, -and pile up heaps of human entrails. Great Genghis -Khan! Thou, our patron saint! Do thou bless us! -Pray to thy blood-drenched father seated above the skies -of Asia, that he may sweep with us through the clouds; -that he may strike down that accursed nation till it -writhes in its blood, till it never can rise again. A red<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_565" id="Page_565">[565]</a></span> -mist swims before my eyes. Of a sudden I see nothing -but blood before me. The heavens have opened, and the -red flood pours in through the windows. Blood wells -up on the altar. The walls run blood from the ceiling to -the floor, and—God the Father steps out of the blood. -Every scale of his skin stands erect, his beard and hair -drip blood. A giant of blood stands before me. He -seats himself backward on the altar, and is laughing from -thick, coarse lips—there sits the King of Dahomey, and -he butchers his slaves. The black executioner raises his -sword and whirls it above my head. Another moment -and my head will roll down on the floor—another moment -and the red jet will spurt from my neck.... Murderers, -murderers! None other than murderers! Lord God in -Heaven!</p> - -<p>Then—</p> - -<p>The church door opens creaking—</p> - -<p>Light, air, the blue of heaven, burst in.</p> - -<p>I draw a breath of relief. We have risen to our feet, -and at length pass out of the twilight into the open air.</p> - -<p>My knees are still trembling under me.</p> - -<p>We fall into line, and in our hob-nailed boots tramp in -step down the street toward the barracks. When I see -my mates marching beside me in their matter-of-fact -and stolid way, I feel ashamed, and call myself a wretched -coward. What a weak-nerved, hysterical breed, that can -no longer look at blood without fainting! You neurasthenic -offspring of your sturdy peasant forebears, who -shouted for joy when they went out to fight!</p> - -<p>I pull myself together and throw my head back.</p> - -<p>I never was a coward, and eye for eye I have always -looked my man in the face, and will so do this time, too, -happen what may.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_566" id="Page_566">[566]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The War Prayer<a name="FNanchor_26" id="FNanchor_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26" class="fnanchor">[Z]</a></h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Mark Twain</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(American humorist. See page <a href="#Page_265">265</a>. This “War Prayer,” -withheld from publication until after Mark Twain’s death, pictures -the assembling of soldiers in church, and the prayer of the -chaplain for victory. In answer to the prayer, God sends down -a white-robed messenger, who voices the unspoken meaning of -the prayer.)</p></div> - -<p>“O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to -bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover -their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot -dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with -the wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their -humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring -the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing -grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little -children to wander unfriended through wastes of their -desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sport of -the sun-flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, -broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for -the refuge of the grave and denied it—for our sakes, -who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their -lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their -steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white -snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask of -one who is the Spirit of love and who is the ever-faithful -refuge and friend of all that are sore beset, and seek -His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Grant our -prayer, O Lord, and Thine shall be the praise and honor -and glory now and ever, Amen.”</p> - -<p>(After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire -it, speak!—the messenger of the Most High waits.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_567" id="Page_567">[567]</a></span></p> -<h3>The Illusion of War</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Richard Le Gallienne</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet, born in England, 1866)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">War I abhor, and yet how sweet</div> - <div class="verse">The sound along the marching street</div> - <div class="verse">Of drum and fife, and I forget</div> - <div class="verse">Wet eyes of widows, and forget</div> - <div class="verse">Broken old mothers, and the whole</div> - <div class="verse">Dark butchery without a soul.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Without a soul, save this bright drink</div> - <div class="verse">Of heady music, sweet as hell;</div> - <div class="verse">And even my peace-abiding feet</div> - <div class="verse">Go marching with the marching street—</div> - <div class="verse">For yonder, yonder goes the fife,</div> - <div class="verse">And what care I for human life!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The tears fill my astonished eyes,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And my full heart is like to break;</div> - <div class="verse">And yet ’tis all embannered lies,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A dream those little drummers make.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O, it is wickedness to clothe</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Yon hideous grinning thing that stalks,</div> - <div class="verse">Hidden in music, like a queen,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That in a garden of glory walks,</div> - <div class="verse">Till good men love the thing they loathe.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Art, thou hast many infamies,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But not an infamy like this—</div> - <div class="verse">Oh, snap the fife, and still the drum,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And show the monster as she is!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_568" id="Page_568">[568]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Lay Down Your Arms</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Baroness Bertha von Suttner</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Austrian novelist and peace advocate, 1850-1914. Her protest -against war, published in 1889, made a deep impression throughout -Europe. In the following scene a woman is taken to visit a field of -battle with the hospital-corps)</p></div> - -<p>No more thunder of artillery, no more blare of trumpets, -no more beat of drum; only the low moans of pain -and the rattle of death. In the trampled ground some -redly-glimmering pools, lakes of blood; all the crops -destroyed, only here and there a piece of land left untouched, -and still covered with stubble; the smiling villages -of yesterday turned into ruins and rubbish. The -trees burned and hacked in the forests, the hedges torn -with grape-shot. And on this battle-ground thousands -and thousands of men dead and dying—dying without -aid. No blossoms of flowers are to be seen on wayside or -meadow; but sabres, bayonets, knapsacks, cloaks, overturned -ammunition wagons, powder wagons blown into -the air, cannon with broken carriages. Near the cannon, -whose muzzles are black with smoke, the ground is bloodiest. -There the greatest number and the most mangled -of dead and half-dead men are lying, literally torn to -pieces with shot; and the dead horses, and the half-dead -which raise themselves on their feet—such feet as they -have left—to sink again; then raise themselves up once -more and fall down again, till they only raise their head -to shriek out their pain-laden death-cry. There is a -hollow way quite filled with corpses trodden into the mire. -The poor creatures had taken refuge there no doubt to -get cover, but a battery has driven over them, and they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_569" id="Page_569">[569]</a></span> -have been crushed by the horses’ hoofs and the wheels. -Many of them are still alive—a pulpy, bleeding mass, but -“still alive”.</p> - -<p>And yet there is still something more hellish even than -all this, and that is the appearance of the most vile scum -of humanity, as it shows itself in war—the appearance -and activity of “the hyenas of the battlefield.” “Then -slink on the monsters who grope after the spoils of the -dead, and bend over the corpses and over the living, -mercilessly tearing off their clothes from their bodies. -The boots are dragged off the bleeding limbs, the rings -off the wounded hands, or to get the ring the finger is -simply chopped off, and if a man tries to defend himself -from such a sacrifice, he is murdered by these hyenas; -or, in order to make him unrecognizable, they dig his eyes -out.”</p> - -<p>I shrieked out loud at the doctor’s last words. I again -saw the whole scene before me, and the eyes into which -the hyena was plunging his knife were Frederick’s soft, -blue, beloved eyes.</p> - -<p>“Pray, forgive me, dear lady, but it was by your own -wish——”</p> - -<p>“Oh, yes; I desire to hear it all. What you are now -describing was the night that follows the battle; and -these scenes are enacted by the starlight?”</p> - -<p>“And by torchlight. The patrols which the conquerors -send out to survey the field of battle carry torches and -lanterns, and red lanterns are hoisted on signal poles to -point out the places where flying hospitals are to be -established.”</p> - -<p>“And next morning, how does the field look?”</p> - -<p>“Almost more fearful still. The contrast between the -bright smiling daylight and the dreadful work of man on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_570" id="Page_570">[570]</a></span> -which it shines has a doubly-painful effect. At night the -entire picture of horror is something ghostly and fantastic. -By daylight it is simply hopeless. Now you see for the -first time the mass of corpses lying around on the lanes, -between the fields, in the ditches, behind the ruins of walls. -Everywhere dead bodies—everywhere. Plundered, some -of them naked; and just the same with the wounded. -Those who, in spite of the nightly labor of the Sanitary -Corps, are still always lying around in numbers, look pale -and collapsed, green or yellow, with fixed and stupefied -gaze, or writhing in agonies of pain, they beg any one -who comes near to put them to death. Swarms of carrion -crows settle on the tops of the trees, and with loud croaks -announce the bill of fare of the tempting banquet. Hungry -dogs, from the villages around, come running by and lick -the blood from wounds. Further afield there are a few -hyenas to be seen, who are still carrying on their work -hastily. And now comes the great interment.”</p> - -<p>“Who does that—the Sanitary Corps?”</p> - -<p>“How could they suffice for such a mass of work? -They have fully enough to do with the wounded.”</p> - -<p>“Then troops are detailed for the work?”</p> - -<p>“No. A crowd of men impressed, or even offering -themselves voluntarily—loiterers, baggage people, who -are supporting themselves by the market-stalls, baggage-wagons -and so forth, and who now have been hunted -away by the force of the military operations, together -with the inhabitants of the cottages and huts—to dig -trenches—good large ones, of course—wide trenches, -for they are not made deep—there is no time for that. -Into these the dead bodies are thrown, heads up or heads -down just as they come to hand. Or it is done in this way: -A heap is made of the corpses, and a foot or two of earth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_571" id="Page_571">[571]</a></span> -is heaped up over them, and then it has the appearance of -a tumulus. In a few days rain comes on and washes the -covering off the festering dead bodies! but what does that -matter? The nimble, jolly grave-diggers do not look so -far forward. For jolly, merry workmen they are, that -one must allow. Songs are piped out there, and all kinds -of dubious jokes made—nay, sometimes a dance of hyenas -is danced round the open trench. Whether life is still -stirring in several of the bodies that are shovelled into it -or are covered with the earth, they give themselves no -trouble to think. The thing is inevitable, for the stiff -cramp often comes on after wounds. Many who have -been saved by accident have told of the danger of being -buried alive which they have escaped. But how many -are there of those who are not able to tell anything! If a -man has once got a foot or two of earth over his mouth he -may well hold his tongue.”</p> - - -<h3>Before Sedan</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Austin Dobson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet and essayist, born 1840)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Here in this leafy place</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Quiet he lies,</div> - <div class="verse">Cold, with his sightless face</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Turned to the skies;</div> - <div class="verse">’Tis but another dead;</div> - <div class="verse">All you can say is said.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_572" id="Page_572">[572]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Carry his body hence,—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Kings must have slaves;</div> - <div class="verse">Kings climb to eminence</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Over men’s graves;</div> - <div class="verse">So this man’s eye is dim;—</div> - <div class="verse">Throw the earth over him.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Doubt</h3> - -<p class="center">(<i>From “The Present Hour”</i>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Percy Mackaye</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(One of a group of six sonnets, entitled “Carnage,” written in -September, 1914)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">So thin, so frail the opalescent ice</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where yesterday, in lordly pageant, rose</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The monumental nations—the repose</div> - <div class="verse">Of continents at peace! Realities</div> - <div class="verse">Solid as earth they seemed; yet in a trice</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their bastions crumbled in the surging floes</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of unconceivable, inhuman woes,</div> - <div class="verse">Gulfed in a mad, unmeaning sacrifice.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We, who survive that world-quake, cower and start,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Searching our hidden souls with dark surmise:</div> - <div class="verse">So thin, so frail—is reason? Patient art—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Is it all a mockery, and love all lies?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Who sees the lurking Hun in childhood’s eyes?</div> - <div class="verse">Is hell so near to every human heart?</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_573" id="Page_573">[573]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Wife of Flanders</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Gilbert K. Chesterton</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_180">180</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Low and brown barns, thatched and repatched and tattered,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where I had seven sons until to-day—</div> - <div class="verse">A little hill of hay your spur has scattered....</div> - <div class="verse indent2">This is not Paris. You have lost your way.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">You, staring at your sword to find it brittle,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Surprised at the surprise that was your plan;</div> - <div class="verse">Who, shaking and breaking barriers not a little,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Find never more the death-door of Sedan.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Must I for more than carnage call you claimant,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Pay you a penny for each son you slay?</div> - <div class="verse">Man, the whole globe in gold were no repayment</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For what you have lost. And how shall I repay?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">What is the price of that red spark that caught me</div> - <div class="verse indent2">From a kind farm that never had a name?</div> - <div class="verse">What is the price of that dead man they brought me?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For other dead men do not look the same.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">How should I pay for one poor graven steeple</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Whereon you shattered what you shall not know?</div> - <div class="verse">How should I pay you, miserable people?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">How should I pay you everything you owe?</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_574" id="Page_574">[574]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Unhappy, can I give you back your honor?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Tho’ I forgave, would any man forget?</div> - <div class="verse">While all our great green earth has, trampled on her,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The treason and terror of the night we met.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Not any more in vengeance or in pardon,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">One old wife bargains for a bean that’s hers,</div> - <div class="verse">You have no word to break; no heart to harden.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ride on and prosper. You have lost your spurs.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Buttons</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Carl Sandburg</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American poet)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I have been watching the war map slammed up for advertising in front of the newspaper office.</div> - <div class="verse">Buttons—red and yellow buttons—blue and black buttons—are shoved back and forth across the map.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">A laughing young man, sunny with freckles,</div> - <div class="verse">Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd,</div> - <div class="verse">And then fixes a yellow button one inch west</div> - <div class="verse">And follows the yellow button with a black button one inch west.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in a red soak along a river edge,</div> - <div class="verse">Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling death in their throats.)</div> - <div class="verse">Who by Christ would guess what it cost to move two buttons one inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing to us?</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_575" id="Page_575">[575]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Wine Press</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Alfred Noyes</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet, born 1880)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">A Murdered man, ten miles away,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Will hardly shake your peace,</div> - <div class="verse">Like one red stain upon your hand;</div> - <div class="verse">And a tortured child in a distant land</div> - <div class="verse">Will never check one smile to-day,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Or bid one fiddle cease.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h4><i>The News</i></h4> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">It comes along a little wire,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Sunk in a deep sea;</div> - <div class="verse">It thins in the clubs to a little smoke</div> - <div class="verse">Between one joke and another joke,</div> - <div class="verse">For a city in flames is less than the fire</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That comforts you and me.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h4><i>The Diplomats</i></h4> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Each was honest after his way,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Lukewarm in faith, and old;</div> - <div class="verse">And blood, to them, was only a word,</div> - <div class="verse">And the point of a phrase their only sword,</div> - <div class="verse">And the cost of war, they reckoned it</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In little disks of gold.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They were cleanly groomed. They were not to be bought.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And their cigars were good.</div> - <div class="verse">But they had pulled so many strings</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_576" id="Page_576">[576]</a></span> - <div class="verse">In the tinselled puppet-show of kings</div> - <div class="verse">That, when they talked of war, they thought</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of sawdust, not of blood;</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Not of the crimson tempest</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where the shattered city falls:</div> - <div class="verse">They thought, behind their varnished doors,</div> - <div class="verse">Of diplomats, ambassadors,</div> - <div class="verse">Budgets, and loans and boundary-lines,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Coercions and re-calls.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h4><i>The Charge</i></h4> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse"><em>Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter!</em></div> - <div class="verse indent2">The cold machines whirred on.</div> - <div class="verse">And strange things crawled amongst the wheat</div> - <div class="verse">With entrails dragging round their feet,</div> - <div class="verse">And over the foul red shambles</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A fearful sunlight shone....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The maxims cracked like cattle-whips</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Above the struggling hordes.</div> - <div class="verse">They rolled and plunged and writhed like snakes</div> - <div class="verse">In the trampled wheat and the blackthorn brakes,</div> - <div class="verse">And the lightnings leapt among them</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Like clashing crimson swords.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The rifles flogged their wallowing herds,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Flogged them down to die.</div> - <div class="verse">Down on their slain the slayers lay,</div> - <div class="verse">And the shrapnel thrashed them into the clay,</div> - <div class="verse">And tossed their limbs like tattered birds</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Thro’ a red volcanic sky.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_577" id="Page_577">[577]</a></span></p> - -<h3>War</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Songs of Joy”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William H. Davies</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(An English poet whose “Autobiography of a Super-tramp” was -given to the world with an introduction by Bernard Shaw)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ye Liberals and Conservatives,</div> - <div class="verse">Have pity on our human lives,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Waste not more blood on human strife;</div> - <div class="verse">Until we know some way to use</div> - <div class="verse">This human blood we take or lose,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">’Tis sin to sacrifice our life.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">When pigs are stuck we save their blood</div> - <div class="verse">And make puddings for our food,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The sweetest and the cheapest meat;</div> - <div class="verse">And many a woman, man and boy</div> - <div class="verse">Have ate those puddings with great joy,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And oft-times in the open street.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Let’s not have war till we can make,</div> - <div class="verse">Of this sweet life we lose or take,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Some kind of pudding of man’s gore;</div> - <div class="verse">So that the clergy in each parish</div> - <div class="verse">May save the lives of those that famish</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Because meat’s dear and times are poor.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_578" id="Page_578">[578]</a></span></p> - -<h3>In Praise of the Warrior</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Don Quixote”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Miguel de Cervantes</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Best known of Spanish novelists, 1547-1616; himself a soldier, -captured and made a galley-slave in Algiers)</p> - -<p>I am not a barbarian, and I love letters, but let us -beware of according them pre-eminence over arms, or -even an equality with arms. The man of letters, it is very -true, instructs and illuminates his fellows, softens manners, -elevates minds, and teaches us justice, a beautiful and -sublime science. But the warrior makes us observe -justice. His object is to procure us the first and sweetest -of blessings, peace, gentlest peace, so necessary to human -happiness. This peace, adorable blessing, gift divine, -source of happiness, this peace is the object of war. The -warrior labors to procure it for us, and the warrior therefore -performs the most useful labor in the world.</p> - - -<h3>Song of the Exposition</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Walt Whitman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Away with themes of war! away with War itself!</div> - <div class="verse">Hence from my shuddering sight, to never more return, that show of blacken’d, mutilated corpses!</div> - <div class="verse">That hell unpent, and raid of blood—fit for wild tigers, or for lop-tongued wolves—not reasoning men!</div> - <div class="verse">And in its stead speed Industry’s campaigns!</div> - <div class="verse">With thy undaunted armies, Engineering!</div> - <div class="verse">Thy pennants, Labor, loosen’d to the breeze!</div> - <div class="verse">Thy bugles sounding loud and clear!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_579" id="Page_579">[579]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Woman and War</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Woman and Labor”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Olive Schreiner</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_240">240</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_504">504</a>)</p> - -<p>In supplying the men for the carnage of a battlefield, -women have not merely lost actually more blood, and -gone through a more acute anguish and weariness, in the -months of bearing and in the final agony of child-birth, -than has been experienced by the men who cover it; but, -in the months of rearing that follow, the women of the -race go through a long, patiently endured strain which no -knapsacked soldier on his longest march has ever more -than equalled; while, even in the matter of death, in all -civilized societies, the probability that the average woman -will die in child-birth is immeasurably greater than the -probability that the average male will die in battle.</p> - -<p>There is, perhaps, no woman, whether she have borne -children, or be merely potentially a child-bearer, who -could look down upon a battlefield covered with slain, -but the thought would rise in her, “So many mothers’ -sons! So many young bodies brought into the world to -lie there! So many months of weariness and pain while -bones and muscles were shaped within! So many hours -of anguish and struggle that breath might be! So many -baby mouths drawing life at women’s breasts;—all this, -that men might lie with glazed eyeballs, and swollen faces, -and fixed, blue, unclosed mouths, and great limbs tossed—this, -that an acre of ground might be manured with human -flesh, that next year’s grass or poppies or karoo bushes may -spring up greener and redder, where they have lain, or that -the sand of a plain may have the glint of white bones!”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_580" id="Page_580">[580]</a></span> -And we cry, “Without an inexorable cause, this must not -be!” No woman who is a woman says of a human body, -“It is nothing!”</p> - - -<h3>The Arsenal at Springfield</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Probably the most popular of American poets, 1807-1882)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms;</div> - <div class="verse">But from their silent pipes no anthem pealing</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Startles the villages with strange alarms.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ah! what a sound will rise—how wild and dreary—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">When the death-angel touches those swift keys!</div> - <div class="verse">What loud lament and dismal Miserere</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Will mingle with their awful symphonies!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The cries of agony, the endless groan,</div> - <div class="verse">Which, through the ages that have gone before us,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In long reverberations reach our own....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Is it, O man, with such discordant noises,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With such accursed instruments as these,</div> - <div class="verse">Thou drownest Nature’s sweet and kindly voices,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And; arrest the celestial harmonies?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Were half the power that fills the world with terror,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,</div> - <div class="verse">Given to redeem the human mind from error,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">There were no need of arsenals or forts.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_581" id="Page_581">[581]</a></span></p> - -<h3>War and Peace</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Benjamin Franklin</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American statesman, 1706-1790)</p> - -<p>I join with you most cordially in rejoicing at the -return of peace. I hope it will be lasting, and that -mankind will at length, as they call themselves reasonable -creatures, have reason enough to settle their differences -without cutting throats; for, in my opinion, there never -was a good war or a bad peace. What vast additions -to the conveniences and comforts of life might mankind -have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been -employed in works of utility! What an extension of -agriculture, even to the tops of the mountains; what -rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what -bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, -edifices and improvements, rendering England a complete -paradise, might not have been obtained by spending -those millions in doing good, which in the last war have -been spent in doing mischief—in bringing misery into -thousands of families, and destroying the lives of so many -working people, who might have performed the useful -labors.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_582" id="Page_582">[582]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>A Prayer of the Peoples</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Present Hour”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Percy Mackaye</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_561">561</a>, <a href="#Page_572">572</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">God of us who kill our kind!</div> - <div class="verse">Master of this blood-tracked Mind</div> - <div class="verse">Which from wolf and Caliban</div> - <div class="verse">Staggers toward the star of Man—</div> - <div class="verse">Now, on Thy cathedral stair,</div> - <div class="verse">God, we cry to Thee in prayer!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Where our stifled anguish bleeds</div> - <div class="verse">Strangling through Thine organ reeds,</div> - <div class="verse">Where our voiceless songs suspire</div> - <div class="verse">From the corpses in Thy choir—</div> - <div class="verse">Through Thy charred and shattered nave,</div> - <div class="verse">God, we cry on Thee to save!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Save us from our tribal gods!</div> - <div class="verse">From the racial powers, whose rods—</div> - <div class="verse">Wreathed with stinging serpents—stir</div> - <div class="verse">Odin and old Jupiter</div> - <div class="verse">From their ancient hells of hate</div> - <div class="verse">To invade Thy dawning state....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Lord, our God! to whom, from clay,</div> - <div class="verse">Blood and mire, Thy peoples pray—</div> - <div class="verse">Not from Thy cathedral’s stair</div> - <div class="verse">Thou hearest:—Thou criest <em>through</em> our prayer</div> - <div class="verse">For our prayer is but the gate:</div> - <div class="verse">We, who pray, ourselves are fate.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_583" id="Page_583">[583]</a></span></p> - -<h3>War</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By the Great Indian, Chief Joseph</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Hear me, my warriors; my heart is sick and sad;</div> - <div class="verse">Our chiefs are killed,</div> - <div class="verse">The old men are all dead,</div> - <div class="verse">It is cold and we have no blankets;</div> - <div class="verse">The little children are freezing to death.</div> - <div class="verse">Hear me, my warriors; my heart is sick and sad;</div> - <div class="verse">From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>A Project for a Perpetual Peace</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Jean Jacques Rousseau</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A document published 1756 in which the French philosopher outlined -in detail a plan for a European federation, which seems -in 1915 to have become the next step in civilization)</p> - -<p>As a more noble, useful, and delightful Project never -engaged the human mind, than that of establishing -a perpetual peace among the contending nations of -Europe, never did a writer lay a better claim to the attention -of the public than he who points out the means to -carry such a design into execution. It is indeed very -difficult for a man of probity and sensibility, not to be -fired with a kind of enthusiasm on such a subject; nay, -I am not clear that the very illusions of a heart truly -humane, whose warmth makes everything easily surmountable, -are not in this case more eligible than that -rigid and forbidding prudence, which finds in its own -indifference and want of public spirit, the chief obstacle -to everything that tends to promote the public good.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_584" id="Page_584">[584]</a></span></p> - -<p>I doubt not that many of my readers will be forearmed -with incredulity, to withstand the pleasing temptation -of being persuaded; and indeed I sincerely lament their -dullness in mistaking obstinacy for wisdom. But I flatter -myself, that many an honest mind will sympathize with -me in that delightful emotion, with which I take up the -pen to treat of a subject so greatly interesting to the world. -I am going to take a view, at least in imagination, of mankind -united by love and friendship: I am going to take a -contemplative prospect of an agreeable and peaceful -society of brethren, living in constant harmony, directed -by the same maxims, and joint sharers of one common -felicity; while, realizing to myself so affecting a picture, -the representation of such imaginary happiness will give -me the momentary enjoyment of a pleasure actually -present.</p> - - -<h3>Let the People Vote on War</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Allen L. Benson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American Socialist writer, born 1871)</p> - -<p>Each voter should sign his or her name to the ballot -that is voted. In counting, the ballots for war -should be kept apart from the ballots against war. In -the event of more than half of the population voting for -war, those who voted for war should be sent to the front -in the order in which they appeared at their respective -polling places. Nobody who voted against war should be -called to serve until everybody who voted for war had -been sent to the front.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 424px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo584" id="illo584">[illo584]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_584f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>WAR</p> - -<p>ARNOLD BÖCKLIN</p> - -<p>(<i>German painter, 1827-1901. Painting in the Dresden Gallery</i>)</p></div> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo585" id="illo585">[illo585]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_585f.jpg" alt="" /> - -<div class="caption"> - -<p> -LONDON<br /> -<br /> -PAUL GUSTAVE DORÉ<br /> -<br /> -<i>French illustrator, 1833-1883.</i><br /> -<br /> -(<i>His pictures for Dante’s “Inferno” are well known</i>) -</p> -</div> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_585" id="Page_585">[585]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Anti-Militarism</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Red Wave”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Joseph-Henry Rosny, the Elder</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(French novelist, member of the Académie des Goncourts; born -1856. A novel of revolutionary Syndicalism. The present scene -describes a debate organized between champions of the revolutionary -and the conservative labor unions, the “Reds” and the “Yellows”; -a grand Homeric combat of ideas, in which the audience is -wrought to a furious pitch of excitement, and does as much talking -as the orators. In the following extract, from about forty pages of -mingled eloquence and humor, the champion of the “Reds” announces -“the grave and dreadful problem of anti-militarism”)</p></div> - -<p>A long shudder agitated the hostile crowds. All -the wild beasts quivered in their cages. Rougemont, -immobile, scarcely raised his hand; never before -had his voice sounded more grave and more pathetic.</p> - -<p>“Ah, yes! Question profound and dreadful. No one -has been troubled by it more than I, for I am not among -those bold internationalists who deny their country. -I love my land of France. To make our happiness perfect, -we must have the land of France. But who would dare -to say that we, the poor, are any other thing upon that -land than food for suffering and food for barracks? The -worst Prussian, provided that he owns a coin of a hundred -sous—is he not superior to the unhappy wretch who -rummages in empty pockets? All the pleasures, all the -beauty, all the luxury, our most beautiful daughters, -belong to the rich cosmopolitan: he possesses the enchanter’s -ring. If you have nothing, you will live more -a stranger in your country than the dog of a swindling -millionaire. If you have nothing, you will be insulted, -scorned, hunted, locked in prison for vagabondage. <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">La<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_586" id="Page_586">[586]</a></span> -patrie!</i> <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">La patrie</i> of the poor! It is a fable, a symbol, -an inscription upon a military-list or a school-book—the -most bitter derision! Your right, unhappy ones—it is to -suffer and defend the soil, which belongs to your master, to -him who possesses. For him, for him alone, our France -devotes each year a billion francs for army and navy....</p> - -<p>“It is necessary purely and simply to suppress the -budget of the army and navy,” thundered Rougemont, -with such force that he broke the tumult. “France -must give all at once, without hesitation, the example -of disarmament. And that would be a thing so grand -and so beautiful that the entire universe would applaud, -that all humanity would turn toward her. From that -day alone we should be at the head of the nations, and -our country would become the country of free men!”</p> - -<p>“Under the heel of Wilhelm!”</p> - -<p>“A Poland!”</p> - -<p>“Guts for the cats!”</p> - -<p>“Sold! Rubbish! Meat for sheenies!”</p> - -<p>“... living in boiling water like lobsters!”</p> - -<p>All at once, the tumult sank. The voice of the orator -forced itself upon the ear, high as a bell, precise as a -clarion. “Free, superb, and triumphant! Queen of the -peoples, goddess of the unfortunate! If we should disarm, -before ten years, France would become a land of -pilgrimage, the Mecca of men. Before twenty years, the -other nations would have followed her example. As for -making of us a Poland, let them try it! Have you then -forgotten the teachings of history? Do you not know -that our grand armies, our innumerable victories—we -have won as many victories as all the rest of Europe -together—have only ended in the crushing of Waterloo -and the collapse of Sedan? On the contrary, Italy, dis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_587" id="Page_587">[587]</a></span>membered -for centuries, Italy, which cannot count its -defeats, is become a free nation. That is because it is -inhabited by a race, clean and well-defined, upon which -the foreigner has been unable to impress his mark. -France enslaved, she, the most intelligent of nations, she -who has had the most influence upon minds and hearts! -Come now, that is not possible, that will never happen! -But the people who would howl indignation at the dismembering -of a disarmed France, would let a war-like -France go down to ruin: she would be only one country -like the others. So, I repeat it without scruple: it is -necessary that we should give the magnificent example of -disarmament. Only then shall we be a nation loved -and admired among nations. Only then will all hearts -turn toward us. Only then will the idea that anyone -could touch France seem a sacrilege such as no tyrant -would risk!”</p> - - -<h3>The Dawn</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Émile Verhaeren</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(In this play the Belgian poet has voiced his hopes for the regeneration -of human society. The city of Oppidomagne is besieged -by a hostile army, and the revolutionists in both armies conspire and -revolt. The gates of the city are thrown open, and the end of war -declared. A captain in the hostile army is speaking over the body -of Hérénian, leader of the revolutionists in the city)</p></div> - -<p>I was his disciple, and his unknown friend. His books -were my Bible. It is men like this who give birth to -men like me, faithful, long obscure, but whom fortune -permits, in one overwhelming hour, to realize the supreme -dream of their master. If fatherlands are fair, sweet to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_588" id="Page_588">[588]</a></span> -the heart, dear to the memory, armed nations on the -frontiers are tragic and deadly; and the whole world is -yet bristling with nations. It is in their teeth that we -throw them this example of our concord. (Cheers.) -They will understand some day the immortal thing accomplished -here, in this illustrious Oppidomagne, whence -the loftiest ideas of humanity have taken flight, one -after another, through all the ages. For the first time -since the beginning of power, since brains have reckoned -time, two races, one renouncing its victory, the other its -humbled pride, are made one in an embrace. The whole -earth must needs have quivered, all the blood, all the sap -of the earth must have flowed to the heart of things. -Concord and good will have conquered hate. (Cheers.) -Human strife, in its form of bloodshed, has been gainsaid. -A new beacon shines on the horizon of future storms. Its -steady rays shall dazzle all eyes, haunt all brains, magnetize -all desires. Needs must we, after all these trials and -sorrows, come at last into port, to whose entrance it points -the way, and where it gilds the tranquil masts and vessels.</p> - -<p>(Enthusiasm of all; the people shout and embrace. -The former enemies rise and surround the speaker. Those -of Oppidomagne stretch their arms towards him.)</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_589" id="Page_589">[589]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Springtime of Peace</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Studies in Socialism”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Jean Léon Jaurés</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Editor of <cite>l’Humanité</cite>, and leader of the French Socialist movement, -1859-1914; probably the most eminent of Socialist parliamentarians, -assassinated by a fanatic at the outbreak of the war -with Germany. The following is the peroration of a speech -delivered at an Anglo-French parliamentary dinner, 1903)</p></div> - -<p>The majesty of suffering labor is no longer dumb: -it speaks now with a million tongues, and it asks -the nations not to increase the ills which crush down the -workers by an added burden of mistrust and hate, by wars -and the expectation of wars.</p> - -<p>Gentlemen, you may ask how and when and in what -form this longing for international concord will express -itself to some purpose.... I can only answer you by a -parable which I gleaned by fragments from the legends of -Merlin, the magician, from the Arabian Nights, and from -a book that is still unread.</p> - -<p>Once upon a time there was an enchanted forest. It -had been stripped of all verdure, it was wild and forbidding. -The trees, tossed by the bitter winter wind that never -ceased, struck one another with a sound as of breaking -swords. When at last, after a long series of freezing -nights and sunless days that seemed like nights, all living -things trembled with the first call of spring, the trees -became afraid of the sap that began to move within them. -And the solitary and bitter spirit that had its dwelling -within the hard bark of each of them said very low, with -a shudder that came up from the deepest roots: “Have a -care! If thou art the first to risk yielding to the wooing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_590" id="Page_590">[590]</a></span> -of the new season, if thou art the first to turn thy lancelike -buds into blossoms and leaves, their delicate raiment -will be torn by the rough blows of the trees that have -been slower to put forth leaves and flowers.”</p> - -<p>And the proud and melancholy spirit that was shut up -within the great Druidical oak spoke to its tree with -peculiar insistence: “And wilt thou, too, seek to join the -universal love-feast, thou whose noble branches have -been broken by the storm?”</p> - -<p>Thus, in the enchanted forest, mutual distrust drove -back the sap, and prolonged the death-like winter even -after the call of spring.</p> - -<p>What happened at last? By what mysterious influence -was the grim charm broken? Did some tree find the -courage to act alone, like those April poplars that break -into a shower of verdure, and give from afar the signal -for a renewal of all life? Or did a warmer and more -life-giving beam start the sap moving in all the trees at -once? For lo! in a single day the whole forest burst forth -into a magnificent flowering of joy and peace.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Micah</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hebrew prophet, B. C. 700)</p> - -<p>He shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong -nations afar off: and they shall beat their swords -into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: -nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither -shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every -man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall -make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts -hath spoken it.</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_591" id="Page_591">[591]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK XII</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><i>Country</i></p> - -<p>The higher patriotism; the duty of man to his country as seen -from the point of view of those who would make the country the -parent and friend of all who dwell in it.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_592" id="Page_592">[592]</a><br /><a name="Page_593" id="Page_593">[593]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Our Country</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Read July 4, 1883</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Greenleaf Whittier</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(New England Quaker poet, 1807-1892; a prominent anti-slavery -advocate)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We give thy natal day to hope,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">O country of our love and prayer!</div> - <div class="verse">Thy way is down no fatal slope,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But up to freer sun and air.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Tried as by furnace fires, and yet</div> - <div class="verse indent2">By God’s grace only stronger made,</div> - <div class="verse">In future task before thee set</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Thou shalt not lack the old-time aid.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Great, without seeking to be great</div> - <div class="verse indent2">By fraud of conquest; rich in gold,</div> - <div class="verse">But richer in the large estate</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of virtue which thy children hold.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With peace that comes of purity,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And strength to simple justice due—</div> - <div class="verse">So runs our loyal dream of thee;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">God of our fathers! make it true.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O land of lands! to thee we give</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Our love, our trust, our service free;</div> - <div class="verse">For thee thy sons shall nobly live,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And at thy need shall die for thee.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_594" id="Page_594">[594]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The New Freedom</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Woodrow Wilson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(President of the United States, born 1856. The following is from -his campaign speeches, 1912)</p> - -<p>Are we preserving freedom in this land of ours, the hope -of all the earth? Have we, inheritors of this continent -and of the ideals to which the fathers consecrated -it,—have we maintained them, realizing them, as each -generation must, anew? Are we, in the consciousness -that the life of man is pledged to higher levels here than -elsewhere, striving still to bear aloft the standards of -liberty and hope; or, disillusioned and defeated, are we -feeling the disgrace of having had a free field in which -to do new things and of not having done them?</p> - -<p>The answer must be, I am sure, that we have been in -a fair way of failure,—tragic failure. And we stand in -danger of utter failure yet, except we fulfil speedily the -determination we have reached, to deal with the new and -subtle tyrannies according to their deserts. Don’t deceive -yourselves for a moment as to the power of the -great interests which now dominate our development. -They are so great that it is almost an open question -whether the government of the United States can dominate -them or not. Go one step further, make their organized -power permanent, and it may be too late to turn -back. The roads diverge at the point where we stand.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_595" id="Page_595">[595]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>An Ode in Time of Hesitation</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Vaughn Moody</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(In these noble words the poet voices his pain at the Philippine war, -and the wave of “imperialism” which then swept over -America)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Was it for this our fathers kept the law?</div> - <div class="verse">This crown shall crown their struggle and their ruth?</div> - <div class="verse">Are we the eagle nation Milton saw</div> - <div class="verse">Mewing its mighty youth,</div> - <div class="verse">Soon to possess the mountain winds of truth,</div> - <div class="verse">And be a swift familiar of the sun</div> - <div class="verse">Where aye before God’s face his trumpets run?</div> - <div class="verse">Or have we but the talons and the maw,</div> - <div class="verse">And for the abject likeness of our heart</div> - <div class="verse">Shall some less lordly bird be set apart?—</div> - <div class="verse">Some gross-billed wader where the swamps are fat?</div> - <div class="verse">Some gorger in the sun? Some prowler with the bat?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ah, no!</div> - <div class="verse">We have not fallen so.</div> - <div class="verse">We are our fathers’ sons: let those who lead us know!...</div> - <div class="verse">We charge you, ye who lead us,</div> - <div class="verse">Breathe on their chivalry no hint of stain!</div> - <div class="verse">Turn not their new-world victories to gain!</div> - <div class="verse">One least leaf plucked for chaffer from the bays</div> - <div class="verse">Of their dear praise,</div> - <div class="verse">One jot of their pure conquest put to hire,</div> - <div class="verse">The implacable republic will require;</div> - <div class="verse">With clamor, in the glare and gaze of noon,</div> - <div class="verse">Or subtly, coming as a thief at night,</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_596" id="Page_596">[596]</a></span> - <div class="verse">But surely, very surely, slow or soon</div> - <div class="verse">That insult deep we deeply will requite.</div> - <div class="verse">Tempt not our weakness, our cupidity!</div> - <div class="verse">For save we let the island men go free,</div> - <div class="verse">Those baffled and dislaureled ghosts</div> - <div class="verse">Will curse us from the lamentable coasts</div> - <div class="verse">Where walk the frustrate dead,</div> - <div class="verse">The cup of trembling shall be drained quite,</div> - <div class="verse">Eaten the sour bread of astonishment,</div> - <div class="verse">With ashes of the heart shall be made white</div> - <div class="verse">Our hair, and wailing shall be in the tent;</div> - <div class="verse">Then on your guiltier head</div> - <div class="verse">Shall our intolerable self-disdain</div> - <div class="verse">Wreak suddenly its anger and its pain;</div> - <div class="verse">For manifest in that disastrous light</div> - <div class="verse">We shall discern the right</div> - <div class="verse">And do it, tardily.—O ye who lead,</div> - <div class="verse">Take heed!</div> - <div class="verse">Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we will smite.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Price of Liberty</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Jefferson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>)</p> - -<p>Cherish the spirit of our people and keep alive -their attention. Do not be too severe upon their -errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once -they become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, -and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors, -shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our -general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_597" id="Page_597">[597]</a></span> -experience declares that man is the only animal which -devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to -the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of -the rich on the poor.</p> - - -<h3>To the Goddess of Liberty</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>New York Harbor</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George Sterling</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_504">504</a>, <a href="#Page_552">552</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Oh! is it bale-fire in thy brazen hand—</div> - <div class="verse">The traitor-light set on betraying coasts</div> - <div class="verse">To lure to doom the mariner? Art thou</div> - <div class="verse">Indeed that Freedom, gracious and supreme,</div> - <div class="verse">By France once sighted over seas of blood—</div> - <div class="verse">A beacon to the ages, and their hope,</div> - <div class="verse">A star against the midnight of the race,</div> - <div class="verse">A vision, an announcement? Art thou she</div> - <div class="verse">For whom our fathers fought at Lexington</div> - <div class="verse">And trod the ways of death at Gettysburg?</div> - <div class="verse">Thy torch is lit, thy steadfast hand upheld,</div> - <div class="verse">Before our ocean-portals. For a sign</div> - <div class="verse">Men set thee there to welcome—loving men,</div> - <div class="verse">With faith in man. Thou wast upraised to tell,</div> - <div class="verse">To simple souls that seek from over-seas</div> - <div class="verse">Our rumored liberty, that here no chains</div> - <div class="verse">Are on the people, here no kings can stand,</div> - <div class="verse">Nor the old tyranny confound mankind,</div> - <div class="verse">Sapping with craft the ramparts of the Law</div> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_598" id="Page_598">[598]</a></span></div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">For such, O high presentment of their dream!</div> - <div class="verse">Thy pathless sandals wait upon the stone,</div> - <div class="verse">Thy tranquil face looks evermore to sea:</div> - <div class="verse">Now turn, and know the treason at thy back!</div> - <div class="verse">Turn to the anarchs’ turrets, and behold</div> - <div class="verse">The cunning ones that reap where others sow!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In those great strongholds lifted to the sun</div> - <div class="verse">They plot dominion. Thronèd greeds conspire,</div> - <div class="verse">Half allied in a brotherhood malign,</div> - <div class="verse">Against the throneless many....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Would One might pour within thy breast of bronze</div> - <div class="verse">Spirit and life! Then should thy loyal hand</div> - <div class="verse">Cast down its torch, and thy deep voice should cry:</div> - <div class="verse">“Turn back! Turn back, O liberative ships!</div> - <div class="verse">Be warned, ye voyagers! From tyranny</div> - <div class="verse">To vaster tyranny ye come! Ye come</div> - <div class="verse">From realms that in my morning twilight wait</div> - <div class="verse">My radiant invasion. But these shores</div> - <div class="verse">Have known me and renounced me. I am raised</div> - <div class="verse">In mockery, and here the forfeit day</div> - <div class="verse">Deepens to West, and my indignant Star</div> - <div class="verse">Would hide her shame with darkness and the sea—</div> - <div class="verse">A sun of doom forecasting on the Land</div> - <div class="verse">The shadow of the sceptre and the sword.”</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_599" id="Page_599">[599]</a></span></p> - -<h3>To the United States Senate</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Vachel Lindsay</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Upon the arrival of the news that the United States Senate had -declared the election of William Lorimer good and valid)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And must the Senator from Illinois</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Be this squat thing, with blinking, half-closed eyes?</div> - <div class="verse">This brazen gutter idol, reared to power</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Upon a leering pyramid of lies?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And must the Senator from Illinois</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Be the world’s proverb of successful shame,</div> - <div class="verse">Dazzling all State house flies that steal and steal,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Who, when the sad State spares them, count it fame?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">If once or twice within his new won hall</div> - <div class="verse indent2">His vote had counted for the broken men;</div> - <div class="verse">If in his early days he wrought some good—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We might a great soul’s sins forgive him then.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But must the Senator from Illinois</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Be vindicated by fat kings of gold?</div> - <div class="verse">And must he be belauded by the smirched,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The sleek, uncanny chiefs in lies grown old?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Be warned, O wanton ones, who shielded him—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Black wrath awaits. You all shall eat the dust.</div> - <div class="verse">You dare not say: “Tomorrow will bring peace;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Let us make merry, and go forth in lust.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">What will you trading frogs do on a day</div> - <div class="verse indent2">When Armageddon thunders thro’ the land;</div> - <div class="verse">When each sad patriot rises, mad with shame,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">His ballot or his musket in his hand?</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_600" id="Page_600">[600]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Duty of Civil Disobedience</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Henry David Thoreau</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_295">295</a>)</p> - -<p>What is the price-current of an honest man and -patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, -and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in -earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, -for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer -have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote -and a feeble countenance and God-speed, to the right, -as it goes by them.</p> - - -<h3>A Prophecy</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Written during the Revolutionary War</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Jefferson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_596">596</a>)</p> - -<p>The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our -rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A -single zealot may become persecutor, and better men be -his victims. It can never be too often repeated that the -time for fixing essential right, on a legal basis, is while -our rulers are honest, ourselves united. <em>From the conclusion -of this war we shall be going down hill.</em> It will not -then be necessary to resort every moment to the people -for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their -rights disregarded. They will forget themselves in the -sole faculty of making money, and will never think of -uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_601" id="Page_601">[601]</a></span> -shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at -the conclusion of this war, will be heavier and heavier, -till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.</p> - - -<h3>An Election Campaign in New York</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The House of Bondage”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Reginald Wright Kauffman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>)</p> - -<p>For many days previously, any outsider, reading the -newspapers or attending the mass-meetings in Cooper -Union and Carnegie Hall, would have supposed that a -prodigious battle was waging and that the result would -be, until the last shot, in doubt. There were terrible scareheads, -brutal cartoons, and extra editions. As the real -problem was whether one organization of needy men -should remain in control, or whether another should -replace it, there were few matters of policy to be discussed; -and so the speechmaking and the printing resolved -themselves into personal investigations, and attacks -upon character. Private detectives were hired, records -searched, neighbors questioned, old enemies sought out, -and family feuds revived. Desks were broken open, -letters bought, anonymous communications mailed, -boyhood indiscretions unearthed, and women and men -hired to wheedle, to commit perjury, to entrap. Whatever -was discovered, forged, stolen, manufactured—whatever -truth or falsehood could be seized by whatever -means—was blazoned in the papers, shrieked by the -newsboys, bawled from the cart-tails at the corners under<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_602" id="Page_602">[602]</a></span> -the campaign banners, in the light of the torches and before -the cheering crowds. It would be all over in a very -short while; in a very short while there would pass one -another, with pleasant smiles, in court, at church, and -along Broadway, the distinguished gentlemen that were -now, before big audiences, calling one another adulterers -and thieves; but it is customary for distinguished gentlemen -so to call one another during a manly campaign in -this successful democracy of ours, and it seems to be an -engrossing occupation while the chance endures.</p> - - -<h3>The Doom of Empires</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert G. Ingersoll</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American lawyer and lecturer, 1833-1899)</p> - -<p>The traveler standing amid the ruins of ancient cities -and empires, seeing on every side the fallen pillar -and the prostrate wall, asks why did these cities fall, why -did these empires crumble? And the Ghost of the Past, -the wisdom of ages, answers: These temples, these -palaces, these cities, the ruins of which you stand upon, -were built by tyranny and injustice. The hands that -built them were unpaid. The backs that bore the burdens -also bore the marks of the lash. They were built by slaves -to satisfy the vanity and ambition of thieves and robbers. -For these reasons they are dust.</p> - -<p>Their civilization was a lie. Their laws merely regulated -robbery and established theft. They bought and -sold the bodies and souls of men, and the mournful wind -of desolation, sighing amid their crumbling ruins, is a -voice of prophetic warning to those who would repeat<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_603" id="Page_603">[603]</a></span> -the infamous experiment, uttering the great truth, that -no nation founded upon slavery, either of body or mind, -can stand.</p> - - -<h3>The Statue of Liberty</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>New York Harbor, A.D. 2900</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Arthur Upson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet, 1877-1908)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Here once, the records show, a land whose pride</div> - <div class="verse">Abode in Freedom’s watchword! And once here</div> - <div class="verse">The port of traffic for a hemisphere,</div> - <div class="verse">With great gold-piling cities at her side!</div> - <div class="verse">Tradition says, superbly once did bide</div> - <div class="verse">Their sculptured goddess on an island near,</div> - <div class="verse">With hospitable smile and torch kept clear</div> - <div class="verse">For all wild hordes that sought her o’er the tide.</div> - <div class="verse">’Twas centuries ago. But this is true:</div> - <div class="verse">Late the fond tyrant who misrules our land,</div> - <div class="verse">Bidding his serfs dig deep in marshes old,</div> - <div class="verse">Trembled, not knowing wherefore, as they drew</div> - <div class="verse">From out this swampy bed of ancient mould</div> - <div class="verse">A shattered torch held in a mighty hand.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Francis Bacon</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(English philosopher and statesman, father of modern scientific -thought; 1561-1626)</p> - -<p>Let states that aim at greatness take heed how their -nobility and gentlemen do multiply too fast. For -that maketh the common subject grow to be a peasant -and base swain, driven out of heart, and in effect but the -gentleman’s laborer.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_604" id="Page_604">[604]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Daniel Webster</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(New England statesman and orator, 1782-1852)</p> - -<p>The freest government cannot long endure when the -tendency of the law is to create a rapid accumulation -of property in the hands of a few, and to render the -masses poor and dependent.</p> - - -<h3>The Deserted Village</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Oliver Goldsmith</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet and novelist, 1728-1774)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Sweet-smiling village, loveliest of the lawn!</div> - <div class="verse">Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn;</div> - <div class="verse">Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,</div> - <div class="verse">And desolation saddens all thy green;</div> - <div class="verse">One only master grasps the whole domain,</div> - <div class="verse">And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain;</div> - <div class="verse">No more thy glassy brook reflects the day,</div> - <div class="verse">But, choked with sedges, works its weedy way;</div> - <div class="verse">Along thy glades, a solitary guest,</div> - <div class="verse">The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest;</div> - <div class="verse">Amidst thy desert walks the lapwing flies,</div> - <div class="verse">And tires their echoes with unvaried cries;</div> - <div class="verse">Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all,</div> - <div class="verse">And the long grass o’ertops the mouldering wall;</div> - <div class="verse">And, trembling, shrinking from the spoiler’s hand;</div> - <div class="verse">Far, far away thy children leave the land.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,</div> - <div class="verse">Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_605" id="Page_605">[605]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade—</div> - <div class="verse">A breath can make them, as a breath has made:</div> - <div class="verse">But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,</div> - <div class="verse">When once destroyed, can never be supplied.</div> - <div class="verse">A time there was, ere England’s griefs began,</div> - <div class="verse">When every rood of ground maintained its man;</div> - <div class="verse">For him light labor spread her wholesome store,</div> - <div class="verse">Just gave what life required, but gave no more:</div> - <div class="verse">His best companions, innocence and health;</div> - <div class="verse">And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But times are altered: trade’s unfeeling train</div> - <div class="verse">Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain;</div> - <div class="verse">Along the lawn, where scattered hamlets rose,</div> - <div class="verse">Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose;</div> - <div class="verse">And every want to luxury allied,</div> - <div class="verse">And every pang that folly pays to pride,</div> - <div class="verse">Those gentle hours that plenty bade to bloom,</div> - <div class="verse">Those calm desires that asked but little room,</div> - <div class="verse">Those healthful sports that graced the peaceful scene,</div> - <div class="verse">Lived in each look, and brightened all the green—</div> - <div class="verse">These, far departing, seek a kinder shore,</div> - <div class="verse">And rural mirth and manners are no more....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen, who survey</div> - <div class="verse">The rich man’s joys increase, the poor’s decay,</div> - <div class="verse">’Tis yours to judge how wide the limits stand</div> - <div class="verse">Between a splendid and a happy land.</div> - <div class="verse">Proud swells the tide with loads of freighted ore,</div> - <div class="verse">And shouting Folly hails them from her shore;</div> - <div class="verse">Hoards, e’en beyond the miser’s wish, abound,</div> - <div class="verse">And rich men flock from all the world around.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_606" id="Page_606">[606]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Yet count our gains; this wealth is but a name,</div> - <div class="verse">That leaves our useful products still the same.</div> - <div class="verse">Not so the loss: the man of wealth and pride</div> - <div class="verse">Takes up a space that many poor supplied;</div> - <div class="verse">Space for his lake, his park’s extended bounds,</div> - <div class="verse">Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds;</div> - <div class="verse">The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth,</div> - <div class="verse">Has robbed the neighboring fields of half their growth;</div> - <div class="verse">His seat, where solitary sports are seen,</div> - <div class="verse">Indignant spurns the cottage from the green;</div> - <div class="verse">Around the world each needful product flies,</div> - <div class="verse">For all the luxuries the world supplies;</div> - <div class="verse">While thus the land, adorned for pleasure all,</div> - <div class="verse">In barren splendor, feebly waits the fall....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Where then, ah! where, shall poverty reside,</div> - <div class="verse">To ‘scape the pressure of contiguous pride?</div> - <div class="verse">If, to some common’s fenceless limits strayed,</div> - <div class="verse">He drives his flock to pick the scanty blade,</div> - <div class="verse">Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide,</div> - <div class="verse">And even the bare-worn common is denied.</div> - <div class="verse">If to the city sped, what waits him there?</div> - <div class="verse">To see profusion that he must not share;</div> - <div class="verse">To see ten thousand baneful arts combined</div> - <div class="verse">To pamper luxury, and thin mankind;</div> - <div class="verse">To see each joy the sons of pleasure know</div> - <div class="verse">Extorted from his fellow-creatures’ woe.</div> - <div class="verse">Here while the courtier glitters in brocade,</div> - <div class="verse">There the pale artist plies the sickly trade;</div> - <div class="verse">Here while the proud their long-drawn pomps display,</div> - <div class="verse">There the black gibbet glooms beside the way.</div> - <div class="verse">The dome where Pleasure holds her midnight reign,</div> - <div class="verse">Here, richly decked, admits the gorgeous train;</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_607" id="Page_607">[607]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square—</div> - <div class="verse">The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare.</div> - <div class="verse">Sure scenes like these no troubles e’er annoy!</div> - <div class="verse">Sure these denote one universal joy!</div> - <div class="verse">Are these thy serious thoughts? Ah! turn thine eyes</div> - <div class="verse">Where the poor, houseless, shivering female lies;</div> - <div class="verse">She once, perhaps, in village plenty blest,</div> - <div class="verse">Has wept at tales of innocence distrest;</div> - <div class="verse">Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,</div> - <div class="verse">Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn;</div> - <div class="verse">Now lost to all—her friends, her virtue fled—</div> - <div class="verse">Near her betrayer’s door she lays her head;</div> - <div class="verse">And, pinched with cold, and shrinking from the shower,</div> - <div class="verse">With heavy heart deplores that luckless hour</div> - <div class="verse">When, idly first, ambitious of the town,</div> - <div class="verse">She left her wheel, and robes of country brown....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O luxury! thou curst by Heaven’s decree,</div> - <div class="verse">How ill exchanged are things like these for thee!</div> - <div class="verse">How do thy potions, with insidious joy,</div> - <div class="verse">Diffuse their pleasures only to destroy!</div> - <div class="verse">Kingdoms by thee, to sickly greatness grown,</div> - <div class="verse">Boast of a florid vigor not their own.</div> - <div class="verse">At every draught more large and large they grow,</div> - <div class="verse">A bloated mass of rank unwieldy woe;</div> - <div class="verse">Till sapped their strength, and every part unsound,</div> - <div class="verse">Down, down they sink, and spread a ruin round.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_608" id="Page_608">[608]</a></span></p> - -<h3>England in 1819</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Percy Bysshe Shelley</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_272">272</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow</div> - <div class="verse">Through public scorn—mud from a muddy spring,—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know,</div> - <div class="verse">But leech-like to their fainting country cling,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow—</div> - <div class="verse">A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">An army, which liberticide and prey</div> - <div class="verse">Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;</div> - <div class="verse">Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;</div> - <div class="verse">A Senate,—Time’s worst statute unrepealed,—</div> - <div class="verse">Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may</div> - <div class="verse">Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Victorian Age</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edward Carpenter</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_541">541</a>)</p> - -<p>I found myself—and without knowing where I was—in -the middle of that strange period of human evolution, -the Victorian Age, which in some respects, one now -thinks, marked the lowest ebb of modern civilized society; -a period in which not only commercialism in public life, -but cant in religion, pure materialism in science, futility -in social conventions, the worship of stocks and shares, -the starving of the human heart, the denial of the human<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_609" id="Page_609">[609]</a></span> -body and its needs, the huddling concealment of the body -in clothes, the “impure hush” on matters of sex, class-division, -contempt of manual labor, and the cruel barring -of women from every natural and useful expression of -their lives, were carried to an extremity of folly difficult -for us now to realize.</p> - - -<h3>Coronation Day</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The People of the Abyss”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Jack London</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_519">519</a>)</p> - -<p>Vivat Rex Eduardus! They crowned a king this -day, and there have been great rejoicing and elaborate -tomfoolery, and I am perplexed and saddened. -I never saw anything to compare with the pageant, -except Yankee circuses and Alhambra ballets; nor did -I ever see anything so hopeless and so tragic.</p> - -<p>To have enjoyed the Coronation procession, I should -have come straight from America to the Hotel Cecil, -and straight from the Hotel Cecil to a five-guinea seat -among the washed. My mistake was in coming from -the unwashed of the East End. There were not many -who came from that quarter. The East End, as a whole, -remained in the East End and got drunk. The Socialists, -Democrats, and Republicans went off to the country for -a breath of fresh air, quite unaffected by the fact that four -hundred millions of people were taking to themselves a -crowned and anointed ruler. Six thousand five hundred -prelates, priests, statesmen, princes and warriors beheld -the crowning, and the rest of us the pageant as it passed.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_610" id="Page_610">[610]</a></span></p> - -<p>I saw it at Trafalgar Square, “the most splendid site in -Europe,” and the very innermost heart of the empire. -There were many thousands of us, all checked and held -in order by a superb display of armed power. The line -of march was double-walled with soldiers. The base -of the Nelson Column was triple-fringed with bluejackets. -Eastward, at the entrance to the square, stood the Royal -Marine Artillery. In the triangle of Pall Mall and Cockspur -Street, the statue of George III was buttressed on -either side by the Lancers and Hussars. To the west -were the red-coats of the Royal Marines, and from the -Union Club to the embouchure of Whitehall swept the -glittering, massive curve of the First Life Guards—gigantic -men mounted on gigantic chargers, steel-breastplated, -steel-helmeted, steel-caparisoned, a great war-sword -of steel ready to the hand of the powers that be. -And further, throughout the crowd, were flung long lines -of the Metropolitan Constabulary, while in the rear were -the reserves—tall, well-fed men, with weapons to wield -and muscles to wield them in case of need.</p> - -<p>And as it was thus at Trafalgar Square, so was it along -the whole line of march—force, overpowering force; -myriads of men, splendid men, the pick of the people, -whose sole function in life is blindly to obey, and blindly -to kill and destroy and stamp out life. And that they -should be well fed, well clothed, and well armed, and have -ships to hurl them to the ends of the earth, the East -End of London, and the “East End” of all England, toils -and rots and dies.</p> - -<p>There is a Chinese proverb that if one man lives in -laziness another will die of hunger; and Montesquieu -has said, “The fact that many men are occupied in making -clothes for one individual is the cause of there being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_611" id="Page_611">[611]</a></span> -many people without clothes.” We cannot understand -the starved and runty toiler of the East End (living with -his family in a one-room den, and letting out the floor -space for lodgings to other starved and runty toilers) -till we look at the strapping Life Guardsmen of the West -End, and come to know that the one must feed and clothe -and groom the other....</p> - -<p>In these latter days, five hundred hereditary peers own -one-fifth of England; and they, and the officers and -servants under the King, and those who go to compose -the powers that be, yearly spend in wasteful luxury -$1,850,000,000, or £370,000,000, which is thirty-two per -cent of the total wealth produced by all the toilers of -the country.</p> - -<p>At the Abbey, clad in wonderful golden raiment, amid -fanfare of trumpets and throbbing of music, surrounded -by a brilliant throng of masters, lords, and rulers, the -King was being invested with the insignia of his sovereignty. -The spurs were placed to his heels by the -Lord Great Chamberlain, and a sword of state, in purple -scabbard, was presented him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, -with these words:—</p> - -<p>“Receive this kingly sword brought now from the altar -of God, and delivered to you by the hands of the bishops -and servants of God, though unworthy.”</p> - -<p>Whereupon, being girded, he gave heed to the Archbishop’s -exhortation:—</p> - -<p>“With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, -protect the Holy Church of God, help and defend -widows and orphans, restore the things that are gone to -decay, maintain the things that are restored, punish and -reform what is amiss, and confirm what is in good -order....”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_612" id="Page_612">[612]</a></span></p> - -<p>“And how did you like the procession, mate?” I asked -an old man on a bench in Green Park.</p> - -<p>“‘Ow did I like it? A bloomin’ good chawnce, sez I -to myself, for a sleep, wi’ all the coppers aw’y, so I -turned into the corner there, along wi’ fifty others. But -I couldn’t sleep, a-lyin’ there ‘ungry an’ thinkin’ ‘ow I’d -worked all the years ‘o my life, an’ now ‘ad no plyce to -rest my ‘ead; an’ the music comin’ to me, an’ the cheers -an’ cannon, till I got almost a hanarchist an’ wanted to -blow out the brains o’ the Lord Chamberlain.”</p> - -<p>Why the Lord Chamberlain I could not precisely see, -nor could he, but that was the way he felt, he said conclusively, -and there was no more discussion....</p> - -<p>At three in the morning I strolled up the Embankment. -It was a gala night for the homeless, for the police were -elsewhere; and each bench was jammed with sleeping -occupants. There were as many women as men, and -the great majority of them, male and female, were old. -Occasionally a boy was to be seen. On one bench I -noticed a family, a man sitting upright with a sleeping -babe in his arms, his wife asleep, her head on his shoulder, -and in her lap the head of a sleeping youngster. The -man’s eyes were wide open. He was staring out over -the water and thinking, which is not a good thing for a -shelterless man with a family to do. It would not be a -pleasant thing to speculate upon his thoughts; but this -I know, and all London knows, that the cases of out-of-works -killing their wives and babies is not an uncommon -happening.</p> - -<p>One cannot walk along the Thames Embankment, in -the small hours of morning, from the Houses of Parliament, -past Cleopatra’s Needle, to Waterloo Bridge, -without being reminded of the sufferings, seven and -twenty centuries old, recited by the author of “Job”:—</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_613" id="Page_613">[613]</a></span></p> - -<p>“There are that remove the landmarks; they violently -take away flocks and feed them.</p> - -<p>“They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take -the widow’s ox for a pledge.</p> - -<p>“They turn the needy out of the way; the poor of the -earth hide themselves together.</p> - -<p>“Behold, as wild asses in the desert they go forth to -their work, seeking diligently for meat; the wilderness -yieldeth them food for their children.</p> - -<p>“They cut their provender in the field, and they glean -the vintage of the wicked.</p> - -<p>“They lie all night naked without clothing, and have -no covering in the cold.</p> - -<p>“They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and -embrace the rock for want of a shelter.</p> - -<p>“There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast, -and take a pledge of the poor.</p> - -<p>“So that they go about naked without clothing, and -being an hungered they carry the sheaves.”</p> - -<p>Seven and twenty centuries agone! And it is all as -true and apposite today in the innermost centre of this -Christian civilisation whereof Edward VII is king.</p> - - -<h3>The Wrongfulness of Riches</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Grant Allen</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_210">210</a>)</p> - -<p>Have you ever reflected with what equipment of -rights the average citizen is born endowed in England? -With the right of moving up and down the public -roads till he drops from exhaustion. That is all. Literally -and absolutely all.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_614" id="Page_614">[614]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Walter Savage Landor</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet and essayist, 1775-1864)</p> - -<p>A want of the necessaries of life, in peasants or -artisans, when the seasons have been favorable, -is a certain sign of defect in the constitution, or of criminality -in the administration.</p> - - -<h3>The True Imperialism</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Watson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet, conspicuous for his courage in opposing the Boer war; -born 1858)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Here, while the tide of conquest rolls</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Against the distant golden shore,</div> - <div class="verse">The starved and stunted human souls</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Are with us more and more.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Vain is your Science, vain your Art,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Your triumphs and your glories vain,</div> - <div class="verse">To feed the hunger of their heart</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And famine of their brain.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Your savage deserts howling near,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Your wastes of ignorance, vice, and shame,—</div> - <div class="verse">Is there no room for victories here,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">No fields for deeds of fame?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Arise and conquer while ye can</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The foe that in your midst resides,</div> - <div class="verse">And build within the mind of Man</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The Empire that abides.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_615" id="Page_615">[615]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Letters from a Chinese Official</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By G. Lowes Dickinson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_510">510</a>)</p> - -<p>Like the prince in the fable, you seem to have released -from his prison the genie of competition, only -to find that you are unable to control him. Your legislation -for the past hundred years is a perpetual and -fruitless effort to regulate the disorders of your economic -system. Your poor, your drunk, your incompetent, your -aged, ride you like a nightmare. You have dissolved -all human and personal ties, and you endeavor, in vain, -to replace them by the impersonal activity of the State. -The salient characteristic of your civilization is its irresponsibility. -You have liberated forces you cannot control; -you are caught yourselves in your own levers and -cogs. In every department of business you are substituting -for the individual the company, for the workman -the tool. The making of dividends is a universal -preoccupation; the well-being of the laborer is no one’s -concern but the State’s. And this concern even the -State is incompetent to undertake, for the factors by -which it is determined are beyond its control. You -depend on variations of supply and demand which you -can neither determine nor anticipate. The failure of a -harvest, the modification of a tariff in some remote country, -dislocates the industry of millions, thousands of miles -away. You are at the mercy of a prospector’s luck, an -inventor’s genius, a woman’s caprice—nay, you are at -the mercy of your own instruments. Your capital is -alive, and cries for food; starve it and it turns and -throttles you. You produce, not because you will, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_616" id="Page_616">[616]</a></span> -because you must; you consume, not what you choose, -but what is forced upon you. Never was any trade so -bound as this which you call free; but it is bound, not -by a reasonable will, but by the accumulated irrationality -of caprice.</p> - - -<h3>Utopia</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Sir Thomas More</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_490">490</a>)</p> - -<p>When I consider and way in my mind all these -common wealthes, which now a dayes any where -do florish, so god helpe me, I can perceave nothing but -a certain conspiracy of riche men procuringe theire owne -commodities under the name and title of the commen -wealth. They invent and devise all meanes and craftes, -first how to kepe safely, without feare of losing, that they -have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire -and abuse the worke and laboure of the poore for as -litle money as may be. These devises, when the riche -men have decreed to be kept and observed under coloure -of the comminaltie, that is to saye, also of the pore people, -then they be made lawes. But these most wicked and -vicious men, when they have by their unsatiable covetousnes -devided among them selves al those thinges, -whiche woulde have sufficed all men, yet how faire be -they from the welth and felicitie of the Utopian commen -wealth?</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_617" id="Page_617">[617]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Tales of Two Countries</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Maxim Gorky</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(A volume of short stories representing the later work of the -Russian novelist, the fruit of his sojourn in Capri. It is interesting -to note how this change of environment altered not merely his point -of view, but even his literary style. The following narrative has the -clarity and delicacy of the best French prose. It is the story of an -Italian workingman)</p></div> - -<p>“I was born naked and stupid, like you and everybody -else; in my youth I dreamed of a rich wife; -when I was a soldier I studied in order to pass the examination -for an officer’s rank. I was twenty-three when -I felt that all was not as it should be in this world, and -that it was a shame to live as if it were....</p> - -<p>“We, our whole regiment, were sent to Bologna. The -peasantry there were in revolt, some demanding that -the rent of land should be lowered, others shouting about -the necessity for raising wages: both parties seemed to -be in the wrong. ‘To lower rents and increase wages, -what nonsense!’ thought I. ‘That would ruin the landowners.’ -To me, who was a town-dweller, it seemed -utter foolishness. I was very indignant—the heat helped -to make one so, and the constant travelling from place -to place and the mounting guard at night. For, you -know, these fine fellows were breaking the machinery -belonging to the landowners; and it pleased them to -burn the corn and to try to spoil everything that did not -belong to them. Just think of it!”</p> - -<p>He sipped his wine and, becoming more animated, -went on: “They roamed about the fields in droves like -sheep, always silently, and as if they meant business. -We used to scatter them, threatening them with our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_618" id="Page_618">[618]</a></span> -bayonets sometimes. Now and then we struck them -with the butts of our rifles. Without showing much -fear, they dispersed in leisurely fashion, but always came -together again. It was a tedious business, like mass, -and it lasted for days, like an attack of fever. Luoto, -our non-commissioned officer, a fine fellow from Abruzzi, -himself a peasant, was anxious and troubled: he turned -quite yellow and thin, and more than once he said to us:</p> - -<p>“‘It’s a bad business, boys; it will probably be necessary -to shoot, damn it!’</p> - -<p>“His grumbling upset us still more; and then, you -know, from every corner, from every hillock and tree we -could see peeping the obstinate heads of the peasants; -their angry eyes seemed to pierce us. For these people, -naturally enough, did not regard us in a very friendly -light....</p> - -<p>“Once I stood on a small hillock near an olive grove, -guarding some trees which the peasants had been injuring. -At the bottom of the hill two men were at work, an old -man and a youth. They were digging a ditch. It was -very hot, the sun burnt like fire, one felt irritable, longed -to be a fish, and I remember I eyed them angrily. At -noon they both left off work, and got out some bread and -cheese and a jug of wine. ‘Oh, devil take them!’ thought -I to myself. Suddenly the old man, who previously had -not once looked at me, said something to the youth, who -shook his head disapprovingly, but the old man shouted: -‘Go on!’ He said this very sternly.</p> - -<p>“The youth came up to me with the jug in his hand, -and said, not very willingly, you know: ‘My father -thinks that you would like a drink and offers you some -wine.’</p> - -<p>“I felt embarrassed, but I was pleased. I refused,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_619" id="Page_619">[619]</a></span> -nodding at the same time to the old man and thanking -him. He responded by looking at the sky. ‘Drink it, -signor, drink it. We offer this to you as a man, not -as a soldier. We do not expect a soldier to become kinder -because he has drunk our wine!’</p> - -<p>“‘D— you, don’t get nasty,’ I thought to myself, and -having drunk about three mouthfuls I thanked him. -Then they began to eat down below. A little later I -was relieved by Ugo from Salertino. I told him quietly -that these two peasants were good fellows. The same -night, as I stood at the door of a barn where the machinery -was kept, a slate fell on my head from the roof. It -did not do much damage, but another slate, striking my -shoulder edgewise, hurt me so severely that my left arm -dropped benumbed.”</p> - -<p>The speaker burst into a loud laugh, his mouth wide -open, his eyes half-closed. “Slates, stones, sticks,” said -he, through his laughter, “in those days and at that place -were alive. This independent action of lifeless things -made some pretty big bumps on our heads. Wherever -a soldier stood or walked, a stick would suddenly fly -at him from the ground, or a stone fall upon him from -the sky. It made us savage, as you can guess.”</p> - -<p>The eyes of his companion became sad, his face turned -pale and he said quietly: “One always feels ashamed to -hear of such things.”</p> - -<p>“What is one to do? People take time to get wise. -Then I called for help. I was led into a house where -another fellow lay, his face cut by a stone. When I -asked him how it happened he said, smiling, but not -with mirth:</p> - -<p>“‘An old woman, comrade, an old gray witch struck -me, and then proposed that I should kill her!’</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_620" id="Page_620">[620]</a></span></p> - -<p>“‘Was she arrested?’</p> - -<p>“‘I said that I had done it myself, that I had fallen -and hurt myself. The commander did not believe it, -I could see it by his eyes. But, don’t you see, it was -awkward to confess that I had been wounded by an old -woman. Eh? The devil! Of course they are hard -pressed, and one can understand that they do not love -us!’</p> - -<p>“‘H’m!’ thought I. The doctor came and two ladies -with him, one of them fair and very pretty, evidently -a Venetian. I don’t remember the other. They looked -at my wound. It was slight, of course. They applied -a poultice and went away....</p> - -<p>“My comrade and I used to sit at the window. We -sat in such a way that the light did not fall on us, and -there once we heard the charming voice of this fair lady. -She and her companion were walking with the doctor in -the garden outside the window and talking in French, -which I understand very well.</p> - -<p>“‘Did you notice the color of his eyes?’ she asked. -‘He is a peasant of course, and once he has taken off his -uniform will no doubt become a Socialist, like all of -them here. People with eyes like that want to conquer -the whole of life, to drive us out, to destroy us in order -that some blind, tedious justice should triumph!’</p> - -<p>“‘Foolish fellows,’ said the doctor—‘half children, -half brutes.’</p> - -<p>“‘Brutes, that is quite true. But what is there -childish about them?’</p> - -<p>“‘What about those dreams of universal equality?’</p> - -<p>“‘Yes, just imagine it. The fellow with the eyes of -an ox, and the other with the face of a bird—our equals! -You and I their equals, the equals of these people of in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_621" id="Page_621">[621]</a></span>ferior -blood! People who can be bidden to come and -kill their fellows, brutes like them.’ ...</p> - -<p>“She spoke much and vehemently. I listened and -thought: ‘Quite right, signora.’ I had seen her more -than once; and you know, of course, that no one dreams -more ardently of a woman than a soldier. I imagined -her to be kind and clever and warm-hearted; and at that -time I had an idea that the landed nobility were especially -clever, or gifted, or something of the kind. I don’t -know why!</p> - -<p>“I asked my comrade: ‘Do you understand this -language?’</p> - -<p>“No, he did not understand. Then I translated for -him the fair lady’s speech. The fellow got as angry as -the devil, and started to jump about the room, his one -eye glistening—the other was bandaged.</p> - -<p>“‘Is that so?’ he murmured. ‘Is that possible? She -makes use of me and does not look upon me as a man. -For her sake I allow my dignity to be offended and she -denies it. For the sake of guarding her property I risk -losing my soul.’</p> - -<p>“He was not a fool and felt that he had been very -much insulted, and so did I. The following day we -talked about this lady in a loud voice, not heeding Luoto, -who only muttered:</p> - -<p>“‘Be careful, boys; don’t forget that you are soldiers, -and that there is such a thing as discipline.’</p> - -<p>“No, we did not forget it. But many of us, almost -all, to tell you the truth, became deaf and blind, and -these young peasants made use of our deafness and blindness -to very good purpose. They won. They treated -us very well indeed. The fair lady could have learnt -from them: for instance, they could have taught her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_622" id="Page_622">[622]</a></span> -very convincingly how honest people should be valued. -When we left the place whither we had come with the -idea of shedding blood, many of us were given flowers. -As we marched along the streets of the village, not stones -and slates but flowers were thrown at us, my friend. I -think we had deserved it. One may forget a cool reception -when one has received such a good send-off.”</p> - - -<h3>The Rights of Man</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Paine</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English radical writer, who took a prominent part in the American -and French revolutions; 1737-1809)</p> - -<p>The superstitious awe, the enslaving reverence, that -formerly surrounded affluence, is passing away in -all countries, and leaving the possessor of property to -the convulsion of accidents. When wealth and splendor, -instead of fascinating the multitude, excite emotions of -disgust; when, instead of drawing forth admiration, it -is beheld as an insult upon wretchedness; when the -ostentatious appearance it makes serves to call the right -of it in question, the case of property becomes critical, -and it is only in a system of justice that the possessor -can contemplate security.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Otto von Bismarck</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(German statesman, 1815-1898)</p> - -<p>I believe that those who profess horror at the intervention -of the state for the protection of the weak lay -themselves open to the suspicion that they are desirous -of using their strength for the benefit of a portion, for -the oppression of the rest.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_623" id="Page_623">[623]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Demand of Labor</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Abraham Lincoln</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(President of the United States; 1809-1865. A frequently quoted -passage attributed to Lincoln, prophesying the developments of -modern capitalist industry, has been proven to be spurious. It -therefore seems worth stating that the passages quoted in this -volume have been duly verified)</p></div> - -<p>Inasmuch as most good things are produced by -labor, it follows that all such things ought to belong -to those whose labor has produced them. But it has -happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, -and others, without labor, have enjoyed a large proportion -of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not -continue. To secure to each laborer the whole product -of his labor as nearly as possible is a worthy object of -any good government.</p> - - -<h3>Bryanism</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the New York “Tribune”</cite>)</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(The following passage is given space as a curiosity of the class-struggle, -and by way of encouragement to social reformers who may -suffer under the lash of capitalist abuse. It is from an editorial -published in one of New York City’s most conservative and -respectable journals on the day after the presidential election of -1896; its subject is the Hon. William Jennings Bryan, now a conservative -and plodding Secretary of State)</p></div> - -<p>The thing was conceived in iniquity and was brought -forth in sin. It had its origin in a malicious conspiracy -against the honor and integrity of the nation. -It gained such monstrous growth as it enjoyed from an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_624" id="Page_624">[624]</a></span> -assiduous culture of the basest passions of the least -worthy members of the community. It has been defeated -and destroyed because right is right and God is -God. Its nominal head was worthy of the cause. Nominal, -because the wretched, rattle-pated boy, posing in -vapid vanity and mouthing resounding rottenness, was -not the real leader of that league of hell. He was only -a puppet in the blood-imbued hands of Altgeld, the -anarchist, and Debs, the revolutionist, and other desperadoes -of that stripe. But he was a willing puppet, -Bryan was—willing and eager. Not one of his masters -was more apt than he at lies and forgeries and blasphemies -and all the nameless iniquities of that campaign -against the Ten Commandments. He goes down with -the cause, and must abide with it in the history of infamy. -He had less provocation than Benedict Arnold, less intellectual -force than Aaron Burr, less manliness and courage -than Jefferson Davis. He was the rival of them all in -deliberate wickedness and treason to the Republic. His -name belongs with theirs, neither the most brilliant nor -the most hateful of the list. Good riddance to it all, -to conspiracy and conspirators, and to the foul menace -of repudiation and anarchy against the honor and life -of the Republic!</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Ferdinand Lassalle</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(German Socialist leader; 1825-1864)</p> - -<p>It is the opposition of the personal interest of the -higher classes to the development of the nation in -culture, which causes the great and necessary immorality -of the higher classes.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_625" id="Page_625">[625]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Rough Rider</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Bliss Carman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet of nature, born 1861)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Take up, who will, the challenge;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Stand pat on graft and greed;</div> - <div class="verse">Grow sleek on others’ labor,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Surfeit on others’ need;</div> - <div class="verse">Let paid and bloodless tricksters</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Devise a legal way</div> - <div class="verse">Our common right and justice</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“To sell, deny, delay.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Not yesterday nor lightly</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We came to know that breed;</div> - <div class="verse">Our quarrel with that cunning</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Is old as Runnymede.</div> - <div class="verse">We saw enfranchised insult</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Deploy in kingly line,</div> - <div class="verse">When broke our sullen fury</div> - <div class="verse indent2">On Rupert of the Rhine....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Now, masking raid and rapine</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In debonair disguise,</div> - <div class="verse">The foe we thought defeated</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Deludes our careless eyes,</div> - <div class="verse">Entrenched in law and largess</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the vested wrong of things,</div> - <div class="verse">Cloaking a fouler treason</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Than any faithless king’s.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_626" id="Page_626">[626]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">He takes our life for wages,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">He holds our land for rent,</div> - <div class="verse">He sweats our little children</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To swell his cent per cent;</div> - <div class="verse">With secret grip and levy</div> - <div class="verse indent2">On every crumb we eat,</div> - <div class="verse">He drives our sons to thieving,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Our daughters to the street....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Against the grim defenses</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where might and murrain hide,</div> - <div class="verse">Unswerving to the issue</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Loose-reined and rough we ride</div> - <div class="verse">Full tardily, to rescue</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Our heritage from wrong,</div> - <div class="verse">And stablish it on manhood,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A thousand times more strong.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By William Ewart Gladstone</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(English liberal statesman, 1809-1898)</p> - -<p>In almost every one, if not in every one, of the greatest -political controversies of the last fifty years, whether -they affected the franchise, whether they affected commerce, -whether they affected religion, whether they -affected the bad and abominable institution of slavery, -or what subject they touched, these leisured classes, -these educated classes, these titled classes, have been in -the wrong.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_627" id="Page_627">[627]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Bad Shepherds</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Octave Mirbeau</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Celebrated French man-of-letters, born 1850. A play, first -produced in 1897, with Sarah Bernhardt in the leading rôle, presenting -the class-struggle from the point of view of the anti-parliamentarian. -At the height of a desperate strike of steel-workers, -the leader of the strikers is addressing a secret gathering in a forest, -near a religious shrine)</p></div> - -<p><span class="smcap">Jean</span>:—You reproach me—and this is the worst -charge you bring against me—that I refused the -meeting with the radical and socialist deputies who -wanted to mix up in our affair, and take the direction -of the strike?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Voices</span>:—Yes—yes! Silence! Hear him!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Jean</span>:—Your deputies! Ah, if you had seen them at -work! And you, yourselves—have you forgotten the -infamous rôle, the pitiful, sinister comedy they played -in the last strike? How, having pushed the workers to -a desperate resistance, they gave them up weakened, -despoiled, bound hands and feet, to the master—the very -day where a last effort, a last surge, would have compelled -him, perhaps, to surrender? Ah, no indeed! I -have not wished that intriguers, under the pretext of -defending you, should come to impose upon you combinations—wherein -you are nothing but a means to maintain -and increase their political power—a prey to satisfy -their political appetites! You have nothing in common -with those people! Their interests are not any more -yours—than those of the usurer and the creditor, of the -assassin and his victim!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Voice</span>:—Bravo! It’s true! Down with politics! -Down with the deputies!</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_628" id="Page_628">[628]</a></span></p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Jean</span>:—Understand, then, that they exist only by your -credulity! Your brutalization, they exploit it as a farm—your -servitude, they treat it as an income. They -grow fat upon your poverty and your ignorance, while -you are living; and when you are dead they make a -pedestal of your corpses! Is that what you want?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Voice</span>:—No, no. He is right!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Jean</span>:—The master is at least a man like yourselves! -You have him before you—you speak to him—you make -him angry—you threaten him—you kill him. At least -he has a face, a breast into which you can thrust a knife! -But go now, and move that being without a face that is -called a politician! Go kill that thing that is known as -politics! That slippery and fugitive thing, that you -think you have, and that always escapes you—that you -believe is dead, and it begins once again—that abominable -thing by which all has been made vile, all corrupted, all -bought, all sold—justice, love, beauty! Which has made -of the venality of conscience a national institution of -France—which has done worse yet, since with its foul -slime it has soiled the august face of the poor—worse -yet, since it has destroyed in you the last ideal—the faith -in the Revolution! Do you understand what I have -desired of you—that which I still demand of your energy, -your dignity, your intelligence? I have desired, and I -desire, that you shall show for once, to the world of political -parasites, that new example, fecund and terrible, of a -strike made, at last, by yourselves, for yourselves! And -if once more you have to die, in this struggle which you -have undertaken, know how to die—one time—for yourselves, -for your sons, for those who will be born of your -sons—and no more for those who trade upon your suffering<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_629" id="Page_629">[629]</a></span>, -as always!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Madeleine</span> (<i>a girl-striker, springs up</i>):—March—march -with him, and no longer with those whose hands are red -with the blood of the poor! March! The road will be -long and hard! You will fall many times upon your -broken knees—what matters it? Stand up and march -again! Justice is at the end!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">A Voice</span>:—We will follow you!</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Madeleine</span>:—And do not fear death! Love death! -Death is splendid—necessary and divine! It makes life -young again! Ah, do not give your tears! Through all -the centuries that you have wept, who has seen them, -who has heard them flow? Give your blood! If blood -is as a hideous spot upon the face of the hangmen, it -shines upon the face of martyrs as an eternal sun! Each -drop of blood that flows from your veins—every stream -of blood that pours from your bosoms—will mean the -birth of a hero—a saint (<i>pointing to the crucifix</i>)—a god! -Ah, would that I had a thousand lives, that I might -give them all for you! Would that I had a thousand -breasts, so that all that blood of deliverance and love -might pour out upon the ground where you suffer!</p> - - -<h3>The Cultured Classes</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Johann Gottlieb Fichte</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(German philosopher, 1762-1814)</p> - -<p>It is particularly to the cultured classes that I wish -to direct my remarks in the present address. I -implore these classes to take the initiative in the work -of reconstruction, to atone for their past deeds, and to -earn the right to continue life in the future. It will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_630" id="Page_630">[630]</a></span> -appear in the course of this address that hitherto all the -advance in the German nation has originated with the -common people; that hitherto all the great national -interests have, in the first instance, been the affair of -the people, have been taken in hand and pushed forward -by the body of the people.</p> - - -<h3>The Duty of Civil Disobedience</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Henry David Thoreau</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_600">600</a>)</p> - -<p>The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men -mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They -are the standing army, and the militia, gaolers, constables, -posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no -free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral -sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and -earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be -manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such -command no more respect than men of straw or a lump -of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses -and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed -good citizens.</p> - -<p>Others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, -and office-holders—serve the State chiefly with -their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, -they are as likely to serve the devil, without -<em>intending</em> it, as God.</p> - -<p>A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in -the great sense, and <em>men</em>, serve the State with their consciences -also, and so necessarily resist it for the most -part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_631" id="Page_631">[631]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Ralph Waldo Emerson</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_522">522</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Let man serve law for man;</div> - <div class="verse">Live for friendship, live for love,</div> - <div class="verse">For truth’s and harmony’s behoof;</div> - <div class="verse">The state may follow how it can,</div> - <div class="verse">As Olympus follows Jove.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Happiness of Nations</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By James Mackaye</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American writer upon economics, born 1872)</p> - -<p>Everywhere we are taught that “life is sacred,” -that “liberty is sacred,” that “property is sacred,”—but -where are we taught that happiness is sacred? -And yet it is only because of their relation to happiness -that these other things have a trace of sacredness.</p> - - -<h3>Paris</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Émile Zola</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_91">91</a>)</p> - -<p>All boiled in the huge vat of Paris; the desires, the -deeds of violence, the strivings of one and another -man’s will, the whole nameless medley of the bitterest -ferments, whence, in all purity, the wine of the future -would at last flow.</p> - -<p>Then Pierre became conscious of the prodigious work<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_632" id="Page_632">[632]</a></span> -which went on in the depths of the vat, beneath all the -impurity and waste. What mattered the stains, the -egotism and greed of politicians, if humanity were still -on the march, ever slowly and stubbornly stepping forward! -What mattered, too, that corrupt and emasculate -<em>bourgeoisie</em>, nowadays as moribund as the aristocracy, -whose place it took, if behind it there ever came -the inexhaustible reserve of men who surged up from the -masses of the country-side and the towns!... If in -the depths of pestilential workshops and factories the -slavery of ancient times subsisted in the wage-earning -system, if men still died of want on their pallets like -broken-down beasts of burden, it was nevertheless a -fact that once already, on a memorable day of tempest, -Liberty sprang forth from the vat to wing her flight -throughout the world. And why in her turn should not -Justice spring from it, proceeding from those troubled -elements, freeing herself from all dross, ascending with -dazzling splendor and regenerating the nations?</p> - - -<h3>Farewell Address</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George Washington</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_305">305</a>)</p> - -<p>Observe good faith and justice toward all nations, -cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion -and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that -good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy -of a free, enlightened and at no distant period a great -nation to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel -example of a people always guided by an exalted justice<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_633" id="Page_633">[633]</a></span> -and benevolence. Who can doubt but, in the course of -time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly -repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by -a steady adherence to it; can it be that Providence has -not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with -its virtue. The experiment, at least, is recommended by -every sentiment which enobles human nature. Alas, is -it rendered impossible by its vices?</p> - - -<h3>America the Beautiful</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Katharine Lee Bates</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Professor at Wellesley College, born 1859. This poem has been -adopted as the official hymn of the American Federation of -Women’s Clubs)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O beautiful for spacious skies,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For amber waves of grain,</div> - <div class="verse">For purple mountain majesties</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Above the fruited plain!</div> - <div class="verse indent4">America! America!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">God shed His grace on thee</div> - <div class="verse">And crown thy good with brotherhood</div> - <div class="verse indent2">From sea to shining sea!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O beautiful for pilgrim feet,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Whose stern, impassioned stress</div> - <div class="verse">A thoroughfare for freedom beat</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Across the wilderness!</div> - <div class="verse indent4">America! America!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">God mend thine every flaw,</div> - <div class="verse">Confirm thy soul in self-control,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Thy liberty in law!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_634" id="Page_634">[634]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O beautiful for heroes proved</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In liberating strife,</div> - <div class="verse">Who more than self their country loved,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And mercy more than life!</div> - <div class="verse indent4">America! America!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">May God thy gold refine,</div> - <div class="verse">Till all success be nobleness,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And every gain divine!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O beautiful for patriot dream</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That sees beyond the years</div> - <div class="verse">Thine alabaster cities gleam</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Undimmed by human tears!</div> - <div class="verse indent4">America! America!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">God shed His grace on thee</div> - <div class="verse">And crown thy good with brotherhood</div> - <div class="verse indent2">From sea to shining sea!</div> -</div></div></div> -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_635" id="Page_635">[635]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK XIII</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><i>Children</i></p> - -<p>Social injustice as it bears upon literature and the producers -of literature; pictures of the life of the outcast poet, and of art -in conflict with mammon.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_636" id="Page_636">[636]</a><br /><a name="Page_637" id="Page_637">[637]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Children of the Poor</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Victor Hugo</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>)</p> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Translated by Algernon Charles Swinburne</cite>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Take heed of this small child of earth;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">He is great: he hath in him God most high.</div> - <div class="verse">Children before their fleshly birth</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Are lights alive in the blue sky.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In our light bitter world of wrong</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They come; God gives us them awhile.</div> - <div class="verse">His speech is in their stammering tongue,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And his forgiveness in their smile.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Their sweet light rests upon our eyes.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Alas! their right to joy is plain.</div> - <div class="verse">If they are hungry, Paradise</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Weeps, and, if cold, Heaven thrills with pain.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The want that saps their sinless flower</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Speaks judgment on sin’s ministers.</div> - <div class="verse">Man holds an angel in his power.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ah! deep in Heaven what thunder stirs,</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">When God seeks out these tender things</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Whom in the shadow where we sleep</div> - <div class="verse">He sends us clothed about with wings,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And finds them ragged babes that weep!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_638" id="Page_638">[638]</a></span></p> - -<h3>In a Southern Cotton Mill</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Elbert Hubbard</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American author and lecturer, born 1859; died May 7, 1915)</p> - -<p>I thought to lift one of the little toilers to ascertain -his weight. Through his thirty-five pounds of skin -and bone there ran a tremor of fear, and he struggled forward -to tie a broken thread. I attracted his attention by -a touch, and offered him a silver dime. He looked at me -dumbly through a face that might have belonged to a man -of sixty, so furrowed, tightly drawn, and full of pain it was. -He did not reach for the money—he did not know what it -was. There were dozens of such children, in this particular -mill. A physician who was with me said that they -would all be dead probably in two years, and their places -filled by others—there were plenty more. Pneumonia -carries off most of them. Their systems are ripe for disease, -and when it comes there is no rebound—no response. -Medicine simply does not act—nature is whipped, beaten, -discouraged, and the child sinks into a stupor and dies.</p> - - -<h3>The Flower Factory</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Florence Wilkinson Evans</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American poetess)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Lizabetta, Marianina, Fiametta, Teresina,</div> - <div class="verse">They are winding stems of roses, one by one, one by one,</div> - <div class="verse">Little children who have never learned to play;</div> - <div class="verse">Teresina softly crying that her fingers ache to-day;</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_639" id="Page_639">[639]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Tiny Fiametta nodding, when the twilight slips in, gray.</div> - <div class="verse">High above the clattering street, ambulance and fire-gong beat,</div> - <div class="verse">They sit, curling crimson petals, one by one, one by one.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Lizabetta, Marianina, Fiametta, Teresina,</div> - <div class="verse">They have never seen a rose-bush nor a dew-drop in the sun.</div> - <div class="verse">They will dream of the vendetta, Teresina, Fiametta,</div> - <div class="verse">Of a Black Hand and a Face behind a grating;</div> - <div class="verse">They will dream of cotton petals, endless, crimson, suffocating,</div> - <div class="verse">Never of a wild rose thicket or the singing of a cricket,</div> - <div class="verse">But the ambulance will bellow through the wanness of their dreams,</div> - <div class="verse">And their tired lids will flutter with the street’s hysteric screams.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Lizabetta, Marianina, Fiametta, Teresina,</div> - <div class="verse">They are winding stems of roses, one by one, one by one.</div> - <div class="verse">Let them have a long, long play-time, Lord of Toil, when toil is done,</div> - <div class="verse">Fill their baby hands with roses, joyous roses of the sun.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_640" id="Page_640">[640]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Beast</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Ben B. Lindsey and Harvey J. O’Higgins</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(“The Children’s Judge,” who founded the first children’s court -in America, tells the story of his long fight with the powers of -privilege in Colorado. In the following extract, he narrates what -came of a newspaper interview on the subject of the revolting conditions -under which children were kept in prison)</p></div> - -<p>The result was an article that took even <em>my</em> breath -away when I read it next day on the front page of -the newspaper. It was the talk of the town. It was -certainly the talk of the Police Board; and Mr. Frank -Adams talked to the reporters in a high voice, indiscreetly. -He declared that the boys were liars, that I was “crazy,” -and that conditions in the jails were as good as they could -be. This reply was exactly what we wished. I demanded -an investigation. The Board professed to be willing, -but set no date. We promptly set one <em>for</em> them—the -following Thursday at two o’clock in my chambers at the -Court House—and I invited to the hearing Governor -Peabody, Mayor Wright, fifteen prominent ministers in -the city, and the Police Board and some members of the -City Council.</p> - -<p>On Thursday morning—to my horror—I learned from a -friendly Deputy Sheriff that the subpœnas I had ordered -sent to a number of boys whom I knew as jail victims had -not been served. I had no witnesses. And in three hours -the hearing was to begin. I appealed to the Deputy -Sheriff to help me. He admitted that he could not get -the boys in less than two days. “Well then,” I said, “for -heaven’s sake, get me Mickey.”</p> - -<p>And Mickey? Well, Mickey was known to fame as -“the worst kid in town.” As such, his portrait had been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_641" id="Page_641">[641]</a></span> -printed in the newspapers—posed with his shine-box over -his shoulder, a cigarette in the corner of his grin, his -thumbs under his suspenders at the shoulders, his feet -crossed in an attitude of nonchalant youthful deviltry. -He had been brought before me more than once on charges -of truancy, and I had been using him in an attempt to -organize a newsboys’ association under the supervision of -the court. Moreover, he had been one of the boys who -had been beaten by the jailer, and I knew he would be -grateful to me for defending him.</p> - -<p>It was midday before the Sheriff brought him to me. -“Mickey,” I said, “I’m in trouble, and you’ve got to help -me out of it. You know I helped <em>you</em>.”</p> - -<p>“Betcher life yuh did, Judge,” he said. “I’m wit’ yuh. -W’at d’ yuh want?”</p> - -<p>I told him what I wanted—every boy that he could get, -who had been in jail. “And they’ve got to be in this -room by two o’clock. Can you do it?”</p> - -<p>Mickey threw out his dirty little hand. “Sure I kin. -Don’t yuh worry, Judge. Get me a wheel—dhat’s all.”</p> - -<p>I hurried out with him and got him a bicycle, and he -flew off down Sixteenth Street on it, his legs so short that -his feet could only follow the pedals half way round. I -went back to my chambers to wait....</p> - -<p>As two o’clock approached, the ministers began to come -into my room, one by one, and take seats in readiness. -Mr. Wilson of the Police Board arrived to represent his -fellow-commissioners. The Deputy District Attorney -came, the president of the upper branch of the City Council -came, Mayor Wright came, and even Governor Peabody -came—but no boys! I felt like a man who had ordered a -big dinner in a strange restaurant for a party of friends, -and then found that he had not brought his purse....<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_642" id="Page_642">[642]</a></span> -I was just about to begin my apologies when I heard an -excited patter of small feet on the stairs and the shuffle and -crowding of Mickey’s cohorts outside in the hall. I threw -open the door. “I got ’em, Judge,” Mickey cried.</p> - -<p>He had them—to the number of about twenty. I shook -him by the shoulder, speechless with relief. “I tol’ yuh -we’d stan’ by yuh, Judge,” he grinned.</p> - -<p>He had the worst lot of little jailbirds that ever saw the -inside of a county court, and he pointed out the gem of his -collection proudly—“Skinny,” a lad in his teens, who had -been in jail twenty-two times!“ “All right, boys,” I told -them, “I don’t know you all, but I’ll take Mickey’s word -for you. You’ve all been in jail and you know what you -do there—all the dirty things you hear and see and do -yourselves. I want you to tell some gentlemen in here -about it. Don’t be scared. They’re your friends the -same as I am. The cops say you’ve been lying to me -about the way things are down in the jails there, and I -want you to tell the truth. Nothing but the truth, now. -Mickey, you pick them out and send them in one by one—your -best witnesses first.”</p> - -<p>I went back to my chambers. “Gentlemen,” I said, -“we’re ready.”</p> - -<p>I sat down at the big table with the Governor at my -right, the Mayor at my left and the president of the Board -of Supervisors and Police Commissioner Wilson at either -end of the table. The ministers seated themselves in the -chairs about my room. (We allowed no newspaper -reporters in, because I knew what sort of vile and unprintable -testimony was coming.) Mickey sent in his first -witness.</p> - -<p>One by one, as the boys came, I impressed upon them -the necessity of telling the truth, encouraged them to talk,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_643" id="Page_643">[643]</a></span> -and tried to put them at their ease. I started each by -asking him how often he had been in jail, what he had -seen there, and so forth. Then I sat back and let him -tell his story.</p> - -<p>And the things they told would raise your hair. -I saw the blushes rise to the foreheads of some of the -ministers at the first details. As we went on, the perspiration -stood on their faces. Some sat pale, staring appalled -at these freckled youngsters from whose little lips, in a -sort of infantile eagerness to tell all they knew, there came -stories of bestiality that were the more horrible because -they were so innocently, so boldly given. It was enough -to make a man weep; and indeed tears of compassionate -shame came to the eyes of more than one father there, as -he listened. One boy broke down and cried when he told -of the vile indecencies that had been committed upon him -by the older criminals; and I saw the muscles working in -the clenched jaws of some of our “investigating committee”—saw -them swallowing the lump in the throat—saw -them looking down at the floor blinkingly, afraid of losing -their self-control. The Police Commissioner made the -mistake of cross-examining the first boy, but the frank -answers he got only exposed worse matters. The boys -came and came, till at last, a Catholic priest, Father -O’Ryan, cried out: “My God! I have had enough!” -Governor Peabody said hoarsely: “I never knew there -was such immorality <em>in the world</em>!” Some one else put in, -“It’s awful,—awful!” in a half groan.</p> - -<p>“Gentlemen,” I said, “there have been over two thousand -Denver boys put through those jails and those conditions, -in the last five years. Do you think it should go -on any longer?”</p> - -<p>Governor Peabody arose. “No,” he said; “no. Never<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_644" id="Page_644">[644]</a></span> -in my life have I heard of so much rot—corruption—vileness—as -I’ve heard today from the mouths of these -babies. I want to tell you that nothing I can do in my -administration can be of more importance—nothing I can -do will I do more gladly than sign those bills that Judge -Lindsey is trying to get through the Legislature to do -away with these terrible conditions. And if,” he said, -turning to the Police Commissioner, “Judge Lindsey is -‘<em>crazy</em>,’ I want my name written under his, among the -<em>crazy</em> people. And if any one says these boys are ‘liars,’ -that man is a liar himself!”</p> - -<p>Phew! The “committee of investigation” dissolved, the -boys trooped away noisily, and the ministers went back to -their pulpits to voice the horror that had kept them silent -in my small chamber of horrors for two hours. Their -sermons went into the newspapers under large black headlines; -and by the end of the next week our juvenile court -bills were passed by the Legislature and made law in -Colorado.</p> - - -<h3>The Cry of the Children</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Elizabeth Barrett Browning</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_644">644</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ere the sorrow comes with years?</div> - <div class="verse">They are leaning their young heads against their mothers—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And <em>that</em> cannot stop their tears.</div> - <div class="verse">The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The young birds are chirping in the nest;</div> - <div class="verse">The young fawns are playing with the shadows;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The young flowers are blowing toward the west—</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_645" id="Page_645">[645]</a></span> - <div class="verse">But the young, young children, O my brothers,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They are weeping bitterly!</div> - <div class="verse">They are weeping in the playtime of the others,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In the country of the free.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Do you question the young children in the sorrow</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Why their tears are falling so?</div> - <div class="verse">The old man may weep for his to-morrow</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Which is lost in Long Ago;</div> - <div class="verse">The old tree is leafless in the forest,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The old year is ending in the frost,</div> - <div class="verse">The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The old hope is hardest to be lost:</div> - <div class="verse">But the young, young children, O my brothers,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Do you ask them why they stand</div> - <div class="verse">Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In our happy Fatherland?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They look up with their pale and sunken faces,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And their looks are sad to see,</div> - <div class="verse">For the man’s hoary anguish draws and presses</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Down the cheeks of infancy;</div> - <div class="verse">“Your old earth,” they say, “is very dreary,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Our young feet,” they say, “are very weak;</div> - <div class="verse">Few paces have we taken, yet are weary—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Our grave-rest is very far to seek.</div> - <div class="verse">Ask the old why they weep, and not the children,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For the outside earth is cold,</div> - <div class="verse">And we young ones stand without, in our bewildering,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the graves are for the old.” ...</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“For oh,” say the children, “we are weary,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And we cannot run or leap;</div> - <div class="verse">If we cared for any meadows, it were merely</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To drop down in them and sleep.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_646" id="Page_646">[646]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We fall upon our faces, trying to go;</div> - <div class="verse">And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The reddest flower would look as pale as snow.</div> - <div class="verse">For, all day, we drag our burden tiring</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Through the coal-dark, underground,</div> - <div class="verse">Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In the factories, round and round.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”For, all day, the wheels are droning, turning;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their wind comes in our faces,</div> - <div class="verse">Till our hearts turn, our head, with pulses burning,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the walls turn in their places:</div> - <div class="verse">Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Turns the long light that drops adown the wall,</div> - <div class="verse">Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">All are turning, all the day, and we with all.</div> - <div class="verse">And all day, the iron wheels are droning,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And sometimes we could pray,</div> - <div class="verse">‘O ye wheels,’ (breaking out in a mad moaning)</div> - <div class="verse indent2">‘Stop! be silent for to-day!’“ ...</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They look up, with their pale and sunken faces,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And their look is dread to see,</div> - <div class="verse">For they mind you of the angels in their places,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With eyes turned on Deity.</div> - <div class="verse">”How long,“ they say, ”how long, O cruel nation,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart,—</div> - <div class="verse">Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?</div> - <div class="verse">Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And your purple shows your path!</div> - <div class="verse">But the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Than the strong man in his wrath.“</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_647" id="Page_647">[647]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Child Labor in England</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “An Industrial History of England”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Henry de B. Gibbins</span></p> - -<p>Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place -of the manufacturer, and transfer a number of children -to a factory district, and there keep them, generally -in some dark cellar, till they could hand them over to a -mill owner in want of hands, who would come and examine -their height, strength, and bodily capacities, exactly as -did the slave owners in the American markets. After -that the children were simply at the mercy of their owners, -nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere slaves, -who got no wages, and whom it was not worth while even -to feed and clothe properly, because they were so cheap -and their places could be so easily supplied. It was often -arranged by the parish authorities, in order to get rid of -imbeciles, that one idiot should be taken by the mill -owner with every twenty sane children. The fate of -these unhappy idiots was even worse than that of the -others. The secret of their final end has never been disclosed, -but we can form some idea of their awful sufferings -from the hardships of the other victims to capitalist -greed and cruelty. The hours of their labor were only -limited by exhaustion, after many modes of torture had -been unavailingly applied to force continued work. Children -were often worked sixteen hours a day, by day and -by night.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_648" id="Page_648">[648]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Mill Children</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Processionals”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Curtis Underwood</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet, born 1874)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We have forgotten how to sing: our laughter is a godless thing: listless and loud and shrill and sly.</div> - <div class="verse">We have forgotten how to smile. Our lips, our voices too are vile. We are all dead before we die.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Our mothers’ mothers made us so: the father that we never know in blindness and in wantonness</div> - <div class="verse">Caused us to come to question you. What is it that you others do, that profit so by our distress?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">You and your children softly sleep. We and our mothers vigil keep. You cheated us of all delight,</div> - <div class="verse">Ere our sick spirits came to birth: you made our fair and fruitful earth a nest of pestilence and blight.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Your black machines are never still, and hard, relentless as your will, they card us like the cotton waste.</div> - <div class="verse">And flesh and blood more cheap than they, they seize and eat and shred away, to feed the fever of your haste.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">For we are waste and shoddy here, who know no God, no faith but fear, no happiness, no hope but sleep.</div> - <div class="verse">Half imbecile and half obscene we sit and tend each tense machine, too sick to sigh, too tired to weep,</div> - <div class="verse">Until the tortured end of day, when fevered faces turn away, to see the stars from blackness leap.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 497px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo648" id="illo648">[illo648]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_648f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>OLIVER TWIST ASKS FOR MORE</p> - -<p>GEORGE CRUIKSHANK</p> - -<p>(<i>English caricaturist, 1792-1878. One of the illustrations of the original -edition of “Oliver Twist”</i>)</p></div> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo649" id="illo649">[illo649]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_649f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"> - -<p> -A CITIZEN LOST<br /> -<br /> -RYAN WALKER<br /> -<br /> -(<i>American Socialist cartoonist, born 1870</i>) - -</p></div> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_649" id="Page_649">[649]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>In the Slums of London</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The People of the Abyss”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Jack London</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_519">519</a>, <a href="#Page_609">609</a>)</p> - -<p>There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only -one, and it is the children dancing in the street when -the organ-grinder goes his round. It is fascinating to -watch them, the new-born, the next generation, swaying -and stepping, with pretty little mimicries and graceful -inventions all their own, with muscles that move swiftly -and easily, and bodies that leap airily, weaving rhythms -never taught in dancing school.</p> - -<p>I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere, -and they struck me as being bright as other children, -and in many ways even brighter. They have most -active little imaginations. Their capacity for projecting -themselves into the realm of romance and fantasy is -remarkable. A joyous life is romping in their blood. -They delight in music, and motion, and color, and very -often they betray a startling beauty of face and form under -their filth and rags.</p> - -<p>But there is a Pied Piper of London Town who steals -them all away. They disappear. One never sees them -again, or anything that suggests them. You may look -for them in vain among the generation of grown-ups. -Here you will find stunted forms, ugly faces, and blunt -and stolid minds. Grace, beauty, imagination, all the -resiliency of mind and muscle, are gone. Sometimes, -however, you may see a woman, not necessarily old, but -twisted and deformed out of all womanhood, bloated and -drunken, lift her draggled skirts and execute a few gro<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_650" id="Page_650">[650]</a></span>tesque -and lumbering steps upon the pavement. It is a -hint that she was once one of those children who danced -to the organ-grinder. Those grotesque and lumbering -steps are all that is left of the promise of childhood. In -the befogged recesses of her brain has arisen a fleeting -memory that she was once a girl. The crowd closes in. -Little girls are dancing beside her, about her, with all the -pretty graces she dimly recollects, but can no more than -parody with her body. Then she pants for breath, -exhausted, and stumbles out through the circle. But the -little girls dance on.</p> - -<p>The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which -make for noble manhood and womanhood; but the -Ghetto itself, like an infuriated tigress turning on its young, -turns upon and destroys all these qualities, blots out the -light and laughter, and moulds those it does not kill into -sodden and forlorn creatures, uncouth, degraded, and -wretched below the beasts of the field.</p> - - -<h3>Slum Children</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Songs of Joy”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William H. Davies</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_577">577</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Your songs at night a drunkard sings,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Stones, sticks and rags your daily flowers;</div> - <div class="verse">Like fishes’ lips, a bluey white,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Such lips, poor mites, are yours.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Poor little things, so sad and solemn,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Whose lives are passed in human crowds—</div> - <div class="verse">When in the water I can see</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Heaven with a flock of clouds.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_651" id="Page_651">[651]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Poor little mites that breathe foul air,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where garbage chokes the sink and drain—</div> - <div class="verse">Now when the hawthorn smells so sweet,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Wet with the summer rain.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But few of ye will live for long;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ye are but small new islands seen,</div> - <div class="verse">To disappear before your lives</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Can grow and be made green.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>No. 5 John Street</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Richard Whiteing</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_137">137</a>)</p> - -<p>Some are locked in all day, “to keep ’em quiet,” -while their owners go forth to work or to booze. The -infant faces, lined with their own dirt, and distorted by -the smeared impurities of the window-panes, seem like -the faces of actors made up for effects of old age. The -poor little hands finger the panes without ceasing, as they -might finger prison bars. The captives crawl over one -another like caged insects, and all their gestures show the -irritation of contact. But the clearest transmission through -that foul medium is to the ear rather than to the eye, in -the querulous whimper, at times rising to a wail, which -betokens the agitation of their shattered nerves. The -children playing below look up at them, and beckon them -into the yard, or make faces at them, with the charitable -intent of provoking them to a smile.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_652" id="Page_652">[652]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Locksley Hall Fifty Years After</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Alfred Tennyson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_486">486</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time,</div> - <div class="verse">City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?</div> - <div class="verse">There among the gloomy alleys Progress halts on palsied feet;</div> - <div class="verse">Crime and hunger cast out maidens by the thousand on the street;</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread;</div> - <div class="verse">There the single sordid attic holds the living and the dead;</div> - <div class="verse">There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,</div> - <div class="verse">And the crowded couch of incest, in the warrens of the poor.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Past and Present</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Carlyle</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_488">488</a>, <a href="#Page_553">553</a>)</p> - -<p>Descend where you will into the lower class, in -Town or Country, by what avenue you will, by -Factory Inquiries, Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue -Returns, by Mining-Laborer Committees, by opening -your own eyes and looking, the same sorrowful result -discloses itself: you have to admit that the working body<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_653" id="Page_653">[653]</a></span> -of this rich English Nation has sunk or is fast sinking into -a state, to which, all sides of it considered, there was -literally never any parallel. At Stockport Assizes, a -Mother and a Father are arraigned and found guilty of -poisoning three of their children, to defraud a “burial-society” -of some £3 8s. due on the death of each child: -they are arraigned, found guilty; and the official authorities, -it is whispered, hint that perhaps the case is not -solitary, that perhaps you had better not probe farther -into that department of things.... In the British land, -a human Mother and Father, of white skin and professing -the Christian religion, had done this thing; they, with -their Irishism and necessity and savagery, had been -driven to do it. Such instances are like the highest mountain -apex emerged into view; under which lies a whole -mountain region and land, not yet emerged. A human -Mother and Father had said to themselves, what shall we -do to escape starvation? We are deep sunk here, in our -dark cellar; and help is far.—Yes, in the Ugolino Hunger-tower -stern things happen; best-loved little Gaddo fallen -dead on his father’s knees!—The Stockport Mother and -Father think and hint: Our poor little starveling Tom, -who cries all day for victuals, who will see only evil and -not good in this world: if he were out of misery at once; -he well dead, and the rest of us perhaps kept alive? It is -thought, and hinted; at last it is done. And now Tom -being killed, and all spent and eaten, Is it poor little -starveling Jack that must go, or poor little starveling -Will?—What a committee of ways and means!</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_654" id="Page_654">[654]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Waifs and Strays</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Arthur Rimbaud</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(French poet, 1854-1891)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Black in the fog and in the snow,</div> - <div class="verse">Where the great air-hole windows glow,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With rounded rumps,</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Upon their knees five urchins squat,</div> - <div class="verse">Looking down where the baker, hot,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The thick dough thumps.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They watch his white arm turn the bread,</div> - <div class="verse">Ere through an opening flaming red</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The loaf he flings.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They smell the good bread baking, while</div> - <div class="verse">The chubby baker with a smile</div> - <div class="verse indent2">An old tune sings.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Breathing the warmth into their soul,</div> - <div class="verse">They squat around the red air-hole,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">As a breast warm;</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And when, for feasters’ midnight bout,</div> - <div class="verse">The ready bread is taken out,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In a cake’s form—</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Sigh with low voices like a prayer,</div> - <div class="verse">Bending toward the light, down there</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where heaven gleams</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">—So eager that they burst their breeches,</div> - <div class="verse">And in the winter wind that screeches</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their linen streams!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_655" id="Page_655">[655]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Oliver Twist</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charles Dickens</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_88">88</a>)</p> - -<p>The room in which the boys were fed, was a large stone -hall, with a copper at one end; out of which the -master, dressed in an apron for the purpose, and assisted -by one or two women, ladled the gruel at meal times. Of -this festive composition each boy had one porringer, -and no more—except on occasions of great public rejoicing, -when he had two ounces and a quarter of bread besides. -The bowls never wanted washing. The boys polished -them with their spoons till they shone again; and when -they had performed this operation (which never took -very long, the spoons being nearly as long as the bowls) -they would sit staring at the copper, with such eager eyes, -as if they could have devoured the very bricks of which -it was composed; employing themselves, meanwhile, in -sucking their fingers most assiduously, with the view of -catching up any stray splashes of gruel that might have -been cast thereon. Boys have generally excellent appetites. -Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the tortures -of slow starvation for three months; at last they -got so voracious and wild with hunger, that one boy, who -was tall for his age, and hadn’t been used to that sort of -thing (for his father had kept a small cook-shop), hinted -darkly to his companions, that unless he had another -basin of gruel <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">per diem</i>, he was afraid he might some night -happen to eat the boy who slept next to him, who happened -to be a weakly youth of tender age. He had a wild, -hungry eye; and they implicitly believed him. A council -was held; lots were cast who should walk up to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_656" id="Page_656">[656]</a></span> -master after supper that evening, and ask for more; and -it fell to Oliver Twist.</p> - -<p>This evening arrived; the boys took their places. The -master, in his cook’s uniform, stationed himself at the -copper; his pauper assistants ranged themselves behind -him; the gruel was served out; and a long grace was said -over the short commons. The gruel disappeared; the -boys whispered to each other, and winked at Oliver; -while his next neighbors nudged him. Child as he was, he -was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. -He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, -basin and spoon in hand, said, somewhat alarmed at his -own temerity:</p> - -<p>“Please, sir, I want some more.”</p> - -<p>The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very -pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small -rebel for some seconds, and then clung for support to the -copper. The assistants were paralyzed with wonder; the -boys with fear.</p> - -<p>“What!” said the master at length, in a faint voice.</p> - -<p>“Please, sir,” replied Oliver, “I want some more.”</p> - -<p>The master aimed a blow at Oliver’s head with the -ladle; pinioned him in his arms; and shrieked aloud for -the beadle.</p> - -<p>The board were sitting in solemn conclave, when Mr. -Bumble rushed into the room in great excitement, and -addressing the gentleman in the high chair, said:</p> - -<p>“Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist -has asked for more!”</p> - -<p>There was a general start. Horror was depicted on -every countenance.</p> - -<p>“For <em>more</em>!” said Mr. Limbkins. “Compose yourself, -Bumble, and answer me distinctly. Do I understand that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_657" id="Page_657">[657]</a></span> -he asked for more, after he had eaten the supper allotted -by the dietary?”</p> - -<p>“He did, sir,” replied Bumble.</p> - -<p>“That boy will be hung,” said the gentleman in the -white waistcoat. “I know that boy will be hung.”</p> - -<p>Nobody controverted the prophetic gentleman’s opinion. -An animated discussion took place. Oliver was -ordered into instant confinement; and a bill was next -morning pasted on the outside of the gate, offering a -reward of five pounds to anybody who would take Oliver -Twist off the hands of the parish. In other words, five -pounds and Oliver Twist were offered to any man or -woman who wanted an apprentice to any trade, business, -or calling.</p> - -<p>“I never was more convinced of anything in my life,” -said the gentleman in the white waistcoat, as he knocked -at the gate and read the bill the next morning: “I never -was more convinced of anything in my life, than I am that -that boy will come to be hung.”</p> - - -<h3>The Children’s Auction</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charles Mackay</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English Chartist poet, 1814-1889)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Who bids for the little children—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Body, and soul and brain?</div> - <div class="verse">Who bids for the little children—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Young and without a stain?</div> - <div class="verse">“Will no one bid,” said England,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“For their souls so pure and white,</div> - <div class="verse">And fit for all good or evil</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The world on their page may write?”</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_658" id="Page_658">[658]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“We bid,” said Pest and Famine;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“We bid for life and limb;</div> - <div class="verse">Fever and pain and squalor,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their bright young eyes shall dim.</div> - <div class="verse">When the children grow too many,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We’ll nurse them as our own,</div> - <div class="verse">And hide them in secret places</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where none may hear their moan.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“I bid,” said Beggary, howling;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“I bid for them one and all!</div> - <div class="verse">I’ll teach them a thousand lessons—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To lie, to skulk, to crawl!</div> - <div class="verse">They shall sleep in my lair like maggots,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They shall rot in the fair sunshine;</div> - <div class="verse">And if they serve my purpose</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I hope they’ll answer thine.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“I’ll bid you higher and higher,”</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Said Crime, with a wolfish grin;</div> - <div class="verse">“For I love to lead the children</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Through the pleasant paths of sin.</div> - <div class="verse">They shall swarm in the streets to pilfer,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They shall plague the broad highway,</div> - <div class="verse">They shall grow too old for pity</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And ripe for the law to slay.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”Give me the little children,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ye good, ye rich, ye wise,</div> - <div class="verse">And let the busy world spin round</div> - <div class="verse indent2">While ye shut your idle eyes;</div> - <div class="verse">And your judges shall have work,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And your lawyers wag the tongue,</div> - <div class="verse">And the jailers and policemen</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Shall be fathers to the young!“</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_659" id="Page_659">[659]</a></span></p> - -<h3>A Modest Proposal</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Jonathan Swift</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English man of letters, 1667-1745; dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, -Dublin. Master of the bitterest satiric pen in English)</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(<cite>From “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children -of Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents or -Country, and for making them Beneficial to the Public”</cite>)</p></div> - -<p>It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through -this great town, or travel in the country, when they see -the streets, the roads, and cabin-doors, crowded with -beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four or six -children, <em>all in rags</em>, and importuning every passenger for -an alms. These mothers instead of being able to work for -their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time -in strolling, to beg sustenance for their helpless infants, -who, as they grow up, either turn thieves for want of work, -or leave their dear Native Country to fight for the Pretender -in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes.</p> - -<p>I think it is agreed by all parties, that this prodigious -number of children, in the arms, or on the backs, or at the -heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in -the present deplorable state of the kingdom, a very great -additional grievance; and therefore whoever could find -out a fair, cheap and easy method of making these children -sound, useful members of the commonwealth would -deserve so well of the public, as to have his statue set up -for a preserver of the nation.</p> - -<p>But my intention is very far from being confined to -provide only for the children of professed beggars, it is of -much greater extent, and shall take in the whole numbers -of infants at a certain age, who are born of parents in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_660" id="Page_660">[660]</a></span> -effect as little able to support them, as those who demand -our charity in the streets....</p> - -<p>There is another great advantage in my scheme, that -it will prevent those voluntary abortions, and that horrid -practice of women murdering their bastard children, alas, -too frequent among us, sacrificing the poor innocent babes, -I doubt, more to avoid the expense, than the shame, -which would move tears and pity in the most savage and -inhuman breast....</p> - -<p>I have been assured by a very knowing American of my -acquaintance in London that a young healthy child well -nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and -wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or -boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a -fricassee, or a ragout.</p> - -<p>I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration, -that of the hundred and twenty thousand children, already -computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, -whereof only one fourth part to be males, which is more -than we allow to sheep, black-cattle, or swine; and my -reason is that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, -a circumstance not much regarded by our savages; -therefore only one male will be sufficient to serve four -females. That the remaining hundred thousand may at -a year old be offered in sale to the persons of quality, and -fortune, through the kingdom, always advising the mother -to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to -render them plump, and fat for a good table....</p> - -<p>I am not so violently bent upon my own opinion, as to -reject any offer, proposed by wise men, which shall be -found equally innocent, cheap, easy, and effectual. But -before something of that kind shall be advanced in contradiction -to my scheme, and offering a better, I desire<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_661" id="Page_661">[661]</a></span> -the author, or authors will be pleased maturely to consider -two points. First, as things now stand, how they will be -able to find food and raiment for an hundred thousand -useless mouths and backs. And secondly, there being a -round million of creatures in human figure, throughout this -kingdom, whose whole subsistence put into a common -stock, would leave them in debt two millions of pounds -sterling, adding those, who are beggars by profession, to -the bulk of farmers, cottagers and laborers with their -wives and children, who are beggars in effect. I desire -those politicians, who dislike my overture, and may perhaps -be so bold to attempt an answer, that they will first -ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not -at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold -for food at a year old, in the manner I prescribe, and thereby -have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes, as -they have since gone through, by the oppression of landlords, -the impossibility of paying rent without money or -trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house -nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the -weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the -like, or greater miseries upon their breed for ever.</p> - -<p>I profess in the sincerity of my heart that I have not the -least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this -necessary work, having no other motive than the <em>public -good of my country, by advancing our trade, providing for -infants, relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the -rich</em>. I have no children, by which I can propose to get a -single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my -wife past child-bearing.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_662" id="Page_662">[662]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Child Labor</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charlotte Perkins Gilman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">No fledgling feeds the father bird!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">No chicken feeds the hen!</div> - <div class="verse">No kitten mouses for the cat—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">This glory is for men:</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We are the Wisest, Strongest Race—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Loud may our praise be sung!</div> - <div class="verse">The only animal alive</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That lives upon its young!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Mother Wept</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Joseph Skipsey</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary English poet, whose work possesses a quaint -simplicity, often suggesting Blake)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Mother wept, and father sighed;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With delight a-glow</div> - <div class="verse">Cried the lad, “Tomorrow,” cried,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“To the pit I go.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Up and down the place he sped,—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Greeted old and young;</div> - <div class="verse">Far and wide the tidings spread;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Clapped his hands and sung.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_663" id="Page_663">[663]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Came his cronies; some to gaze</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Rapt in wonder; some</div> - <div class="verse">Free with counsel; some with praise;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Some with envy dumb.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“May he,” many a gossip cried,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“Be from peril kept;”</div> - <div class="verse">Father hid his face and sighed,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Mother turned and wept.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>A Workingman’s Home-Life</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Tressall</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(The life-story of an English house-painter who died of consumption, -leaving behind him a manuscript portraying the pitiful lives -of the half-starved English artisans. Published in book form, it -proved to be one of the literary events of the year 1914)</p></div> - -<p>“Hark!” said the mother, holding up her finger.</p> - -<p>“Dad!” cried Frankie, rushing to the door and -flinging it open.</p> - -<p>He ran along the passage and opened the staircase door -before Owen reached the top of the last flight of stairs.</p> - -<p>“Why ever do you come up at such a rate?” exclaimed -Owen’s wife reproachfully, as he came into the room -exhausted from the climb upstairs and sank panting into -the nearest chair.</p> - -<p>“I al—ways—for—get,” he replied, when he had in -some degree recovered.</p> - -<p>As he lay back in the chair, his face haggard and of a -ghastly whiteness, and with the water dripping from his -saturated clothing, Owen presented a terrible appearance.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_664" id="Page_664">[664]</a></span></p> - -<p>Frankie noticed with childish terror the extreme alarm -with which his mother looked at his father.</p> - -<p>“You’re always doing it,” he said with a whimper. -“How many more times will mother have to tell you about -it before you take any notice?”</p> - -<p>“It’s all right, old chap,” said Owen, drawing the child -nearer to him and kissing the curly head. “Listen, and -see if you can guess what I’ve got for you under my coat.”</p> - -<p>“A kitten!” cried the boy, taking it out of its hiding -place. “All black, and I believe it’s half a Persian. Just -the very thing I wanted.”</p> - -<p>While Frankie amused himself playing with the kitten, -which had been provided with another saucer of bread and -milk, Owen went into the bedroom to put on the dry -clothes....</p> - -<p>After the child was in bed, Owen sat alone by the table -in the draughty sitting-room, thinking.</p> - -<p>Although there was a bright fire, the room was very cold, -being so close to the roof. The wind roared loudly round -the gables, shaking the house in a way that threatened -every moment to hurl it to the ground.</p> - -<p>Staring abstractedly at the lamp, he thought of the -future.</p> - -<p>A few years ago the future had seemed a region of wonderful -and mysterious possibilities of good, but to-night -the thought brought no such illusions, for he knew that the -story of the future was to be much the same as the story -of the past. He would continue to work, and they would -all three have to go without most of the necessaries of life. -When there was no work they would starve.</p> - -<p>For himself he did not care much, because he knew that, -at the best—or worst—it would be only a very few years. -Even if he were able to have proper food and clothing, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_665" id="Page_665">[665]</a></span> -take reasonable care of himself, he could not live much -longer; but, when that time came, what was to become of -<em>them</em>?</p> - -<p>There would be some hope for the boy if he were more -robust and if his character were less gentle and more -selfish. In order to succeed in the world it was necessary -to be brutal, selfish, and unfeeling; to push others aside -and to take advantage of their misfortunes.</p> - -<p>Owen stood up and began walking about the room, -oppressed with a kind of terror. Presently he returned -to the fire and began rearranging his clothes that were -drying. He found that the boots, having been placed too -near the fire, had dried too quickly, and, consequently the -sole of one of them had begun to split away from the -upper. He remedied this as well as he was able, and, while -turning the wetter parts of the clothing to the fire, he -noticed the newspaper in the coat pocket. He drew it out -with an exclamation of pleasure. Here was something to -distract his thoughts. But, as soon as he opened the -paper, his attention was riveted by the staring headlines -of one of the principal columns: TERRIBLE DOMESTIC -TRAGEDY. <i>Wife and Two Children Killed. -Suicide of the Murderer.</i></p> - -<p>It was one of the ordinary crimes of poverty. The man -had been without employment for many weeks and they -had pawned or sold their furniture and other possessions. -But even this resource must have failed at last, and one -day the neighbors noticed that the blinds remained down -and that there was a strange silence about the house. -When the police entered they found, in one of the upper -rooms, the dead bodies of the woman and the two children, -with their throats cut, laid out side by side upon the bed, -which was saturated with their blood.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_666" id="Page_666">[666]</a></span></p> - -<p>There was no bedstead, and no furniture in the room -except the straw mattress and the ragged clothes and -blankets upon the floor.</p> - -<p>The man’s body was found in the kitchen, lying with -outstretched arms face downward on the floor, surrounded -by the blood from the terrible wound in his throat, which -had evidently been inflicted by the razor that was grasped -in his right hand.</p> - -<p>No particle of food was found, but, attached to a nail -in the kitchen wall, was a piece of blood-smeared paper, -on which was written in pencil:</p> - -<p>“This is not <em>my</em> crime, but Society’s.”</p> - -<p>The report went on to explain that the deed must have -been perpetrated during a fit of temporary insanity -brought on by the sufferings the man had endured.</p> - -<p>“Insanity!” muttered Owen, as he read this glib -theory. “Insanity! It seems to me that he would have -been insane if he had <em>not</em> killed them.”</p> - -<p>Surely it was wiser and better and kinder to send them -all to sleep than to let them continue to suffer.</p> - -<p>At the same time it seemed strange that the man should -have chosen to do it in that way, when there were so many -other cleaner, easier, and less painful ways of accomplishing -his object.</p> - -<p>One could take poison. Of course, there was a certain -amount of difficulty in procuring it, and one would have -to be very careful not to select a poison that would cause -a lot of pain.</p> - -<p>Owen went over to his bookshelf, and took down “The -Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine,” an old, rather out-of-date -book, which he thought might contain the required -information. He was astonished to find what a number -of poisons there were within easy reach of whoever wished<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_667" id="Page_667">[667]</a></span> -to make use of them: poisons which could be relied upon -to do their work certainly, quickly, and without pain. -Why, it was not even necessary to buy them; one could -gather them from the hedges by the roadside and in the -fields.</p> - -<p>The more he thought of it the stranger it seemed that -such a clumsy method as a razor should be so popular. -Strangulation, or even hanging would be better than that, -though the latter method could scarcely be adopted in -their flat, because there were no beams or rafters or anything -from which it would be possible to suspend a cord. -Still, he could drive some large nails or hooks into one of the -walls. For that matter, there were already some clothes -hooks on some of the doors. He began to think that this -would be a more excellent way than poison: he could -pretend to Frankie that he was going to show him some -new kind of play. The boy would offer no resistance, and -in a few minutes it would all be over.</p> - -<p>He threw down the book and pressed his hands over -his ears. He fancied he could hear the boy’s hands and -feet beating against the panels of the door as he struggled -in his death agony.</p> - -<p>Then, as his arms fell nervelessly by his side again, he -thought he heard Frankie’s voice calling:</p> - -<p>“Dad! Dad!”</p> - -<p>Owen hastily opened the door.</p> - -<p>“Are you calling, Frankie?”</p> - -<p>“Yes. I’ve been calling you quite a long time.”</p> - -<p>“What do you want?”</p> - -<p>“I want you to come here. I want to tell you something.”</p> - -<p>“Well, what is it, dear? I thought you were asleep a -long time ago,” said Owen, as he came into the room.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_668" id="Page_668">[668]</a></span></p> - -<p>“That’s just what I want to speak to you about. The -kitten’s gone to sleep all right, but I can’t go. I’ve tried -all different ways, counting and all, but it’s no use, so I -thought I’d ask you if you’d mind coming and staying with -me, and letting me hold your hand for a little while, and -then p’raps I could go.”</p> - -<p>The boy twined his arms round Owen’s neck and hugged -him very tightly.</p> - -<p>“Oh, dad, I love you so much!” he said. “I love you so -much I could squeeze you to death.”</p> - -<p>“I’m afraid you will, if you squeeze me so tightly as -that.”</p> - -<p>The boy laughed softly as he relaxed his hold.</p> - -<p>“That <em>would</em> be a funny way of showing you how much -I loved you, wouldn’t it, dad? Squeezing you to death!”</p> - -<p>“Yes, I suppose it would,” replied Owen, huskily, as he -tucked the bedclothes round the child’s shoulders. “But -don’t talk any more, dear, just hold my hand and try to -sleep.”</p> - -<p>Lying there very quietly, holding his father’s hand and -occasionally kissing it, the child presently fell asleep....</p> - -<p>Owen lay listening to the howling of the wind and the -noise of the rain as it poured heavily on the roof. But -it was not the storm only that kept him awake. Through -the dark hours of the night his thoughts were still haunted -by the words on that piece of blood-stained paper on a -kitchen wall: “This is not my crime, but Society’s.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_669" id="Page_669">[669]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Behold the Future</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Red Wave”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Joseph-Henry Rosny, the Elder</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A glimpse of the home-life of a Syndicalist leader, an interesting -contrast with the passage from the English book preceding)</p> - -<p>François raised the little chap in his arms. “Well, -my young rebel, are you happy to be alive? Tomorrow -I will teach you a new game: the dance of the bourgeois.”</p> - -<p>He seated himself in an arm-chair and gazed at the -child with the grave and persuasive eyes of a leader of -men. “You will be a good Socialist, eh, little Antoine? -You will love men; you will not separate your life from -that of others, like a Robinson Crusoe of egoism. <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Vive -la revolution!</i>”</p> - -<p>“<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Vive la revolution!</i>” cried the child.</p> - -<p>“Behold the future!” said François Rougemont, rocking -the little one upon his knees. “It will see the shining -of the great dawn, the dawn of a humanity as different -from our own as ours is different from the humanity of -the pyramids. Ah, my little man, you will know things -beside which steam, electricity, and radium are as nothing. -You will see man in his beauty, because he will no -longer be hungry—and for a hundred thousand years he has -been hungry. He will no longer be hungry, he will have -all his force! He will no longer be hungry, he will be -able to unfold all his genius! He will no longer be hungry, -he will construct beneath the sea tunnels that will go -from one continent to another, and his aeroplanes will fill -the firmament; he will no longer be hungry, and he will -build cities out of fairy tales, with fields and forests upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_670" id="Page_670">[670]</a></span> -the roofs, with bridges of glass over the streets, with -elevators at every corner; he will no longer be hungry, he -will draw enormous energies from the ocean and from the -warm bosom of the earth. Ah! my little boy, in what -gardens of enchantment you are going to live!”</p> - -<p>The little one listened hypnotized; the grandmother -was quivering with happiness. A shining glory passed -over their souls.</p> - - -<h3>The Factories</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Margaret Widdemer</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I have shut my little sister in from life and light</div> - <div class="verse indent2">(For a rose, for a ribbon, for a wreath across my hair),</div> - <div class="verse">I have made her restless feet still until the night,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Locked from sweets of summer and from wild spring air;</div> - <div class="verse">I who ranged the meadow lands, free from sun to sun,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Free to sing and pull the buds and watch the far wings fly,</div> - <div class="verse">I have bound my sister till her playing-time is done—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Oh, my little sister, was it I?—was it I?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I have robbed my sister of her day of maidenhood</div> - <div class="verse indent2">(For a robe, for a feather, for a trinket’s restless spark),</div> - <div class="verse">Shut from Love till dusk shall fall, how shall she know good,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">How shall she pass scatheless through the sinlit dark?</div> - <div class="verse">I who could be innocent, I who could be gay,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I who could have love and mirth before the light went by,</div> - <div class="verse">I have put my sister in her mating-time away—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Sister, my young sister,—was it I?—was it I?</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_671" id="Page_671">[671]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I have robbed my sister of the lips against her breast</div> - <div class="verse indent2">(For a coin, for the weaving of my children’s lace and lawn),</div> - <div class="verse">Feet that pace beside the loom, hands that cannot rest,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">How can she know motherhood, whose strength is gone?</div> - <div class="verse">I who took no heed of her, starved and labor-worn,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I against whose placid heart my sleepy gold heads lie,</div> - <div class="verse">Round my path they cry to me, little souls unborn,</div> - <div class="verse indent2"><em>God of Life—Creator! It was I! It was I!</em></div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>God and the Flowers</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “My Lady of the Chimney-Corner”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Alexander Irvine</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A tender and loving picture of the author’s mother, an Irish -peasant-woman. See page <a href="#Page_385">385</a>)</p> - -<p>That night there was an unusual atmosphere in her -corner. She had a newly tallied cap on her head and -her little Sunday shawl over her shoulders. Her candle -was burning and the hearth stones had an extra coat of -whitewash. She drew me up close beside her and told me -a story.</p> - -<p>“Once, a long, long time ago, God, feelin’ tired, went to -sleep an’ had a nice wee nap on His throne. His head was -in His han’s an’ a wee white cloud came down an’ covered -him up. Purty soon He wakes up an’ says He:</p> - -<p>“‘Where’s Michael?’</p> - -<p>“‘Here I am, Father!’ said Michael.</p> - -<p>“‘Michael, me boy,’ says God, ‘I want a chariot and a -charioteer!’</p> - -<p>“‘Right ye are!’ says he. Up comes the purtiest -chariot in the city of Heaven an’ the finest charioteer.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_672" id="Page_672">[672]</a></span></p> - -<p>“‘Me boy,’ says God, ‘take a million tons of th’ -choicest seeds of th’ flowers of Heaven an’ take a trip -around th’ world wi’ them. Scatter them,’ says He, ‘be -th’ roadsides an’ th’ wild places of th’ earth where my poor -live.’</p> - -<p>“‘Aye,’ says the charioteer, ‘that’s jist like ye, Father. -It’s th’ purtiest job of m’ afther-life an’ I’ll do it finely.’</p> - -<p>“‘It’s jist come t’ Me in a dream,’ says th’ Father, -‘that th’ rich have all the flowers down there an’ th’ -poor haave nown at all.”</p> - -<p>At this point I got in some questions about God’s -language and the kind of flowers.</p> - -<p>“Well, dear,” she said, “He spakes Irish t’ Irish people, -an’ the charioteer was an Irishman.”</p> - -<p>“Maybe it was a woman!” I ventured.</p> - -<p>“Aye, but there’s no difference up there.”</p> - -<p>“Th’ flowers,” she said, “were primroses, buttercups, -an’ daisies, an’ th’ flowers that be handy t’ th’ poor, an’ -from that day to this there’s been flowers a-plenty for all -of us everywhere!”</p> - - -<h3>The Leaden-Eyed</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Congo”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Vachel Lindsay</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_335">335</a>, <a href="#Page_599">599</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Let not young souls be smothered out before</div> - <div class="verse">They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.</div> - <div class="verse">It is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull,</div> - <div class="verse">Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.</div> - <div class="verse">Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_673" id="Page_673">[673]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,</div> - <div class="verse">Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,</div> - <div class="verse">Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Children and Economics</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “What Is It To Be Educated?”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By C. Hanford Henderson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American educator; born 1861)</p> - -<p>One will not talk economics in any formal way to -children. It is not necessary. But one cannot -avoid the economic implications upon which our current -daily life and all history and literature quite obviously -rest.</p> - -<p>Children are very explicit in their interest. They want -to know what the hero feeds upon, how he is dressed, -where he sleeps. If great deeds are in prospect, wars to -be waged, palaces to be built, pleasure parks to be laid -out, princesses to be won, tourneys to be run off, the -little reader has a keen eye for the sinews of war. In -every tale worth the telling, the hero sets out with the -express purpose of seeking his fortune. Parents and -teachers do not have to drag in economics by the heels. -They may, of course, ignore the question, and allow the -children to grow up with confused and mediæval ideas; -but if they do so, they fail quite miserably to educate -the children in the fundamentals of a moral individual -and social life. The bread-and-butter question must be -met by each parent and teacher in his own personal life; -and in dealing with the children, it must be met constantly -and in the most unexpected quarters.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_674" id="Page_674">[674]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>What to Do</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Leo Tolstoy</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>, <a href="#Page_555">555</a>)</p> - -<p>It is very easy to take a child away from a prostitute, or -from a beggar. It is very easy, when one has money, -to have him washed, cleaned and dressed in good clothes, -fed up, and even taught various sciences; but for us who do -not earn our own bread, it is not only difficult to teach him -to earn his bread, it is impossible; because by our example, -and even by those material improvements of his life which -cost us nothing, we teach the opposite.</p> - - -<h3>True Education</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Zadig”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Voltaire</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(French philosopher and poet, 1694-1778; a skeptic and bitter -satirist, imprisoned and exiled to England. One of the great -intellectual forces which prepared the French Revolution)</p> - -<p>A widow, having a young son, and being possessed -of a handsome fortune, had given a promise of marriage -to two magi, who were both desirous of marrying -her.</p> - -<p>“I will take for my husband,” said she, “the man who -can give the best education to my beloved son.”</p> - -<p>The two magi contended who should bring him up, and -the cause was carried before Zadig. Zadig summoned -the two magi to attend him.</p> - -<p>“What will you teach your pupil?” he said to the first.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_675" id="Page_675">[675]</a></span></p> - -<p>“I will teach him,” said the doctor, “the eight parts of -speech, logic, astrology, pneumatics, what is meant by -substance and accident, abstract and concrete, the doctrine -of the monades, and the pre-established harmony.”</p> - -<p>“For my part,” said the second, “I will endeavor to give -him a sense of justice, and to make him worthy the friendship -of good men.”</p> - -<p>Zadig then cried: “Whether thou art the child’s favorite -or not, thou shalt have his mother.”</p> - - -<h3>New Worlds for Old</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By H. G. Wells</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_519">519</a>)</p> - -<p>The Socialist holds that the community as a whole -should be responsible, and every individual in the -community, married or single, parent or childless, should -be responsible, for the welfare and upbringing of every -child born into that community. This responsibility may -be delegated in whole or in part to parent, teacher, or -other guardian—but it is not simply the right but the duty -of the state—that is to say, of the organized power and -intelligence of the community—to direct, to inquire, and -to intervene in any default for the child’s welfare.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_676" id="Page_676">[676]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Way to Freedom</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Francisco Ferrer</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_336">336</a>)</p> - -<p>We must destroy all which in the present school -answers to the organization of constraint, the -artificial surroundings by which children are separated -from nature and life, the intellectual and moral discipline -made use of to impose ready-made ideas upon them, -beliefs which deprave and annihilate natural bent. -Without fear of deceiving ourselves, we can restore the -child to the environment which entices it, the environment -of nature in which he will be in contact with all that -he loves, and in which impressions of life will replace -fastidious book-learning. If we did no more than that, -we should already have prepared in great part the deliverance -of the child.</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_677" id="Page_677">[677]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK XIV</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><i>Humor</i></p> - -<p>Comedy of the social struggle; masterpieces from those who -have had the courage to fight the battle for social progress with -the weapon of laughter.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_678" id="Page_678">[678]</a><br /><a name="Page_679" id="Page_679">[679]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Reserved Section</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Wilbur D. Nesbit</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(At the time of the great anthracite coal strike of 1902, George -F. Baer, head of the coal trust, was quoted as declaring: “The -rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and -cared for, not by labor and agitation, but by the Christian men to -whom God in his infinite wisdom has given control of the property -interests of this country”)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In the prehistoric ages, when the world was a ball of mist—</div> - <div class="verse">A seething swirl of something unknown in the planet list;</div> - <div class="verse">When the earth was vague with vapor, and formless and dark and void—</div> - <div class="verse">The sport of the wayward comet—the jibe of the asteroid—</div> - <div class="verse">Then the singing stars of morning chanted soft: “Keep out of there!</div> - <div class="verse">Keep off that spot which is sizzling hot—it is making coal for Baer!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">When the pterodactyl ambled, or fluttered, or swam, or jumped,</div> - <div class="verse">And the plesiosaurus rambled, all careless of what he bumped,</div> - <div class="verse">And the other old time monsters that thrived on the land and sea,</div> - <div class="verse">And did not know what their names were, any more than today do we—</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_680" id="Page_680">[680]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Wherever they went they heard it: “You fellows keep out of there—</div> - <div class="verse">That place which shakes and quivers and quakes—it is making coal for Baer.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The carboniferous era consumed but a million years;</div> - <div class="verse">It started when earth was shedding the last of her baby tears,</div> - <div class="verse">When still she was swaddled softly in clumsily tied on clouds,</div> - <div class="verse">When stars from the shop of nature were being turned out in crowds;</div> - <div class="verse">But high o’er the favored section this sign said to all: “Beware!</div> - <div class="verse">Stay back of the ropes that surround these slopes—they are making coal for Baer!”</div> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 453px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo680" id="illo680">[illo680]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_680f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>THE COAL FAMINE</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">Please, good Mr. Devil, fetch my mamma, too. It’s so -nice and warm in your house</span>”</p> - -<p>THOMAS THEODOR HEINE</p> - -<p>(<i>An example of German Socialist cartooning; from “Simplizissimus”</i>)</p></div> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 588px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo681" id="illo681">[illo681]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_681f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>MY SOLICITOR SHALL HEAR OF THIS!</p> - -<p>WILL DYSON</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(<i>Cartoonist of the London “Daily Herald,” born 1883. Dyson -is accustomed to describe the plutocracy as “Fat.” In the present instance -the great man is discovered seeing himself as others see him</i>) -</p> -</div> -</div> -</div> - - -<h3>The Monthly Rent</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Game of Life”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Bolton Hall</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American lawyer and single-taxer, born 1854)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They sheared the lamb twelve times a year,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To get some money to buy some beer;</div> - <div class="verse">The lamb thought this was extremely queer—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Poor little snow-white lamb!—<span class="smcap">Old Song.</span></div> -</div></div></div> - -<p>“God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” said -the deacon.</p> - -<p>“I will shut the gate of the field so as to keep him -warm,” said the philanthropist.</p> - -<p>“If you give me the tags of wool,” said the charity -clipper, “I’ll let the poor creature have half.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_681" id="Page_681">[681]</a></span></p> - -<p>“The lambs we have always with us,” said the wool -broker.</p> - -<p>“Lambs must always be shorn,” said the business -man; “hand me the shears.”</p> - -<p>“We should leave him enough wool to make him a -coat,” said the profit sharer.</p> - -<p>“His condition is improving,” said the land owner, -“for his fleece will be longer next year.”</p> - -<p>“We should prohibit cutting his flesh when we shear,” -said the legislator.</p> - -<p>“But I intend,” said the radical, “to stop this shearing.”</p> - -<p>The others united to throw him out; then they divided -the wool.</p> - - -<h3>Penguin Island</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Anatole France</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(French man of letters, born 1844. In this masterpiece of social -satire the aged and half-blind Saint Maël has by mistake baptized -a flock of penguins. After a consultation of the heavenly powers, -the penguins are turned into human beings)</p></div> - -<p>Now one autumn morning, as the blessed Maël was -walking in the valley of Clange in company with a -monk of Yvern called Bulloch, he saw bands of fierce-looking -men loaded with stones passing along the roads. -At the same time he heard in all directions cries and -complaints mounting up from the valley towards the -tranquil sky.</p> - -<p>And he said to Bulloch:</p> - -<p>“I notice with sadness, my son, that since they became -men the inhabitants of this island act with less wisdom -than formerly. When they were birds they only quarrelled<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_682" id="Page_682">[682]</a></span> -during the season of their love affairs. But now they -dispute all the time; they pick quarrels with each other -in summer as well as in winter. How greatly have they -fallen from that peaceful majesty which made the assembly -of the penguins look like the senate of a wise republic!</p> - -<p>“Look towards Surelle, Bulloch, my son. In yonder -pleasant valley a dozen men penguins are busy knocking -each other down with the spades and picks that -they might employ better in tilling the ground. The -women, still more cruel than the men, are tearing their -opponents’ faces with their nails. Alas! Bulloch, my son, -why are they murdering each other in this way?”</p> - -<p>“From a spirit of fellowship, father, and through forethought -for the future,” answered Bulloch. “For man -is essentially provident and sociable. Such is his character, -and it is impossible to imagine it apart from a -certain appropriation of things. Those penguins whom -you see are dividing the ground among themselves.”</p> - -<p>“Could they not divide it with less violence?” asked -the aged man. “As they fight they exchange invectives -and threats. I do not distinguish their words, but they -are angry ones, judging from the tone.”</p> - -<p>“They are accusing one another of theft and encroachment,” -answered Bulloch. “That is the general sense of -their speech.”</p> - -<p>At that moment the holy Maël clasped his hands and -sighed deeply.</p> - -<p>“Do you see, my son,” he exclaimed, “that madman -who with his teeth is biting the nose of the adversary -he has overthrown, and that other one who is pounding -a woman’s head with a huge stone?”</p> - -<p>“I see them,” said Bulloch. “They are creating law; -they are founding property; they are establishing the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_683" id="Page_683">[683]</a></span> -principles of civilization, the basis of society, and the -foundations of the State.”</p> - -<p>“How is that?” asked old Maël.</p> - -<p>“By setting bounds to their fields. That is the origin -of all government. Your penguins, O Master, are performing -the most august of functions. Throughout the -ages their work will be consecrated by lawyers, and -magistrates will confirm it.”</p> - - -<h3>“Mr. Dooley” on Success</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Finley Peter Dunne</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American humorist and social philosopher, born 1867)</p> - -<p>Th’ millyionaire starts in as a foreman in a can -facthry. By an’ by, he larns that wan iv th’ men -wurrukin’ f’r him has invinted a top that ye can opin -with a pair iv scissors, an’ he throws him down an’ -takes it away fr’m him. He’s a robber, says ye? He -is while he’s got th’ other man down. But whin he -gets up he’s a magnate.</p> - - -<h3>Diomedes the Pirate to Alexander</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By François Villon</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(French poet and vagabond, 1431-1484)</p> - -<p>The Emperor reasoned with him: “Why should you -desire to be a pirate?” And the other replied: -“Why call me a pirate? Because you see me going about -in a little galley? If I could arm myself like you, like you -I would be an emperor.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_684" id="Page_684">[684]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Leisure Classes</h3> - -<p><span class="smcap">Anonymous</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">There was a little beggar maid</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Who wed a king long, long ago;</div> - <div class="verse">Of course the taste that he displayed</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Was criticised by folks who know</div> - <div class="verse">Just what formalities and things</div> - <div class="verse">Are due to beggar maids and kings.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But straight the monarch made reply:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“There is small difference, as I live,</div> - <div class="verse">Between our stations! She and I</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Subsist on what the people give.</div> - <div class="verse">We do not toil with strength and skill,</div> - <div class="verse">And, pleasing Heaven, never will.”</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Influence of Servants</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Reign of Gilt”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By David Graham Phillips</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American novelist of radical sympathies, 1867-1911)</p> - -<p>There is a woman in one of our big cities who is -now a leader of fashion, very “classy” indeed, most -glib on the subject of the “traditions of people of our -station.” Her father was an excellent peddler, her -mother a farmer’s daughter who could be induced to -“help out” a neighbor in the rush of the harvest time. -This typical American woman behaved very sensibly so -long as her sensible father and mother were alive and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_685" id="Page_685">[685]</a></span> -until the craze for English households arose. She fell -into line. But the haughty servants were most trying -at first. For instance, she loved bread spread with -molasses. She ate it before the butler once; his face -told her what a hideous “break” she had made. She -tried to conquer this low taste—never did weak woman -fight harder against the gnawings of sinful appetite. -At last she gave way, and in secret and in stealth indulged. -She was not caught and, encouraged, she proceeded to -add one low common habit to another until she was -leading a double life. It had its terrors; it had its compensating -joys. But before she had gone too far she -was happily saved. One morning her maid caught her, -and the whole household was agog. The miseries endured -in the few following weeks completely cured her. She -is now in private, as well as in public, as sound a snob -as ever reveled in “exclusiveness.”</p> - - -<h3>A Gentleman and His Boots</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “A Traveler from Altruria”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Dean Howells</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(The “dean of American novelists,” 1837-1919, here gently -satirizes his country. “A Traveler from Altruria” comes to -America expecting to find democracy; at a summer hotel he -makes the mistake of helping the porter to black boots. For -this he is rebuked by a friend.)</p></div> - -<p>“There are a great many things we are willing to -do for ourselves that we are not willing to do for -others. But even on that principle, which I think false -and illogical, you could not be justified. A gentleman is -not willing to black <em>his own</em> boots. It is offensive to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_686" id="Page_686">[686]</a></span> -his feelings, to his self-respect; it is something he will -not do if he can get anybody else to do it for him.”</p> - -<p>“Then, in America,” said the Altrurian, “it is not offensive -to the feelings of a gentleman to let another do for -him what he would not do for himself?”</p> - -<p>“Certainly not.”</p> - -<p>“Ah,” he returned, “then we understand something -altogether different by the word gentleman in Altruria.”</p> - - -<h3>Song of the Lower Classes</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Ernest Jones</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Chartist leader and poet, 1819-1869; sentenced in 1848 to two -years imprisonment)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We plow and sow, we’re so very, very low,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That we delve in the dirty clay;</div> - <div class="verse">Till we bless the plain with the golden grain,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the vale with the fragrant hay.</div> - <div class="verse">Our place we know, we’re so very, very low,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">’Tis down at the landlord’s feet;</div> - <div class="verse">We’re not too low the grain to grow,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But too low the bread to eat.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Down, down we go, we’re so very, very low,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To the hell of the deep-sunk mines;</div> - <div class="verse">But we gather the proudest gems that glow,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">When the crown of the despot shines;</div> - <div class="verse">And when’er he lacks, upon our backs</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Fresh loads he deigns to lay;</div> - <div class="verse">We’re far too low to vote the tax,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But not too low to pay.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_687" id="Page_687">[687]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We’re low, we’re low—we’re very, very low,—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And yet from our fingers glide</div> - <div class="verse">The silken floss and the robes that glow</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Round the limbs of the sons of pride;</div> - <div class="verse">And what we get, and what we give,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We know, and we know our share;</div> - <div class="verse">We’re not too low the cloth to weave,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But too low the cloth to wear.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We’re low, we’re low, we’re very, very low,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And yet when the trumpets ring,</div> - <div class="verse">The thrust of a poor man’s arm will go</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Through the heart of the proudest king.</div> - <div class="verse">We’re low, we’re low—mere rabble, we know—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We’re only the rank and the file;</div> - <div class="verse">We’re not too low to kill the foe,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But too low to share the spoil.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Tom Dunstan: or, the Politician</h3> - -<p class="center">(“<cite>How Long, O Lord, How Long?</cite>”)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Buchanan</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_367">367</a>, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Cross-legg’d on the board we sat,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Like spiders spinning,</div> - <div class="verse">Stitching and sweating, while fat</div> - <div class="verse">Old Moses, with eyes like a cat,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Sat greasily grinning;</div> - <div class="verse">And here Tom said his say,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And prophesied Tyranny’s death;</div> - <div class="verse">And the tallow burned all day,</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_688" id="Page_688">[688]</a></span> - <div class="verse">And we stitch’d and stitch’d away</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In the thick smoke of our breath.</div> - <div class="verse">Poor worn-out slops were we,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With hearts as heavy as lead;</div> - <div class="verse">But “Patience! she’s coming!” said he;</div> - <div class="verse">“Courage, boys! wait and see!</div> - <div class="verse indent2"><em>Freedom’s</em> ahead!” ...</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But Tom was little and weak,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The hard hours shook him;</div> - <div class="verse">Hollower grew his cheek,</div> - <div class="verse">And when he began to speak</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The coughing took him.</div> - <div class="verse">And at last the cheery sound</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of his voice among us ceased,</div> - <div class="verse">And we made a purse, all round,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That he mightn’t starve, at least.</div> - <div class="verse">His pain was awful to see,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Yet there, on his poor sick-bed,</div> - <div class="verse">“She’s coming, in spite of me!</div> - <div class="verse">Courage, and wait!” cried he;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“<em>Freedom’s</em> ahead!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ay, now Tom Dunstan’s cold,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">All life seems duller;</div> - <div class="verse">There’s a blight on young and old,</div> - <div class="verse">And our talk has lost the bold</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Red-republican color.</div> - <div class="verse">But we see a figure gray,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And we hear a voice of death,</div> - <div class="verse">And the tallow burns all day,</div> - <div class="verse">And we stitch and stitch away</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In the thick smoke of our breath;</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_689" id="Page_689">[689]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Ay, while in the dark sit we,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Tom seems to call from the dead—</div> - <div class="verse">“She’s coming! she’s coming!” says he;</div> - <div class="verse">“Courage, boys! wait and see!</div> - <div class="verse indent2"><em>Freedom’s</em> ahead!”</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Lines</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Stephen Crane</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_217">217</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Have you ever made a just man?”</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“Oh, I have made three,” answered God,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“But two of them are dead,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the third—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Listen! listen,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And you will hear the thud of his defeat....”</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Memoirs of Li Hung Chang</h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_196">196</a>)</p> - -<p>A poor man is ever at a disadvantage in matters of -public concern. When he rises to speak, or writes -a letter to his superiors, they ask: Who is this fellow that -offers advice? And when it is known that he is without -coin they spit their hands at him, and use his letters in -the cooks’ fires. But if it be a man of wealth who would -speak, or write, or denounce, even though he have the -brain of a yearling dromedary, or a spine as crooked and -unseemly, the whole city listens to his words and declares -them wise.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_690" id="Page_690">[690]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From Ecclesiasticus</span></h3> - -<p>A rich man speaketh, and all keep silence; and -what he saith they extol to the clouds: A poor -man speaketh, and they say, Who is this? and if he -stumble, they will help to overthrow him.</p> - - -<h3>The Pauper’s Drive</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By T. Noel</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet of the Chartist period)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">There’s a grim one-horse hearse in a jolly round trot;</div> - <div class="verse">To the churchyard a pauper is going, I wot;</div> - <div class="verse">The road it is rough, and the hearse has no springs,</div> - <div class="verse">And hark to the dirge that the sad driver sings:—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“Rattle his bones over the stones;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">He’s only a pauper, whom nobody owns!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Oh, where are the mourners? alas! there are none;</div> - <div class="verse">He has left not a gap in the world now he’s gone,</div> - <div class="verse">Not a tear in the eye of child, woman, or man—</div> - <div class="verse">To the grave with his carcase as fast as you can.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“Rattle his bones over the stones;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">He’s only a pauper, whom nobody owns!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">What a jolting and creaking, and splashing and din;</div> - <div class="verse">The whip how it cracks! and the wheels how they spin!</div> - <div class="verse">How the dirt, right and left, o’er the hedges is hurled!</div> - <div class="verse">The pauper at length makes a noise in the world.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“Rattle his bones over the stones;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">He’s only a pauper, whom nobody owns!” ...</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_691" id="Page_691">[691]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">You bumpkin, who stare at your brother conveyed;</div> - <div class="verse">Behold what respect to a cloddy is paid,</div> - <div class="verse">And be joyful to think, when by death you’re laid low</div> - <div class="verse">You’ve a chance to the grave like a gemman to go.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“Rattle his bones over the stones;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">He’s only a pauper, whom nobody owns!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But a truce to this strain—for my soul it is sad,</div> - <div class="verse">To think that a heart in humanity clad</div> - <div class="verse">Should make, like the brutes, such a desolate end,</div> - <div class="verse">And depart from the light without leaving a friend.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Bear softly his bones over the stones;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Though a pauper, he’s one whom his Maker yet owns.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Complaint to My Empty Purse</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Geoffrey Chaucer</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_423">423</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">To you, my purse, and to none other wight</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Complain I, for ye be my lady dear!</div> - <div class="verse">I am so sorry, now that ye be light;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For certès, but ye make me heavy cheer,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Me were as lief be laid upon my bier;</div> - <div class="verse">For which unto your mercy thus I cry:</div> - <div class="verse">Be heavy again, or elles might I die!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Now voucheth safe this day, or it be night,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That I of you the blissful sound may hear,</div> - <div class="verse">Or see your colour like the sun bright</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That of yellowness had never a peer.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ye be my life, ye be my hertes stere,</div> - <div class="verse">Queen of comfort and of good company:</div> - <div class="verse">Be heavy again, or elles might I die!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_692" id="Page_692">[692]</a></span></p> - -<h3>“Mr. Dooley” on Poverty</h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_683">683</a>)</p> - -<p>Wan iv th’ sthrangest things about life is that th’ -poor, who need th’ money th’ most, ar-re th’ very -wans that niver have it.</p> - - -<h3>Don Quixote</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Miguel de Cervantes</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Sancho Panza, the servant of the half-crazed knight, has accompanied -him upon the promise of being promoted to a high -station)</p> - -<p>“Troth, wife,” quoth Sancho, “were not I in hopes -to see myself, ere it be long, governor of an -island, on my conscience I should drop down dead on -the spot.” “Not so, my chicken,” quoth the wife, -“‘let the hen live, though it be with pip’; do thou live, -and let all the governments in the world go to the Devil. -Thou camest out of thy mother’s belly without government, -and thou mayest be carried to thy long home -without government, when it shall please the Lord. How -many people in this world live without government yet -do well enough, and are well looked upon? There is no -sauce in the world like hunger; and as the poor never -want that, they always eat with a good stomach.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_693" id="Page_693">[693]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Freebooter’s Prayer</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Scotland, 1405</cite>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Thou That willed us naked-born,</div> - <div class="verse">Send us meat against the morn—</div> - <div class="verse">Got with right or got with wrong</div> - <div class="verse">So we fast not overlong.</div> - <div class="verse">Prosper “Snaffle, Spur and Spear!”</div> - <div class="verse">Grant us booty, horse and gear;</div> - <div class="verse">Save our necks from hempen thrall,</div> - <div class="verse">Bless the souls of them that fall.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h4><i>A Modern Version</i></h4> - -<p class="center">(<cite>U. S. A., 1905</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Arthur Guiterman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American poet)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Thou, Whom rich and poor adore,</div> - <div class="verse">Grant me fifty millions more,</div> - <div class="verse">Earned or pilfered, foul or pure;</div> - <div class="verse">From man’s law hold me secure.</div> - <div class="verse">So, when I have gained of gold</div> - <div class="verse">All my coffers well can hold,</div> - <div class="verse">I may give, O Lord, for Thee,</div> - <div class="verse">One-sixteenth in Charity.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_694" id="Page_694">[694]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Zadig</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Voltaire</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_674">674</a>)</p> - -<p>The lord of the castle was one of those Arabians -who are commonly called robbers; but he now and -then performed some good actions amidst a multitude -of bad ones. He robbed with furious rapacity, and -granted favors with great generosity.</p> - -<p>“May I take the liberty of asking thee,” said Zadig, -“how long thou hast followed this noble profession?”</p> - -<p>“From my most tender youth,” replied the lord. “I -was servant to a petty, good-natured Arabian, but could -not endure the hardships of my situation. I was vexed -to find that fate had given me no share of the earth -which equally belongs to all men. I imparted the cause -of my uneasiness to an old Arabian, who said to me:</p> - -<p>“‘My son, do not despair; there was once a grain of -sand that lamented that it was no more than a neglected -atom in the deserts; at the end of a few years it became -a diamond, and it is now the brightest ornament in the -crown of the king of the Indies.’</p> - -<p>“This discourse made a deep impression on my mind. -I was the grain of sand, and I resolved to become the -diamond. I began by stealing two horses. I soon got -a party of companions. I put myself in a condition to -rob small caravans; and thus, by degrees, I destroyed -the difference which had formerly subsisted between me -and other men. I had my share of the good things of -this world; and was even recompensed with usury for -the hardships I had suffered. I was greatly respected, -and became the captain of a band of robbers. I seized<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_695" id="Page_695">[695]</a></span> -this castle by force. The satrap of Syria had a mind to -dispossess me of it; but I was too rich to have anything -to fear. I gave the satrap a handsome present, by which -I preserved my castle, and increased my possessions. -He even appointed me treasurer of the tributes which -Arabia Petraea pays to the king of kings. I perform my -office of receiver with great punctuality; but I take -the freedom to dispense with that of paymaster.”</p> - - -<h3>For the Other 365 Days</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Franklin P. Adams</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American humorist)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Christmas is over. Uncork your ambition!</div> - <div class="verse">Back to the battle! Come on, competition!</div> - <div class="verse">Down with all sentiment, can scrupulosity!</div> - <div class="verse">Commerce has nothing to gain by jocosity;</div> - <div class="verse">Money is all that is worth all your labors;</div> - <div class="verse">Crowd your competitors, nix on your neighbors!</div> - <div class="verse">Push ’em aside in a passionate hurry,</div> - <div class="verse">Argue and bustle and bargain and worry!</div> - <div class="verse">Frenzy yourself into sickness and dizziness—</div> - <div class="verse">Christmas is over and Business is Business.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_696" id="Page_696">[696]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Road to Success</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Random Reminiscences of Men and Events”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John D. Rockefeller</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_487">487</a>)</p> - -<p>If I were to give advice to a young man starting out -in life, I should say to him: If you aim for a large, -broad-gauged success, do not begin your business career, -whether you sell your labor or are an independent -producer, with the idea of getting from the world by -hook or crook all you can. In the choice of your profession -or your business employment, let your first thought -be: Where can I fit in so that I may be most effective -in the work of the world? Where can I lend a hand in -a way most effective to advance the general interests? -Enter life in such a spirit, choose your vocation in that -way, and you have taken the first step on the highest -road to a large success. Investigation will show that the -great fortunes which have been made in this country, -and the same is probably true of other lands, have come -to men who have performed great and far-reaching -economic services—men who, with great faith in the future -of their country, have done most for the development -of its resources. The man will be most successful who -confers the greatest service on the world.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_697" id="Page_697">[697]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Latest Decalogue</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Arthur Hugh Clough</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_488">488</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Thou shalt have one God only; who</div> - <div class="verse">Would be at the expense of two?</div> - <div class="verse">No graven images may be</div> - <div class="verse">Worshipped, except the currency.</div> - <div class="verse">Swear not at all; for, for thy curse</div> - <div class="verse">Thine enemy is none the worse.</div> - <div class="verse">At church on Sunday to attend</div> - <div class="verse">Will serve to keep the world thy friend.</div> - <div class="verse">Honor thy parents; that is, all</div> - <div class="verse">From whom advancement may befall.</div> - <div class="verse">Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive</div> - <div class="verse">Officiously to keep alive.</div> - <div class="verse">Do not adultery commit;</div> - <div class="verse">Advantage rarely comes of it.</div> - <div class="verse">Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,</div> - <div class="verse">When it’s so lucrative to cheat.</div> - <div class="verse">Bear not false witness; let the lie</div> - <div class="verse">Have time on its own wings to fly.</div> - <div class="verse">Thou shalt not covet, but tradition</div> - <div class="verse">Approves all forms of competition.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_698" id="Page_698">[698]</a></span></p> - -<p>“Mr. Dooley” on the Trusts</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_683">683</a>, <a href="#Page_692">692</a>)</p> - -<p>“Mind ye, Jawn, I’ve no wurrud to say again thim -that sets back in their own house an’ lot an’ -makes th’ food iv th’ people dear. They’re good men, -good men. Whin they tilt the price iv beef to where wan -pound iv it costs as much as many th’ man in this Ar-rchey -Road ‘d wurruk from th’ risin’ to th’ settin’ iv th’ sun to -get, they have no thought iv th’ likes iv you an’ me. -’Tis aisy come, aisy go with thim; an’ ivry cint a pound -manes a new art musoom or a new church, to take th’ -edge off hunger. They’re all right, thim la-ads with their -own porkchops delivered free at th’ door. ’Tis, ‘Will ye -have a new spring dress, me dear? Willum, ring thim up, -an’ tell thim to hist the price iv beef. If we had a few -more pitchers an’ statoos in th’ musoom ‘twud ilivate th’ -people a sthory or two. Willum, afther this steak ‘ll -be twinty cints a pound.’ Oh, they’re all right, on’y -I was thinkin’ iv th’ Connock man’s fam’ly back iv th’ -dumps.”</p> - -<p>“For a man that was gay a little while ago, it looks to -me as if you’d grown mighty solemn-like,” said Mr. -McKenna.</p> - -<p>“Mebbe so,” said Mr. Dooley. “Mebbe so. What th’ -‘ell, annyhow. Mebbe ’tis as bad to take champagne out -iv wan man’s mouth as round steak out iv another’s. -Lent is near over. I seen Doherty out shinin’ up his pipe -that’s been behind th’ clock since Ash Winsdah. Th’ -girls ‘ll be layin’ lilies on th’ altar in a day or two. The -springs come on. Th’ grass is growin’ good; an’, if th’ -Connock man’s children back iv th’ dumps can’t get meat, -they can eat hay.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_699" id="Page_699">[699]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>What the Moon Saw</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Vachel Lindsay</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_335">335</a>, <a href="#Page_599">599</a>, <a href="#Page_672">672</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Two statesmen met by moonlight.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their ease was partly feigned.</div> - <div class="verse">They glanced about the prairie,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their faces were constrained.</div> - <div class="verse">In various ways aforetime</div> - <div class="verse indent2">They had misled the state,</div> - <div class="verse">Yet did it so politely</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Their henchmen thought them great.</div> - <div class="verse">They sat beneath a hedge and spake</div> - <div class="verse indent2">No word, but had a smoke.</div> - <div class="verse">A satchel passed from hand to hand.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Next day the deadlock broke.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Portrait of a Supreme Court Judge</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Louis Untermeyer</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>, <a href="#Page_515">515</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">How well this figure represents the Law—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">This pose of neuter Justice, sterile Cant;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">This Roman Emperor with the iron jaw,</div> - <div class="verse">Wrapped in the black silk of a maiden-aunt.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_700" id="Page_700">[700]</a></span></p> - -<p>The Furred Law-Cats</p> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Pantagruel”</cite>)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">François Rabelais</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(French satirist of the middle ages, 1483-1553)</p> - -<p>The Furred Law-Cats are most terrible and dreadful -monsters; they devour little children, and trample -over marble stones. Pray tell me, noble topers, do they -not deserve to have their snouts slit? The hair of their -hides doesn’t lie outward, but inwards, and every mother’s -son of them for his device wears a gaping pouch, but not -all in the same manner; for some wear it tied to their -neck scarfwise, others upon the breech, some on the -side, and all for a cause, with reason and mystery. They -have claws so very strong, long, and sharp that nothing -can get from ’em what is once fast between their clutches. -Sometimes they cover their heads with mortar-like caps, -at other times with mortified caparisons.</p> - -<p>Examine well the countenance of these stout props and -pillars of this catch-coin law and iniquity; and pray -observe, that if you live but six olympiads, and the age -of two dogs more, you’ll see these Furred Law-cats lords -of all Europe, and in peaceful possession of all the estates -and domains belonging to it; unless, by divine providence, -what’s got over the devil’s back is spent under his -belly, or the goods which they unjustly get perish with -their prodigal heirs. Take this from an honest beggar!</p> - -<p>Among ’em reigns the sixth essence; by the means of -which they gripe all, devour all, conskite all, burn all, -draw all, hang all, quarter all, behead all, murder all, -imprison all, waste all, and ruin all, without the least -notice of right and wrong; for among them vice is called<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_701" id="Page_701">[701]</a></span> -virtue; wickedness, piety; treason, loyalty; robbery, -justice. Plunder is their motto, and when acted by -them is approved by all men, except the heretics; and -all this they do because they dare; their authority is -sovereign and irrefragable. Should all their villany be -once displayed in its true colours and exposed to the -people, there never was, is, nor will be any spokesman -could save ’em; nor any magistrate so powerful as to -hinder their being burnt alive in their coney-burrows -without mercy. Even their own furred kittlings, friends -and relations would abominate ’em.</p> - - -<h3>The Gentleman Inside</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Damon Runyon</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American writer)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They’s a banker that’s a trusty workin’ on the warden’s books;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I kin see him from the rock pile where I’m sittin’,</div> - <div class="verse">An’ on his case I’m basin’ this advice to feller crooks:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">You’d better git a plenty while yer gittin’.</div> - <div class="verse">Now, this guy wrecked a county an’ he copped his neighbor’s dough;</div> - <div class="verse">He got six hundred thousand, which is some change, as you know;</div> - <div class="verse">They give him one or two years, an’ the softest job here—Oh</div> - <div class="verse indent2">It pays to git a plenty while yer gittin’.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Wit’ me little flask o’ nitro an’ me bar o’ laundry soap,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I blew a safe, an’ then, as was befittin’,</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_702" id="Page_702">[702]</a></span> - <div class="verse">I took me ten years smilin’, glad I didn’t get the rope!—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But the next time! Oh, a plenty while I’m gittin’!</div> - <div class="verse">For this guy tore off half a state an’ shook the other half;</div> - <div class="verse">He robbed his friends an’ neighbors an’ he handed both the laugh—</div> - <div class="verse">But you oughta heard him holler at that one or two year gaff.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">You’d better git a plenty while yer gittin’!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">An’ so he’s here a trusty, while I wear a ball an’ chain—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">(They say he beat most every statoot written.)</div> - <div class="verse">He’s got a fortune planted an’ all I’ve got’s a pain;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">You’d better git a plenty while yer gittin’!</div> - <div class="verse">He cost the state a million bucks before they put him here;</div> - <div class="verse">He had ten lawyers for his trial, w’ich lasted most a year;</div> - <div class="verse">An’ the jedge who had to sentence him pronounced it wit’ a tear—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">It pays to git a plenty while yer gittin’!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Memoirs of Li Hung Chang</h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_689">689</a>)</p> - -<p>They showed me a beautifully shaped old bell, which -is in Independence Hall, and is called the Bell of -Liberty; which means that at its ringing all men within -sound of its voice know they are free. But they do not -ring it any more because it is cracked. Is Liberty cracked -also?</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_703" id="Page_703">[703]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Penguin Island</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Anatole France</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_681">681</a>. In the following passage one of the most learned -of the Penguins pays a visit to America)</p> - -<p>After a voyage of fifteen days his steamer entered, -during the night, the harbor of Titanport, where -thousands of ships were anchored. An iron bridge thrown -across the water and shining with lights, stretched between -two piers so far apart that Professor Obnubile -imagined he was sailing on the seas of Saturn, and that -he saw the marvellous ring which girds the planet of the -Old Man. And this immense conduit bore upon it more -than a quarter of the wealth of the world. The learned -Penguin, having disembarked, was waited on by automatons -in a hotel forty-eight stories high. Then he took -the great railway that led to Gigantopolis, the capital -of New Atlantic. In the train there were restaurants, -gaming-rooms, athletic arenas, telegraphic, commercial, -and financial offices, a Protestant Church, and the printing-office -of a great newspaper, which latter the doctor was -unable to read, as he did not know the language of the -New Atlantans. The train passed along the banks of -great rivers, through manufacturing cities which concealed -the sky with the smoke from their chimneys, towns -black in the day, towns red at night, full of noise by day -and full of noise also by night.</p> - -<p>“Here,” thought the doctor, “is a people far too -much engaged in industry and trade to make war. I -am already certain that the New Atlantans pursue a -policy of peace. For it is an axiom admitted by all -economists that peace without and peace within are necessary -for the progress of commerce and industry.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_704" id="Page_704">[704]</a></span></p> - -<p>As he surveyed Gigantopolis, he was confirmed in this -opinion. People went through the streets so swiftly -propelled by hurry that they knocked down all who were -in their way. Obnubile was thrown down several times, -but soon succeeded in learning how to demean himself -better; after an hour’s walking he himself knocked down -an Atlantan.</p> - -<p>Having reached a great square he saw the portico of -a palace in the classic style, whose Corinthian columns -reared their capitals of arborescent acanthus seventy -metres above the stylobate.</p> - -<p>As he stood with his head thrown back admiring the -building, a man of modest appearance approached him -and said in Penguin:</p> - -<p>“I see by your dress that you are from Penguinia. -I know your language; I am a sworn interpreter. This -is the Parliament palace. At the present moment the -representatives of the States are in deliberation. Would -you like to be present at the sitting?”</p> - -<p>The doctor was brought into the hall and cast his -looks upon the crowd of legislators who were sitting on -cane chairs with their feet upon their desks.</p> - -<p>The president arose, and, in the midst of general inattention, -muttered rather than spoke the following -formulas which the interpreter immediately translated to -the doctor.</p> - -<p>“The war for the opening of the Mongol markets being -ended to the satisfaction of the States, I propose that -the accounts be laid before the finance committee....”</p> - -<p>“Is there any opposition?...”</p> - -<p>“The proposal is carried.”</p> - -<p>“The war for the opening of the markets of Third-Zealand -being ended to the satisfaction of the States,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_705" id="Page_705">[705]</a></span> -I propose that the accounts be laid before the finance -committee....”</p> - -<p>“Is there any opposition?...”</p> - -<p>“The proposal is carried.”</p> - -<p>“Have I heard aright?” asked Professor Obnubile. -“What? you an industrial people and engaged in all -these wars!”</p> - -<p>“Certainly,” answered the interpreter, “these are industrial -wars. Peoples who have neither commerce nor -industry are not obliged to make war, but a business -people is forced to adopt a policy of conquest. The -number of wars necessarily increases with our productive -capacity. As soon as one of our industries fails to find -a market for its products a war is necessary to open new -outlets. It is in this way we have had a coal war, a -copper war, and a cotton war. In Third-Zealand we have -killed two-thirds of the inhabitants in order to compel -the remainder to buy our umbrellas and braces.”</p> - -<p>At that moment a fat man who was sitting in the -middle of the assembly ascended the tribune.</p> - -<p>“I claim,” said he, “a war against the Emerald Republic, -which insolently contends with our pigs for the -hegemony of hams and sauces in all the markets of the -universe.”</p> - -<p>“Who is that legislator?” asked Doctor Obnubile.</p> - -<p>“He is a pig merchant.”</p> - -<p>“Is there any opposition?” said the President. “I -put the proposition to the vote.”</p> - -<p>The war against the Emerald Republic was voted with -uplifted hands by a very large majority.</p> - -<p>“What?” said Obnubile to the interpreter; “you -have voted a war with that rapidity and that indifference!”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_706" id="Page_706">[706]</a></span></p> - -<p>“Oh! it is an unimportant war which will hardly cost -eight million dollars.”</p> - -<p>“And men....”</p> - -<p>“The men are included in the eight million dollars.”</p> - -<p>Then Doctor Obnubile bent his head in bitter reflection.</p> - -<p>“Since wealth and civilization admit of as many causes -of poverty as war and barbarism, since the folly and -wickedness of men are incurable, there remains but one -good action to be done. The wise man will collect enough -dynamite to blow up this planet. When its fragments -fly through space an imperceptible amelioration will be -accomplished in the universe and a satisfaction will be -given to the universal conscience. Moreover, this universal -conscience does not exist.”</p> - - -<h3>“Mr. Dooley” on the Tariff</h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_683">683</a>, <a href="#Page_692">692</a>, <a href="#Page_698">698</a>)</p> - -<p>“Well,” said Mr. Hennessy, “what diff’rence does -it make? Th’ foreigner pays th’ tax annyhow.”</p> - -<p>“He does,” said Mr. Dooley, “if he ain’t turned back -at Castle Garden.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_707" id="Page_707">[707]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Preacher and the Slave</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By J. Hill</span></p> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Tune: “Sweet Bye and Bye”</cite>)</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(A sample of many parodies upon Christian hymns which are -published by the Industrial Workers of the World, and sung by the -migratory workers of the Far West in their camping-places, known as -“jungles.” While this selection and the one following can hardly -be classed as literature, they have their interest as social documents. -It was Napoleon who said that if he could write a country’s -songs, he would not care who wrote its laws.)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Long-haired preachers come out every night,</div> - <div class="verse">Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;</div> - <div class="verse">But when asked how ‘bout something to eat</div> - <div class="verse">They will answer with voices so sweet:</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p><span class="smcap">Chorus</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent6">You will eat, bye and bye,</div> - <div class="verse indent8">In that glorious land above the sky;</div> - <div class="verse indent6">Work and pray, live on hay,</div> - <div class="verse indent8">You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And the Starvation Army they play,</div> - <div class="verse">And they sing and they clap and they pray,</div> - <div class="verse">Till they get all your coin on the drum,</div> - <div class="verse">Then they’ll tell you when you’re on the bum: (Chorus)</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">If you fight hard for children and wife—</div> - <div class="verse">Try to get something good in this life—</div> - <div class="verse">You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell,</div> - <div class="verse">When you die you will sure go to hell. (Chorus)</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_708" id="Page_708">[708]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Workingmen of all countries, unite,</div> - <div class="verse">Side by side we for freedom will fight;</div> - <div class="verse">When the world and its wealth we shall gain</div> - <div class="verse">To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain:</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<p><span class="smcap">Chorus</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent2">You will eat, bye and bye,</div> - <div class="verse indent4">When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Chop some wood, ‘twill do you good,</div> - <div class="verse indent4">And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Work for All but Father</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Henry M. Tichenor</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(The poet of the <cite>Rip-Saw</cite>, a revolutionary paper of the middle -West which has an immense circulation)</p> - -<p>“Everybody works but father”—God, what a -ghastly lay! “Everybody works but father”—he -wants too much pay! Mother and Ann and Maggie, -and tiny Tim and Bill, work like hell for a paltry wage -in the sweatshop and the mill. “Everybody works but -father”—he talks like a fool—he asks enough in wages -to send the kids to school—he wants more for his daily -toil than we pay the wife and brood—he says he ought -to have enough to keep them all in food! “Everybody -works but father”—for him we have no need—all we -want of father is just to keep up the breed. The mother -and the babies, that’s all we require, the mother and the -babies—those are the ones we hire. Just keep on breeding -babies—that’s the bull moose hunch—just keep on -breeding babies, we can work the whole damn bunch!</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_709" id="Page_709">[709]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Mr. “Dooley” on Industry</h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_683">683</a>, <a href="#Page_692">692</a>, <a href="#Page_698">698</a>, <a href="#Page_706">706</a>)</p> - -<p>’Tis a sthrange thing whin we come to think iv it -that th’ less money a man gets f’r his wurruk, th’ -more nicissary it is to th’ wurruld that he shud go on wurrukin’. -Ye’er boss can go to Paris on a combination wedding -an’ divoorce thrip an’ no wan bothers his head about him. -But if ye shud go to Paris—excuse me f’r laughin’ mesilf -black in th’ face—th’ industhrees iv the counthry pines -away.</p> - - -<h3>Lines to a Pomeranian Puppy Valued at $3,500</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Louis Untermeyer</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>, <a href="#Page_515">515</a>, <a href="#Page_699">699</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Often as I strain and stew,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Digging in these dirty ditches,</div> - <div class="verse">I have dared to think of you—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">You and all your riches.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Lackeys help you on and off;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the bed is silk you lie in;</div> - <div class="verse">You have doctors when you cough,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Priests when you are dying.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Wrapt in soft and costly furs,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">All sewed up with careful stitches,</div> - <div class="verse">You consort with proper curs</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And with perfumed bitches....</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_710" id="Page_710">[710]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">You don’t sweat to struggle free,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Work in rags and rotting breeches—</div> - <div class="verse">Puppy, have a laugh at me</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Digging in the ditches!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Labor and Capital Are One</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From The “Game of Life”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Bolton Hall</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_680">680</a>)</p> - -<p>“Times are hard,” said the Picked Chicken.</p> - -<p>“Why,” said the Rat, “this is an era of prosperity; -see how I have feathered my nest.”</p> - -<p>“But,” said the Picked Chicken, “you have gotten my -feathers.”</p> - -<p>“You must not think,” said the Rat, “that because -I get more comfort you get poorer.”</p> - -<p>“But,” said the Chicken, “you produce no feathers, -and I keep none—”</p> - -<p>“If you would use your teeth”—interrupted the Rat.</p> - -<p>“If—” said the Picked Chicken.</p> - -<p>“You could lay—”</p> - -<p>“I—” said the Picked Chicken.</p> - -<p>“—up as much as I do,” concluded the Rat.</p> - -<p>“Excuse me for living,” said the Picked Chicken, -“but—”</p> - -<p>“Without consumers like me,” said the Rat, “there -would be no demand for the feathers which you produce.”</p> - -<p>“I shall vote for a change,” said the Picked Chicken.</p> - -<p>“Only those who have feathers should have the Privilege -of voting,” remarked the Rat.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_711" id="Page_711">[711]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>“Mr. Dooley” on Prosperity</h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_683">683</a>, <a href="#Page_692">692</a>, <a href="#Page_698">698</a>, <a href="#Page_706">706</a>, <a href="#Page_709">709</a>)</p> - -<p>Yes, Prosperity has come hollerin’ an’ screamin’. -To read th’ papers, it seems to be a kind iv a -vagrancy law. No wan can loaf anny more. Th’ end iv -vacation has gone f’r manny a happy lad that has spint -six months ridin’ through th’ counthry, dodgin’ wurruk, -or loafin’ under his own vine or hat-three. Prosperity -grabs ivry man be th’ neck, an’ sets him shovellin’ slag -or coke or runnin’ up an’ down a ladder with a hod iv -mortar. It won’t let th’ wurruld rest.... It goes -around like a polisman givin’ th’ hot fut to happy people -that are snoozin’ in th’ sun. ‘Get up,’ says Prosperity. -‘Get up, an’ hustle over to th’ rollin’ mills: there’s a man -over there wants ye to carry a ton iv coal on ye’er back.’ -‘But I don’t want to wurruk,’ says th’ lad. ‘I’m very -comfortable th’ way I am.’ ‘It makes no difference,’ -says Prosperity. ‘Ye’ve got to do ye’er lick. Wurruk, -f’r th’ night is comin’. Get out, an’ hustle. Wurruk, or -ye can’t be unhappy; an’, if th’ wurruld isn’t unhappy, -they’se no such a thing as Prosperity.“</p> - - -<h3>Why the Socialist Party Is Growing</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Dedicated to the School of Journalism</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Franklin P. Adams</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_695">695</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“A story,” the reporter said, “about commercial crime.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A merchant’s been convicted of selling phony stuff.</div> - <div class="verse">The sentence is a thousand meg and seven years of time—”</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“A hundred words,” the city Ed. replied, “will be enough.”</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_712" id="Page_712">[712]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“A story,” the reporter said, “about a crimson dame</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Just landed from the steamer, wearing slippers that are red.</div> - <div class="verse">She used to be the Dearest Friend of Emperor Wotsisname—”</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“Three columns and a layout!” cried the eager city Ed.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Babble Machines</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “When the Sleeper Wakes”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By H. G. Wells</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(One of the writer’s earlier romances, telling of a man who sleeps -for two hundred years and wakens to find himself hailed as Master -of the World—through the operation of a bequest of money which -has been accumulating through that time. The power of this -wealth is being wielded in his name by a cynical and unscrupulous -oligarchy which has reduced the populace to a uniformed slave-caste, -seething with futile revolt. The following portrays the newspapers -of that new world of Capitalism triumphant)</p></div> - -<p>Beyond this place they came into a closed hall, and -Graham discovered the cause of the noise that had -perplexed him. His attention was arrested by a violent, -loud hoot, followed by a vast leathery voice. He stopped -and, looking up, beheld a foolish trumpet face. This -was the General Intelligence Machine. For a space it -seemed to be gathering breath, and a regular throbbing -from its cylindrical body was audible. Then it trumpeted -“Galloop, Galloop,” and broke out again.</p> - -<p>“Paris is now pacified. All resistance is over. Galloop!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_713" id="Page_713">[713]</a></span> -The black police hold every position of importance in the -city. They fought with great bravery, singing songs -written in praise of their ancestors by the poet Kipling. -Once or twice they got out of hand, and tortured and -mutilated wounded and captured insurgents, men and -women. Moral—don’t go rebelling. Haha! Galloop, -Galloop! They are lively fellows. Lively brave fellows. -Let this be a lesson to the disorderly banderlog of this -city. Yah! Banderlog! Filth of the earth! Galloop, -Galloop!”</p> - -<p>The voice ceased. There was a confused murmur of -disapproval among the crowd. “Damned niggers.” -A man began to harangue near them. “Is this the -Master’s doing, brothers? Is this the Master’s doing?”</p> - -<p>“Black police!” said Graham. “What is that? You -don’t mean——”</p> - -<p>His companion touched his arm and gave him a warning -look, and forthwith another of these mechanisms screamed -deafeningly and gave tongue in a shrill voice. “Yahaha! -Yahah, Yap! Hear a live paper yelp! Live paper. -Yaha! Shocking outrage in Paris. Yahahah! The -Parisians exasperated by the black police to the pitch of -assassination. Dreadful reprisals. Savage times come -again. Blood! Blood! Yahah!” The nearer Babble -Machine hooted stupendously, “Galloop, Galloop,” -drowned the end of the sentence, and proceeded in a -rather flatter note than before with novel comments on -the horrors of disorder. “Law and order must be maintained,” -said the nearer Babble Machine....</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_714" id="Page_714">[714]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Ballad of Kiplingson</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Buchanan</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(An English poet and journalist, 1841-1901, who through his lifetime -fought valiantly against militarism and imperialism. -See pages <a href="#Page_367">367</a>, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>, <a href="#Page_687">687</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">There came a knock at the Heavenly Gate, where the good St. Peter sat,—</div> - <div class="verse">“Hi, open the door, you fellah there, to a British rat-tat-tat!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The Saint sat up in his chair, rubbed eyes, and prick’d his holy ears,</div> - <div class="verse">“Who’s there?” he muttered, “a single man, or a regiment of Grenadiers?”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“A single man,” the voice replied, “but one of prodigious size,</div> - <div class="verse">Who claims by Jingo, his patron Saint, the entry to Paradise!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The good St. Peter open’d the Gate, but blocking the entry scan’d</div> - <div class="verse">The spectacled ghost of a little man, with an infant’s flag in his hand....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Wot! haven’t you heard of Kiplingson? whose name and fame have spread</div> - <div class="verse">As far as the Flag of England waves, and the Tory prints are read?</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_715" id="Page_715">[715]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”I was raised in the lap of Jingo, sir, till I grew to the height of man,</div> - <div class="verse">And a wonderful Literary Gent, I emerged upon Hindostan!...</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“And rapid as light my glory spread, till thro’ cockaigne it flew,</div> - <div class="verse">And I grew the joy of the Cockney cliques, and the pet of the Jingo Jew!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”For the Lord my God was a Cockney Gawd, whose voice was a savage yell,</div> - <div class="verse">A fust-rate Gawd who dropt, d’ye see, the ‘h’ in Heaven and Hell!...</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Oh I was a real Phenomenon,” continued Kiplingson,</div> - <div class="verse">“The only genius ever born who was Tory at twenty-one!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Alas! and alas!” the good Saint said, a tear in his eye serene,</div> - <div class="verse">“A Tory at twenty-one! Good God! At fifty what <em>would</em> you have been?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”There’s not a spirit now here in Heaven who wouldn’t at twenty-one</div> - <div class="verse">Have tried to upset the very Throne, and reform both Sire and Son!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“The saddest sight my eyes have seen, down yonder on earth or here,</div> - <div class="verse">Is a brat that talks like a weary man, or a youth with a cynic’s leer.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_716" id="Page_716">[716]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”Try lower down, young man,“ he cried, and began to close the Gate—</div> - <div class="verse">”Hi, here, old fellah,“ said Kiplingson, ”by Jingo! just you wait—</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“I’ve heaps of Criticisms here, to show my claims are true,</div> - <div class="verse">That I’m ‘cute in almost everything, and have probed Creation through!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“And what have you <em>found</em>?” the Saint inquired, a frown on his face benign—</div> - <div class="verse">“The Flag of England!” cried Kiplingson, “and the thin black penny-a-line!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”Wherever the Flag of England waves, down go all other flags;</div> - <div class="verse">Wherever the thin black line is spread, the Bulldog bites and brags!...</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“O Gawd, beware of the Jingo’s wrath! the Journals of Earth are mine!</div> - <div class="verse">Across the plains of the earth still creeps the thin black penny-a-line!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">”For wherever the Flag of England waves“—but here, we grieve to state,</div> - <div class="verse">His voice was drown’d in a thunder-crash, for the Saint bang’d-to the Gate!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_717" id="Page_717">[717]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Militancy</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Israel Zangwill</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_136">136</a>)</p> - -<p>Heckling became a fine art, and even a joyous: -for, despite all the suffering it cost them, they carried -it through with such inexhaustible spirit and invention as -to restore a touch of chic and bravado to our drab life and -add to the gaiety of nations. Miss Pankhurst even -managed to badger Cabinet Ministers in the witness-box.... -There was no meeting, however guarded, to -which, by hook or crook, organ-pipe or drain-pipe, she -did not gain admission, padlocking herself against easy -expulsion; while, even were her bodily presence averted, -always, like the horns of Elfland faintly blowing, came -from some well-placed megaphone that inevitable and -implacable slogan “Votes for Women.” Chalked on -pavement or scrawled on walls or blazoned on sky-signs, -it became a universal, ubiquitous obsession. Streamers -carried it under the terrace of Parliament or balloons -suspended it from above. Cabinet Ministers were dogged -to their privatest haunts, for the leakages of information -were everywhere. Since Christianity no such force has -arisen to divide families. No household, however Philistine, -was safe from a jail-bird. If Lady Anon asked Lady -Alamode when her daughter was coming out, it no longer -referred to the young lady’s début. The most obstinate -autocrat since Pharaoh, Mr. Asquith, has been shown -similar signs and wonders. “We are the appointed -plagues,” said Mrs. Pankhurst, with a rare touch of humor. -And nothing has plagued British society more than that -outbreak of religion which brought disgrace upon so many<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_718" id="Page_718">[718]</a></span> -respectable homes. Incidentally, the prisons and the -courts were improved by receiving critics instead of -criminals. “We do not care for ourselves,” cried Christabel -Pankhurst at the London Police Court, “because -prison is nothing to us. But the injustice done here to -thousands of helpless creatures is too terrible to contemplate.” -Warders and wardresses, too, profited by the -society of their new prisoners. It was like a rise in the -social scale to them. Nor was even the Bench immune -from education.</p> - -<p>“Boyle!” called the magistrate. “<em>Miss</em> Boyle” corrected -the prisoner. “We always call our prisoners by their -surnames,” explained the magistrate. “We are here to -teach you better manners” said the Suffragette.</p> - - -<h3>“Mr. Dooley” on Woman Suffrage</h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_683">683</a>, <a href="#Page_692">692</a>, <a href="#Page_698">698</a>, <a href="#Page_706">706</a>, <a href="#Page_709">709</a>, <a href="#Page_711">711</a>)</p> - -<p>Don’t ask f’r rights. Take thim. An’ don’t let anny -wan give thim to ye. A right that is handed to ye -f’r nawthin’ has somethin’ the matther with it. It’s -more than likely it’s on’y a wrong turned inside out.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_719" id="Page_719">[719]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Heloise sans Abelard</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>A Modern Scholar on a Mediæval Nun</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Joel Elias Spingarn</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(A professor in America’s most prosperous university was discharged -for his protests against commercialized education. In -the following poem he has paid his respects to his colleagues, likening -them to nuns in a convent, and himself to Heloise, who ran away)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In the cool, calm palace of prayer</div> - <div class="verse indent2">She sought her haven of dreams;</div> - <div class="verse">She gave up her dower of air,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of stars, and cities, and streams.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">On the cold, sweet steps of prayer</div> - <div class="verse indent2">She sought what young girls seek;</div> - <div class="verse">She laid her bosom bare,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And asked for the stones to speak.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Who wonders she could not hear</div> - <div class="verse indent2">What silence and stones belie?</div> - <div class="verse">Who wonders where love may steer?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Not I, not I, not I!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O passionate Heloise,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I, too, have lived under the ban,</div> - <div class="verse">With seven hundred professors,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And not a single man.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_720" id="Page_720">[720]</a></span></p> - -<h3>In the Shadows: the Priest</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Arthur Upson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American poet, 1877-1908)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">How long is it now, I wonder—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A thousand years, at least,</div> - <div class="verse">Here the dark vault under,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Feet to the East,</div> - <div class="verse">Supposed to be Paradise-walking, a purgèd priest!</div> - <div class="verse">Well, none of them see me, thank heaven,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">As they pass me here on the hill—</div> - <div class="verse">So long as they live they’re shriven,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And when they come here—they are still.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Thinking</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Anatole France</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_681">681</a>, <a href="#Page_703">703</a>)</p> - -<p>’Tis a great infirmity to think. God preserve you from -it, my son, as He has preserved His greatest saints, -and the souls whom He loves with especial tenderness and -destines to eternal felicity.</p> - - -<h3>The Tail of the World</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Amid</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American poet)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The world is a beast with a long fur tail,</div> - <div class="verse">With an angry tooth, and a biting nail;</div> - <div class="verse">And she’s headed the way that she ought not to go</div> - <div class="verse">For the Lord he designed and decreed her so.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_721" id="Page_721">[721]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The point of the game is to drag the beast</div> - <div class="verse">While she’s headed sou-west, toward the nor-nor-east;</div> - <div class="verse">God made the beast, and he drew the plan,</div> - <div class="verse">And he left the bulk of the haul to man.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">So primitive man dug a brace for his sandal.</div> - <div class="verse">Took hold of the tail, as the logical handle;</div> - <div class="verse">Got a last good drink, and a bite of bread,</div> - <div class="verse">And pulled till the blood ran into his head.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">At first he gained till it looked like a cinch,</div> - <div class="verse">But then the beast crawled back an inch;</div> - <div class="verse">And ever since then it’s been Nip and Tuck,</div> - <div class="verse">Sometimes moving, but oftener stuck.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Most of the gains have been made by the crowd—</div> - <div class="verse">Sweating nobly, and swearing aloud.</div> - <div class="verse">Yet sometimes a single man could land</div> - <div class="verse">A good rough jerk, or a hand-over-hand.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They say Confucius made her come—</div> - <div class="verse">Homer and Dante—they each pulled some!</div> - <div class="verse">Bill Schopenhauer’s foot slipped, rank,</div> - <div class="verse">While Shakespeare, he fetched her a horrible yank.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The beast has hollered and frequently spit,</div> - <div class="verse">Often scratched, and sometimes bit,</div> - <div class="verse">And the men who were mauled, or laid out cold,</div> - <div class="verse">Were the very ones with the strangle hold.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Why he did it, I don’t know;</div> - <div class="verse">But the Lord he designed and decreed it so.</div> - <div class="verse">Of course he knew that the game was no cinch,</div> - <div class="verse">So he gave man some trifles to help in a pinch.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_722" id="Page_722">[722]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">One was an instinct, that might be read:</div> - <div class="verse">“Lay hold of something, and pull till you’re dead!”</div> - <div class="verse">Another, that can’t be translated as well,</div> - <div class="verse">Was, “Le’ go my tail—and go to Hell!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But the strongest card in the whole blame pack</div> - <div class="verse">Was the fine sensation that paid man back;</div> - <div class="verse">For the finest feeling that’s been unfurled</div> - <div class="verse">Is the feel of the fur on the tail of the world!</div> -</div></div></div> -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_723" id="Page_723">[723]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK XV</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3">The Poet</p> - -<p>Social injustice as it bears upon the future generation; pictures -of child labor, and of the degradation of children in slums; also -hopes for the future deliverance of the child.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_724" id="Page_724">[724]</a><br /><a name="Page_725" id="Page_725">[725]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>By-the-Way</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Songs of the Dead End”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Patrick MacGill</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">These be the little verses, rough and uncultured, which</div> - <div class="verse">I’ve written in hut and model, deep in the dirty ditch,</div> - <div class="verse">On the upturned hod by the palace made for the idle rich.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Out on the happy highway, or lines where the engines go,</div> - <div class="verse">Which fact you may hardly credit, still for your doubts ’tis so,</div> - <div class="verse">For I am the person who wrote them, and surely to God, I know!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Wrote them beside the hot-plate, or under the chilling skies,</div> - <div class="verse">Some of them true as death is, some of them merely lies,</div> - <div class="verse">Some of them very foolish, some of them otherwise.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Little sorrows and hopings, little and rugged Rhymes,</div> - <div class="verse">Some of them maybe distasteful to the moral men of our times,</div> - <div class="verse">Some of them marked against me in the Book of the Many Crimes.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">These, the Songs of a Navvy, bearing the taint of the brute,</div> - <div class="verse">Unasked, uncouth, unworthy, out to the world I put,</div> - <div class="verse">Stamped with the brand of labor, the heel of a navvy’s boot.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_726" id="Page_726">[726]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Democratic Vistas</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Walt Whitman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_578">578</a>)</p> - -<p>Literature, strictly considered, has never recognized -the people, and, whatever may be said, does -not today. Speaking generally, the tendencies of literature, -as hitherto pursued, have been to make mostly -critical and querulous men. It seems as if, so far, there -were some natural repugnance between a literary and -professional life, and the rude rank spirit of the democracies. -There is, in later literature, a treatment of benevolence, -a charity business, rife enough it is true; but I -know nothing more rare, even in this country, than a fit -scientific estimate and reverent appreciation of the -People—of their measureless wealth of latent worth and -capacity, their vast, artistic contrasts of lights and -shades—with, in America, their entire reliability in emergencies, -and a certain breadth of historic grandeur, of -peace or war, far surpassing all the vaunted samples of -book-heroes, or any <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">haut ton</i> coteries, in all the records of -the world....</p> - -<p>Dominion strong is the body’s; dominion stronger is -the mind’s. What has filled, and fills today our intellect, -our fancy, furnishing the standards therein, is yet foreign. -The great poems, Shakespeare’s included, are poisonous -to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, -the life-blood of democracy. The models of our literature, -as we get it from other lands, ultramarine, have had -their birth in courts, and basked and grown in castle sunshine; -all smells of princes’ favors. Of workers of a -certain sort, we have, indeed, plenty, contributing after<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_727" id="Page_727">[727]</a></span> -their kind; many elegant, many learned, all complacent. -But touched by the national test, or tried by the standards -of democratic personality, they wither to ashes. I say -I have not seen a single writer, artist, lecturer, or what -not, that has confronted the voiceless but ever erect and -active, pervading, underlying will and typic inspiration of -the land, in a spirit kindred to itself. Do you call these -genteel little creatures American poets? Do you term -that perpetual, pistareen, pastepot work, American art, -American drama, taste, verse? I think I hear, echoed -as from some mountain-top afar in the west, the scornful -laugh of the Genius of these States....</p> - -<p>Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for -elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say -democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and -come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest -forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs—in -religion, literature, colleges, and schools—democracy -in all public and private life, and in the army and navy.</p> - - -<h3>Today</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Helen Gray Cone</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American poet)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Voice, with what emulous fire thou singest free hearts of old fashion,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">English scorners of Spain, sweeping the blue sea-way,</div> - <div class="verse">Sing me the daring of life for life, the magnanimous passion</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of man for man in the mean populous streets of To-day!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_728" id="Page_728">[728]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Hand, with what color and power thou couldst show, in the ring hot-sanded,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Brown Bestiarius holding the lean tawn tiger at bay,</div> - <div class="verse">Paint me the wrestle of Toil with the wild-beast Want, bare-handed;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Shadow me forth a soul steadily facing Today!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>What Is Art?</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Leo Tolstoy</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>, <a href="#Page_555">555</a>, <a href="#Page_674">674</a>)</p> - -<p>Art of the future, that is to say, such part of art as -will be chosen from among all the art diffused among -mankind, will consist, not in transmitting feelings accessible -only to members of the rich classes, as is the case -today, but in transmitting such feelings as embody the -highest religious perceptions of our times. Only those -productions will be considered art which transmit feelings -drawing men together in brotherly union, or such universal -feelings as can unite all men. Art transmitting feelings -flowing from antiquated, worn-out religious teachings—church -art, patriotic art, voluptuous art, transmitting -feelings of superstitious fear, of pride, of vanity, of -ecstatic admiration for national heroes—art exciting -exclusive love of one’s own people, or sensuality, will be -considered bad, harmful art, and will be censured and -despised by public opinion. All the rest of art, transmitting -feelings accessible only to a section of the people, -will be considered unimportant, and will be neither blamed -nor praised. And the appraisement of art in general will -devolve, not, as is now the case, on a separate class of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_729" id="Page_729">[729]</a></span> -rich people, but on the whole people; so that for a work -to be esteemed good, and to be approved of and diffused, -it will have to satisfy the demands, not of a few people -living in identical and often unnatural conditions, but it -will have to satisfy the demands of all those great masses -of people who are situated in the natural conditions of -laborious life. And the artists producing art will not be, -as now, merely a few people selected from a small section -of the nation, members of the upper classes or their -hangers-on, but will consist of all those gifted members of -the whole people who prove capable of, and are inclined -towards, artistic activity.</p> - - -<h3>A Catechism for Workers</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By August Strindberg</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Swedish poet, dramatist and novelist, 1849-1912; author of over -a hundred volumes, and probably the greatest genius that Sweden -has produced. It is not generally known that he was a Socialist, -although the labor unions and Social-democrats of his country -marched in a body at his funeral. The following are a few paragraphs -from a “catechism” covering every aspect of life from the -worker’s point of view)</p></div> - -<p><i>What is philosophy</i>?</p> - -<p>A seeking of the truth.</p> - -<p><i>Then how can philosophy be the friend of the upper classes?</i></p> - -<p>The upper classes pay the philosopher, in order that he -may discover only such truths as are expedient in their -eyes.</p> - -<p><i>But suppose uncomfortable truths should be discovered?</i></p> - -<p>They are called lies, and the philosopher gets no pay.</p> - -<p><i>What is history?</i></p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_730" id="Page_730">[730]</a></span></p> - -<p>The story of the past, presented in a light favorable -to the interests of the upper classes.</p> - -<p><i>Suppose the light is unfavorable?</i></p> - -<p>That is scandalous.</p> - -<p><i>What is a scandal?</i></p> - -<p>Anything offending the upper classes.</p> - -<p><i>What is esthetics?</i></p> - -<p>The art of praising or belittling works of art.</p> - -<p><i>What works of art must be praised?</i></p> - -<p>Those that glorify the upper classes.</p> - -<p>Therefore Raphael and Michaelangelo are the most -famous artists, for they glorified the religious falsehoods -of the upper classes. Shakespeare magnified kings, and -Goethe magnified himself, the writer for the upper classes.</p> - -<p><i>But how about other works of art?</i></p> - -<p>There must not be others.</p> - - -<h3>The Superior Classes</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George D. Herron</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American clergyman and college professor, born 1862; resigned to -become an active Socialist)</p> - -<p>It is customary to speak of the unpreparedness of the -proletary for Socialism. But I am sure that, even -today, the working-class would give a vastly better -organization of industrial forces, a profoundly nobler and -freer society, than ever the world has had. The ignorance -of the working-class and the superior intelligence of the -privileged class are superstitions—are superstitions fostered -by intellectual mercenaries, by universities and -churches, and by all the centers of privilege. And the -assumption of superior intelligence on the part of the -privileged is not warranted by a single historical expe<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_731" id="Page_731">[731]</a></span>rience. -The derangements and miseries of mankind are -precisely due to the ignorant and arrogant rule of “superior” -classes and persons. The mental and spiritual -capacity of these classes is a myth; their so-called culture -but thinly veneers their essential savagery, their social -rapacity and impudence....</p> - -<p>The system that divides society into classes can bring -forth no true knowledge, no living truth, no industrial -competence, no fundamental social decency. It can only -continue the desolation of labor and increase the blindness -and depravity of the privileged. So long as some people -own the tools upon which others depend for bread, so -long as the few possess themselves of the fruits of the labor -of the many, so long as the arts and the institutions and -the sciences are built upon exploited workers, just so long -will our so-called progress be through the perennial -exhaustion of generations and races; just so long will -successive civilizations be but voracious parasites upon the -spirit and body of mankind.</p> - - -<h3>The Midnight Lunch Room</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Frozen Grail and Other Poems”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Elsa Barker</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_315">315</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With little silver one may enter here,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And yet those hungry faces watch outside</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The frosty window—and the door is wide!</div> - <div class="verse">The clatter to my unaccustomed ear</div> - <div class="verse">Of dishes and harsh tongues, is like a spear</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Shaken within the sensitive wounded side</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of Silence. Soiled, indifferent hands provide</div> - <div class="verse">Pitiful fare, and cups of pallid cheer.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_732" id="Page_732">[732]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In my warm, fragrant home an hour ago</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I wrote a sonnet on the peace they win</div> - <div class="verse">Who worship Beauty! Let me breathe it low.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">What would it mean if chanted in this din?</div> - <div class="verse">What would it say to those out in the snow,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Who hunger, and who may not enter in?</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>What Life Means to Me</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Revolution”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Jack London</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_519">519</a>, <a href="#Page_609">609</a>, <a href="#Page_649">649</a>)</p> - -<p>I was born into the working class. I early discovered -enthusiasm, ambition, and ideals; and to satisfy these -became the problem of my childlife. My environment was -crude and rough and raw. I had no outlook, but an uplook -rather. My place in society was at the bottom. -Here life offered nothing but sordidness and wretchedness, -both of the flesh and the spirit; for here flesh and spirit -were alike starved and tormented.</p> - -<p>Above me towered the colossal edifice of society, and to -my mind the only way out was up. Into this edifice I -early resolved to climb. Up above, men wore black clothes -and boiled shirts, and women dressed in beautiful gowns. -Also, there were good things to eat, and there was plenty -to eat. This much for the flesh. Then there were the -things of the spirit. Up above me, I knew, were unselfishness -of the spirit, clean and noble thinking, keen intellectual -living. I knew all this because I read “Seaside -Library” novels, in which, with the exception of the -villains and adventuresses, all men and women thought<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_733" id="Page_733">[733]</a></span> -beautiful thoughts, spoke a beautiful tongue, and performed -glorious deeds. In short, as I accepted the rising of the -sun, I accepted that up above me was all that was fine and -noble and gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to -life, all that made life worth living and that remunerated -one for his travail and misery.</p> - -<p>But it is not particularly easy for one to climb up out of -the working class—especially if he is handicapped by the -possession of ideals and illusions. I lived on a ranch in -California, and I was hard put to find the ladder whereby -to climb. I early inquired the rate of interest on invested -money, and worried my child’s brain into an understanding -of the virtues and excellences of that remarkable invention -of man, compound interest. Further, I ascertained the -current rates of wages for workers of all ages, and the cost -of living. From all these data I concluded that if I began -immediately and worked and saved until I was fifty years -of age, I could then stop working and enter into participation -in a fair portion of the delights and goodnesses that -would then be open to me higher up in society. Of course, -I resolutely determined not to marry, while I quite forgot -to consider at all that great rock of disaster in the working -class world—sickness.</p> - -<p>But the life that was in me demanded more than a -meager existence of scraping and scrimping. Also, at -ten years of age, I became a newsboy on the streets of a -city, and found myself with a changed uplook. All about -me were still the same sordidness and wretchedness, and -up above me was still the same paradise waiting to be -gained; but the ladder whereby to climb was a different -one. It was now the ladder of business. Why save my -earnings and invest in government bonds, when by buying -two newspapers for five cents, with a turn of the wrist I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_734" id="Page_734">[734]</a></span> -could sell them for ten cents and double my capital? -The business ladder was the ladder for me, and I had a -vision of myself becoming a baldheaded and successful -merchant prince....</p> - -<p>[The author became the owner of an oyster-boat, and -thereby a capitalist; but was ruined by the burning of -his boat.]</p> - -<p>From then on I was mercilessly exploited by other -capitalists. I had the muscle, and they made money out -of it while I made but a very indifferent living out of it. -I was a sailor before the mast, a longshoreman, a roustabout; -I worked in canneries, and factories, and laundries; -I mowed lawns, and cleaned carpets, and washed windows. -And I never got the full product of my toil. I looked at -the daughter of the cannery owner, in her carriage, and -knew that it was my muscle, in part, that helped drag -along that carriage on its rubber tires. I looked at the -son of the factory owner, going to college, and knew that -it was my muscle that helped, in part, to pay for the wine -and good-fellowship he enjoyed.</p> - -<p>But I did not resent this. It was all in the game. They -were the strong. Very well, I was strong. I would carve -my way to a place among them, and make money out of -the muscles of other men. I was not afraid of work. I -loved hard work. I would pitch in and work harder than -ever and eventually become a pillar of society.</p> - -<p>And just then, as luck would have it, I found an employer -that was of the same mind. I was willing to work, and he -was more than willing that I should work. I thought I -was learning a trade. In reality, I had displaced two men. -I thought he was making an electrician out of me; as a -matter of fact, he was making fifty dollars per month out -of me. The two men I had displaced had received forty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_735" id="Page_735">[735]</a></span> -dollars each per month; I was doing the work of both for -thirty dollars per month.</p> - -<p>This employer worked me nearly to death. A man may -love oysters, but too many oysters will disincline him -toward that particular diet. And so with me. Too much -work sickened me. I did not wish ever to see work again. -I fled from work. I became a tramp, begging my way from -door to door, wandering over the United States, and -sweating bloody sweats in slums and prisons.</p> - -<p>I had been born in the working class, and I was now, at -the age of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had -started. I was down in the cellar of society, down in the -subterranean depths of misery about which it is neither -nice nor proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss, the -human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel house of -our civilization. This is the part of the edifice of society -that society chooses to ignore. Lack of space compels -me here to ignore it, and I shall say only that the things -I there saw gave me a terrible scare....</p> - -<p>[The author reflected, and decided that it was better to -sell brains than muscle.] Then began a frantic pursuit -of knowledge. I returned to California and opened the -books. While thus equipping myself to become a brain -merchant, it was inevitable that I should delve into -sociology. There I found, in a certain class of books, -scientifically formulated, the simple sociological concepts -I had already worked out for myself. Other and greater -minds, before I was born, had worked out all that I had -thought, and a vast deal more. I discovered that I was a -Socialist.</p> - -<p>The Socialists were revolutionists, inasmuch as they -struggled to overthrow the society of the present, and out -of the material to build the society of the future. I, too,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_736" id="Page_736">[736]</a></span> -was a Socialist, and a revolutionist. I joined the groups -of working-class and intellectual revolutionists, and for -the first time came into intelligent living. Here I found -keen-flashing intellects and brilliant wits; for here I met -strong and alert-brained, withal horny-handed, members -of the working class; unfrocked preachers too wide in their -Christianity for any congregation of Mammon-worshippers; -professors broken on the wheel of university subservience -to the ruling class and flung out because they -were quick with knowledge which they strove to apply -to the affairs of mankind.</p> - -<p>Here I found, also, warm faith in the human, glowing -idealism, sweetness of unselfishness, renunciation and -martyrdom—all the splendid, stinging things of the -spirit. Here life was clean, noble, and alive. Here life -rehabilitated itself, became wonderful and glorious; and -I was glad to be alive. I was in touch with great souls -who exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents; and -to whom the thin wail of the starved slum-child meant -more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial -expansion and world-empire. All about me were nobleness -of purpose and heroism of effort, and my days and nights -were sunshine and starshine, all fire and dew, with before -my eyes, ever burning and blazing, the Holy Grail, -Christ’s own Grail, the warm human, long suffering and -maltreated, but to be rescued and saved at the last....</p> - -<p>As a brain merchant I was a success. Society opened -its portals to me. I entered right in on the parlor floor, -and my disillusionment proceeded rapidly. I sat down to -dinner with the masters of society, and with the wives -and daughters of the masters of society. The women -were gowned beautifully, I admit; but to my naive -surprise I discovered that they were of the same clay as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_737" id="Page_737">[737]</a></span> -all the rest of the women I had known down below in the -cellar. “The colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady were -sisters under their skins”—and gowns.</p> - -<p>It was not this, however, so much as their materialism, -that shocked me. It is true these beautifully gowned, -beautiful women prattled sweet little ideals and dear -little moralities; but in spite of their prattle the dominant -key of the life they lived was materialistic. And they -were so sentimentally selfish! They assisted in all kinds -of sweet little charities, and informed one of the fact, -while all the time the food they ate and the beautiful -clothes they wore were bought out of dividends stained -with the blood of child labor, and sweated labor, and of -prostitution itself. When I mentioned such facts, expecting -in my innocence that these sisters of Judy O’Grady -would at once strip off their blood-dyed silks and jewels, -they became excited and angry, and read me preachments -about the lack of thrift, the drink, and the innate depravity -that caused all the misery in society’s cellar. -When I mentioned that I couldn’t quite see that it was -the lack of thrift, the intemperance, and the depravity -of a half-starved child of six that made it work twelve -hours every night in a Southern cotton mill, these sisters -of Judy O’Grady attacked my private life and called me an -“agitator”—as though that, forsooth, settled the argument.</p> - -<p>Nor did I fare better with the masters themselves. -I had expected to find men who were clean, noble and -alive, whose ideals were clean, noble and alive. I went out -amongst the men who sat in the high places, the preachers, -the politicians, the business men, the professors, and the -editors. I ate meat with them, drank wine with them, -automobiled with them, and studied them. It is true,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_738" id="Page_738">[738]</a></span> -I found many that were clean and noble; but, with rare -exceptions, they were not alive. I do verily believe I -could count the exceptions on the fingers of my two hands. -Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with -unclean life, they were merely the unburied dead—clean -and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive. -In this connection I may especially mention the professors -I met, the men who live up to that decadent university -ideal, “the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence.”</p> - -<p>I met men who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace -in their diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the -hands of Pinkertons with which to shoot down strikers -in their own factories. I met men incoherent with indignation -at the brutality of prize-fighting, and who, at the -same time, were parties to the adulteration of food that -killed each year more babies than even red-handed Herod -had killed....</p> - -<p>I discovered that I did not like to live on the parlor -floor of society. Intellectually I was bored. Morally and -spiritually I was sickened. I remembered my intellectuals -and idealists, my unfrocked preachers, broken -professors, and clean-minded, class-conscious workingmen. -I remembered my days and nights of sunshine -and starshine, where life was all a wild wonder, a spiritual -paradise of unselfish adventure and ethical romance. -And I saw before me, ever blazing and burning, the -Holy Grail.</p> - -<p>So I went back to the working-class, in which I had -been born and where I belonged. I care no longer to -climb. This imposing edifice of society above my head -holds no delight for me. It is the foundation of the -edifice that interests me. There I am content to labor, -crowbar in hand, shoulder to shoulder with intellectuals,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_739" id="Page_739">[739]</a></span> -idealists, and class-conscious workingmen, getting a solid -pry now and again and setting the whole edifice rocking. -Some day, when we get a few more hands and crowbars -to work, we’ll topple it over, along with all its rotten life -and unburied dead, its monstrous selfishness and sodden -materialism. Then we’ll cleanse the cellar and build -a new habitation for mankind, in which there will be no -parlor floor, in which all the rooms will be bright and airy, -and where the air that is breathed will be clean, noble -and alive.</p> - - -<h3>Fires</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Wilfrid Wilson Gibson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary English poet of the lives of the poor)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Snug in my easy chair,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I stirred the fire to flame.</div> - <div class="verse">Fantastically fair</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The flickering fancies came,</div> - <div class="verse">Born of heart’s desire:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Amber woodlands streaming;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Topaz islands dreaming,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Sunset-cities gleaming,</div> - <div class="verse">Spire on burning spire;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ruddy-windowed taverns;</div> - <div class="verse">Sunshine-spilling wines;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Crystal-lighted caverns</div> - <div class="verse">Of Golconda’s mines;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Summers, unreturning;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Passion’s crater yearning;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Troy, the ever-burning;</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_740" id="Page_740">[740]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Shelley’s lustral pyre;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Dragon-eyes, unsleeping;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Witches’ cauldrons leaping;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Golden galleys sweeping</div> - <div class="verse">Out from sea-walled Tyre:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Fancies, fugitive and fair,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Flashed with winging through the air;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Till, dazzled by the drowsy glare,</div> - <div class="verse">I shut my eyes to heat and light;</div> - <div class="verse">And saw, in sudden night,</div> - <div class="verse">Crouched in the dripping dark,</div> - <div class="verse">With streaming shoulders stark,</div> - <div class="verse">The man who hews the coal to feed my fire.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Alton Locke</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charles Kingsley</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A young poet is taken out by an old Scotchman, to make his -first acquaintance with the world of misery)</p> - -<p>It was a foul, chilly, foggy Saturday night. From the -butchers’ and greengrocers’ shops the gas-lights -flared and flickered, wild and ghastly, over haggard groups -of slip-shod dirty women, bargaining for scraps of stale -meat and frost-bitten vegetables, wrangling about short -weight and bad quality. Fish-stalls and fruit-stalls -lined the edge of the greasy pavement, sending up odors -as foul as the language of sellers and buyers. Blood and -sewer-water crawled from under doors and out of spouts, -and reeked down the gutters among the offal, animal and -vegetable, in every stage of putrefaction. Foul vapors -rose from cowsheds and slaughter-houses, and the door<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_741" id="Page_741">[741]</a></span>ways -of undrained alleys, where the inhabitants carried -the filth out on their shoes from the back-yard into the -court, and from the court up into the main street; while -above, hanging like cliffs over the streets—those narrow, -brawling torrents of filth, and poverty, and sin—the -houses with their teeming load of life were piled up into -the dingy, choking night. A ghastly, deafening, sickening -sight it was. Go, scented Belgravian! and see what -London is! and then go to the library which God has given -thee—one often fears in vain—and see what science says -this London might be!</p> - -<p>“Ay,” he muttered to himself, as he strode along, -“sing awa; get yoursel’ wi’ child wi’ pretty fancies and -gran’ words, like the rest o’ the poets, and gang to hell -for it.”</p> - -<p>“To hell, Mr. Mackaye?”</p> - -<p>“Ay, to a verra real hell, Alton Locke, laddie—a warse -ane than ony fiends’ kitchen, or subterranean Smithfield -that ye’ll hear o’ in the pulpits—the hell on earth o’ -being a flunkey, and a humbug, and a useless peacock, -wasting God’s gifts on your ain lusts and pleasures—and -kenning it—and not being able to get oot o’ it, for the -chains o’ vanity and self-indulgence. I’ve warned ye. -Now look there——”</p> - -<p>He stopped suddenly before the entrance of a miserable -alley—</p> - -<p>“Look! there’s not a soul down that yard but’s either -beggar, drunkard, thief, or warse. Write anent that! -Say how you saw the mouth o’ hell, and the two pillars -thereof at the entry—the pawn-broker’s shop o’ one side, -and the gin palace at the other—twa monstrous deevils, -eating up men, and women, and bairns, body and soul. -Look at the jaws o’ the monsters, how they open and open,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_742" id="Page_742">[742]</a></span> -and swallow in anither victim and anither. Write anent -that.”</p> - -<p>“What jaws, Mr. Mackaye?”</p> - -<p>“They faulding-doors o’ the gin shop, goose. Are na -they a mair damnable man-devouring idol than ony -red-hot statue o’ Moloch, or wicker Gogmagog, wherein -thae auld Britons burnt their prisoners? Look at thae -bare-footed bare-backed hizzies, with their arms roun’ -the men’s necks, and their mouths full o’ vitriol and -beastly words! Look at that Irishwoman pouring the -gin down the babbie’s throat! Look at that rough o’ a -boy gaun out o’ the pawn shop, where he’s been pledging -the handkerchief he stole the morning, into the gin shop, -to buy beer poisoned wi’ grains o’ paradise, and cocculus -indicus, and saut, and a’ damnable, maddening, thirst-breeding, -lust-breeding drugs! Look at that girl that -went in wi’ a shawl on her back and cam’ out wi’out ane! -Drunkards frae the breast! harlots frae the cradle! -damned before they’re born! John Calvin had an inkling -o’ the truth there, I’m a’most driven to think, wi’ his -reprobation deevil’s doctrines!”</p> - -<p>“Well—but—Mr. Mackaye, I know nothing about -these poor creatures.”</p> - -<p>“Then ye ought. What do ye ken anent the Pacific? -[Alton Locke has been writing poems about the South -Sea Islands.] Which is maist to your business?—thae -bare-backed hizzies that play the harlot o’ the other side -o’ the warld, or these—these thousands o’ bare-backed -hizzies that play the harlot o’ your ain side—made out o’ -your ain flesh and blude? You a poet! True poetry, -like true charity, my laddie, begins at hame. If ye’ll be -a poet at a’, ye maun be a cockney poet; and while the -cockneys be what they be, ye maun write, like Jeremiah<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_743" id="Page_743">[743]</a></span> -of old, o’ lamentation and mourning and woe, for the sins -o’ your people. Gin you want to learn the spirit o’ a -people’s poet, down wi’ your Bible and read thae auld -Hebrew prophets; gin ye wad learn the style, read your -Burns frae morning till night; and gin ye’d learn the -matter, just gang after your nose, and keep your eyes -open, and ye’ll no miss it.”</p> - -<p>“But all this is so—so unpoetical.”</p> - -<p>“Hech! Is there no the heeven above them there, and -the hell beneath them? and God frowning, and the deevil -grinning? No poetry there! Is no the verra idea of the -classic tragedy defined to be, man conquered by circumstance? -Canna ye see it there? And the verra idea of -the modern tragedy, man conquering circumstance?—and -I’ll show you that, too—in mony a garret where no -eye but the gude God’s enters, to see the patience, and -the fortitude, and the self-sacrifice, and the luve stronger -than death, that’s shining in thae dark places o’ the earth. -Come wi’ me, and see.”</p> - - -<h3>The Prophetic Book “Milton”</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Blake</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And did those feet in ancient time</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Walk upon England’s mountain green?</div> - <div class="verse">And was the holy Lamb of God</div> - <div class="verse indent2">On England’s pleasant pastures seen?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And did the countenance divine</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Shine forth upon our clouded hills?</div> - <div class="verse">And was Jerusalem builded here</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Among these dark Satanic mills?</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_744" id="Page_744">[744]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Bring me my bow of burning gold!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Bring me my arrows of desire!</div> - <div class="verse">Bring me my spear: O clouds, unfold!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Bring me my chariot of fire!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I will not cease from mental fight,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,</div> - <div class="verse">Till we have built Jerusalem</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In England’s green and pleasant land.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Heinrich Heine</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>)</p> - -<p>I know not if I deserve that a laurel-wreath should -one day be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have -loved it, has always been to me but a divine plaything. -I have never attached any great value to poetical fame; -and I trouble myself very little whether people praise -my verses or blame them. But lay on my coffin a <em>sword</em>; -for I was a brave soldier in the Liberation War of -humanity.</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 504px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo744" id="illo744">[illo744]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_744f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>THE MILITANT</p> - -<p>CHARLES A. WINTER</p> - -<p>(<i>Contemporary American illustrator</i>)</p></div> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo745" id="illo745">[illo745]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_745f.jpg" alt="" /> - -<div class="caption"> - -<p> -THE DEATH OF CHATTERTON<br /> -<br /> -HENRY WALLIS<br /> -<br /> -(<i>English painter, born 1830</i>) - -</p></div> -</div> - - -<h3>The Last Word</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Matthew Arnold</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_203">203</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">They out-talk’d thee, hiss’d thee, tore thee.</div> - <div class="verse">Better men fared thus before thee;</div> - <div class="verse">Fired their ringing shot and pass’d,</div> - <div class="verse">Hotly charged—and broke at last.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_745" id="Page_745">[745]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Charge once more, then, and be dumb!</div> - <div class="verse">Let the victors, when they come,</div> - <div class="verse">When the forts of folly fall,</div> - <div class="verse">Find thy body by the wall.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>An Appeal to the Young</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Peter Kropotkin</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>)</p> - -<p>If your heart really beats in unison with that of -humanity, if like a true poet you have an ear for Life, -then, gazing out upon this sea of sorrow whose tide sweeps -up around you, face to face with these people dying of -hunger, in the presence of these corpses piled up in the -mines, and these mutilated bodies lying in heaps on the -barricades, looking on these long lines of exiles who are -going to bury themselves in the snows of Siberia and in -the marshes of tropical islands; in full view of this desperate -battle which is being fought, amid the cries of pain -from the conquered and the orgies of the victors, of heroism -in conflict with cowardice, of noble determination face to -face with contemptible cunning—you cannot remain -neutral; you will come and take the side of the oppressed -because you know that the beautiful, the sublime, the -spirit of life itself is on the side of those who fight for -light, for humanity, for justice!...</p> - -<p>It rests with you either to palter continually with your -conscience, and in the end to say, one fine day: “Perish -humanity, provided I can have plenty of pleasures and -enjoy them to the full, so long as the people are foolish -enough to let me.” Or, once more the inevitable alterna<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_746" id="Page_746">[746]</a></span>tive, -to take part with the Socialists and work with them -for the complete transformation of society. That is the -logical conclusion which every intelligent man must -perforce arrive at, provided that he reasons honestly -about what passes around him, and discards the sophisms -which his bourgeois education and the interested views -of those about him whisper in his ear.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From the Book of Proverbs</span></h3> - -<p>Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the -cause of the poor and needy.</p> - - -<h3>Chants Communal</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Horace Traubel</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_185">185</a>)</p> - -<p>What can I do? I can talk out when others are -silent. I can say man when others say money. -I can stay up when others are asleep. I can keep on -working when others have stopped to play. I can give -life big meanings when others give life little meanings. -I can say love when others say hate. I can say every -man when others say one man. I can try events by a -hard test when others try it by an easy test.</p> - -<p>What can I do? I can give myself to life when other -men refuse themselves to life.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_747" id="Page_747">[747]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>No Enemies</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charles Mackay</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_657">657</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">You have no enemies, you say?</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Alas! my friend, the boast is poor;</div> - <div class="verse">He who has mingled in the fray</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of duty, that the brave endure,</div> - <div class="verse"><em>Must</em> have made foes! If you have none,</div> - <div class="verse">Small is the work that you have done.</div> - <div class="verse">You’ve hit no traitor on the hip,</div> - <div class="verse">You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip,</div> - <div class="verse">You’ve never turned the wrong to right,</div> - <div class="verse">You’ve been a coward in the fight.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Revolution</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Richard Wagner</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_236">236</a>)</p> - -<p>Unhappy man! uplift thine eyes, look up to where a -thousand thousand gather on the hills in joyous -expectation of the dawn! Regard them, they are all thy -brothers, sisters, the troops of those poor wights who -hitherto knew naught of life but suffering, have been but -strangers on this earth of Joy; they all are waiting for -that Revolution which affrights thee, their redeemer -from this world of sorrow, creator of a new world that -blesses all! See there, there stream the legions from the -factories; they have made and fashioned lordly stuffs,—themselves -and children, they are naked, frozen, hungry; -for not to them belongs the fruit of all their labor, but to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_748" id="Page_748">[748]</a></span> -the rich and mighty one who calls men and the earth his -own! So, there they troop, from fields and farmyards; -they have tilled the earth and turned it to a smiling garden, -and fruits in plenty, enough for all who live, have paid -their pains,—yet poor are they, and naked, starving; -for not to them, nor to others who are needy, belongs -earth’s blessing, but solely to the rich and mighty one who -calls men and the earth his own. They all, the hundred-thousands, -millions, are camped upon the hills and gaze -into the distance, where thickening clouds proclaim the -advent of emancipating Revolution; they all, to whom -nothing is left to grieve for, from whom men rob the sons -to train them into sturdy gaolers of their fathers; whose -daughters walk the city’s streets with burden of their -shame, an offering to the baser lusts of rich and mighty; -they all, with the sallow, careworn faces, the limbs devoured -by frost and hunger, they all who have never known -joy, encamp there on the heights and strain their eyes in -blissful expectation of its coming, and listen in rapt -silence to the rustle of the rising storm, which fills their -ears with Revolution’s greeting.</p> - - -<h3>The Refusal</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Addressed to General Sebastiani</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Pierre Jean de Beranger</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(French lyric poet, of great popularity, 1780-1857; twice prosecuted -by the government for his republican utterances)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">A minister offers me gold!</div> - <div class="verse">Not a creature, of course, to be told,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Not a word to appear in the press!</div> - <div class="verse">My wants are but few, to be sure,</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_749" id="Page_749">[749]</a></span> - <div class="verse">And yet, when I think of the poor,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I long to be rich, I confess!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With the poor, as the world is aware,</div> - <div class="verse">Stars and ribands one cannot well share,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But gold is a different thing!</div> - <div class="verse">Yes, just for a hundred francs down</div> - <div class="verse">I’d cheerfully pawn both my crown</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And my sceptre, if I were king!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">When money does come in my way,</div> - <div class="verse">It goes the next moment astray,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">How and where I can’t really explain;</div> - <div class="verse">My pocket is cursed with a hole</div> - <div class="verse">Which my grandmother, excellent soul,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">All her days would have stitched at in vain!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">All the same, my good friend, keep your gold!</div> - <div class="verse">In my teens, if the truth must be told,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Proud Freedom I fervently woo’d;</div> - <div class="verse">Yes, I, who have vaunted in song</div> - <div class="verse">Lax loveliness all my life long,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Am wedded in fact to a prude!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ay, Liberty, Sir, you must learn,</div> - <div class="verse">Is a bigot inflexibly stern,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Who, heedless of time and of place,</div> - <div class="verse">Directly the tinsel she spies</div> - <div class="verse">On Servility’s livery, cries,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">“Away with the rascally lace!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Your dross she an insult would deem!</div> - <div class="verse">But, frankly, how came you to dream</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of attempting to treat with <em>my</em> muse?</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_750" id="Page_750">[750]</a></span> - <div class="verse">As it is, I’m at least a good “sou,”</div> - <div class="verse">But lacquer me over, and you</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Make me counterfeit ev’n among “sous.”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Keep your pelf; I’m no hero, I fear,</div> - <div class="verse">But if the world happens to hear</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of this secret you think so profound,</div> - <div class="verse">You’ll know whence the story has sprung—</div> - <div class="verse">My heart’s like a lyre newly strung,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">One touch, and you make it resound!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>To the Retainers</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Socialism and Success”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By W. J. Ghent</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American Socialist writer, born 1866)</p> - -<p>You retainers and servitors of the men of wealth—you -who from rostrum, pulpit and sanctum, from bar -and bench, defend the existing régime and oppose the -struggles of the working class for a better life; you whose -business it is to find a practical, a judicial, an ethical and -even a spiritual sanction for things as they exist, and who -devise the cheap moralities which are the reflex of the -interests of the class that employs you—there is a word to -say to you which needs to be spoken. Upon those who -take part in the forward movement of the time no more -pressing duty is laid than that of telling you in plain words -what millions of men are thinking of you....</p> - -<p>With what eager impulse and with what compliant -will do you make yourselves the defenders of the present -scheme of things and the assailants of the coming order!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_751" id="Page_751">[751]</a></span> -Now that in every civilized land the working class, sick -of the reign of cruelty and wrong, is awakening to a -consciousness of its power, and to a determination to -ordain a fairer life, you take upon yourselves the mission -to ridicule its aims and ideals and to discredit its leaders.</p> - -<p>It is only the unsuccessful, you say, who attack our -existing institutions. You cannot understand, such is -your subservient complacence, that multitudes among -this revolutionary working class are proud of their unsuccess -and wear it as a badge of honor. Pray you, -under the existing scheme of things, how many, and what -quality of men achieve “success,” and what must they do -to achieve it? It is not, except in rare cases, probity, -honor, truthfulness, nor humaneness, nor fellow service, -that wins this fallacious good. It is, in the majority of -cases, grafting and lying, fawning and cringing, selfishness -and brutality, restrained only by that Chinese ethical -standard, the necessity of “saving your face,” that give -victory in the struggle. And the men who are seeking -the overthrow of this system disdain to make use of these -means. They leave that function to you. They do not, -like your bishops, lend their presence to chambers of -commerce at banquets, and give to the gamblers in the -world’s wealth the benediction of divine favor. They do -not, like your Board of Foreign Missions, solicit the -profits of law breaking and theft for their propaganda, -and promise an intercession at the throne of grace. They -do not, like your college heads, prescribe the dainty -punishment of “social ostracism” for the world’s robbers, -crying out from their gables, “Bring on your tainted -money!” Nor do they, like your journalists, make themselves -the servile lackeys of the ruling class; nor, like -your economists, constitute themselves the secular<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_752" id="Page_752">[752]</a></span> -priests of capital, perpetually renewing their character -of “pests of society and persecutors of the poor.” Many -of them might be “successful” if they chose to do these -things. Rather they chose, like Francis of Assisi, the -bride of Poverty, instead of the harlot Success. And so -you are right in your statement. But you utter your own -condemnation when you speak it.</p> - - -<h3>Ad Valorem</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Ruskin</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_491">491</a>)</p> - -<p>In a community regulated by laws of demand and -supply, but protected from open violence, the persons -who become rich are, generally speaking, industrious, -resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, -unimaginative, insensitive, and ignorant. The persons -who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely -wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, -the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, -the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, -the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, -just, and godly person.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_753" id="Page_753">[753]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Lost Leader</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Browning</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Celebrated English poet, 1812-1889. The present poem has been -generally taken to refer to Wordsworth, who became in his old -age a conservative and the poet-laureate of a reactionary government)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Just for a handful of silver he left us,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Just for a riband to stick in his coat—</div> - <div class="verse">Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Lost all the others she lets us devote;</div> - <div class="verse">They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">So much was theirs who so little allowed:</div> - <div class="verse">How all our copper had gone for his service!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Rags—were they purple, his heart had been proud!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We that had loved him so, followed him, honored him,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,</div> - <div class="verse">Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Made him our pattern to live and to die!</div> - <div class="verse">Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Burns, Shelley, were with us,—they watch from their graves!</div> - <div class="verse">He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">We shall march prospering,—not thro’ his presence;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Songs may inspirit us,—not from his lyre;</div> - <div class="verse">Deeds will be done,—while he boasts his quiescence,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire:</div> - <div class="verse">Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,</div> - <div class="verse">One more devil’s-triumph and sorrow for angels,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_754" id="Page_754">[754]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Journalism</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Swinton</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(One of America’s oldest and most beloved journalists was tendered -a banquet by his fellow-editors, and surprised his hosts -by the following words)</p> - -<p>There is no such thing in America as an independent -press, unless it is in the country towns.</p> - -<p>You know it and I know it. There is not one of you -who dares to write his honest opinions, and if you did you -know beforehand that it would never appear in print.</p> - -<p>I am paid $150.00 a week for keeping my honest opinions -out of the paper I am connected with—others of you are -paid similar salaries for similar things—and any of you -who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions -would be out on the streets looking for another job.</p> - -<p>The business of the New York journalist is to destroy -the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at -the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country -for his daily bread.</p> - -<p>You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be -toasting an “Independent Press.”</p> - -<p>We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the -scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings -and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our -lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual -prostitutes.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_755" id="Page_755">[755]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Rebel</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Hilaire Belloc</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English historian and poet, born 1871; resigned from parliament -to conduct a campaign against the control of England’s -political machinery by vested wealth)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">There is a wall of which the stones</div> - <div class="verse">Are lies and bribes and dead men’s bones.</div> - <div class="verse">And wrongfully this evil wall</div> - <div class="verse">Denies what all men made for all,</div> - <div class="verse">And shamelessly this wall surrounds</div> - <div class="verse">Our homestead and our native grounds.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">But I will gather and I will ride,</div> - <div class="verse">And I will summon a countryside,</div> - <div class="verse">And many a man shall hear my halloa</div> - <div class="verse">Who never had thought the horn to follow;</div> - <div class="verse">And many a man shall ride with me</div> - <div class="verse">Who never had thought on earth to see</div> - <div class="verse">High Justice in her armoury.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">When we find them where they stand,</div> - <div class="verse">A mile of men on either hand,</div> - <div class="verse">I mean to charge from right away</div> - <div class="verse">And force the flanks of their array,</div> - <div class="verse">And press them inward from the plains,</div> - <div class="verse">And drive them clamoring down the lanes,</div> - <div class="verse">And gallop and harry and have them down,</div> - <div class="verse">And carry the gates and hold the town.</div> - <div class="verse">Then shall I rest me from my ride</div> - <div class="verse">With my great anger satisfied.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_756" id="Page_756">[756]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Only, before I eat and drink,</div> - <div class="verse">When I have killed them all, I think</div> - <div class="verse">That I will batter their carven names,</div> - <div class="verse">And slit the pictures in their frames,</div> - <div class="verse">And burn for scent their cedar door,</div> - <div class="verse">And melt the gold their women wore,</div> - <div class="verse">And hack their horses at the knees,</div> - <div class="verse">And hew to death their timber trees,</div> - <div class="verse">And plough their gardens deep and through—</div> - <div class="verse">And all these things I mean to do</div> - <div class="verse">For fear perhaps my little son</div> - <div class="verse">Should break his hands, as I have done.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By John Ruskin</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_491">491</a>, <a href="#Page_752">752</a>)</p> - -<p>I feel the force of mechanism and the fury of avaricious -commerce to be at present so irresistible, that I -have seceded from the study not only of architecture, but -nearly of all art; and have given myself, as I would in a -besieged city, to seek the best modes of getting bread and -water for its multitudes.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Ō-Shi-O</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Japanese scholar of the Eighteenth Century)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I have a suit of new clothes in this happy new year;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Hot rice cake soup is excellent to my taste;</div> - <div class="verse">But when I think of the hungry people in this city,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I am ashamed of my fortune in the presence of God.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_757" id="Page_757">[757]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Jean-Christophe</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Romain Rolland</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(French novelist and critic, born 1866; lecturer at the University -of Paris. This epoch-making ten-volume novel, probably the -greatest published in France since “Les Miserables,” tells the life -story of a German-born musician. The following passage describes -his attitude towards the revolutionary movement in Paris)</p></div> - -<p>Christophe was dragged into the wake of force in -the track of the army of the working-classes in revolt. -But he was hardly aware that it was so; and he would -tell his companions in the restaurant that he was not with -them.</p> - -<p>“As long as you are only out for material interests,” -he would say, “you don’t interest me. The day when you -march out for a belief, then I shall be with you. Otherwise, -what have I to do with the conflict between one -man’s belly and another’s? I am an artist; it is my -duty to defend art; I have no right to enroll myself in -the service of a party. I am perfectly aware that recently -certain ambitious writers, impelled by a desire for an -unwholesome popularity, have set a bad example. It -seems to me that they have not rendered any great -service to the cause which they defended in that way; -but they have certainly betrayed art. It is our business—the -artists’—to save the light of the intellect. We -have no right to obscure it with your blind struggles. -Who shall hold the light aloft if we let it fall? You will -be glad enough to find it still intact after the battle. There -must always be workers busy keeping up the fire in the -engine, while there is fighting on the deck of the ship. -To understand everything is to hate nothing. The -artist is the compass which, through the raging of the -storm, points steadily to the north.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_758" id="Page_758">[758]</a></span></p> - -<p>They regarded him as a maker of phrases, and said -that, if he were talking of compasses, it was very clear -that he had lost his: and they gave themselves the pleasure -of indulging in a little friendly contempt at his expense. -In their eyes an artist was a shirker who contrived to work -as little and as agreeably as possible.</p> - -<p>He replied that he worked as hard as they did, even -harder, and that he was not nearly so afraid of work. -Nothing disgusted him so much as <em>sabotage</em>, the deliberate -bungling of work, and skulking raised to the level of a -principle.</p> - -<p>“All these wretched people,” he would say, “afraid -for their own skins!... Good Lord! I’ve never stopped -working since I was eight. You people don’t love your -work; at heart you’re just common men.... If only -you were capable of destroying the old world! But you -can’t do it. You don’t even want to. No, you don’t even -want to. It is all very well for you to go about shrieking -menace and pretending you’re going to exterminate the -human race. You have only one thought: to get the -upper hand and lie snugly in the warm beds of the middle -classes....”</p> - -<p>Thereupon they would all lose their tempers and all -talk at once. And in the heat of the argument it would -often happen that Christophe, whirled away by his passion, -would become more revolutionary than the others. In -vain did he fight against it; his intellectual pride, his -complacent conception of a purely esthetic world, made for -the joy of the spirit, would sink deep into the ground at -the sight of injustice. Esthetic, a world in which eight -men out of ten live in nakedness and want, in physical -and moral wretchedness? Oh, come! A man must be -an impudent creature of privilege who would dare to claim<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_759" id="Page_759">[759]</a></span> -as much. An artist like Christophe, in his inmost conscience, -could not but be on the side of the working-classes. -What man more than the spiritual worker has to -suffer from the immorality of social conditions, from the -scandalously unequal partition of wealth among men? -The artist dies of hunger or becomes a millionaire for no -other reason than the caprice of fashion and of those who -speculate on fashion. A society which suffers its best -men to die or gives them extravagant rewards is a monstrous -society: it must be swept and put in order. Every -man, whether he works or no, has a right to a living -minimum. Every kind of work, good or mediocre, should -be rewarded, not according to its real value—(who can -be the infallible judge of that?)—but according to the -normal legitimate needs of the worker. Society can and -should assure the artist, the scientist, and the inventor -an income sufficient to guarantee that they have the means -and the time yet further to grace and honor it. Nothing -more. The <cite>Gioconda</cite> is not worth a million. There is no -relation between a sum of money and a work of art: -a work of art is neither above nor below money: it is -outside it. It is not a question of payment: it is a question -of allowing the artist to live. Give him enough to feed -him, and allow him to work in peace. It is absurd and -horrible to try to make him a robber of another’s property. -This thing must be put bluntly: every man who has more -than is necessary for his livelihood and that of his family, -and for the normal development of his intelligence, is a -thief and a robber. If he has too much, it means that -others have too little. How often have we smiled sadly -to hear tell of the inexhaustible wealth of France, and -the number of great fortunes—we workers, and toilers, -and intellectuals, and men and women who from our very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_760" id="Page_760">[760]</a></span> -birth have been given up to the wearying task of keeping -ourselves from dying of hunger, often struggling in vain, -often seeing the very best of us succumbing to the pain of -it all,—we who are the moral and intellectual treasure of -the nation! You who have more than your share of the -wealth of the world are rich at the cost of our suffering and -our poverty. That troubles you not at all; you have -sophistries and to spare to reassure you: the sacred -rights of property, the fair struggle for life, the supreme -interests of that Moloch, the State, and Progress, that -fabulous monster, that problematical Better to which -men sacrifice the Good,—the Good of other men. But -for all that, the fact remains, and all your sophistries -will never manage to deny it: “You have too much to live -on. We have not enough. And we are as good as you. -And some of us are better than the whole lot of you put -together.”</p> - - -<h3>The Problem Play</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By G. Bernard Shaw</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>)</p> - -<p>When we succeed in adjusting our social structure -in such a way as to enable us to solve social questions -as fast as they become really pressing, they will no -longer force their way into the theatre. Had Ibsen, for -instance, had any reason to believe that the abuses to -which he called attention in his prose plays would have -been adequately attended to without his interference, -he would no doubt have gladly left them alone. The -same exigency drove William Morris in England from his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_761" id="Page_761">[761]</a></span> -tapestries, his epics, and his masterpieces of printing, to -try and bring his fellow citizens to their senses by the -summary process of shouting at them in the streets and -in Trafalgar Square. John Ruskin’s writing began with -Modern Painters; Carlyle began with literary studies -of German culture and the like; both were driven to -become revolutionary pamphleteers. If people are rotting -and starving in all directions, and nobody else has the -heart or brains to make a disturbance about it, the great -writers must.</p> - - -<h3>Fleet Street Eclogues</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Davidson</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(In these dialogues a number of English journalists discuss their -views of life. The author, by his tragic death, may be said to have -put the seal of sincerity upon his bitter utterances. See page <a href="#Page_216">216</a>)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I too, for light the world explore,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And, trembling, tread where angels trod;</div> - <div class="verse">Devout at every shrine adore,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And follow after each new god.</div> - <div class="verse">But by the altar everywhere</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I find the money-changer’s stall;</div> - <div class="verse">And littering every temple-stair</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The sick and sore like maggots crawl....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And always divers undertones</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Within the roaring tempest throb—</div> - <div class="verse">The chink of gold, the laborer’s groans,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The infant’s wail, the woman’s sob.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_762" id="Page_762">[762]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Hoarsely they beg of Fate to give</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A little lightening of their woe,</div> - <div class="verse">A little time to love, to live,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A little time to think and know.</div> - <div class="verse">I see where from the slums may rise</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Some unexpected dreadful dawn—</div> - <div class="verse">The gleam of steeled and scowling eyes,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A flash of women’s faces wan!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>To a Bourgeois Litterateur</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Who referred to a group of agitators as “Professional -Hoboes”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Max Eastman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_408">408</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">How old, my friend, is that fine-pointed pen</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Wherewith in smiling quietude you trace</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The maiden maxims of your writing-place,</div> - <div class="verse">And o’er this gripped and mortal-sweating den</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And battle-pit of hunger, now and then</div> - <div class="verse">Dip out, with nice and intellectual grace,</div> - <div class="verse">The faultless wisdoms of a nurtured race</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of pale-eyed, pink, and perfect gentlemen?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">How long have art and wit and poetry,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With all their power, been content, like you,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To gild the smiling fineness of the few,</div> - <div class="verse">To filmy-curtain what they dare not see</div> - <div class="verse">In multudinous reality—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The rough and bloody soul of what is true?</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_763" id="Page_763">[763]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Scholar as Revolutionist</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Anatole France”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Georg Brandes</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Danish critic, born 1842)</p> - -<p>What gives Anatole France his lasting hold over his -hearers is not his cleverness, but himself—the fact -that this savant who bears the heavy load of three cultures, -nay, who is in himself a whole little culture—this -sage, to whom the whole life of the earth is but an ephemeral -eruption on its surface, and who consequently -regards all human endeavor as finally vain—this thinker, -who can see everything from innumerable sides and might -have come to the conclusion that, things being bad at the -best, the existing state of matters was probably as good as -the untried: that this man should proclaim himself a son -of the Revolution, side with the workingman, acknowledge -his belief in liberty, throw away his load and draw his -sword—this is what moves a popular audience, this is -what plain people can understand and can prize. It has -shown them that behind the author there dwells a man—behind -the great author a brave man.</p> - - -<h3>A Warning</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Heinrich Heine</span></p> - -<p class="center">(<cite>Translated by Louis Untermeyer</cite>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_744">744</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">You will print such books as these!</div> - <div class="verse">Then you’re lost, my friend, that’s certain.</div> - <div class="verse">If you wish for gold and honor,</div> - <div class="verse">Write more humbly—bend your knees!</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_764" id="Page_764">[764]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Aye, you must have lost your senses</div> - <div class="verse">Thus to speak before the people;</div> - <div class="verse">Thus to dare to speak of Preachers</div> - <div class="verse">And of Potentates and Princes.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Friend, you’re lost—so it appears—</div> - <div class="verse">For the Princes have long arms,</div> - <div class="verse">And the Preachers have long tongues,</div> - <div class="verse">—And the masses have long ears!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Stoning the Prophets</h3> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(On page 623 appears a sample of the weapons with which -Privilege defends itself upon the political field. It seems worth -while to include at this place a sample of what the revolutionary -poet has to encounter. The following are comments of newspapers -and weekly reviews in London at the time of the first productions -of the plays of Henrik Ibsen, in 1891. They are taken partly -from an article by William Archer, “Ghosts and Gibberings,” <cite>Pall -Mall Gazette</cite>, April 8, 1891; and partly from another article by -the same writer, “The Mausoleum of Ibsen,” <cite>Fortnightly Review</cite>, -July, 1893)</p></div> - -<p>London <cite>Truth</cite>, March 19, 1891, discussing a reading -of “Ghosts”:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>An obscure Scandinavian dramatist and poet, a crazy -fanatic, and determined Socialist, is to be trumpeted -into fame for the sake of the estimable gentleman who can -translate his works, and the enterprising tradesmen who -publish them.... The unwomanly woman, the unsexed -female, and the whole army of unprepossessing cranks in -petticoats ... sat open-mouthed and without a blush on -their faces, whilst a Socialist orator read aloud “Ghosts,”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_765" id="Page_765">[765]</a></span> -the most loathsome of Ibsen’s plays.... If you have -seen one play by Ibsen you have seen them all. A disagreeable -and nasty woman; an egotistical and preachy -man; a philosophical sensualist; dull and undramatic -dialogue. The few independent people who have sat out -a play by Ibsen ... have said to themselves, Put this -stuff before the play-going public, risk it at the evening -theatre, remove your claque, exhaust your attendance of -the Socialistic and the sexless, and then see where your -Ibsen will be. I have never known an audience yet that -cared to pay to be bored.</p></div> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>London <cite>Daily Telegraph</cite>, reviewing the first performance -of “Ghosts”:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>Ibsen’s positively abominable play.... This disgusting -representation.... Reprobation due to -such as aim at infecting the modern theatre with poison -after desperately inoculating themselves and others.... -An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act -done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and -windows open.... Candid foulness.... Kotzebue -turned bestial and cynical.... Offensive cynicism.... -Ibsen’s melancholy and malodorous world.... Absolutely -loathsome and fetid.... Gross, almost putrid -indecorum.... Literary carrion.... Crapulous stuff.... -Novel and perilous nuisance.</p></div> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>Other London reviews of “Ghosts”:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>Unutterably offensive.... Prosecution under Lord -Campbell’s Act.... Abominable piece.... Scandalous.—<cite>Standard.</cite></p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_766" id="Page_766">[766]</a></span></p> - -<p>Naked loathsomeness.... Most dismal and revolting -production.—<cite>Daily News.</cite></p> - -<p>Revolting, suggestive and blasphemous.... Characters -either contradictory in themselves, uninteresting or -abhorrent.—<cite>Daily Chronicle.</cite></p> - -<p>A repulsive and degrading work.—<cite>Queen.</cite></p> - -<p>Morbid, unhealthy, unwholesome, disgusting story.... -A piece to bring the stage into disrepute and dishonor with -every right-thinking man and woman.—<cite>Lloyds.</cite></p> - -<p>Merely dull dirt long drawn out.—<cite>Hawk.</cite></p> - -<p>If any repetition of this outrage be attempted, the -authorities will doubtless wake from their lethargy.—<cite>Sporting -and Dramatic News.</cite></p> - -<p>Most loathsome of all Ibsen’s plays.... Garbage -and offal.—<cite>Truth.</cite></p> - -<p>Ibsen’s putrid play called “Ghosts.” ... So loathsome.—<cite>Academy.</cite></p> - -<p>As foul and filthy a concoction as has ever been allowed -to disgrace the boards in an English theatre.... Dull -and disgusting.... Nastiness and malodorousness laid -on thickly as with a trowel.—<cite>Era.</cite></p> - -<p>Noisome corruption.—<cite>Stage.</cite></p></div> - - -<h3>For Hire</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Morris Rosenfeld</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_56">56</a>. Translation by Rose Pastor Stokes)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Work with might and main,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Or with hand or heart,</div> - <div class="verse">Work with soul and brain,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Or with holy art,</div> - <div class="verse">Thread, or genius’ fire—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Make a vest, or verse—</div> - <div class="verse">If ’tis done for hire,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">It is done the worse.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_767" id="Page_767">[767]</a></span></p> - -<h3>A Man of Genius</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The New Grub Street”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George Gissing</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A novel portraying the lives of the innumerable hack-writers who -starve in the garrets of modern London. See page <a href="#Page_104">104</a>)</p> - -<p>His name was Harold Biffen, and, to judge from his -appearance, he did not belong to the race of common -mortals. His excessive meagerness would all but have -qualified him to enter an exhibition in the capacity of -living skeleton, and the garments which hung upon this -framework would perhaps have sold for three and sixpence -at an old-clothes dealer’s. But the man was superior -to these accidents of flesh and raiment. He had a fine -face: large, gentle eyes, nose slightly aquiline, small and -delicate mouth. Thick black hair fell to his coat-collar; -he wore a heavy moustache and a full beard. In his -gait there was a singular dignity; only a man of cultivated -mind and grateful character could move and stand as he -did.</p> - -<p>His first act on entering the room was to take from his -pocket a pipe, a pouch, a little tobacco-stopper, and a box -of matches, all of which he arranged carefully on a corner -of the central table. Then he drew forward a chair and -seated himself.</p> - -<p>“Take your top-coat off,” said Reardon.</p> - -<p>“Thanks, not this evening.”</p> - -<p>“Why the deuce not?”</p> - -<p>“Not this evening, thanks.”</p> - -<p>The reason, as soon as Reardon sought for it, was -obvious. Biffen had no ordinary coat beneath the other. -To have referred to this fact would have been indelicate;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_768" id="Page_768">[768]</a></span> -the novelist of course understood it, and smiled, but with -no mirth.</p> - -<p>“Let me have your Sophocles,” were the visitor’s next -words.</p> - -<p>Reardon offered him a volume of the Oxford Pocket -Classics.</p> - -<p>“I prefer the Wunder, please.”</p> - -<p>“It’s gone, my boy.”</p> - -<p>“Gone?”</p> - -<p>“Wanted a little cash.”</p> - -<p>Biffen uttered a sound in which remonstrance and -sympathy were blended.</p> - -<p>“I’m sorry to hear that; very sorry. Well, this must -do. Now, I want to know how you scan this chorus in -the ‘Oedipus Rex.’”</p> - -<p>Reardon took the volume, considered, and began to -read aloud with metric emphasis.</p> - -<p>“Choriambics, eh?” cried the other. “Possible, of -course; but treat them as Ionics <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">a minore</i> with an anacrusis, -and see if they don’t go better.”</p> - -<p>He involved himself in terms of pedantry, and with -such delight that his eyes gleamed. Having delivered a -technical lecture, he began to read in illustration, producing -quite a different effect from that of the rhythm as -given by his friend. And the reading was by no means -that of a pedant, rather of a poet.</p> - -<p>For half an hour the two men talked Greek metres as -if they lived in a world where the only hunger known -could be satisfied by grand or sweet cadences....</p> - -<p>Biffen was always in dire poverty, and lived in the -oddest places; he had seen harder trials than even Reardon -himself. The teaching by which he partly lived was of -a kind quite unknown to the respectable tutorial world.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_769" id="Page_769">[769]</a></span> -In these days of examinations, numbers of men in a poor -position—clerks chiefly—conceive a hope that by “passing” -this, that, or the other formal test they may open -for themselves a new career. Not a few such persons -nourish preposterous ambitions; there are warehouse -clerks privately preparing (without any means or prospect -of them) for a call to the Bar, drapers’ assistants who -“go in” for the preliminary examination of the College -of Surgeons, and untaught men innumerable, who desire -to procure enough show of education to be eligible for a -curacy. Candidates of this stamp frequently advertise -in the newspapers for cheap tuition, or answer advertisements -which are intended to appeal to them; they pay -from sixpence to half a crown an hour—rarely as much as -the latter sum. Occasionally it happened that Harold -Biffen had three or four such pupils in hand, and extraordinary -stories he could draw from his large experience -in this sphere....</p> - - -<h4><i>Biffen Falls in Love</i></h4> - -<p>A fatal day. There was an end of all his peace, all his -capacity for labor, his patient endurance of penury. -Once, when he was about three and twenty, he had been -in love with a girl of gentle nature and fair intelligence; -on account of his poverty, he could not even hope that his -love might be returned, and he went away to bear the -misery as best he might. Since then the life he had led -precluded the forming of such attachments; it would -never have been possible for him to support a wife of -however humble origin. At intervals he felt the full -weight of his loneliness, but there were happily long -periods during which his Greek studies and his efforts -in realistic fiction made him indifferent to the curse laid<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_770" id="Page_770">[770]</a></span> -upon him. But after that hour of intimate speech with -Amy, he never again knew rest of mind or heart....</p> - -<p>He was not the kind of man that deceives himself as -to his own aspect in the eyes of others. Be as kind as -she might, Amy could not set him strutting Malvolio-wise; -she viewed him as a poor devil who often had to -pound his coat—a man of parts who could never get on in -the world—a friend to be thought of kindly because her -dead husband had valued him. Nothing more than that; -he understood perfectly the limits of her feeling. But this -could not put restraint upon the emotion with which he -received any trifling utterance of kindness from her. He -did not think of what was, but of what, under changed -circumstances, might be. To encourage such fantasy -was the idlest self-torment, but he had gone too far in -this form of indulgence. He became the slave of his -inflamed imagination....</p> - -<p>Companionless, inert, he suffered the tortures which -are so ludicrous and contemptible to the happily married. -Life was barren to him, and would soon grow hateful; -only in sleep could he cast off the unchanging thoughts -and desires which made all else meaningless. And -rightly meaningless; he revolted against the unnatural -constraints forbidding him to complete his manhood. -By what fatality was he alone of men withheld from the -winning of a woman’s love?</p> - -<p>He could not bear to walk the streets where the faces -of beautiful women would encounter him. When he must -needs leave the house, he went about in the poor, narrow -ways, where only spectacles of coarseness, and want, -and toil would be presented to him. Yet even here he was -too often reminded that the poverty-stricken of the class -to which poverty is natural were not condemned to endure<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_771" id="Page_771">[771]</a></span> -in solitude. Only he who belonged to no class, who was -rejected alike by his fellows in privation and by his equals -in intellect, must die without having known the touch of a -loving woman’s hand.</p> - -<p>The summer went by, and he was unconscious of its -warmth and light. How his days passed he could not have -said....</p> - -<p>One evening in early autumn, as he stood before the -book-stall at the end of Goodge Street, a familiar voice -accosted him. It was Whelpdale’s. A month or two ago -he had stubbornly refused an invitation to dine with -Whelpdale and other acquaintances, and since then the -prosperous young man had not crossed his path.</p> - -<p>“I’ve something to tell you,” said the assailer, taking -hold of his arm. “I’m in a tremendous state of mind, and -want someone to share my delight.... You know -Dora Milvain; I have asked her to marry me, and, by the -Powers! she has given me an encouraging answer! Not -an actual yes, but encouraging! She’s away in the -Channel Islands, and I wrote——”</p> - -<p>He talked on for a quarter of an hour. Then, with a -sudden movement, the listener freed himself.</p> - -<p>“I can’t go any farther,” he said hoarsely. “Goodbye!”</p> - -<p>Whelpdale was disconcerted.</p> - -<p>“I have been boring you. That’s a confounded fault -of mine; I know it.”</p> - -<p>Biffen had waved his hand, and was gone.</p> - -<p>A week or two would see him at the end of his money. -He had no lessons now, and could not write; from his novel -nothing was to be expected. He might apply again to his -brother, but such dependence was unjust and unworthy. -And why should he struggle to preserve a life which had -no prospect but of misery?...</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_772" id="Page_772">[772]</a></span></p> - -<p>It was in the hours following his encounter with -Whelpdale that he first knew the actual desire of death, -the simple longing for extinction. One must go far in -suffering before the innate will-to-live is thus truly overcome; -weariness of bodily anguish may induce this perversion -of the instincts; less often, that despair of suppressed -emotion which had fallen upon Harold. Through -the night he kept his thoughts fixed on death in its aspect -of repose, of eternal oblivion. And herein he found -solace.</p> - -<p>The next night it was the same. Moving among many -common needs and occupations, he knew not a moment’s -cessation of heartache, but when he lay down in the -darkness a hopeful summons whispered to him. Night, -which had been the worst season of his pain, had now -grown friendly; it came as an anticipation of the sleep -that is everlasting.</p> - -<p>A few more days, and he was possessed by a calm of -spirit such as he had never known. His resolve was taken, -not in a moment of supreme conflict, but as the result -of a subtle process by which his imagination had become -in love with death. Turning from contemplation of life’s -one rapture, he looked with the same intensity of desire -to a state that had neither fear nor hope.</p> - -<p>One afternoon he went to the Museum Reading Room, -and was busy for a few minutes in consultation of a volume -which he took from the shelves of medical literature. On -his way homeward he entered two or three chemists’ -shops. Something of which he had need could be procured -only in very small quantities; but repetition of his -demand in different places supplied him sufficiently. -When he reached his room, he emptied the contents of -sundry little bottles into one larger, and put this in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_773" id="Page_773">[773]</a></span> -pocket. Then he wrote rather a long letter, addressed to -his brother in Liverpool....</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>“Really,” said Jasper, “one can’t grieve. There -seemed no possibility of his ever earning enough to live -decently upon. But why the deuce did he go all the way -out there? Consideration for the people in whose house -he lived, I dare say; Biffen had a good deal of native -delicacy....”</p> - -<p>“Was he still so very poor?” asked Amy, compassionately.</p> - -<p>“I’m afraid so. His book failed utterly.”</p> - -<p>“Oh, if I had imagined him still in such distress, surely I -might have done something to help him!”—So often the -regretful remark of one’s friends, when one has been -permitted to perish.</p> - - -<h3>Letter to the Earl of Chesterfield</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Samuel Johnson</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(English man of letters, 1709-1784; maker of a celebrated English -dictionary, and the subject of one of the world’s most famous biographies. -Dr. Johnson might be called the first professional literary -man; the first who lived by his trade and was respected for it. So -the present letter, addressed to one of the most powerful personages -of the time, may be said to mark the end of the age of patronage -in the literary world: the system whereby authors dedicated their -works to noblemen, and received food and favors in return)</p></div> - -<p>My Lord, I have been lately informed, by the -proprietor of the World, that two papers, in which -my Dictionary is recommended to the publick, were -written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished, is an -honour, which, being very little accustomed to favours<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_774" id="Page_774">[774]</a></span> -from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what -terms to acknowledge.</p> - -<p>When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited -your Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, -by the enchantment of your address, and could not -forbear to wish that I might boast myself <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Le vainquer du -vainqueur de la terre</i>;—that I might obtain that regard -for which I saw the world contending; but I found my -attendance so little encouraged, that neither pride nor -modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once -addressed your Lordship in publick, I had exhausted all -the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar -can possess. I had done all that I could; and no man is -well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.</p> - -<p>Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited -in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; -during which time I have been pushing my work through -difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have -brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one -act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile -of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never -had a Patron before.</p> - -<p>The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with -Love, and found him a native of the rocks.</p> - -<p>Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern -on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has -reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice -which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had -it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till -I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, -and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want -it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity, not to confess -obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_775" id="Page_775">[775]</a></span> -unwilling that the Publick should consider me as owing -that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do -for myself.</p> - -<p>Having carried my work thus far with so little obligation -to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed -though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; -for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope -in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation,</p> - -<p> -My Lord,<br /> -Your Lordship’s most humble<br /> -Most obedient servant,<br /> -<span class="smcap">Sam. Johnson</span>. -</p> - - -<h3>Mother Hubbard’s Tale</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edmund Spenser</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_493">493</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Full little knowest thou that hast not tride,</div> - <div class="verse">What hell it is in suing long to bide:</div> - <div class="verse">To loose good dayes, that might be better spent;</div> - <div class="verse">To waste long nights in pensive discontent;</div> - <div class="verse">To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;</div> - <div class="verse">To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow;</div> - <div class="verse">To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares;</div> - <div class="verse">To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires;</div> - <div class="verse">To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne,</div> - <div class="verse">To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne.</div> - <div class="verse">Unhappie wight, borne to desastrous end,</div> - <div class="verse">That doth his life in so long tendence spend!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_776" id="Page_776">[776]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Journal of Arthur Stirling</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Upton Sinclair</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A young poet, starving and about to commit suicide, leaves his -farewell testament to the world)</p> - -<p>The poet! He comes with a heart trembling with -gladness; he comes with tears of rapture in his eyes. -He comes with bosom heaving and throat choking and -heart breaking. He comes with tenderness and with trust, -with joy in the beauty that he beholds. He comes a -minstrel, with a harp in his hand—and you set your dogs -upon him, you drive him torn and bleeding from your -gates!</p> - -<p>The poet! You make him go out into the market and -chaffer for his bread! You subject him to the same law -to which you subject your loafers and your louts—that -he who will not work cannot eat! Your drones and your -drunkards—and your poets! Every man must earn for -himself, every man must pay his way! No man must -ask favors, no man must be helped, no man shall be -different from other men! For shame! For shame!...</p> - -<p>I am to die now, therefore let me write it: that I was a -man of Genius. And that you have trodden me down in -the struggle for existence. I saw things that no other man -has ever seen, I would have written things that no other -man can ever write. And you have trodden me down in -the struggle for existence—you have trodden me down -because I could not earn my bread!</p> - -<p>This is what I tell you—this is what I cry out to you, -that the man of Genius <em>cannot</em> earn his bread; that the -work by which he develops his power is something absolutely -and utterly different from the work by which he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_777" id="Page_777">[777]</a></span> -earns his bread; and that every hour which he gives to -the one, he lessens his power and his capacity for the -other. Every hour that he gives to the earning of his -bread, he takes from his soul, he weakens his work, he -destroys beauty which never again can he know or dream.</p> - -<p>And this again is what I tell you, this again is what I -cry out to you: that the power by which a man of Genius -does his work, and the power by which he earns his bread, -are things so entirely distinct that <em>they may not occur -together at all!</em>The man may have both, but then again -he may only have the former. And in that case he will die -like a poisoned rat in a hole.</p> - - -<h3>Last Verses</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Chatterton</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(This boy, 1752-1770, came to London friendless and unknown, -and on account of starvation committed suicide at the age of eighteen. -He has become the classic example of the world’s mistreatment of -its poets. The reference to Bristol is to his native city)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Farewell, Bristolia’s dingy piles of brick,</div> - <div class="verse">Lovers of mammon, worshippers of trick!</div> - <div class="verse">Ye spurned the boy who gave you antique lays,</div> - <div class="verse">And paid for learning with your empty praise.</div> - <div class="verse">Farewell, ye guzzling aldermanic fools,</div> - <div class="verse">By nature fitted for corruption’s tools!</div> - <div class="verse">I go to where celestial anthems swell;</div> - <div class="verse">But you, when you depart, will sink to hell.</div> - <div class="verse">Farewell, my mother!—cease, my anguished soul,</div> - <div class="verse">Nor let distraction’s billows o’er me roll!</div> - <div class="verse">Have mercy, Heaven! when here I cease to live,</div> - <div class="verse">And this last act of wretchedness forgive.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_778" id="Page_778">[778]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The “Pinch of Poverty”</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Francis Thompson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet, 1860-1907, who lived neglected and died in misery)</p> - -<p>’Tis the convinced belief of mankind that to make a -poet sing you must pinch his belly, as if the Almighty -had constructed him like a certain rudimentary -vocal doll.</p> - - -<h3>Man as God</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “A Ballad in Blank Verse”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Davidson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_761">761</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">How vain! he cried. A God? a mole, a worm!</div> - <div class="verse">An engine frail, of brittle bones conjoined;</div> - <div class="verse">With tissue packed; with nerves, transmitting force;</div> - <div class="verse">And driven by water, thick and coloured red:</div> - <div class="verse">That may for some few pence a day be hired</div> - <div class="verse">In thousands to be shot at! Oh, a God,</div> - <div class="verse">That lies and steals and murders! Such a God</div> - <div class="verse">Passionate, dissolute, incontinent!</div> - <div class="verse">A God that starves in thousands, and ashamed,</div> - <div class="verse">Or shameless in the workhouse lurks; that sweats</div> - <div class="verse">In mines and foundries! An enchanted God,</div> - <div class="verse">Whose nostrils in a palace breathe perfume,</div> - <div class="verse">Whose cracking shoulders hold the palace up,</div> - <div class="verse">Whose shoeless feet are rotting in the mire!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_779" id="Page_779">[779]</a></span></p> - -<h3>A Preface to Politics</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Walter Lippmann</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American writer upon public questions, born 1889)</p> - -<p>We have almost no spiritual weapons against classicalism: -universities, churches, newspapers are by-products -of a commercial success; we have no tradition -of intellectual revolt. The American college student has -the gravity and mental habits of a Supreme Court judge; -his “wild oats” are rarely spiritual; the critical, analytical -habit of mind is distrusted. We say that “knocking” -is a sign of the “sorehead” and we sublimate criticism -by saying that “every knock is a boost.” America does -not play with ideas; generous speculation is regarded as -insincere, and shunned as if it might endanger the optimism -which underlies success. All this becomes such an insulation -against new ideas that when the Yankee goes abroad -he takes his environment with him.</p> - - -<h3>Learning</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Thus Spake Zarathustra”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Friedrich Nietzsche</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(German philosopher, 1844-1900, whose lofty utterance has suffered -from materialistic interpreters)</p> - -<p>As I lay in sleep a sheep ate up the ivy crown of my head—ate -and then said: “Zarathustra is no more a -scholar.”</p> - -<p>Said it and went strutting away, and proud. A child -told it to me....</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_780" id="Page_780">[780]</a></span></p> - -<p>This is the truth. I am gone out of the house of the -scholars, and have slammed to the door behind me....</p> - -<p>I am too hot, and burning with my own thoughts; oft -will it take away my breath. I must into the open and -out of all dusty rooms.</p> - -<p>But they sit cool in cool shadows; they wish in all -things to be but spectators, and guard themselves lest -they sit where the sun burn the steps.</p> - -<p>Like those who stand upon the street and stare at the -people who go by; so they wait also and stare at the -thoughts that others have thought.</p> - -<p>If one touches them with the hands, they make dust -around them like meal-sacks, and involuntarily; but who -could guess that their dust comes from corn and the golden -rapture of the summer fields?</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_781" id="Page_781">[781]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK XVI</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><i>Socialism</i></p> - -<p>The most eloquent passages from the pens of those who foresee -the definite solution of the problems of economic inequality.</p> - -<p>Every aspect of the Socialist movement is represented.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_782" id="Page_782">[782]</a><br /><a name="Page_783" id="Page_783">[783]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Is It Nothing to You?</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Merrie England”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Blatchford</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>)</p> - -<p>Go out into the streets of any big English town, and -use your eyes, John. What do you find? You -find some rich and idle, wasting unearned wealth to their -own shame and injury, and the shame and injury of -others. You find hard-working people packed away in -vile, unhealthy streets. You find little children, famished, -dirty, and half naked outside the luxurious clubs, -shops, hotels, and theatres. You find men and women -overworked and underpaid. You find vice and want -and disease cheek by jowl with religion and culture and -wealth. You find the usurer, the gambler, the fop, the -finnikin fine lady, and you find the starveling, the slave, -the vagrant, the drunkard, and the harlot.</p> - -<p>Is it nothing to you, John Smith? Are you a citizen? -Are you a man? And will not strike a blow for the right -nor lift a hand to save the fallen, nor make the smallest -sacrifice for the sake of your brothers and your sisters! -John, I am not trying to work upon your feelings. This -is not rhetoric, it is hard fact. Throughout these letters -I have tried to be plain and practical, and moderate. I -have never so much as offered you a glimpse of the higher -regions of thought. I have suffered no hint of idealism -to escape me. I have kept as close to the earth as I -could. I am only now talking street talk about the -common sights of the common town. I say that wrong<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_784" id="Page_784">[784]</a></span> -and sorrow are here crushing the life out of our brothers -and sisters. I say that you, in common with all men, -are responsible for the things that are. I say that it is -your duty to seek the remedy; and I say that if you seek -it you will find it.</p> - -<p>These common sights of the common streets, John, -are very terrible to me. To a man of a nervous temperament, -at once thoughtful and imaginative, those sights -must be terrible. The prostitute under the lamps, the -baby beggar in the gutter, the broken pauper in his livery -of shame, the weary worker stifling in his filthy slums, -the wage slave toiling at his task, the sweater’s victim -“sewing at once, with a double thread, a shroud as well -as a shirt,” these are dreadful, ghastly, shameful facts -which long since seared themselves upon my heart.</p> - -<p>All this sin, all this wretchedness, all this pain, in -spite of the smiling fields and the laughing waters, under -the awful and unsullied sky. And no remedy!</p> - -<p>These things I saw, and I knew that I was responsible -as a man. Then I tried to find out the causes of the -wrong and the remedy therefor. It has taken me some -years, John. But I think I understand it now, and I -want you to understand it, and to help in your turn to -teach the truth to others.</p> - -<p>Sometimes while I have been writing these letters I -have felt bitter and angry. More than once I have -thought that when I got through the work I would ease -my heart with a few lines of irony or invective. But -I have thought better of it. Looking back now I remember -my own weakness, folly, cowardice. I have no heart -to scorn or censure other men. Charity, John, mercy, -John, humility, John. We are poor creatures, all of us.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_785" id="Page_785">[785]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Sign of the Son of Man</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Vida D. Scudder</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_289">289</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Thy Kingdom, Lord, we long for,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Where love shall find its own;</div> - <div class="verse">And brotherhood triumphant</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Our years of pride disown.</div> - <div class="verse">Thy captive people languish</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In mill and mart and mine;</div> - <div class="verse">We lift to Thee their anguish,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We wait Thy promised Sign!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Thy Kingdom, Lord, Thy Kingdom!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">All secretly it grows;</div> - <div class="verse">In faithful hearts forever</div> - <div class="verse indent2">His seed the Sower sows;</div> - <div class="verse">Yet ere its consummation</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Must dawn a mighty doom;</div> - <div class="verse">For judgment and salvation</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The Son of Man shall come.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">If now perchance in tumult</div> - <div class="verse indent2">His destined Sign appear,—</div> - <div class="verse">The rising of the people,—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Dispel our coward fear!</div> - <div class="verse">Let comforts that we cherish,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Let old traditions die,</div> - <div class="verse">Our wealth, our wisdom perish,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">So that He draw but nigh!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_786" id="Page_786">[786]</a></span></p> - -<h3>Poverty Makes All Unhappy</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Ruskin</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_491">491</a>, <a href="#Page_752">752</a>, <a href="#Page_756">756</a>)</p> - -<p>For my own part, I will put up with this state of -things, passively, not an hour longer. I am not -an unselfish person, nor an evangelical one; I have no -particular pleasure in doing good; neither do I dislike -doing it so much as to expect to be rewarded for it in -another world. But I simply cannot paint, nor read, -nor look at minerals, nor do anything else I like, and the -very light of the morning sky has become hateful to me, -because of the misery that I know of, and see signs of -where I know it not, which no imagination can interpret -too bitterly.</p> - - -<h3>The One Duty</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Measure of the Hours”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Maurice Maeterlinck</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Belgian poet, dramatist and philosopher, born 1862)</p> - -<p>Let us start fairly with the great truth: for those -who possess there is only one certain duty, which -is to strip themselves of what they have so as to bring -themselves into the condition of the mass that possesses -nothing. It is understood, in every clear-thinking conscience, -that no more imperative duty exists; but, at the -same time, it is admitted that this duty, for lack of -courage, is impossible of accomplishment.</p> - -<p>For the rest, in the heroic history of duties, even at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_787" id="Page_787">[787]</a></span> -the most ardent period, even at the beginning of Christianity -and in the majority of the religious orders that -made a special cult of poverty, this is perhaps the only -duty that has never been completely fulfilled. It behooves -us, therefore, when considering our subsidiary duties, -to remember that the essential one has been knowingly -evaded. Let this truth govern us. Let us not forget -that we are speaking in shadow, and that our boldest, -our utmost steps will never lead us to the point at which -we ought to have been from the first.</p> - - -<h3>Land Titles</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Herbert Spencer</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_460">460</a>)</p> - -<p>It can never be pretended that the existing titles to -landed property are legitimate. The original deeds -were written with the sword, soldiers were the conveyancers, -blows were the current coin given in exchange, -and for seals, blood. Those who say that “time is a -great legaliser” must find satisfactory answers to such -questions as—How long does it take for what was originally -wrong to become right? At what rate per annum do -invalid claims become valid?</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_788" id="Page_788">[788]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Rights of Labor</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Abraham Lincoln</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_623">623</a>)</p> - -<p>It is assumed that labor is available only in connection -with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody -else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it, -induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered -whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, -and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or -buy them and drive them to do it without their consent. -Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that -all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call -slaves.</p> - -<p>Now, there is no such relation between capital and -labor as here assumed.... Labor is prior to and independent -of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, -could never have existed if labor had not first existed. -Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the -higher consideration.</p> - - -<h3>A Marching Song</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Algernon Charles Swinburne</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_637">637</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent8">We mix from many lands,</div> - <div class="verse indent10">We march for very far;</div> - <div class="verse indent8">In hearts and lips and hands</div> - <div class="verse indent10">Our staffs and weapons are;</div> - <div class="verse">The light we walk in darkens sun and moon and star.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_789" id="Page_789">[789]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent8">It doth not flame and wane</div> - <div class="verse indent10">With years and spheres that roll,</div> - <div class="verse indent8">Storm cannot shake nor stain</div> - <div class="verse indent10">The strength that makes it whole,</div> - <div class="verse">The fire that moulds and moves it of the sovereign soul....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent8">From the edge of harsh derision,</div> - <div class="verse indent10">From discord and defeat,</div> - <div class="verse indent8">From doubt and lame division,</div> - <div class="verse indent10">We pluck the fruit and eat;</div> - <div class="verse">And the mouth finds it bitter, and the spirit sweet....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent8">O nations undivided,</div> - <div class="verse indent10">O single people and free,</div> - <div class="verse indent8">We dreamers, we derided,</div> - <div class="verse indent10">We mad blind men that see,</div> - <div class="verse">We bear you witness ere ye come that ye shall be.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent8">Ye sitting among tombs,</div> - <div class="verse indent10">Ye standing round the gate,</div> - <div class="verse indent8">Whom fire-mouthed war consumes,</div> - <div class="verse indent10">Or cold-lipped peace bids wait,</div> - <div class="verse">All tombs and bars shall open, every grave and grate....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent8">O sorrowing hearts of slaves,</div> - <div class="verse indent10">We heard you beat from far!</div> - <div class="verse indent8">We bring the light that saves,</div> - <div class="verse indent10">We bring the morning star;</div> - <div class="verse">Freedom’s good things we bring you, whence all good things are....</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_790" id="Page_790">[790]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse indent8">Rise, ere the dawn be risen;</div> - <div class="verse indent10">Come, and be all souls fed;</div> - <div class="verse indent8">From field and street and prison</div> - <div class="verse indent10">Come, for the feast is spread;</div> - <div class="verse">Live, for the truth is living; wake, for night is dead.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Duties of Man</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Giuseppe Mazzini</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Italian patriot and statesman, 1805-1872; the deliverer of his -country here urges the deliverance of mankind)</p> - -<p>We improve with the improvement of Humanity; -nor without the improvement of the whole can -you hope that your own moral and material conditions -will improve. Generally speaking, you cannot, even if -you would, separate your life from that of Humanity; -you live in it, by it, for it. Your souls, with the exception -of the very few men of exceptional power, cannot -free themselves from the influence of the elements amid -which they exist, just as the body, however robust its -constitution, cannot escape from the effects of corrupt -air around it. How many of you have the strength of -mind to bring up your sons to be wholly truthful, knowing -that you are sending them forth to persecution in a -country where tyrants and spies bid them conceal or -deny two-thirds of their real opinions? How many of -you resolve to educate them to despise wealth in a society -where gold is the only power which obtains honors, influence, -and respect, where indeed it is the only protection -from the tyranny and insults of the powerful and -their agents? Who is there among you who in pure love<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_791" id="Page_791">[791]</a></span> -and with the best intentions in the world has not murmured -to his dear ones in Italy, <em>Do not trust men</em>; <em>the honest -man should retire into himself and fly from public life</em>; -<em>charity begins at home</em>,—and such-like maxims, plainly -immoral, but prompted by the general state of society? -What mother is there among you who, although she -belongs to a faith which adores the cross of Christ, the -voluntary martyr for humanity, has not flung her arms -around her son’s neck and striven to dissuade him from -perilous attempts to benefit his brothers? And even if -you had strength to teach the contrary, would not the -whole of society, with its thousand voices, its thousand -evil examples, destroy the effect of your words? Can -you purify, elevate your own souls in an atmosphere of -contamination and degradation?</p> - -<p>And, to descend to your material conditions, do you -think they can be lastingly ameliorated by anything but -the amelioration of all? Millions of pounds are spent -annually here in England, where I write, by private -charity, for the relief of individuals who have fallen into -want; yet want increases here every year, and charity -to individuals has proved powerless to heal the evil—the -necessity of collective organic remedies is more and -more universally felt....</p> - -<p>There is no hope for you except in universal reform -and in the brotherhood of all the peoples of Europe, -and through Europe of all humanity. I charge you -then, O my brothers, by your duty and by your own -interest, not to forget that your first duties—duties without -fulfilling which you cannot hope to fulfil those owed -to family and country—are to Humanity. Let your -words and your actions be for all, since God is for all, -in His Love and in His Law. In whatever land you may<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_792" id="Page_792">[792]</a></span> -be, wherever a man is fighting for right, for justice, for -truth, there is your brother; wherever a man suffers -through the oppression of error, of injustice, of tyranny, -there is your brother. Free men and slaves, YOU ARE -ALL BROTHERS.</p> - - -<h3>From Revolution to Revolution</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George D. Herron</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_730">730</a>)</p> - -<p>We have talked much of the brotherhood to come; -but brotherhood has always been the fact of our -life, long before it became a modern and insipid sentiment. -Only we have been brothers in slavery and torment, -brothers in ignorance and its perdition, brothers in -disease and war and want, brothers in prostitution and -hypocrisy. What happens to one of us sooner or later -happens to all; we have always been unescapably involved -in a common destiny. We are brothers in the -soil from which we spring; brothers in earthquakes, -floods and famines; brothers in la grippe, cholera, smallpox -and priestcraft. It is to the interests of the whole -of mankind to stamp out the disease that may be starting -tonight in some wretched Siberian hamlet; to rescue -the children of Egypt and India from the British cotton -mills; to escape the craze and blight of some new superstition -springing up in Africa or India or Boston. The -tuberculosis of the East Side sweatshops is infecting the -whole of the city of New York, and spreading therefrom -to the Pacific and back across the Atlantic. The world -constantly tends to the level of the downmost man in it;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_793" id="Page_793">[793]</a></span> -and that downmost man is the world’s real ruler, hugging -it close to his bosom, dragging it down to his death. -You do not think so, but it is true, and it ought to be true. -For if there were some way by which some of us could -get free apart from others, if there were some way by -which some of us could have heaven while others had -hell, if there were some way by which part of the world -could escape some form of the blight and peril and misery -of disinherited labor, then would our world indeed be -lost and damned; but since men have never been able -to separate themselves from one another’s woes and -wrongs, since history is fairly stricken with the lesson -that we cannot escape brotherhood of some kind, since -the whole of life is teaching us that we are hourly choosing -between brotherhood in suffering and brotherhood in -good, it remains for us to choose the brotherhood of a -co-operative world, with all its fruits thereof—the fruits -of love and liberty.</p> - - -<h3>The March of the Workers</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Morris</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English poet and artist, 1834-1896; founder of the “Arts and -Crafts” movement, and a lifelong Socialist)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">What is this—the sound and rumor? What is this that all men hear,</div> - <div class="verse">Like the wind in hollow valleys when the storm is drawing near,</div> - <div class="verse">Like the rolling-on of ocean in the eventide of fear?</div> - <div class="verse indent12">’Tis the people marching on.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_794" id="Page_794">[794]</a></span></p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Chorus</span></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Hark the rolling of the thunder!</div> - <div class="verse">Lo! the sun! and lo! thereunder</div> - <div class="verse">Riseth wrath, and hope, and wonder,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And the host comes marching on.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Forth they come from grief and torment; on they go towards health and mirth.</div> - <div class="verse">All the wide world is their dwelling, every corner of the earth.</div> - <div class="verse">Buy them, sell them for thy service! Try the bargain what ’tis worth,</div> - <div class="verse indent12">For the days are marching on. (Chorus)</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Many a hundred years passed over have they labored deaf and blind;</div> - <div class="verse">Never tidings reached their sorrow, never hope their toil might find.</div> - <div class="verse">Now at last they’ve heard and hear it, and the cry comes down the wind</div> - <div class="verse indent12">And their feet are marching on. (Chorus)</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">“Is it war then? Will ye perish as the dry wood in the fire?</div> - <div class="verse">Is it peace? Then be ye of us, let your hope be our desire.</div> - <div class="verse">Come and live! for life awaketh, and the world shall never tire;</div> - <div class="verse indent12">And hope is marching on. (Chorus)</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_795" id="Page_795">[795]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Working Day</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Capital”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Karl Marx</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A German Jew, father of modern revolutionary Socialism, 1818-1883. -Of his epoch-making work the scope of this collection -permits but a brief passage, by way of illustration)</p> - -<p>What is a working day? What is the length of time -during which capital may consume the labor-power -whose daily value it buys? How far may the -working-day be extended beyond the working time necessary -for the reproduction of labor-power itself? It -has been seen that to these questions capital replies: -the working day contains the full twenty-four hours, -with the deduction of the few hours of repose without -which labor-power absolutely refuses its services again. -Hence it is self-evident that the laborer is nothing else, -his whole life through, than labor-power; that therefore -all his disposable time is by nature and law labor-time, -to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital. Time -for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling -of social functions and for social intercourse, for -the free-play of his bodily and mental activity, even the -rest time of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!)—moonshine! -But in its blind, unrestrainable passion, -its were-wolf hunger for surplus-labor, capital -oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical -maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps -the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance -of the body. It steals the time required for the -consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles over -a meal-time, incorporating it where possible with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_796" id="Page_796">[796]</a></span> -process of production itself, so that food is given to the -laborer as to a mere means of production, as coal is -supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery. -It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, -reparation, refreshment of the bodily powers, to just so -many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, -absolutely exhausted, renders essential. It is not the -normal maintenance of the labor-power which is to -determine the limits of the working-day; it is the greatest -possible daily expenditure of labor-power, no matter -how diseased, compulsory and painful it may be, which -is to determine the limits of the laborers’ period of -repose. Capital cares nothing for the length of life of -labor-power. All that concerns it is simply and solely -the maximum of labor-power, that can be rendered fluent -in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the -extent of the laborer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches -increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its -fertility.</p> - - -<h3>The Organization of Labor</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Louis Blanc</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Early French Utopian Socialist, 1811-1882)</p> - -<p>What is competition, from the point of view of the -workman? It is work put up to auction. A -contractor wants a workman; three present themselves.</p> - -<p>“How much for your work?”</p> - -<p>“Half a crown; I have a wife and children.”</p> - -<p>“Well; and how much for yours?”</p> - -<p>“Two shillings; I have no children, but I have a wife.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_797" id="Page_797">[797]</a></span></p> - -<p>“Very well; and now how much for yours?”</p> - -<p>“One and eightpence are enough for me; I am single.”</p> - -<p>“Then you shall have the work.”</p> - -<p>It is done; the bargain is struck. And what are the -other two workmen to do? It is to be hoped they will -die quietly of hunger. But what if they take to thieving? -Never fear; we have the police. To murder? We have -the hangman. As for the lucky one, his triumph is only -temporary. Let a fourth workman make his appearance, -strong enough to fast every other day, and his price will -run down still lower; there will be a new outcast, perhaps -a new recruit for the prison.</p> - - -<h3>The Wastes of Capitalism</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Laws of Social Evolution”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Theodor Hertzka</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(An Austrian economist, one of the few in the world who have -dealt with the real problem of economic science, the elimination -of waste and the rationalizing of the system of production. In -the following passage he investigates the question what proportion -of human labor is lost through our competitive methods of -industry. The passage has been frequently quoted, in a mistranslation -which obscures its real significance. The following is not -so much a translation as a summary of the essential statements)</p></div> - -<p>We are to investigate what labor-power is required, -under circumstances now existing in Austria (1886), -to produce the most essential food-stuffs, and suitable -housing and clothing. For every family has been allowed -a separate, five-roomed house, about forty feet square, and -calculated to last fifty years. I have reckoned all men<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_798" id="Page_798">[798]</a></span> -between the ages of sixteen and fifty as capable of working: -there being of such in Austria about five million. I find -that it requires the labor of 615,000 workers to supply -the population of 22,000,000 with food, clothing and -shelter: that is to say, it requires only 12.3 per cent of -available labor-power, and each worker needs to labor -only six weeks in the year, in order to provide for himself -and his family the necessary means of life.</p> - -<p>In order that no one should conclude that the production -of the luxuries of the better situated part of the population -consumes the balance of the available labor-power, let -us add the labor-cost of all the luxury-industries in the -widest sense. Including the labor-cost of transportation, -these require 315,000 workers, or 6.3 per cent of the -available labor-power. As a precaution, I increase the -total of 18.6 per cent to 20 per cent, and so find that by -working sixty days in the year, the actual existing consumption -should be fully satisfied. There remains now this -double question: What becomes of the additional two -hundred and forty days, which are actually spent in labor? -What abyss swallows up the other 80 per cent of the -nation’s labor-power? And second, how can it be that -in spite of hard work, the majority are the prey of misery, -when at the utmost 20 per cent of the available labor-power -should suffice for the maintenance of all?</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By G. Bernard Shaw</span></h3> - -<p>Any person under the age of thirty, who, having any -knowledge of the existing social order, is not a -revolutionist, is an inferior.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_799" id="Page_799">[799]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>From Revolution to Revolution</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George D. Herron</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_730">730</a>, <a href="#Page_792">792</a>)</p> - -<p>Under the Socialist movement there is coming a -time, and the time may be even now at hand, -when improved conditions or adjusted wages will no -longer be thought to be an answer to the cry of labor; -yes, when these will be but an insult to the common -intelligence. It is not for better wages, improved capitalist -conditions, or a share of capitalist profits that the -Socialist movement is in the world; it is here for the -abolition of wages and profits, and for the end of capitalism -and the private capitalist. Reformed political institutions, -boards of arbitration between capital and labor, -philanthropies and privileges that are but the capitalist’s -gifts—none of these can much longer answer the question -that is making the temples, thrones and parliaments -of the nations tremble. There can be no peace between -the man who is down and the man who builds on his -back. There can be no reconciliation between classes; -there can only be an end of classes. It is idle to talk of -good will until there is first justice, and idle to talk of -justice until the man who makes the world possesses the -work of his own hands. The cry of the world’s workers -can be answered with nothing save the whole product -of their work.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_800" id="Page_800">[800]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Internationale</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Eugene Pottier</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Hymn of the revolutionary working-class of all nations)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Arise, ye pris’ners of starvation!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Arise, ye wretched of the earth,</div> - <div class="verse">For Justice thunders condemnation,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">A better world’s in birth.</div> - <div class="verse">No more tradition’s chains shall bind us,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Arise, ye slaves! No more in thrall!</div> - <div class="verse">The earth shall rise on new foundations,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">We have been naught, we shall be all.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - - <div class="verse"><span class="smcap">Refrain</span></div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">’Tis the final conflict,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Let each stand in his place,</div> - <div class="verse">The International Party</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Shall be the human race.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Behold them seated in their glory,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The kings of mine and rail and soil!</div> - <div class="verse">What would you read in all their story</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But how they plundered toil?</div> - <div class="verse">Fruits of the people’s work are buried</div> - <div class="verse indent2">In the strong coffers of a few;</div> - <div class="verse">In voting for their restitution</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The men will only ask their due. (Refrain)</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Toilers from shops and fields united,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The party we of all who work;</div> - <div class="verse">The earth belongs to us, the people,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">No room here for the shirk.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_801" id="Page_801">[801]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">How many on our flesh have fattened!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But if the noisome birds of prey</div> - <div class="verse">Shall vanish from our sky some morning,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The blessed sunlight still will stay. (Refrain)</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Syndicalist</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Red Wave”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Joseph-Henry Rosny, the Elder</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_585">585</a>, <a href="#Page_669">669</a>)</p> - -<p>Like a thousand others, Rougemont wanted the daily -revolution, which should ferment in the brain, not -like a dream, but like an energy, should manifest itself -by a discipline and a method, by daily exercises to keep -it in condition. It was no longer a question of brandishing -the torch. It was necessary to understand and -to will, to organize social experience, to wage petty warfare—sallies, -raids, ambuscades; to entertain cold hatreds, -logical and continuous, to haggle over wages as the -Norman peasant haggles over chickens, and above all to -create a sort of happy excitement, a fraternal exaltation -which would bring to the gatherings ideas of security, of -trust, of mutual aid.</p> - -<p>The strikes will be beautiful schools of social struggle. -They will open the path for magnanimous instincts, -heroic and adventurous, which air the human soul. -Always better organized, they will no longer reduce the -artisan to famine, they will demand of him only to -undergo some privations which the beauty of revolt will -render almost joyous. They will develop generosity,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_802" id="Page_802">[802]</a></span> -abnegation, the richest spirit of sacrifice. Their recollection -will awaken magnificent and powerful images; -they will lend to the social life that passionate unforeseen, -which is evoked in us by the virgin forest, the open -plain, the palpitant sea.... Everywhere, finally, the -proletariat will build its visions upon the basis of reality.</p> - - -<h3>The Communist Manifesto (1848)</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Karl Marx and Frederick Engels</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_514">514</a>, <a href="#Page_795">795</a>)</p> - -<p>The Communists disdain to conceal their views and -aims. They openly declare that their ends can be -attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing -social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a -Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing -to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.</p> - -<p>Workingmen of all countries, unite!</p> - - -<h3>The Workingman’s Program</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Ferdinand Lassalle</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(One of the founders of the German Socialist movement, 1825-1864. -Lassalle was arrested and sentenced to prison for delivering the -address from which the following paragraph is taken)</p> - -<p>Whoever invokes the idea of the working-class as -the ruling principle of society, does not put forth -a cry that divides and separates the classes of society. -On the contrary, he utters a cry of reconciliation, a cry -which embraces the whole of the community, a cry for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_803" id="Page_803">[803]</a></span> -the abolishing of all the contradictions in every circle of -society; a cry of union, in which all should join who do -not wish for privileges, for the oppression of the people -by privileged classes; a cry of love, which having once -gone up from the heart of the people, will forever remain -the true cry of the people, and whose meaning will still -make it a cry of love, even when it sounds as the people’s -war cry.</p> - - -<h3>Jurgis Hears a Socialist Speech</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Jungle”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Upton Sinclair</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>, <a href="#Page_776">776</a>)</p> - -<p>It was like coming suddenly upon some wild sight of -nature—a mountain forest lashed by a tempest, a -ship tossed about upon a stormy sea. Jurgis had an -unpleasant sensation, a sense of confusion, of disorder, -of wild and meaningless uproar. The man was tall and -gaunt, as haggard as his auditor himself; a thin black -beard covered half of his face, and one could see only -two black hollows where the eyes were. He was speaking -rapidly, in great excitement; he used many gestures—as -he spoke he moved here and there upon the stage, -reaching with his long arms as if to seize each person in -his audience. His voice was deep, like an organ; it was -some time, however, before Jurgis thought of the voice—he -was too much occupied with his eyes to think of what -the man was saying. But suddenly it seemed as if the -speaker had been pointing straight at him, as if he had -been singled out particularly for his remarks; and so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_804" id="Page_804">[804]</a></span> -Jurgis became suddenly aware of the voice, trembling, -vibrant with emotion, with pain and longing, with a -burden of things unutterable, not to be compassed by -words. To hear it was to be suddenly arrested, to be -gripped, transfixed.</p> - -<p>“You listen to these things,” the man was saying, -“and you say, ‘Yes, they are true, but they have been -that way always.’ Or you say, ‘Maybe it will come, but -not in my time—it will not help me.’ And so you return -to your daily round of toil, you go back to be ground -up for profits in the world-wide mill of economic might! -To toil long hours for another’s advantage; to live in -mean and squalid homes, to work in dangerous and -unhealthful places; to wrestle with the spectres of hunger -and privation, to take your chances of accident, disease -and death. And each day the struggle becomes -fiercer, the pace more cruel; each day you have to toil -a little harder, and feel the iron hand of circumstance -close upon you a little tighter. Months pass, years -maybe—and then you come again; and again I am here -to plead with you, to know if want and misery have yet -done their work with you, if injustice and oppression -have yet opened your eyes! I shall still be waiting—there -is nothing else that I can do. There is no wilderness -where I can hide from these things, there is no -haven where I can escape them; though I travel to the -ends of the earth, I find the same accursed system,—I -find that all the fair and noble impulses of humanity, -the dreams of poets and the agonies of martyrs, are -shackled and bound in the service of organized and -predatory Greed! And therefore I cannot rest, I cannot -be silent; therefore I cast aside comfort and happiness, -health and good repute—and go out into the world and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_805" id="Page_805">[805]</a></span> -cry out the pain of my spirit! Therefore I am not to -be silenced by poverty and sickness, not by hatred and -obloquy, by threats and ridicule—not by prison and persecution, -if they should come—not by any power that is -upon the earth or above the earth, that was, or is, or -ever can be created. If I fail tonight, I can only try -tomorrow; knowing that the fault must be mine—that -if once the vision of my soul were spoken upon earth, if -once the anguish of its defeat were uttered in human -speech, it would break the stoutest barriers of prejudice, -it would shake the most sluggish soul to action! It -would abash the most cynical, it would terrify the most -selfish; and the voice of mockery would be silenced, and -fraud and falsehood would slink back into their dens, -and the truth would stand forth alone! For I speak -with the voice of the millions who are voiceless! Of them -that are oppressed and have no comforter! Of the disinherited -of life, for whom there is no respite and no -deliverance, to whom the world is a prison, a dungeon of -torture, a tomb! With the voice of the little child who -toils tonight in a Southern cotton-mill, staggering with -exhaustion, numb with agony, and knowing no hope but -the grave! Of the mother who sews by candle-light in -her tenement garret, weary and weeping, smitten with -the mortal hunger of her babes! Of the man who lies -upon a bed of rags, wrestling in his last sickness and -leaving his loved ones to perish! Of the young girl -who, somewhere at this moment, is walking the streets -of this horrible city, beaten and starving, and making -her choice between the brothel and the lake! With the -voice of those, whoever and wherever they may be, who -are caught beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of Greed! -With the voice of humanity, calling for deliverance! Of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_806" id="Page_806">[806]</a></span> -the everlasting soul of Man, arising from the dust; breaking -its way out of its prison—rending the bands of oppression -and ignorance-groping its way to the light!”</p> - - -<h3>The Marseillaise</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(French captain of engineers, 1760-1836. He composed this -most famous of all revolutionary songs in 1792, when the French -republicans were resisting the armies of all the kings and emperors -of Europe. The volunteers from Marseilles marched into Paris -singing it—“seven hundred Marseillais who know how to die”)</p></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ye sons of toil, awake to glory!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Hark, hark, what myriads bid you rise;</div> - <div class="verse">Your children, wives and grandsires hoary—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Behold their tears and hear their cries!</div> - <div class="verse">Shall hateful tyrants, mischief breeding,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">With hireling hosts, a ruffian band,—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Affright and desolate the land,</div> - <div class="verse">While peace and liberty lie bleeding?</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - - <div class="verse"><span class="smcap">Chorus</span></div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">To arms! to arms! ye brave!</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Th’ avenging sword unsheathe!</div> - <div class="verse">March on, march on, all hearts resolved</div> - <div class="verse indent2">On Victory or Death.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With luxury and pride surrounded,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The vile, insatiate despots dare,</div> - <div class="verse">Their thirst for gold and power unbounded,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To mete and vend the light and air;</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_807" id="Page_807">[807]</a></span> - <div class="verse">Like beasts of burden would they load us,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Like gods would bid their slaves adore,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But Man is Man, and who is more?</div> - <div class="verse">Then shall they longer lash and goad us? (Chorus)</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O Liberty! can man resign thee,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Once having felt thy generous flame?</div> - <div class="verse">Can dungeons’ bolts and bars confine thee,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Or whips thy noble spirit tame?</div> - <div class="verse">Too long the world has wept bewailing,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">That Falsehood’s dagger tyrants wield;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">But Freedom is our sword and shield,</div> - <div class="verse">And all their arts are unavailing! (Chorus)</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Trial for High Treason</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “My Life”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By August Bebel</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(A German woodworker, 1840-1912, who founded the Social-democratic -party, and guided it for fifty years. In the following -passage from his memoirs he tells of his first imprisonment, as a -part of Bismarck’s long campaign to destroy the Socialist movement -in Germany)</p></div> - -<p>The jury comprised six tradesmen, one aristocratic -landowner, one head forester, and a few small landowners. -The court was crowded every day. The Minister -of Justice and the Attorney-General were present on -several occasions. As the leading papers of Germany -gave extensive reports of the trial, their readers became -for the first time aware of what Socialism meant and at -what it aimed. The trial thus became eminently service<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_808" id="Page_808">[808]</a></span>able -from the propagandist point of view; and we, especially -Liebknecht, who was the chief propagandist, were -not loath to avail ourselves of this opportunity. But -our opponents, day after day, were hard at work seeking -to prejudice the jury against us, meeting them in the -restaurant, when the events of the day were discussed, -and exploiting these to our disadvantage.</p> - -<p>On the thirteenth day the “pleadings” for and against -us commenced. The Public Prosecutor closed his speech -with the words: “If you do not find against the accused, -you will sanction high treason for all time to come.”</p> - -<p>Our counsel replied, and tore the indictment to tatters; -but after two and a half hours of deliberation the jury -came in with a verdict of guilty. The Public Prosecutor -demanded two years’ imprisonment in a fortress, and the -court passed judgment accordingly.</p> - -<p>Our party friends were exceedingly angry on hearing -the verdict and sentence; but I, feeling reckless, proposed -that we should go together to Auerbach’s cellar—rendered -famous by the scene in Goethe’s <cite>Faust</cite>—and have a bottle -of wine. Our wives, who received us with tears, were -not pleased with our levity; but finally, plucky women -that they were, they came with us. My doctor consoled -my wife in a curious way. “Frau Bebel,” he said, “if -your husband gets a year in prison you may rejoice, for -he needs a rest!”</p> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 464px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo808" id="illo808">[illo808]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_808f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>ONCE YE HAVE SEEN MY FACE YE DARE NOT MOCK</p> - -<p>CARTOON FROM THE “NEW AGE,” LONDON</p></div> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter" style="width: 449px;"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="illo809" id="illo809">[illo809]</a></span> -<img src="images/i_809f.jpg" alt="" /> -<div class="caption"><p>JUSTICE</p> - -<p>WALTER CRANE</p> - -<p class="center">(<i>English artist and Socialist, 1845-1915</i>)</p></div> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_809" id="Page_809">[809]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Jimmie Higgins</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Ben Hanford</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A New York printer who literally gave his life for the Socialist -movement, dying of consumption caused by overwork. He was -the party’s candidate for Vice-president in 1904)</p> - -<p>A comrade who shall be called Jimmie Higgins -because that is not his name, and who shall be -styled a painter for the very good reason that he is not -a painter, has perhaps had a greater influence in keeping -me keyed up to my work in the labor movement than any -other person.</p> - -<p>Jimmie Higgins is neither broad-shouldered nor thick-chested. -He is neither pretty nor strong. A little, thin, -weak, pale-faced chap. But he is strong enough to support -a mother with equal physical disabilities. Strong -enough to put in ten years of unrecognized and unexcelled -service to the cause of Socialism.</p> - -<p>What did he do? Everything.</p> - -<p>He has made more Socialist speeches than any man in -America. Not that he did the talking; but he carried -the platform on his bent shoulders when the platform -committee failed to be on hand.</p> - -<p>Then he hustled around to another branch and got -their platform out. Then he got a glass of water for -“the speaker.” That same evening or the day before -he had distributed hand-bills advertising the meeting.</p> - -<p>Previously he had informed his branch as to “the best -corner” in the district for drawing a crowd. Then he -distributed leaflets at the meeting, and helped to take -the platform down and carry it back to headquarters, -and got subscribers for Socialist papers.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_810" id="Page_810">[810]</a></span></p> - -<p>The next day the same, and so on all through the campaign, -and one campaign after another. When he had -a job, which was none too often, for Jimmie was not an -extra good workman and was always one of the first to -be laid off, he would distribute Socialist papers among -his fellows during the noon hour, or take a run down -to the gate of some factory and give out Socialist leaflets -to the employees who came out to lunch.</p> - -<p>What did he do? Jimmie Higgins did everything, anything. -Whatever was to be done, THAT was Jimmie’s -job.</p> - -<p>First to do his own work; then the work of those who -had become wearied or negligent. Jimmie Higgins -couldn’t sing, nor dance, nor tell a story—but he could -DO the thing to be done.</p> - -<p>Be you, reader, ever so great, you nor any other shall -ever do more than that. Jimmie Higgins had no riches, -but out of his poverty he always gave something, his -all; be you, reader, ever so wealthy and likewise generous, -you shall never give more than that.</p> - -<p>Jimmie Higgins never had a front seat on the platform; -he never knew the tonic of applause nor the -inspiration of opposition; he never was seen in the foreground -of the picture.</p> - -<p>But he had erected the platform and painted the picture; -through his hard, disagreeable and thankless toil -it had come to pass that liberty was brewing and things -were doing.</p> - -<p>Jimmie Higgins. How shall we pay, how reward this -man? What gold, what laurels shall be his?</p> - -<p>There’s just one way, reader, that you and I can -“make good” with Jimmie Higgins and the likes of him. -That way is to be like him.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_811" id="Page_811">[811]</a></span></p> - -<p>Take a fresh start and never let go.</p> - -<p>Think how great his work, and he has so little to do -with. How little ours in proportion to our strength!</p> - -<p>I know some grand men and women in the Socialist -movement. But in high self-sacrifice, in matchless -fidelity to truth, I shall never meet a greater man than -Jimmie Higgins.</p> - -<p>And many a branch has one of him.</p> - -<p>And may they have more of him.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From The Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians</span></h3> - -<p>For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many -wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many -noble, are called: but God hath chosen the weak things -of the world to confound the things which are mighty; -and base things of the world, and things which are -despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, -to bring to naught things that are.</p> - - -<h3>Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Vachel Lindsay</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_335">335</a>, <a href="#Page_599">599</a>, <a href="#Page_672">672</a>, <a href="#Page_699">699</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I am unjust, but I can strive for justice.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">My life’s unkind, but I can vote for kindness.</div> - <div class="verse">I, the unloving, say life should be lovely.</div> - <div class="verse indent2">I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Man is a curious brute—he pets his fancies—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Fighting mankind to win sweet luxury;</div> - <div class="verse">So he will be, tho’ law be clear as crystal,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Tho’ all men plan to live in harmony.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_812" id="Page_812">[812]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Come, let us vote against our human nature,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Crying to God in all the polling places</div> - <div class="verse">To heal our everlasting sinfulness</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And make us sages with transfigured faces.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Progressivism and After</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William English Walling</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American Socialist writer, born 1877)</p> - -<p>A certain measure of progress is to be expected -through the self-interest of the governing classes. -This is the national, or industrial, efficiency movement.</p> - -<p>Far greater progress is to be expected from the successive -rise into power and prosperity of new elements -of the middle-class—and of the upper layers of the wage-earners. -This is the progressive and the Laborite -movement.</p> - -<p>By far the greatest progress is to be expected as a -direct or indirect result of the revolt of the lower classes. -For this is the only force that can be relied upon to put -an end to class government and class exploitation of -industry, and to establish that social democracy which -is the real or professed aim of every progressive movement.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Otto von Bismarck</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(Speech in the German Reichstag, 1884)</p> - -<p>I acknowledge unconditionally the right to work, -and I will stand up for it as long as I am in this -place.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_813" id="Page_813">[813]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the Preface</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Owen</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Early English Utopian Socialist, 1771-1858)</p> - -<p>The Past has been inevitable, and necessary to produce -the Present; as the Present will necessarily -produce the Future state of human existence. The past -has produced a repulsive, unorganized, ignorant, and to -a great extent, miserable state of society, over the world, -as now existing. The present, however, has been made -to develop all the materials requisite to produce an -attractive, organized, enlightened and happy future, for -the human race, in all parts of the globe.</p> - -<p>Those informed know that all the materials are -amply prepared, ready to create a happy future; but -that to effect this result, the materials must be wisely -applied, to form a scientific arrangement of society, -based on an accurate knowledge of human nature. -Means are, therefore, now required to induce the public -to investigate this important subject, which is in direct -opposition to the false and fatal association of ideas -which, from birth, have been forced into the minds and -upon the habits of people.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_814" id="Page_814">[814]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Running a Socialist Paper</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Comrade Yetta”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Albert Edwards</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>)</p> - -<p>For half an hour they bent their heads over balance-sheets. -It was an appalling situation. The debt -was out of all proportion to the property. To be sure -much of it was held by sympathizers, who were not -likely to foreclose. But there was no immediate hope of -decreasing the burden. Any new income would have -to go into improvements. The future of the paper -depended not only on its ability to carry this dead weight, -but on the continuance of the Pledge Fund and on Isadore’s -success in begging about a hundred dollars a week.</p> - -<p>“It’s hopeless,” Yetta said. “You might run a good -weekly on these resources, but you need ten times as -much to keep up a good daily.”</p> - -<p>“Well, if you feel that way about it, Yetta, I hope -you’ll resign at to-night’s meeting.” His eyes turned -away from her face about the busy room, and his discouraged -look gave place to one of conviction. A note -of dogged determination rang in his voice.—“Because it -isn’t hopeless! Our only real danger is that the executive -committee may kill us with cold water. If we can get -a committee that believes in us, we’ll be all right. A -paper like this isn’t a matter of finance. That’s what -you—and the other discouragers—don’t see. You look -at it from a bourgeois dollar-and-cents point of view. -It’s hopeless, is it? Well, we’ve been doing this impossible -thing for more than a year. It’s hopeless to carry -such indebtedness? Good God! We started with noth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_815" id="Page_815">[815]</a></span>ing -but debts—nothing at all to show. Every number -that comes out makes it more hopeful. The advertising -increases. The Pledge Fund grows. Why, we’ve got -twelve thousand people in the habit of reading it now. -That habit is an asset which doesn’t show in the books. -Six months ago we had nothing!—not even experience. -Why, our office force wasn’t even organized! And now -you say it’s hopeless—want us to quit—just when it’s -getting relatively easy. We——”</p> - -<p>Levine’s querulous voice rose above the din of the -machines—finding fault with something. A stenographer -in a far corner began to count, “One! two! three!” -Every one in the office, even the linotypers and printer’s -devil beyond the partition took up the slogan.</p> - -<p>“O-o-oh! Cut it out and work for Socialism.”</p> - -<p>The tense expression on Isadore’s face relaxed into a -confident grin.</p> - -<p>“That’s it. You think we need money to run this -paper? We’re doing it on enthusiasm. And nothing -is going to stop us.”</p> - - -<h3>Renovating the State</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Ralph Waldo Emerson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_522">522</a>, <a href="#Page_631">631</a>)</p> - -<p>What is strange, there never was in any man sufficient -faith in the power of rectitude, to inspire -him with the broad design of renovating the State on the -principle of right and love. All those who have pretended -this design have been partial reformers, and have admitted -in some manner the supremacy of the bad State. I do -not call to mind a single human being who has steadily<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_816" id="Page_816">[816]</a></span> -denied the authority of the laws, on the simple ground -of his own moral nature. Such designs, full of genius -and full of fate as they are, are not entertained except -avowedly as air-pictures. If the individual who exhibits -them dare to think them practicable, he disgusts scholars -and churchmen; and men of talent, and women of -superior sentiments, cannot hide their contempt. Not -the less does nature continue to fill the heart of youth -with suggestions of this enthusiasm.</p> - - -<h3>The New State</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From the “Panama-Pacific Ode”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George Sterling</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_504">504</a>, <a href="#Page_552">552</a>, <a href="#Page_597">597</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">O dark and cruel State,</div> - <div class="verse">Whose towers are altars unto self alone,—</div> - <div class="verse indent8">Whose streets with tears are wet,</div> - <div class="verse">And half thy councils given unto hate!</div> - <div class="verse">Shall Time not hurl thy temples stone from stone,</div> - <div class="verse indent8">And o’er the ruin set</div> - <div class="verse">A fairer city than the years have known?</div> - <div class="verse">Out of thy darkness do we find us dreams,</div> - <div class="verse indent8">And on the future gleams</div> - <div class="verse">The vision of thy ramparts built anew.</div> - <div class="verse">Mammon and War sit now a double throne,</div> - <div class="verse">Yet what we dream, a wiser Age shall do.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Be ye lift up, O everlasting gates</div> - <div class="verse">Of that far City men shall build for man!</div> - <div class="verse indent8">O fairer Day that waits,</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_817" id="Page_817">[817]</a></span> - <div class="verse">The splendor of whose dawn we shall not see,</div> - <div class="verse">When selfish bonds of family and clan</div> - <div class="verse">Melt in the higher love that yet shall be!</div> - <div class="verse">O State without a master or a slave,</div> - <div class="verse indent8">Whose law of light we crave</div> - <div class="verse">Ere morning widen on a world set free!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Coming Dawn</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Woman”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By August Bebel</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_807">807</a>)</p> - -<p>Every day furnishes fresh proof of the rapid growth -and spread of the ideas that we represent. In all -fields there is tumult and push. The dawn of a fair day -is approaching with mighty strides. Let us then ever -battle and strive forward, unconcerned as to “where” -and “when” the boundary-posts of the new and better -day for mankind will be raised. And if, in the course -of this great battle for the emancipation of the human -race, we should fall, those now in the rear will step forward; -and we shall fall with the consciousness of having -done our duty as human beings, and with the conviction -that the goal will be reached, however the powers hostile -to humanity may struggle or strain in resistance. <em>Ours -is the world, despite all; that is, for the workers and the -woman.</em></p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_818" id="Page_818">[818]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Labor Irresistible</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Violence and the Labor Movement”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Hunter</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American Socialist writer, born 1874)</p> - -<p>Here it is, “the self-conscious, independent movement -of the immense majority, in the interest of -the immense majority,” already with its eleven million -voters and its fifty million souls. It has slowly, patiently, -painfully toiled up to a height where it is beginning to -see visions of victory. It has faith in itself and in its -cause. It believes it has the power of deliverance for -all society and for all humanity. It does not expect the -powerful to have faith in it; but, as Jesus came out of -despised Nazareth, so the new world is coming out of -the multitude, amid the toil and sweat and anguish of -the mills, mines, and factories of the world. It has -endured much; suffered long ages of slavery and serfdom. -From being mere animals of production, the -workers have become the “hands” of production; and -they are now reaching out to become the masters of -production. And, while in other periods of the world -their intolerable misery led them again and again to -strike out in a kind of torrential anarchy that pulled -down society itself, they have in our time, for the first -time in the history of the world, patiently and persistently -organized themselves into a world power. Where shall -we find in all history another instance of the organization -in less than half a century of eleven million people -into a compact force for the avowed purpose of peacefully -and legally taking possession of the world? They -have refused to hurry. They have declined all short cuts.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_819" id="Page_819">[819]</a></span> -They have spurned violence. The “bourgeois democrats,” -the terrorists, and the syndicalists, each in their time, have -tried to point out a shorter, quicker path. The workers -have refused to listen to them. On the other hand, they -have declined the way of compromise, of fusions, and of -alliances, that have also promised a quicker and shorter -road to power. With most maddening patience they -have declined to take any other path than their own—thus -infuriating not only the terrorists in their own ranks -but those Greeks from the other side who came to them -bearing gifts. Nothing seems to disturb them or to block -their path. They are offered reforms and concessions, -which they take blandly, but without thanks. They -move on and on, with the terrible, incessant, irresistible -power of some eternal, natural force. They have been -fought; yet they have never lost a single great battle. -They have been flattered and cajoled, without ever once -anywhere being appeased. They have been provoked, -insulted, imprisoned, calumniated, and repressed. They -are indifferent to it all. They move on and on—with -the patience and the meekness of a people with the vision -that they are soon to inherit the earth.</p> - - -<h3>From the Magnificat</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Mary, Mother of Jesus</span></p> - -<p>He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath -scattered the proud in the imagination of their -hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, -and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the -hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent -empty away.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_820" id="Page_820">[820]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>To Labor</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “In This Our World”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charlotte Perkins Gilman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>, <a href="#Page_662">662</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Shall you complain who feed the world?</div> - <div class="verse indent8">Who clothe the world?</div> - <div class="verse indent8">Who house the world?</div> - <div class="verse">Shall you complain who are the world,</div> - <div class="verse indent6">Of what the world may do?</div> - <div class="verse indent8">As from this hour</div> - <div class="verse indent8">You use your power,</div> - <div class="verse indent6">The world must follow you!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The world’s life hangs on your right hand!</div> - <div class="verse indent8">Your strong right hand,</div> - <div class="verse indent8">Your skilled right hand,</div> - <div class="verse">You hold the whole world in your hand,</div> - <div class="verse indent6">See to it what you do!</div> - <div class="verse indent8">Or dark or light,</div> - <div class="verse indent8">Or wrong or right,</div> - <div class="verse indent6">The world is made by you!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Then rise as you never rose before!</div> - <div class="verse indent8">Nor hoped before!</div> - <div class="verse indent8">Nor dared before!</div> - <div class="verse">And show as was never shown before,</div> - <div class="verse indent6">The power that lies in you!</div> - <div class="verse indent8">Stand all as one!</div> - <div class="verse indent8">See justice done!</div> - <div class="verse indent6">Believe, and Dare, and Do!</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_821" id="Page_821">[821]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Robert Tressall</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_663">663</a>. In the character of “Owen,” the author here -tells of his own efforts to awaken his fellow-workers in England)</p> - -<p>Toward the end of March the outlook began to -improve. By the middle of April Rushton and Company -were working eleven and a half hours a day. In -May, as the jobs increased and the days grew longer, -they were allowed to put in overtime; and, as the summer -months came round, once more the crowd of ragged-trousered -philanthropists began to toil and sweat at their -noble and unselfish task of making money for Mr. Rushton. -Papering, painting, white-washing, distempering, digging -up drains, repairing roofs, their zeal and enthusiasm were -unbounded. Their operations extended all over the -town. At all hours of the day they were to be seen -going to or returning from jobs, carrying planks and -ladders, paint and whitewash, chimney pots and drain -pipes, a crowd of tattered Imperialists, in broken boots, -paint-splashed caps, their clothing saturated with sweat -and plastered with mortar. The daily spectacle of the -workmen, tramping wearily home along the pavement of -the Grand Parade, caused some annoyance to the better -classes, and a letter appeared in <cite>The Obscurer</cite> suggesting -that it would be better if they walked on the road. When -they heard of this letter most of the men adopted the -suggestion and left the pavement for their betters.</p> - -<p>On the jobs themselves, meanwhile, the same old conditions -prevailed, the same frenzied hurry, the same scamping -of the work, slobbering it over, cheating the customers; -the same curses behind the foreman’s back, the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_822" id="Page_822">[822]</a></span> -groveling in his presence, the same strident bellowing -from Misery: “Get it <em>Done!</em>For Gord’s sake, get it -<em>Done!</em>‘Aven’t you finished yet? We’re losing money -over this! If you chaps can’t tear into it we’ll have an -<em>Alteration</em>!” and the result was that the philanthropists -often tore into it to such an extent that they worked -themselves out of a job, for business fluctuated, and -occasionally everybody was “stood off” for a few -days....</p> - -<p>They were putting new floors where the old ones were -decayed, and making two rooms into one by demolishing -the parting wall and substituting an iron girder. They -were replacing window frames and sashes, replastering -cracked ceilings and walls, cutting openings and fitting -doors where no doors had ever been before. They were -taking down broken chimney pots and fixing new ones -in their places. They were washing the old whitewash -off the ceilings, and scraping the old paper off the walls. -The air was full of the sounds of hammering and sawing, -the ringing of trowels, the rattle of pails, the splashing -of water brushes and the scraping of the stripping knives. -It was also heavily laden with dust and disease germs, -powdered mortar, lime, plaster, and the dirt that had -been accumulating within the old house for years. In -brief, those employed there might be said to be living -in a Tariff Reform Paradise—they had Plenty of Work.</p> - -<p>At twelve o’clock Bob Crass, the painter’s foreman, -blew a prolonged blast upon a whistle and all hands -assembled in the kitchen, where Bert the apprentice had -already prepared the tea in the large galvanized iron pail -placed in the middle of the floor. By the side of the -pail were a number of old jam jars, mugs, dilapidated -teacups, and one or two empty condensed milk tins.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_823" id="Page_823">[823]</a></span> -Each man on the “job” paid Bert threepence a week for -the tea and sugar—they did not have milk—and although -they had tea at breakfast time as well as at dinner the -lad was generally considered to be making a fortune....</p> - -<p>As each man came in he filled his cup, jam jar, or condensed -milk tin with tea from the steaming pail, before -sitting down. Most of them brought their food in little -wicker baskets, which they held on their laps, or placed -on the floor beside them.</p> - -<p>At first there was no attempt at conversation and -nothing was heard but the sounds of eating and drinking -and the frizzling of the bloater which Easton, one of the -painters, was toasting on the end of a pointed stick at -the fire.</p> - -<p>“I don’t think much of this bloody tea,” suddenly -remarked Sawkins, one of the laborers.</p> - -<p>“Well, it oughter be all right,” retorted Bert; “it’s -bin bilin’ ever since ‘arf past eleven....”</p> - -<p>“Has anyone seen old Jack Linden since ‘e got the -push?” inquired Harlow.</p> - -<p>“I seen ’im Saturday,” said Slyme.</p> - -<p>“Is ‘e doin’ anything?”</p> - -<p>“I don’t know: I didn’t ‘ave time to speak to ’im.”</p> - -<p>“No, ‘e ain’t got nothing,” remarked Philpot. “I -seen ’im Saturday night, an’ ‘e told me ‘e’s been walkin’ -about ever since.”</p> - -<p>Philpot did not add that he had “lent” Linden a shilling, -which he never expected to see again.</p> - -<p>“‘E won’t be able to get a job again in a ‘urry,” remarked -Easton; “‘e’s too old.”</p> - -<p>“You know, after all, you can’t blame Misery for -sackin’ ’im,” said Crass after a pause. “‘E was too slow -for a funeral.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_824" id="Page_824">[824]</a></span></p> - -<p>“I wonder how much <em>you’ll</em> be able to do when you’re -as old as he is?” said Owen.</p> - -<p>“Praps I won’t want to do nothing,” replied Crass, -with a feeble laugh. “I’m goin’ to live on me means.”</p> - -<p>“I should say the best thing old Jack could do would -be to go in the workhouse,” said Harlow.</p> - -<p>“Yes: I reckon that’s what’ll be the end of it,” said -Easton, in a matter-of-fact tone.</p> - -<p>“It’s a grand finish, isn’t it?” observed Owen. “After -working hard all one’s life to be treated like a criminal -at the end.”</p> - -<p>“I don’t know what you call bein’ treated like criminals,” -exclaimed Crass. “I reckon they ‘as a bloody -fine time of it, an’ we’ve got to find the money.”</p> - -<p>“Oh, for Gord’s sake, don’t start no more arguments,” -cried Harlow, addressing Owen. “We ‘ad enough of -that last week. You can’t expect a boss to employ a -man when ‘e’s too old to work.”</p> - -<p>“Of course not,” said Crass.</p> - -<p>Old Joe Philpot said—nothing.</p> - -<p>“I don’t see no sense in always grumblin’,” Crass proceeded; -“these things can’t be altered. You can’t expect -there can be plenty of work for everyone with all this ‘ere -labor-savin’ machinery what’s been invented.”</p> - -<p>“Of course,” said Harlow, “the people what used to -be employed on the work what’s now done by machinery -has to find something else to do. Some of ’em goes -to our trade, for instance. The result is there’s too many -at it, and there ain’t enough work to keep ’em all goin’.”</p> - -<p>“Yes,” said Crass, eagerly, “that’s just what I say. -Machinery is the real cause of all the poverty. That’s -what I said the other day.”</p> - -<p>“Machinery is undoubtedly the cause of unemploy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_825" id="Page_825">[825]</a></span>ment,” -replied Owen, “but it’s not the cause of poverty; -that’s another matter altogether.”</p> - -<p>The others laughed derisively.</p> - -<p>“Well, it seems to me to amount to the same thing,” -said Harlow, and nearly everyone agreed.</p> - -<p>“It doesn’t seem to me to amount to the same thing,” -Owen replied. “In my opinion we are all in a state of -poverty even when we have employment. The condition -we are reduced to when we’re out of work is more -properly described as destitution.</p> - -<p>“Poverty,” continued Owen after a short silence, -“consists in a shortage of the necessaries of life. When -those things are so scarce or so dear that people are -unable to obtain sufficient of them to satisfy all their -needs, they are in a condition of poverty. If you think -that the machinery which makes it possible to produce -all the necessaries of life in abundance is the cause of -the shortage, it seems to me there must be something -the matter with your minds.”</p> - -<p>“Oh, of course we’re all bloody fools, except you,” -snarled Crass. “When they was servin’ out the sense -they give you such a ‘ell of a lot there wasn’t none left -for nobody else.”</p> - -<p>“If there wasn’t something wrong with your minds,” -continued Owen, “you would be able to see that we -might have ‘Plenty of Work’ and yet be in a state of -destitution. The miserable wretches who toil sixteen or -eighteen hours a day—father, mother, and even the little -children—making matchboxes, or shirts or blouses, have -‘Plenty of Work,’ but I for one don’t envy them. Perhaps -you think that if there was no machinery, and we -all had to work thirteen or fourteen hours a day in order -to obtain a bare living, we should not be in a condition<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_826" id="Page_826">[826]</a></span> -of poverty? Talk about there being something the -matter with your minds—if there were not you wouldn’t -talk one day about Tariff Reform as a remedy for unemployment, -and then the next day admit that machinery -is the cause of it! Tariff Reform won’t do away with -machinery, will it?” ...</p> - -<p>No one answered, because none of them knew of any -remedy; and Crass began to feel sorry that he had reintroduced -the subject at all.</p> - -<p>“In the near future,” continued Owen, “it is probable -that horses will be almost entirely superseded by motor -cars and electric trams. As the services of horses will -no longer be required, all but a few will die out; they -will no longer be bred to the same extent as formerly. -We can’t blame the horses for allowing themselves to be -exterminated. They have not sufficient intelligence to -understand what’s being done. Therefore, they will -submit tamely to the extinction of the greater number -of their kind.</p> - -<p>“As we have seen, a great deal of the work which was -formerly done by human beings is now being done by -machinery. This machinery belongs to a few people; -it is being worked for the benefit of those few, just the -same as were the human beings it displaced.</p> - -<p>“These few have no longer any need of the services -of so many human workers, so they propose to exterminate -them! The unnecessary human beings are to be allowed -to starve to death! And they are also to be taught -that it is wrong to marry and breed children, because -the Sacred Few do not require so many people to work -for them as before!”</p> - -<p>“Yes, and you’ll never be able to prevent it, mate!” -shouted Crass.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_827" id="Page_827">[827]</a></span></p> - -<p>“Why can’t we?”</p> - -<p>“Because it can’t be done!” cried Crass, fiercely. -“It’s impossible!” ...</p> - -<p>There was a general murmur of satisfaction. Nearly -everyone seemed very pleased to think that the existing -state of things could not possibly be altered.</p> - - -<h3>Wealth Against Commonwealth</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Henry Demarest Lloyd</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American social reformer, pioneer in what later came to be known as -“muck-raking”; 1847-1903)</p> - -<p>One of the largest stones in the arch of “consolidation,” -perhaps the keystone, is that men have -become so intelligent, so responsive and responsible, so -co-operative, that they can be trusted in great masses with -the care of vast properties owned entirely by others; -and with the operation of complicated processes, although -but a slender cost of subsistence is awarded them out of -fabulous profits. The spectacle of the million and more -employees of the railroads of this country despatching -trains, maintaining tracks, collecting fares and freights, -and turning over hundreds of millions of net profits to -the owners, not one in a thousand of whom would know -how to do the simplest of these things himself, is possible -only where civilization has reached a high average of -morals and culture. More and more the mills and mines -and stores, and even the farms and forests, are being -administered by other than the owners. The virtue of -the people is taking the place Poor Richard thought only -the eye of the owner could fill. If mankind driven by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_828" id="Page_828">[828]</a></span> -their fears and the greed of others can do so well, what -will be their productivity and cheer when the “interest -of all” sings them to their work?</p> - - -<h3>Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Peter Kropotkin</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(This work of the great Russian scientist is a most important -contribution to modern thought, overthrowing as it does the old-fashioned -view of “Nature red in tooth and claw with ravin,” which -was the basis of early biologic teaching and is still the basis of all -bourgeois economic ideas)</p></div> - -<p>As soon as we study animals—not in laboratories and -museums only, but in the forest and prairie, in the -steppe and in the mountains—we at once perceive that -though there is an immense amount of warfare and -extermination going on amidst various species, and especially -amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the -same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual -support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals -belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same -society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual -struggle. Of course it would be extremely difficult to -estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance -of both these series of facts. But if we resort -to an indirect test, and ask Nature: “Who are the fittest: -those who are continually at war with each other, or those -who support one another?” we at once see that those -animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly -the fittest. They have more chances to survive, -and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest -development and bodily organization. If the number<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_829" id="Page_829">[829]</a></span>less -facts which can be brought forward to support this -view are taken into account, we may safely say that -mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual -struggle; but that as a factor of evolution, it most -probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it -favors the development of such habits and characters -as insure the maintenance and further development of -the species, together with the greatest amount of welfare -and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least -waste of energy.</p> - - -<h3>Co-operation and Nationality</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By “A.E.”</span> (<span class="smcap">George W. Russell</span>)</p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_513">513</a>)</p> - -<p>Wherever there is mutual aid, wherever there is -constant give and take, wherever the prosperity of -the individual depends directly and obviously on the -prosperity of the community about him, there the social -order tends to produce fine types of character, with a -devotion to public ideas; and this is the real object of all -government. The worst thing which can happen to a -social community is to have no social order at all, where -every man is for himself and the devil may take the hindmost. -Generally in such a community he takes the front -rank as well as the stragglers.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_830" id="Page_830">[830]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>New Worlds for Old</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By H. G. Wells</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_519">519</a>, <a href="#Page_675">675</a>, <a href="#Page_712">712</a>)</p> - -<p>Socialism is to me a very great thing indeed, the -form and substance of my ideal life and all the religion -I possess. I am, by a sort of predestination, a Socialist. -I perceive I cannot help talking and writing about Socialism, -and shaping and forwarding Socialism. I am one of -a succession—one of a growing multitude of witnesses, -who will continue. It does not—in the larger sense—matter -how many generations of us must toil and testify. -It does not matter, except as our individual concern, how -individually we succeed or fail, what blunders we make, -what thwartings we encounter, what follies and inadequacies -darken our private hopes and level our personal -imaginations to the dust. We have the light. We know -what we are for, and that the light that now glimmers so -dimly through us must in the end prevail.</p> - - -<h3>Socialism and Motherhood</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By John Spargo</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(American Socialist writer and lecturer, born in England, 1876)</p> - -<p>The message of Socialism is a message of Life and -Liberty and Love. It promises to destroy the -political, social, and economic disabilities imposed upon -womanhood; to give the mothers of the race equal freedom -with the fathers of the race. It pledges itself to destroy -those conditions of life and labor which weaken the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_831" id="Page_831">[831]</a></span> -mothers and deny to their babies the right to be well born. -It claims for every child all the advantages of healthful -and beautiful environment. It would destroy the dread -fear of want which drives the mother from the service of -her child into the service of a great factory. It would -bestow upon every child, as its rightful heritage, opportunity -to develop all its powers. It would apply the principles -of the family to the state. It would abolish the body -and soul debasing labor of children, and give to the little -ones their Kingdom of Laughter and Dreams. It would -end the waste of human lives by poverty, and make true -wealth possible for all. It would put an end to war—the -war of classes as well as the war of nations—and organize -and direct the genius and power of the race, now so largely -given to destruction, to the enrichment of life for all and -the realization of Human Brotherhood.</p> - -<p>Socialism comes to the mother as an Angel of Light and -Life, bearing the torch of a great hope. “I am Life -Abundant,” cries the angel, “and I bring you as gifts the -Freedom and Opportunity and Joy and Peace for which -you have prayed. See, my Sister, Mother of Men, all -these are yours if you will put forth your hand and receive -them.”</p> - - -<h3>Progress in Medicine</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By James P. Warbasse</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Contemporary American physician)</p> - -<p>Servetus and Harvey were not spurred on to the -discovery of the circulation of the blood by the -expectation of profits. One was burned to the stake -and the other was mobbed for his pains. The whole<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_832" id="Page_832">[832]</a></span> -history of medicine, with its splendid list of martyrs, is -a glorious refutation of the sophistry that competition -for profits is important to human progress. The competitive -system, which surrounds and harrasses medical -advancement, hindered it from the beginning, and -retards it still.</p> - - -<h3>The Socialist Faith</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George D. Herron</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_730">730</a>, <a href="#Page_792">792</a>, <a href="#Page_799">799</a>)</p> - -<p>Despite the paradoxical and deathful nature of our -capitalist civilization, despite the industrial insanity -and spiritual chaos, a new world is surely forming; dimly -may we discern the white pinnacles and the green gardens -of the gathering city of man. There is approaching—and -it is not so far off as it seems—a world arranged by the -wisdom hid in the human heart; a world that is the -organization of a strong and universal kindness; a world -redeemed from the fear of institutions and of poverty. -Even now, derided and discouraged as it is, socially -untrained and inexperienced as it is, if the instinctual and -repressed kindness of mankind were suddenly let loose -upon the earth, sooner than we think would we be members -one of another, sitting around one family hearthstone, -and singing the song of the new humanity....</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_833" id="Page_833">[833]</a></span> -<h2 class="nooldeng">BOOK XVII</h2> -</div> - -<p class="ph3"><i>The New Day</i></p> - -<p>The deliverance of humanity and the triumph of labor enfranchised; -passages from Utopias new and old, and the raptures of -poets and prophets contemplating “the good time coming.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_834" id="Page_834">[834]</a><br /><a name="Page_835" id="Page_835">[835]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Walt Whitman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_578">578</a>, <a href="#Page_726">726</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Beautiful World of new, superber Birth, that rises to my eyes,</div> - <div class="verse">Like a limitless golden cloud, filling the western sky....</div> - <div class="verse">Thou Wonder World, yet undefined, unformed—neither do I define thee;</div> - <div class="verse">How can I pierce the impenetrable blank of the future?</div> - <div class="verse">I feel thy ominous greatness, evil as well as good;</div> - <div class="verse">I watch thee, advancing, absorbing the present, transcending the past;</div> - <div class="verse">I see thy light lighting and thy shadow shadowing, as if the entire globe;</div> - <div class="verse">But I do not undertake to define thee—hardly to comprehend thee;</div> - <div class="verse">I but thee name—thee prophesy—as now!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Kingdom of Man</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By E. Ray Lankester</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(English scientist, professor in the University of London, born 1847)</p> - -<p>The new knowledge of Cature, the newly-ascertained -capacity of man for a control of Nature so thorough -as to be almost unlimited, has not as yet had an opportunity -of showing what it can do. No power has called -on man to arise and enter upon the possession of this -kingdom—the “Kingdom of Man” foreseen by Francis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_836" id="Page_836">[836]</a></span> -Bacon and pictured by him to an admiring but incredulous -age with all the fervor and picturesque detail of -which he was capable. And yet at this moment the -mechanical difficulties, the want of assurance and of exact -knowledge, which necessarily prevented Bacon’s schemes -from taking practical shape, have been removed. The -will to possess this vast territory is alone wanting.</p> - -<p>The weariness which is so largely expressed today in -regard to human effort is greatly due to the fact that we -have exhausted old sources of inspiration, and have not yet -learned to believe in the new. It is time for man to take -up whole-heartedly the Kingdom of Nature which it is his -destiny to rule. New hope, new life will, when he does -this, be infused into every line of human activity. To a -community which believes in the destiny of man as the -controller of Nature and has consciously entered upon its -fulfilment, there can be none of the weariness and even -despair which comes from an exclusive worship of the -past. There can be only encouragement in every victory -gained, hope and the realization of hope.</p> - - -<h3>On a Steamship</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Upton Sinclair</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>, <a href="#Page_776">776</a>, <a href="#Page_803">803</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">All night, without the gates of slumber lying,</div> - <div class="verse">I listen to the joy of falling water,</div> - <div class="verse">And to the throbbing of an iron heart.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">In ages past, men went upon the sea,</div> - <div class="verse">Waiting the pleasure of the chainless winds:</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_837" id="Page_837">[837]</a></span> - <div class="verse">But now the course is laid, the billows part;</div> - <div class="verse">Mankind has spoken: “Let the ship go there!”</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">I am grown haggard and forlorn, from dreams</div> - <div class="verse">That haunt me, of the time that is to be,</div> - <div class="verse">When man shall cease from wantonness and strife,</div> - <div class="verse">And lay his law upon the course of things.</div> - <div class="verse">Then shall he live no more on sufferance,</div> - <div class="verse">An accident, the prey of powers blind;</div> - <div class="verse">The untamed giants of nature shall bow down—</div> - <div class="verse">The tides, the tempest and the lightning cease</div> - <div class="verse">From mockery and destruction, and be turned</div> - <div class="verse">Unto the making of the soul of man.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Thomas Carlyle</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_488">488</a>, <a href="#Page_553">553</a>, <a href="#Page_652">652</a>)</p> - -<p>We must some day, at last and forever, cross the line -between Nonsense and Common Sense. And on -that day we shall pass from Class Paternalism, originally -derived from fetish fiction in times of universal ignorance, -to Human Brotherhood in accordance with the nature of -things and our growing knowledge of it; from Political -Government to Industrial Administration; from Competition -in Individualism to Individuality in Co-operation; -from War and Despotism, in any form, to Peace and -Liberty.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_838" id="Page_838">[838]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Revolution</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Richard Wagner</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_747">747</a>)</p> - -<p>Aye, we behold it, the old world crumbling; a new will -rise therefrom; for the lofty goddess Reason comes -rustling on the wings of storm, her stately head ringed -round with lightnings, a sword in her right hand, a torch -in her left. Her eye is stern, is punitive, is cold; and -yet what warmth of purest love, what wealth of happiness -streams forth toward him who dares to look with steadfast -gazing into that eye! Rustling she comes, the ever-rejuvenating -mother of mankind; destroying and fulfilling, she -fares across the earth; before her soughs the storm, and -shakes so fiercely at man’s handiwork that vast clouds -of dust eclipse the sky, and where her mighty foot is set, -there falls in ruins what an idle whim had built for aeons; -the hem of her robe sweeps its last remains away. But in -her wake there opens out a never-dreamt paradise of -happiness, illumined by kindly sunbeams; and where her -foot had trodden down, spring fragrant flowers from the -soul, and jubilant songs of freed mankind fill the air, -scarce silent from the din of battle.</p> - - -<h3>In Memoriam</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Alfred Tennyson</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_486">486</a>, <a href="#Page_652">652</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The flying clouds, the frosty light:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The year is dying in the night;</div> - <div class="verse">Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_839" id="Page_839">[839]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ring out the old, ring in the new,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ring, happy bells, across the snow:</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The year is going, let him go;</div> - <div class="verse">Ring out the false, ring in the true.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ring out the grief that saps the mind,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">For those that here we see no more;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ring out the feud of rich and poor,</div> - <div class="verse">Ring in redress to all mankind....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ring out false pride in place and blood,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The civic slander and the spite;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ring in the love of truth and right,</div> - <div class="verse">Ring in the common love of good.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ring out old shapes of foul disease;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ring out the thousand wars of old,</div> - <div class="verse">Ring in the thousand years of peace.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Ring in the valiant man and free,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The larger heart, the kindlier hand;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Ring out the darkness of the land,</div> - <div class="verse">Ring in the Christ that is to be.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Isaiah</span></h3> - -<p>They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy -mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge -of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_840" id="Page_840">[840]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Makar’s Dream</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Vladamir G. Korolenko</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Contemporary Russian novelist. In this short story a drunken old -peasant is taken in a dream before the Taion, or god of the forest, to be -judged for his many sins. The sins are piled upon a wooden scale-pan -and the virtues upon a golden one—but alas, the virtues rise -high into the air. Thereupon old Makar, driven to despair, breaks -out into protest so eloquent that the judge is puzzled)</p></div> - -<p>The scales trembled again ... the old Taion was lost -in thought.</p> - -<p>“How is this?” said he. “There are good people still -living on the earth. Their eyes are bright, and their faces -shine, and their robes are spotless.... Their hearts are -as tender as good soil; they receive the good seed, and -bring forth beautiful fruit and the perfume is sweet in -my nostrils. Look at yourself!”</p> - -<p>All eyes were turned towards Makar, who felt ashamed -of his appearance. He knew that his eyes were not bright, -and his face begrimed, his hair and beard matted and -tangled, and his clothes torn. True, he had been thinking -of buying a pair of boots before his death, in order to appear -at the judgment seat as behooves an honest peasant. But -he had always spent the money on drink, and now he stood -before the Taion in ragged shoes, like the last of the -Yakouts.... He would gladly have sunk under the -ground.</p> - -<p>“Thy face is dark,” went on the Taion. “Thy eyes are -not bright, and thy clothes are torn. And thy heart is -overgrown with weeds and thorns. That is the reason -why I love mine own that are pure and good and holy, and -turn my face away from such as you are.”</p> - -<p>Makar’s heart was ready to break. He felt ashamed of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_841" id="Page_841">[841]</a></span> -his existence. He hung his head, but suddenly lifted it -and began to speak again.</p> - -<p>Who were those just and good men the Taion was -speaking about? If he meant those who were living in -fine palaces on the earth at the same time as Makar did, -he knew them well enough. Their eyes were bright because -they had not shed as many tears as he had, and their faces -shone because they were bathed in perfume, and their -clean garments had been wrought by other people’s hands. -Did he not see that he too had been born like the others, -with bright, open eyes, in which heaven and earth were -reflected as in a mirror, and with a pure heart which was -ready to take in all that was beautiful in the world. And -if he longed now to hide his wretched self under the ground, -it was no fault of his ... he did not know whose fault -it was ... all he knew was that all the patience had died -in his heart.</p> - -<p>If Makar had seen the effect which his speech had -produced on the old Taion, and that every word he said -fell on the golden scale like a weight of lead, his rebellious -heart would have been soothed. But he saw nothing, -because he was full of blind despair.</p> - -<p>He thought of his past life, which had been so hard. -How had he been able to bear it so long? He had borne it -because the star of hope had shone through the darkness. -And now the star had vanished, and the hope was dead.... -Darkness fell on his soul, and a storm rose in it like -the storm-wind which flies across the steppe in the dead of -night. He forgot where he was, before whom he stood—forgot -everything except his anger.</p> - -<p>But the old Taion said to him: “Wait, poor man! -You are no longer on earth. There is justice for you here.”</p> - -<p>And Makar trembled. He realized that they pitied<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_842" id="Page_842">[842]</a></span> -him; his heart was softened; and, as he thought of his -wretched life, he burst into tears, weeping over himself. -The old Taion wept too, and so did the old father Ivan. -Tears flowed from the eyes of the young serving-men, and -they wiped them with their wide sleeves.</p> - -<p>And the scales trembled, and the wooden scale rose -higher and higher!</p> - - -<h3>The Desire of Nations</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edwin Markham</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Earth will go back to her lost youth,</div> - <div class="verse">And life grow deep and wonderful as truth,</div> - <div class="verse">When the wise King out of the nearing Heaven comes</div> - <div class="verse">To break the spell of long millenniums—</div> - <div class="verse">To build with song again</div> - <div class="verse">The broken hope of men—</div> - <div class="verse">To hush and heroize the world,</div> - <div class="verse">Beneath the flag of brotherhood unfurled.</div> - <div class="verse">And He will come some day;</div> - <div class="verse">Already is His star upon the way!</div> - <div class="verse">He comes, O world, He comes!</div> - <div class="verse">But not with bugle-cry nor roll of doubling drums....</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">And when He comes into the world gone wrong,</div> - <div class="verse">He will rebuild her beauty with a song.</div> - <div class="verse">To every heart He will its own dream be:</div> - <div class="verse">One moon has many phantoms in the sea.</div> - <div class="verse">Out of the North the norns will cry to men:</div> - <div class="verse">“Baldur the Beautiful has come again!”</div> - <div class="verse">The flutes of Greece will whisper from the dead:</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_843" id="Page_843">[843]</a></span> - <div class="verse">“Apollo has unveiled his sunbright head!”</div> - <div class="verse">The stones of Thebes and Memphis will find voice:</div> - <div class="verse">“Osiris comes: O tribes of Time, rejoice!”</div> - <div class="verse">And social architects who build the State,</div> - <div class="verse">Serving the Dream at citadel and gate,</div> - <div class="verse">Will hail Him coming through the labor-hum.</div> - <div class="verse">And glad quick cries will go from man to man:</div> - <div class="verse">“Lo, he has come, our Christ the Artisan,</div> - <div class="verse">The King who loved the lilies, He has come!”</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>The Great Change</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George D. Herron</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_730">730</a>, <a href="#Page_792">792</a>, <a href="#Page_799">799</a>, <a href="#Page_832">832</a>)</p> - -<p>Whatever definitions we use, or if we use none at -all, we cannot escape the sense of the passion and the -peril, the joy and the travail of the tremendous and transcendent -change we are inwardly and outwardly undergoing. -We are already appreciably transfigured by it, and -soon shall the news of it be upon pentecostal tongues, -and in music such as man has never heard, and in common -deeds diviner than divinest dreams. In a little while, -in a few decades, in one or two or four hundred years, -the change will have been precipitated, the promise will -have been fulfilled, and all things will have passed into -the keeping of the expanded soul. Another, and different -race of men, splendid alike in strength and gentleness, -will walk the earth and climb its sky, bearing down the -soul’s constrictions and frontiers, even unto the ramparts -around the throne of life. Man shall sit upon the throne; -he shall hold the keys of his kingdom; he shall make<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_844" id="Page_844">[844]</a></span> -his universe his home, the house of his heart’s desire, -shaping it according to the will that love has begotten -within him, and founding it upon the truth wherewith -love has made him free.</p> - - -<h3>My Utopian Self</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “A Modern Utopia”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By H. G. Wells</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(A vision of the future world which combines the insight of the -poet with the precision of the scientist. In this brief but poignant -passage the spiritual side of the problem is touched upon)</p></div> - -<p>It falls to few of us to interview our better selves. My -Utopian self is, of course, my better self—according -to my best endeavors—and I must confess myself fully -alive to the difficulties of the situation. When I came to -this Utopia I had no thought of any such intimate self-examination.</p> - -<p>The whole fabric of that other universe sways for a -moment as I come into his room, into his clear and ordered -work-room. I am trembling. A figure rather taller than -myself stands against the light.</p> - -<p>He comes toward me, and I, as I advance to meet him, -stumble against a chair. Then, still without a word, we -are clasping hands.</p> - -<p>I stand now so that the light falls upon him, and I can -see his face better. He is a little taller than I, younger -looking and sounder looking; he has missed an illness or so, -and there is no scar over his eye. His training has been -subtly finer then mine; he has made himself a better face -than mine.... These things I might have counted upon.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_845" id="Page_845">[845]</a></span> -I can fancy he winces with a twinge of sympathetic understanding -at my manifest inferiority. Indeed, I come, trailing -clouds of earthly confusion and weakness; I bear upon -me all the defects of my world. He wears, I see, that -white tunic with the purple band that I have already begun -to consider the proper Utopian clothing for grave men, -and his face is clean shaven. We forgot to speak at first -in the intensity of our mutual inspection....</p> - -<p>I think of the confessions I have just made to him, the -strange admissions both to him and myself. I have -stirred up the stagnation of my own emotional life, the -pride that has slumbered, the hopes and disappointments -that have not troubled me for years. There are things -that happened to me in my adolescence that no discipline -of reason will ever bring to a just proportion for me, the -first humiliations I was made to suffer, the waste of all -the fine irrevocable loyalties and passions of my youth. -The dull base caste of my little personal tragi-comedy—I -have ostensibly forgiven, I have for the most part forgotten—and -yet when I recall them I hate each actor still. -Whenever it comes into my mind—I do my best to prevent -it—there it is, and these detestable people blot out -the stars for me.</p> - -<p>I have told all that story to my double, and he has -listened with understanding eyes. But for a little while -those squalid memories will not sink back into the deeps.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Isaiah</span></h3> - -<p>The ransomed of the Lord shall return: they shall -obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing -shall flee away.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_846" id="Page_846">[846]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Incentives</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charles Fourier</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_202">202</a>)</p> - -<p>Up to the present time politicians and philosophers have -not dreamed of rendering industry attractive; to -enchain the mass to labor, they have discovered no other -means, after slavery, than the fear of want and starvation; -if, however, industry is the destiny which is assigned to us -by the creator, how can we think that he would wish to -force us to it by violence, and that he has no notion how to -put in play some more noble lever, some incentive capable -of transforming its occupations into pleasures?</p> - - -<h3>For Lyric Labor</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Elizabeth Waddell</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Apropos of a remark, attributed to an Italian girl of the Garment -Workers’ Union, “It wouldn’t be so bad if they would -only let us sing at our work”)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Child of the Renaissance, and little sister</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of Ariosto and of Raphael,</div> - <div class="verse">If any hush the song within your bosom,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">By all your lyric land, he does not well!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">One day a traveller from our songless country,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Passing at morning through Saint Mark’s great Square,</div> - <div class="verse">Marvelled, from workmen on the campanile,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To hear a song arising on the air.</div><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_847" id="Page_847">[847]</a></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Marvelled to see those stones of Venice rising</div> - <div class="verse indent2">To Labor’s matin chant intoned so clear,</div> - <div class="verse">As the great towers builded by Amphion</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Rose to the lyre’s strong throbbing, tier on tier.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Give us, O Child, the gifts we lack full sorely—</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Give us your heritage of art and song,</div> - <div class="verse">The soul that in your fathers grew, sun-nourished,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Soaring above its poverty and wrong.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Of singing vintagers and laughing reapers</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Teach us your happy, sunland way, nor we</div> - <div class="verse">In blind greed longer lay a stern proscription</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Upon your song, O Heart of Italy!</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Free and serene, in his reward unstinted,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">The workman’s hand shall mould his rhythmic thought;</div> - <div class="verse">How candid to the keen-eyed gods’ appraisal</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Shall be the work of Song’s great ardor wrought—</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">When our young land, reborn in Beauty’s image,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Unto the Morn of Prophecy shall come,</div> - <div class="verse">And every tower be raised with mirth and music,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And every harvest brought with singing home.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Isaiah</span></h3> - -<p>The Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings -unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the -brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives. -They shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the -former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_848" id="Page_848">[848]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Perfect City</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “The Republic”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Plato</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Greek philosopher, B. C. 429-347. His “Republic” is the first, and -perhaps the most famous, of all efforts to portray an ideal Society. -The argument is in the form of a discussion between Socrates and -some of his friends and pupils)</p></div> - -<p>First, then (said Socrates), let us consider in what -manner those who dwell in the city shall be supported. -Is there any other way than by making bread and wine, -and clothes and shoes, and building houses? They will be -nourished, partly with barley, making meal of it, and -partly with wheat, making loaves, boiling part, and toasting -part, putting fine loaves and cakes over a fire of stubble, -or over dried leaves, and resting themselves on couches -strewed with smilax and myrtle leaves. They and their -children will feast, drinking wine, and crowned, and singing -to the Gods; and they will pleasantly live together, begetting -children not beyond their substance, guarding against -poverty or war.</p> - -<p>Glauco, replying, said: You make the men to feast, as it -appears, without meats.</p> - -<p>You say true, said I: for I forget that they need have -meats likewise. They shall have salt and olives and -cheese, and they shall boil bulbous roots and herbs of the -field; and we set before them desserts of figs and vetches -and beans; and they toast at the fire myrtle berries and -the berries of the beech-tree, drinking in moderation. -Thus passing their life in peace and health, and dying, as is -likely, in old age, they will leave to their children another -such life.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_849" id="Page_849">[849]</a></span></p> - -<p>If you had been making, Socrates, said he, a city of hogs, -what else would have fed them but these things?</p> - -<p>But how should we do, Glauco, said I?</p> - -<p>What is usually done, said he. They must, as I imagine, -have their beds and tables, and meats and desserts, as we -now have, if they are not to be miserable.</p> - -<p>Be it so, said I: I understand you. We consider, it -seems, not only how a city may exist, but a luxurious city; -and perhaps it is not amiss; for in considering such a one, -we may probably see how justice and injustice have their -origin in cities. The true city seems to me to be such as -we have described, like one who is healthy; but if you -prefer that we likewise consider a city that is corpulent, -nothing hinders it. For these things will not, it seems, -please some, nor this sort of life satisfy them; but there -shall be beds and tables and all other furniture, seasonings, -ointments, and perfumes, mistresses, and confections: -and various kinds of these. And we must no longer consider -as alone necessary what we mentioned at the first, -houses and clothes and shoes, but painting, too, and all the -curious arts must be set agoing, and carving, and gold, and -ivory; and all these things must be got, must they not?</p> - -<p>Yes, said he.</p> - -<p>Must not the city, then, be larger? For that healthy one -is no longer sufficient, but is already full of luxury, and of -a crowd of such as are in no way necessary to cities; such -as all kinds of sportsmen, and the imitative artists, many -of them imitating in figures, and colors; and others in -music; and poets too, and their ministers, rhapsodists, -actors, dancers, undertakers, workmen of all sorts of -instruments, and what hath reference to female ornament, -as well as other things. We shall need likewise many more -servants. Do you not think they will need pedagogues,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_850" id="Page_850">[850]</a></span> -and nurses, and tutors, hair-dressers, barbers, victuallers -too, and cooks? And further still, we shall want swineherds -likewise; of these there were none in the other city -(for there needed not); but in this we shall want these, and -many other sorts of herds likewise, if any eat the several -animals, shall we not?</p> - -<p>Why not?</p> - -<p>Shall we not, then, in this manner of life be much more -in need of physicians than formerly?</p> - -<p>Much more.</p> - -<p>And the country, which was then sufficient to support -the inhabitants, will, instead of being sufficient, become -too little; or how shall we say?</p> - -<p>Just so, said he.</p> - -<p>Must we not then encroach upon the neighboring country, -if we want to have sufficient for plough and pasture, -and they in like manner upon us, if they likewise suffer -themselves to accumulate wealth to infinity, going beyond -the boundaries of necessaries?</p> - -<p>There is great necessity for it, Socrates.</p> - -<p>Shall we afterwards fight, Glauco, or how shall we do?</p> - -<p>We shall certainly, said he.</p> - -<p>We say nothing, said I, whether war does any evil or -any good, but this much only: <em>that we have found the -origin of war, from which most especially arise the greatest -mischiefs to states, both private and public</em>.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_851" id="Page_851">[851]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Utopia</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Sir Thomas More</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(The word “Utopia” means “No Place.” It was first used in this -book, and has come to be a general name for pictures of a future -society. The book was written in Latin, and first published in -Belgium in 1516. The translation here quoted was published in -England in 1551)</p></div> - -<p>Every Cytie is devided into foure equall partes or -quarters. In the myddes of every quarter there is -a market place of all maner of things. Thether the workes -of every familie be brought into certeyne houses. And -everye kynde of thing is layde up severall in bernes or store -houses. From hence the father of everye familye, or every -householder fetchethe whatsoever he and his have neade of, -and carieth it away with him without money, without -exchaunge, without any gage, pawne, or pledge. For whye -shoulde any thing be denyed unto him? Seynge there is -abundance of all things, and that it is not to bee feared, -leste anye man wyll aske more then he neadeth. For -whie should it be thoughte that that man woulde aske -more then anough, which is sewer never to lacke? Certeynely -in all kyndes of lyving creatures either feare of -lacke dothe cause covetousnes and ravyne, or in man only -pryde, which counteth it a glorious thinge to pass and -excel other in the superfluous and vayne ostentation of -thinges. The whyche kynde of vice amonge the Utopians -can have no place.</p> - -<p>Nowe I have declared and described unto you, as -truelye as I coulde the fourme and ordre of that common -wealth, which verely in my judgment is not only the beste, -but also that which alone of good right maye claime and -take upon it the name of a commonwealth or publique<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_852" id="Page_852">[852]</a></span> -weale. For in other places they speake stil of the common -wealth. But every man procureth his owne private gaine. -Here where nothinge is private, the commen affaires bee -earnestlye loked upon.... For there nothinge is distributed -after a nyggyshe sorte, neither there is anye poore -man or beggar. And thoughe no man have anye thinge, -yet everye man is ryche. For what can be more ryche, -than to lyve joyfully and merely, without al griefe and -pensifenes: not caring for his owne lyving, nor vexed or -troubled with his wifes importunate complayntes, nor -dreadynge povertie to his sonne, nor sorrowyng for his -doughters dowrey?</p> - - -<h3>The Soul of Man Under Socialism</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Oscar Wilde</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_155">155</a>)</p> - -<p>The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The -Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are -slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture -and contemplation become almost impossible. Human -slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical -slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of -the world depends.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From the Book of Leviticus</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_477">477</a>)</p> - -<p>Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all -the inhabitants thereof.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_853" id="Page_853">[853]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Cities, Old and New</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “In the Days of the Comet”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By H. G. Wells</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_519">519</a>, <a href="#Page_675">675</a>, <a href="#Page_712">712</a>, <a href="#Page_830">830</a>, <a href="#Page_844">844</a>)</p> - -<p>Where is that old world now? Where is London, -that somber city of smoke and drifting darkness, -full of the deep roar and haunting music of disorder, with -its oily, shining, mud-rimmed, barge-crowded river, its -black pinnacles, and blackened dome, its sad wildernesses -of smut-grayed houses, its myriads of draggled prostitutes, -its millions of hurrying clerks? The very leaves -upon its trees were foul with greasy black defilements. -Where is the lime-white Paris, with its green and disciplined -foliage, its hard unflinching tastefulness, its smartly -organized viciousness, and the myriads of workers, noisily -shod, streaming over the bridges in the gray cold light of -dawn? Where is New York, the high city of clangor and -infuriated energy, wind swept and competition swept, -its huge buildings jostling one another and straining ever -upward for a place in the sky, the fallen pitilessly overshadowed? -Where are its lurking corners of heavy and -costly luxury, the shameful bludgeoning bribing vice of -its ill ruled underways, and all the gaunt extravagant -ugliness of its strenuous life?...</p> - -<p>All these vast cities have given way and gone, even as -my native Potteries and the Black Country have gone, -and the lives that were caught, crippled, starved, and -maimed amidst their labyrinths, their forgotten and -neglected maladjustments, and their vast, inhuman, ill-conceived -industrial machinery have escaped—to life. -Those cities of growth and accident are altogether gone,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_854" id="Page_854">[854]</a></span> -never a chimney smokes about our world today, and the -sound of the weeping of children who toiled and hungered, -the dull despair of overburdened women, the noise of -brute quarrels in alleys, all shameful pleasures and all -the ugly grossness of wealthy pride have gone with them, -with the utter change of our lives. As I look back into -the past I see a vast exultant dust of house-breaking and -removal rise up into the clear air; I live again the Year of -Tents, the Years of Scaffolding, and like the triumph of a -new theme in a piece of music—the great cities of our new -days arise.</p> - - -<h3>Caesar and Cleopatra</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By G. Bernard Shaw</span></p> - -<p>(See pages <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>, <a href="#Page_760">760</a>, <a href="#Page_798">798</a>)</p> - -<p class="center">(<cite>The Romans have set fire to the Library of Alexandria</cite>)</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Theodotus</span>:—What is burning there is the memory -of mankind.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Caesar</span>:—A shameful memory. Let it burn.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Theodotus</span> (<i>wildly</i>):—Will you destroy the past?</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Caesar</span>:—Ay, and build the future with its ruins.</p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">By Alfred Tennyson</span></h3> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_486">486</a>, <a href="#Page_652">652</a>, <a href="#Page_838">838</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The old order changeth, yielding place to new</div> - <div class="verse">And God fulfils Himself in many ways,</div> - <div class="verse">Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_855" id="Page_855">[855]</a></span></p> - -<h3>A Festival in Utopia</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “News from Nowhere”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Morris</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_793">793</a>)</p> - -<p>“Once a year, on May-day, we hold a solemn feast in -those easterly communes of London to commemorate -the Clearing of Misery, as it is called. On that day -we have music and dancing, and merry games and happy -feasting on the site of some of the worst of the old slums, -the traditional memory of which we have kept. On that -occasion the custom is for the prettiest girls to sing some -of the old revolutionary songs, and those which were the -groans of discontent, once so hopeless, on the very spots -where those terrible crimes of class-murder were committed -day by day for so many years. To a man like me, who has -studied the past so diligently, it is a curious and touching -sight to see some beautiful girl, daintily clad, and crowned -with flowers from the neighboring meadows, standing -among the happy people, on some mound where of old -time stood the wretched apology for a house,—a den in -which men and women lived packed among the filth like -pilchards in a cask; lived in such a way that they could -only have endured it, as I said just now, by being degraded -out of humanity. To hear the terrible words of threatening -and lamentation coming from her sweet and beautiful -lips, and she unconscious of their real meaning; to hear -her singing Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt,’ and think all the -time she does not understand what it is all about—a -tragedy grown inconceivable to her and her listeners. -Think of that if you can, and of how glorious life is grown!”</p> - -<p>“Indeed,” said I, “it is difficult for me to think of it.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_856" id="Page_856">[856]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Utopian City</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “A Modern Utopia”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By H. G. Wells</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_519">519</a>, <a href="#Page_675">675</a>, <a href="#Page_712">712</a>, <a href="#Page_830">830</a>, <a href="#Page_844">844</a>, <a href="#Page_853">853</a>)</p> - -<p>Here will be one of the great meeting places of mankind. -Here—I speak of Utopian London—will be -the traditional centre of one of the great races in the -commonality of the World State—and here will be its -social and intellectual exchange. There will be a mighty -University here, with thousands of professors and tens of -thousands of advanced students, and here great journals -of thought and speculation, mature and splendid books -of philosophy and science, and a glorious fabric of literature -will be woven and shaped, and with a teeming leisureliness, -put forth. Here will be stupendous libraries, and a -mighty organization of museums. About these centres -will cluster a great swarm of people, and close at hand will -be another centre,—for I who am an Englishman must -needs stipulate that Westminster shall still be a seat of -world Empire, one of several seats, if you will—where the -ruling council of the world assembles. Then the arts will -cluster round this city, as gold gathers about wisdom, and -here Englishmen will weave into wonderful prose and -beautiful rhythms and subtly atmospheric forms, the -intricate, austere and courageous imagination of our race.</p> - -<p>One will come into this place as one comes into a noble -mansion. They will have flung great arches and domes of -glass above the wider spaces of the town, the slender beauty -of the perfect metal-work far overhead will be softened to -a fairy-like unsubstantiality by the mild London air. -It will be the London air we know, clear of filth and all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_857" id="Page_857">[857]</a></span> -impurity, the same air that gives our October days their -unspeakable clarity and makes every London twilight -mysteriously beautiful. We shall go along avenues of -architecture that will be emancipated from the last memories -of the squat temple boxes of the Greek, the buxom -curvatures of Rome; the Goth in us will have taken to -steel and countless new materials as kindly as once he -took to stone. The gay and swiftly moving platforms of -the public ways will go past on either hand, carrying -sporadic groups of people, and very speedily we shall -find ourselves in a sort of central space, rich with palms -and flowering bushes and statuary. We shall look along -an avenue of trees, down a wide gorge between the cliffs -of crowded hotels that are still glowing with internal lights, -to where the shining morning river streams dawnlit out -to sea.</p> - - -<h3>The Utopia of Syndicalism</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Émile Pataud and Émile Pouget</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(Two of the most prominent leaders of the revolutionary trade -unions of France have in this story, published in 1912, portrayed the -overthrow of the capitalist state by the method of the general strike, -and the form of society which they anticipate from the “direct -action” of the workers).</p></div> - - -<h4><i>The Trade Union Congress</i></h4> - -<p>Delegates came from all parts of France. They -came from all trades, from all professions. In the -enormous hall in which the Congress was held, peasants, -teachers, fishermen, doctors, postmen, masons, sat beside<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_858" id="Page_858">[858]</a></span> -market-gardeners, miners and metal-workers. An epitome -of the whole of society was there.</p> - -<p>It was a stirring scene, this assembly, where were -gathered together the most energetic and most enthusiastic -of the combatants for the Revolution, who, inaugurating -a new era, were about to disentangle and sum up the -aspirations of the people; to point out the road along -which they were resolved to march.</p> - -<p>The old militants, who had seen so many Congresses; -who had fought rough fights, and known the bitterness of -struggles against the employers and the State; who in -their hours of anxiety and doubt had despaired of ever -seeing their hopes materialize, were radiant with joy. -Their bold thoughts of past years were taking shape, -they lived their dream! A happy moment it was, when -old comrades greeted each other. They met, their hands -held out; and trembling, and deeply moved, they embraced -each other—transfigured, radiant.</p> - -<p>The new delegates, out of their element at first, in the -midst of this fever of life, were soon caught by the atmosphere -of enthusiasm. Many of them were the product of -events. Before the Revolution, they were ignorant of -their own capacities; and if it had not come to shake them -out of their torpor, they would have continued to vegetate; -passive, indifferent, hesitating. Thanks to it, their inner -powers were revealed to themselves; and now, overflowing -with passion, energy, and enthusiasm, they vibrated -with an immense force.</p> - - -<h4><i>The Distribution of Wealth</i></h4> - -<p>In the first place, a resolution was taken which there -was no need to discuss, or even to explain—it was so logical -and inevitable: the charging the community with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_859" id="Page_859">[859]</a></span> -care of the children, the sick, and the aged. This was a -question of principle which had the advantage of demonstrating, -to those who still retained prejudices with regard -to the new régime, how little the future was going to be -like the past....</p> - -<p>Two tendencies were shown; one, that of pure Communism, -which advocated complete liberty in consumption, -without any restriction; the other, inspired with Communist -ideas, but finding their strict application premature, -and advocating a compromise.</p> - -<p>The latter view predominated. It was therefore agreed -as follows:—</p> - -<p>That every human being, whatever his social function -might be, had a right to an equal remuneration, which -would be divided into two parts: the one for the satisfaction -of ordinary needs; the other for the needs of luxury. -The remuneration would be obtained, with regard to the -first, by a permanent Trade Union card; and with regard -to the second, by a book of consumers’ “notes.”</p> - -<p>The first class included all kinds of commodities, all -food products, clothing, all that would be in such abundance -that the consumption of it need not be restricted; -each one would have the right to draw from the common -stock, according to his needs, without any other formality -than having to present his card in the shops and depots, -to those in charge of distribution.</p> - -<p>In the second class would be placed products of various -kinds, which, being in too small a quantity to allow of their -being put at the free disposition of all, retained a purchase -value, liable to vary according to their greater or less -rarity, and greater or less demand. The price of these -products was calculated according to the former monetary -method, and the quantity of work necessary to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_860" id="Page_860">[860]</a></span> -produce them would be one of the elements in fixing their -value; they would be delivered on the payment of “consumers’ -notes,” the mechanism of whose use recalled that -of the cheque.</p> - -<p>It was, however, agreed that in proportion as the products -of this second class became abundant enough to -attain to the level necessary for free consumption, they -should enter into the first class; and ceasing to be considered -as objects of luxury, they should be, without rationing, -placed at the disposal of all.</p> - -<p>By this arrangement society approached, automatically, -more and more towards pure Communism.</p> - - -<h3>The New Nationalism</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Theodore Roosevelt</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Ex-president of the United States, born 1858)</p> - -<p>Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, -when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, -every man will have a fair chance to make himself all that -in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, -unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered -by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and -to get for himself and for his family substantially what he -has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that -the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest -service of which he is capable. No man who carries the -burden of the special privileges of another can give to the -commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_861" id="Page_861">[861]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>Looking Backward</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edward Bellamy</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(A story of the experience of a man who goes to sleep and wakes up -a hundred years later. See page <a href="#Page_85">85</a>)</p> - -<p>“How do you regulate wages?” I asked.</p> - -<p>Dr. Leete did not reply till after several moments -of meditative silence. “I know, of course,” he -finally said, “enough of the old order of things to understand -just what you mean by that question; and yet the -present order is so utterly different at this point that I am -a little at a loss how to answer you best. You ask me how -we regulate wages: I can only reply that there is no idea -in the modern social economy which at all corresponds -with what was meant by wages in your day.”</p> - -<p>“I suppose you mean that you have no money to pay -wages in,” said I. “But the credit given the worker at -the Government storehouse answers to his wages with us. -How is the amount of credit given respectively to the -workers in different lines determined? By what title -does the individual claim his particular share? What is -the basis of allotment?”</p> - -<p>“His title,” replied Dr. Leete, “is his humanity. The -basis of his claim is the fact that he is a man.”</p> - -<p>“The fact that he is a man!” I repeated, incredulously. -“Do you possibly mean that all have the same share?”</p> - -<p>“Most assuredly.” ...</p> - -<p>“But what inducement,” I asked, “can a man have to -put forth his best endeavors when, however much or -little he accomplishes, his income remains the same? High -characters may be moved by devotion to the common welfare -under such a system, but does not the average man<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_862" id="Page_862">[862]</a></span> -tend to rest back on his oar, reasoning that it is of no use -to make a special effort, since the effort will not increase -his income, nor its withholding diminish it?”</p> - -<p>“Does it then really seem to you,” answered my companion, -“that human nature is insensible to any motives -save fear of want and love of luxury, that you should -expect security and equality of livelihood to leave them -without possible incentives to effort? Your contemporaries -did not really think so, though they might fancy they -did. When it was a question of the grandest class of -efforts, the most absolute self-devotion, they depended on -quite other incentives. Not higher wages, but honor and -hope of men’s gratitude, patriotism and the inspiration -of duty, were the motives which they set before their -soldiers when it was a question of dying for the nation; -and never was there an age of the world when these motives -did not call out what is best and noblest in men. And -not only this, but when you come to analyze the love of -money which was the general impulse to effort in your day, -you find that the dread of want and desire of luxury were -two of several motives which the pursuit of money represented; -the others, and with many the more influential, -being desire of power, of social position and reputation -for ability and success. So you see that though we have -abolished poverty and the fear of it, and inordinate -luxury with the hope of it, we have not touched the greater -part of the motives which underlay the love of money in -former times, or any of those which prompted the supremer -sorts of effort. The coarser motives, which no longer move -us, have been replaced by high motives wholly unknown -to the mere wage earners of your age. Now that industry -of any sort is no longer self-service, but service of the -nation, patriotism, passion for humanity, impel the workers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_863" id="Page_863">[863]</a></span> -as in your day they did the soldier. The army of industry -is an army, not alone by virtue of its perfect organization, -but by reason also of the ardor of self-devotion which -animates its members.</p> - -<p>“But as you used to supplement the motives of patriotism -with the love of glory, in order to stimulate the value -of your soldiers, so do we. Based as our industrial system -is on the principle of requiring the same unit of effort from -every man, that is the best he can do, you will see that the -means by which we spur the workers to do their best must -be a very essential part of our scheme. With us, diligence -in the national service is, the sole and certain way to public -repute, social distinction, and official power. The value -of a man’s services in society fixes his rank in it. Compared -with the effect of our social arrangements in impelling -men to be zealous in business, we deem the object-lessons -of biting poverty and wanton luxury on which you -depended a device as weak and uncertain as it was barbaric.”</p> - - -<h3>Liberty in Utopia</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “A Modern Utopia”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By H. G. Wells</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_519">519</a>, <a href="#Page_675">675</a>, <a href="#Page_712">712</a>, <a href="#Page_830">830</a>, <a href="#Page_844">844</a>, <a href="#Page_853">853</a>, <a href="#Page_856">856</a>)</p> - -<p>The idea of individual liberty is one that has grown in -importance and grows with every development of -modern thought. To the classical Utopists freedom was -relatively trivial. Clearly they considered virtue and -happiness as entirely separable from liberty, and as being -altogether more important things. But the modern view,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_864" id="Page_864">[864]</a></span> -with its deepening insistence upon individuality and upon -the significance of its uniqueness, steadily intensifies the -value of freedom, until at last we begin to see liberty as the -very substance of life, that indeed it is life, and that only -the dead things, the choiceless things, live in absolute -obedience to law. To have free play for one’s individuality -is, in the modern view, the subjective triumph of -existence, as survival in creative work and offspring is its -objective triumph....</p> - -<p>A Utopia such as this present one, written on the opening -of the Twentieth Century, and after the most exhaustive -discussion—nearly a century long—between Communistic -and Socialistic ideas on the one hand, and Individualism -on the other, emerges upon a sort of effectual conclusion -to these controversies.... In the very days when -our political and economic order is becoming steadily more -Socialistic, our ideals of intercourse turn more and more to -a fuller recognition of the claims of individuality. The -State is to be progressive, it is no longer to be static, and -this alters the general condition of the Utopian problem -profoundly; we have to provide not only for food and -clothing, for order and health, but for initiative. The -factor that leads the World State on from one phase of -development to the next is the interplay of individualities; -to speak teleologically, the world exists for the sake -of and through initiative, and individuality is the method -of initiative.... The State is for Individuals, the law is -for freedoms, the world is for experiment, experience and -change: these are the fundamental beliefs upon which -modern Utopia must go.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_865" id="Page_865">[865]</a></span></p> - - -<h3 class="nooldeng"><span class="smcap">From the Epistle of James</span></h3> - -<p>Whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and -continueth therein, he not being a forgetful hearer, -but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his -deed.</p> - - -<h3>The Social Revolution and After</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Karl Kautsky</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(German Socialist editor, generally recognized as the intellectual -leader of the modern Social-democratic movement in his -country)</p> - -<p>Freedom of education and of scientific investigation -from the fetters of capitalist dominion; freedom of -the individual from the oppression of exclusive, exhaustive -physical labor; displacement of capitalist industry in the -intellectual production of society by the free unions—along -this road proceeds the tendency of the proletarian -régime....</p> - -<p>Regulation of social chaos and liberation of the individual—these -are the two historical tasks that capitalism -has placed before society. They appear to be contradictory, -but they are simultaneously soluble because each of -them belongs to a different sphere of social life. Undoubtedly -whoever should seek to rule both spheres in the same -manner would find himself involved in insoluble contradictions....</p> - -<p><em>Communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual.</em> -This is the type of the Socialist productive system -which will arise from the dominion of the proletariat.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_866" id="Page_866">[866]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Understanding of Nature</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Studies in Socialism”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Jean Leon Jaurès</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_589">589</a>)</p> - -<p>When Socialism has triumphed, when conditions of -peace have succeeded to conditions of combat, when -all men have their share of property in the immense -human capital, and their share of initiative and of the -exercise of free-will in the immense human activity, then -all men will know the fulness of pride and joy; and they -will feel that they are co-operators in the universal civilization, -even if their immediate contribution is only the -humblest manual labor; and this labor, more noble and -more fraternal in character, will be so regulated that the -laborers shall always reserve for themselves some leisure -hours for reflection and for a cultivation of the sense of -life.</p> - -<p>They will have a better understanding of the hidden -meaning of life, whose mysterious aim is the harmony of -all consciences, of all forces, and of all liberties. They -will understand history better and will love it, because it -will be their history, since they are the heirs of the whole -human race. Finally, they will understand the universe -better; because, when they see conscience and spirit -triumphing in humanity, they will be quick to feel that -this universe which has given birth to humanity cannot be -fundamentally brutal and blind; that there is spirit everywhere, -soul everywhere, and that the universe itself is -simply an immense confused aspiration toward order, -beauty, freedom, and goodness. Their point of view will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_867" id="Page_867">[867]</a></span> -be changed; they will look with new eyes not only at -their brother men, but at the earth and the sky, rocks and -trees, animals, flowers, and stars.</p> - - -<h3>The Future of Art</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Collectivism and Industrial Evolution”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Émile Vandervelde</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(Belgian Socialist leader, since the war a member of the Cabinet)</p> - -<p>Many a time it has been said that art under all its -forms is only the mirror, more or less distorted, yet -always faithful, of society. Today it reflects the discouragements -of a dying <em>bourgeoisie</em>, the torments, the -anguish, and also the hopes of a proletariat which lives -and grows in the midst of suffering. Tomorrow, it will -reflect the calm and peace of happy generations which, -escaped from the mire of poverty, will have founded -through their own efforts the sovereignty of labor and the -reign of brotherhood.</p> - - -<h3>Art After the Revolution</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Émile Pataud and Émile Pouget</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_857">857</a>)</p> - -<p>Life was now to take its revenge. The human being -was no longer riveted to the chain of wages; his aim in -life passed beyond the mere struggle for a living. Industry -was no longer his master, but his servant. Freed from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_868" id="Page_868">[868]</a></span> -all hindrances, he would be able to develop without constraint.</p> - -<p>And there was no need to fear that the level of art would -be lowered as it became universalized. Far from this, it -would gain in extent and depth. Its domain would be -unlimited. It would enter into all production. It would -not restrict itself to painting large canvasses, to sculpturing -marble, to moulding bronze. There would be art in -everything.</p> - -<p>And we should no longer see great artists stifled by -misery, lost in the quicksands of indifference, as was too -often the case formerly.</p> - - -<h3>Punishment in Utopia</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “A Modern Utopia”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By H. G. Wells</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_519">519</a>, <a href="#Page_675">675</a>, <a href="#Page_712">712</a>, <a href="#Page_830">830</a>, <a href="#Page_844">844</a>, <a href="#Page_853">853</a>, <a href="#Page_856">856</a>, <a href="#Page_863">863</a>)</p> - -<p>You see the big convict steamship standing in to the -Island of Incurable Cheats. The crew are respectfully -at their quarters, ready to lend a hand overboard, -but wide awake, and the captain is hospitably on the -bridge to bid his guests good-bye and keep an eye on the -movables. The new citizens for this particular Alsatia, -each no doubt with his personal belongings securely packed -and at hand, crowd the deck and study the nearing coast. -Bright, keen faces would be there, and we, were we by any -chance to find ourselves beside the captain, might recognize -the double of this great earthly magnate or that, Petticoat -Lane and Park Lane cheek by jowl. The landing part -of the jetty is clear of people, only a government man or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_869" id="Page_869">[869]</a></span> -so stands there to receive the boat and prevent a rush; -but beyond the gates a number of engagingly smart-looking -individuals loiter speculatively. One figures a remarkable -building labeled Custom House, an interesting fiscal -revival this population has made, and beyond, crowding -up the hill, the painted walls of a number of comfortable -inns clamor loudly. One or two inhabitants in reduced -circumstances would act as hotel touts, there are several -hotel omnibuses and a Bureau de Change, certainly a -Bureau de Change. And a small house with a large board, -aimed point-blank seaward, declares itself a Gratis Information -Office, and next to it rises the graceful dome of a -small Casino. Beyond, great hoardings proclaim the -advantages of many island specialities, a hustling commerce, -and the opening of a Public Lottery. There is a -large cheap-looking barrack, the school of Commercial -Science for gentlemen of inadequate training....</p> - -<p>Altogether a very go-ahead looking little port it would -be, and though this disembarkation would have none of -the flow of hilarious good fellowship that would throw a -halo of genial noise about the Islands of Drink, it is doubtful -if the new arrivals would feel anything very tragic in the -moment. Here at last was scope for adventure after their -hearts.</p> - -<p>This sounds more fantastic than it is. But what else -is there to do, unless you kill? You must seclude, but why -should you torment? All modern prisons are places of -torture by restraint, and the habitual criminal plays the -part of a damaged mouse at the mercy of the cat of our -law. He has his little painful run, and back he comes -again to a state more horrible even than destitution. There -are no Alsatias left in the world. For my own part I can -think of no crime, unless it is reckless begetting or the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_870" id="Page_870">[870]</a></span> -wilful transmission of contagious disease, for which the -bleak terrors, the solitudes and ignominies of the modern -prison do not seem outrageously cruel. If you want to go -as far as that, then kill. Why, once you are rid of them, -should you pester criminals to respect an uncongenial -standard of conduct? Into such islands of exile as this -a modern Utopia will have to purge itself. There is no -alternative that I can contrive.</p> - - -<h3>A Preface to Politics</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Walter Lippmann</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_779">779</a>)</p> - -<p>You don’t have to preach honesty to men with a creative -purpose. Let a human being throw the energies -of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct -of workmanship will take care of his honesty. The writers -who have nothing to say are the ones you can buy; the -others have too high a price. A genuine craftsman will -not adulterate his product; the reason isn’t because duty -says he shouldn’t, but because passion says he couldn’t.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_871" id="Page_871">[871]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The Triumph of Love</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Labor”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Émile Zola</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(In this novel the French writer gives his solution of the labor -problem, in the story of a young engineer who is led by the study of -Fourier to found a co-operative steel mill, which in the course of time -replaces all the old competitive establishments, and brings about a -reign of human brotherhood)</p></div> - -<p>The triumphant spectacle that Luc had now always -before his eyes, that city of happiness, the gayly -colored roofs of which were spread out before his window, -was admirable. The march of progress which a former -generation, sunk in ancient error, and contaminated by an -iniquitous environment, had so mournfully begun in the -midst of many obstacles and former hatreds, was to be -pursued by their children, instructed and disciplined by -the schools and workshops, advancing with a cheerful step, -even to the attainment of aims formerly declared chimerical. -The long effort of struggling humanity resulted in -the free expansion of the individual, in a society completely -satisfied; in man being fully man, and living his life in its -entirety. The happy city was thus realized in the religion -of life; the religion of humanity, freed at length from -dogmas, became in itself all glory and all joy....</p> - -<p>Authority was at an end; the new social system had no -other foundation than the tie of labor accepted as necessary -by all, their law and the object of their worship. A -number of groups adopted the new system, breaking off -from the old groups of builders, dealers in clothing, metal-workers, -artisans, and farm laborers, each group increasing -in number, each different, each making itself essential to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_872" id="Page_872">[872]</a></span> -the rest, and satisfying individual wants as well as the -needs of a community. Nothing impeded any man’s -expansion; a citizen working as a laborer might unite himself -with as many groups as he thought proper....</p> - -<p>And in the city all was love. A pervading sense of love, -increasing, wholesome, purifying, became the perfume and -the sacred flame of daily life. Love, general and universal, -had its birth in youth; then it passed on and became -mother love, father love, filial love; it spread to relations, -to neighbors, to fellow-citizens, to all men upon earth, and -as its waves swept on and became stronger, it seemed to -become a great sea of love, bathing the shores of the whole -earth. Charity—that is, love of one’s neighbors—was -like the fresh air which fills the lungs of all who breathe -it; everywhere there was this feeling of brotherly love; -love alone had proved able to realize the unity men had so -long dreamed of, bringing all into divine harmony. The -human race, at last as well balanced as the planets in their -orbits by the law of attraction, the laws of justice, solidarity, -and love, would go joyfully on its round through the -ages of eternity. Such was the harvest ever renewed and -renewing, the great harvest of tenderness and loving kindness, -that Luc every morning saw growing up around him -in spots where he had sown his seed so bountifully in his -early days. In his whole city, in his school-rooms, in his -work-shops, in each house, and almost in each heart, for -many years he had been sowing the good seed with lavish -hands.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_873" id="Page_873">[873]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>The City of the Sun</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Campanella</span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(A picture of an ideal community written about A.D. 1600 by an -Italian student who was imprisoned for twenty-seven years, and nine -times tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. See page <a href="#Page_438">438</a>)</p></div> - -<p>Love is foremost in attending to the charge of the race. -He sees that men and women are joined together, that -they bring forth the best offspring. Indeed, they laugh at -us who exhibit a studious care for our breed of horses and -dogs, but neglect the breeding of human beings. Thus -the education of children is under his rule. So also is the -medicine that is sold, the sowing and collecting of fruits -of the earth and of trees, agriculture, pasturage, the preparations -for the months, the cooking arrangements, and -whatever has any reference to food, clothing, and the intercourse -of the sexes. Love himself is ruler, but there are -many male and female magistrates dedicated to these arts.</p> - - -<h3>Love in Utopia</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “News from Nowhere”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By William Morris</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_793">793</a>, <a href="#Page_855">855</a>)</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>(A famous English Socialist romance; the dream of a poet made -heartsick by the sights and sounds of a machine civilization, and -yearning for beauty, simplicity, and peace)</p></div> - -<p>“Ah,” said I, “no doubt you wanted to keep them out -of the Divorce Court; but I suppose it often has -to settle such matters?”</p> - -<p>“Then you suppose nonsense,” said he. “I know that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_874" id="Page_874">[874]</a></span> -there used to be such lunatic affairs as divorce courts; -but just consider, all the cases that came into them were -matters of property quarrels; and I think, dear guest, -that though you do come from another planet, you can -see from the mere outside look of our world that quarrel -about private property could not go on among us in our -days.”</p> - -<p>Indeed, my drive from Hammersmith to Bloomsbury, -and all the quiet, happy life I had seen so many hints of, -even apart from my shopping, would have been enough -to tell me that “the sacred rights of property,” as we used -to think of them, were now no more. So I sat silent -while the old man took up the thread of the discourse -again....</p> - -<p>“You must understand once for all that we have changed -these matters; or rather, that our way of looking at them -has changed within the last two hundred years. We do -not deceive ourselves, indeed, or believe that we can get -rid of all the trouble that besets the dealings between the -sexes. We know that we must face the unhappiness that -comes of man and woman confusing the relations between -natural passion and sentiment, and the friendship which, -when things go well, softens the awakening from passing -illusions; but we are not so mad as to pile up degradation -on that unhappiness by engaging in sordid squabbles -about livelihood and position, and the power of tyrannizing -over the children who have been the results of love or -lust.” ...</p> - -<p>He was silent for some time, and I would not interrupt -him. At last he began again: “But you must know that -we of these generations are strong and healthy of body, -and live easily; we pass our lives in reasonable strife -with nature, exercising not one side of ourselves only,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_875" id="Page_875">[875]</a></span> -but all sides, taking the keenest pleasure in all the life -of the world. So it is a point of honor with us not to be -self-centered,—not to suppose that the world must cease -because one man is sorry; therefore we should think it -foolish, or if you will, criminal, to exaggerate these matters -of sentiment and sensibility; we are no more inclined to -eke out our sentimental sorrows than to cherish our -bodily pains; and we recognize that there are other -pleasures besides love-making. You must remember, -also, that we are long-lived, and that therefore beauty -both in man and woman is not so fleeting as it was in the -days when we were burdened so heavily with self-inflicted -diseases. So we shake off these griefs in a way which -perhaps the sentimentalist of other times would think -contemptible and unheroic, but which we think necessary -and manlike. As on the one hand, therefore, we have -ceased to be commercial in our love-matters, so also we -have ceased to be artificially foolish. The folly which -comes by nature, the unwisdom of the immature man, -or the older man caught in a trap, we must put up with -that, nor are we much ashamed of it; but to be conventionally -sensitive or sentimental—my friend, I am old -and perhaps disappointed, but at least I think that we -have cast off <em>some</em> of the follies of the older world.”</p> - - -<h3>Parentage and the State</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By H. G. Wells</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_519">519</a>, <a href="#Page_675">675</a>, <a href="#Page_712">712</a>, <a href="#Page_830">830</a>, <a href="#Page_844">844</a>, <a href="#Page_853">853</a>, <a href="#Page_856">856</a>, <a href="#Page_863">863</a>, <a href="#Page_868">868</a>)</p> - -<p>Parentage rightly undertaken is a service as well -as a duty to the world, carrying with it not only obligations -but a claim, the strongest of claims, upon the -whole community. It must be paid for like any other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_876" id="Page_876">[876]</a></span> -public service; in any completely civilized state it must -be sustained, rewarded, and controlled. And this is to -be done not to supersede the love, pride, and conscience -of the parent, but to supplement, encourage, and maintain -it.</p> - - -<h3>The Deliverance of Woman</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Woman and Labor”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Olive Schreiner</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_240">240</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_502">502</a>, <a href="#Page_579">579</a>)</p> - -<p>Always in our dreams we hear the turn of the key that -shall close the door of the last brothel; the clink of -the last coin that pays for the body and soul of a woman; -the falling of the last wall that encloses artificially the -activity of woman and divides her from man; always we -picture the love of the sexes as once a dull, slow, creeping -worm; then a torpid, earthy chrysalis; at last the full-winged -insect, glorious in the sunshine of the future.</p> - -<p>Today, as we row hard against the stream of life, is it -only blindness in our eyes, which have been too long -strained, which makes us see, far up the river where it -fades into the distance, through all the mists that rise -from the river-banks, a clear, golden light? Is it only a -delusion of the eyes which makes us grasp our oars more -lightly and bend our backs lower; though we know well -that, long before the boat reaches those stretches, other -hands than ours will man the oars and guide its helm? -Is it all a dream?</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_877" id="Page_877">[877]</a></span></p> - - -<h3>She Who Is to Come</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “In This Our World”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Charlotte Perkins Gilman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>, <a href="#Page_662">662</a>, <a href="#Page_820">820</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">A woman—in so far as she beholdeth</div> - <div class="verse indent6">Her one Beloved’s face;</div> - <div class="verse">A mother—with a great heart that enfoldeth</div> - <div class="verse indent6">The children of the Race;</div> - <div class="verse">A body, free and strong, with that high beauty</div> - <div class="verse indent6">That comes of perfect use, is built thereof;</div> - <div class="verse">A mind where Reason ruleth over Duty,</div> - <div class="verse indent6">And Justice reigns with Love;</div> - <div class="verse">A self-poised, royal soul, brave, wise, and tender,</div> - <div class="verse indent6">No longer blind and dumb;</div> - <div class="verse">A Human Being, of an unknown splendor,</div> - <div class="verse indent6">Is she who is to come!</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Woman in Freedom</h3> - -<p class="center">(<cite>From “Love’s Coming of Age”</cite>)</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Edward Carpenter</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_541">541</a>, <a href="#Page_608">608</a>)</p> - -<p>There is no solution except the freedom of woman—which -means of course also the freedom of the masses -of the people, men and women, and the ceasing altogether -of economic slavery. There is no solution which will not -include the redemption of the terms “free woman” and -“free love” to their <em>true</em> and rightful significance. Let<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_878" id="Page_878">[878]</a></span> -every woman whose heart bleeds for the sufferings of her -sex, hasten to declare herself and to constitute herself, -as far as she possibly can, a free woman. Let her accept -the term with all the odium that belongs to it; let her -insist on her right to speak, dress, think, act, and above -all to use her sex, as she deems best; let her face the scorn -and ridicule; let her “lose her own life” if she likes; -assured that only so can come deliverance, and that only -when the free woman is honored will the prostitute cease -to exist. And let every man who really would respect -his counterpart, entreat her also to act so; let him never -by word or deed tempt her to grant as a bargain what can -only be precious as a gift; let him see her with pleasure -stand a little aloof; let him help her to gain her feet; -so at last, by what slight sacrifices on his part such a course -may involve, will it dawn upon him that he has gained a -real companion and helpmate on life’s journey.</p> - - -<h3>The Free Woman</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Walt Whitman</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_578">578</a>, <a href="#Page_726">726</a>, <a href="#Page_835">835</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">She is less guarded than ever, yet more guarded than ever,</div> - <div class="verse">The gross and soil’d she moves among do not make her gross and soiled,</div> - <div class="verse">She knows the thoughts as she passes, nothing is concealed from her,</div> - <div class="verse">She is none the less considerate or friendly therefor,</div> - <div class="verse">She is the best belov’d, it is without exception; she has no reason to fear, and she does not fear.</div> -</div></div></div> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_879" id="Page_879">[879]</a></span></p> - -<h3>The Coming Singer</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By George Sterling</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See pages <a href="#Page_504">504</a>, <a href="#Page_552">552</a>, <a href="#Page_597">597</a>, <a href="#Page_816">816</a>)</p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">The Veil before the mystery of things</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Shall stir for him with iris and with light;</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Chaos shall have no terror in his sight</div> - <div class="verse">Nor earth a bond to chafe his urgent wings;</div> - <div class="verse">With sandals beaten from the crown of kings</div> - <div class="verse indent2">He shall tread down the altars of their night,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">And stand with Silence on her breathless height,</div> - <div class="verse">To hear what song the star of morning sings.</div> -</div><div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">With perished beauty in his hands as clay,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Shall he restore futurity its dream.</div> - <div class="verse">Behold! his feet shall take a heavenly way</div> - <div class="verse indent2">Of choric silver and of chanting fire,</div> - <div class="verse">Till in his hands unshapen planets gleam,</div> - <div class="verse indent2">‘Mid murmurs from the Lion and the Lyre.</div> -</div></div></div> - - -<h3>Thus Spake Zarathustra</h3> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Friedrich Nietzsche</span></p> - -<p class="poemintro">(See page <a href="#Page_779">779</a>)</p> - -<p>When Zarathustra came into the next city, which -lay beside the forest, he found in that place much -people gathered together in the market; for they had been -called that they should see a rope-dancer. And Zarathustra -spoke thus unto the people:</p> - -<p>“<em>I teach ye the Over-man.</em> The man is something who -shall be overcome. What have ye done to overcome him?</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_880" id="Page_880">[880]</a></span></p> - -<p>“All being before this made something beyond itself: -and you will be the ebb of this great flood, and rather go -back to the beast than overcome the man?</p> - -<p>“What is the ape to the man? A mockery or a painful -shame. And even so shall man be to the Over-man: a -mockery or a painful shame.</p> - -<p>“Man is a cord, tied between Beast and Over-man—a -cord above an abyss.</p> - -<p>“A perilous arriving, a perilous traveling, a perilous -looking backward, a perilous trembling and standing still.</p> - -<p>“What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and no -goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-over -and a going-under.</p> - -<p>“I love them that know not how to live, be it even as -those going under, for such are those going across.</p> - -<p>“I love them that are great in scorn, because these are -they that are great in reverence, and arrows of longing -toward the other shore!”</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_881" id="Page_881">[881]</a></span></p> - - - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_882" id="Page_882">[882]</a><br /><a name="Page_883" id="Page_883">[883]</a></span> -<h2><i>Index</i></h2> -</div> - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<h2>Index of Authors</h2> -</div> - - - -<ul class="index"><li class="ifrst">Abercrombie, Lascelles, <a href="#Page_537">537</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Adams, Abigail, <a href="#Page_241">241</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Adams, Francis W. L., <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Adams, Franklin P., <a href="#Page_695">695</a>, <a href="#Page_711">711</a></li> - -<li class="indx">“A.E.” <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_513">513</a>, <a href="#Page_829">829</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Alcaeus, <a href="#Page_440">440</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, <a href="#Page_314">314</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Alfonso the Wise, <a href="#Page_251">251</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Allen, Grant, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_613">613</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Ambrose, St., <a href="#Page_397">397</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Amid, John, <a href="#Page_720">720</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Amos, <a href="#Page_524">524</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Andreyev, Leonid, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Anonymous, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>, <a href="#Page_684">684</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Antiparos, <a href="#Page_198">198</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Arabian, <a href="#Page_475">475</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Archer, William, <a href="#Page_764">764</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Aristophanes, <a href="#Page_442">442</a>, <a href="#Page_449">449</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Aristotle, <a href="#Page_480">480</a>, <a href="#Page_523">523</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Arnold, Matthew, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_744">744</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Augustine, St., <a href="#Page_398">398</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Aurelius, Marcus, <a href="#Page_455">455</a>, <a href="#Page_474">474</a>, <a href="#Page_480">480</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Bacon, Francis, <a href="#Page_480">480</a>, <a href="#Page_603">603</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Barbour, John, <a href="#Page_470">470</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Barker, Elsa, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>, <a href="#Page_731">731</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Barrie, James Matthew, <a href="#Page_31">31</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Basil, St., <a href="#Page_396">396</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Bates, Katharine Lee, <a href="#Page_633">633</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Beals, May, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_533">533</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Bebel, August, <a href="#Page_807">807</a>, <a href="#Page_817">817</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Bellamy, Edward, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_861">861</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Belloc, Hilaire, <a href="#Page_755">755</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Benson, Allan L., <a href="#Page_584">584</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Beranger, Pierre Jean de, <a href="#Page_748">748</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Bergström, Hjalmar, <a href="#Page_107">107</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Berkman, Alexander, <a href="#Page_320">320</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Bismarck, Otto von, <a href="#Page_622">622</a>, <a href="#Page_812">812</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Björkman, Edwin, <a href="#Page_505">505</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Björnson, Björnstjerne, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_339">339</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Blake, William, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_743">743</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Blanc, Louis, <a href="#Page_796">796</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Blatchford, Robert, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>, <a href="#Page_783">783</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Boethius, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Bondareff, T. M., <a href="#Page_414">414</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Braley, Berton, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Brandes, George, <a href="#Page_763">763</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Breshkovsky, Katharine, <a href="#Page_317">317</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Brieux, Eugene, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_644">644</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Browning, Robert, <a href="#Page_753">753</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Bryant, William Cullen, <a href="#Page_231">231</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Buchanan, Robert, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>, <a href="#Page_687">687</a>, <a href="#Page_714">714</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Buddha, <a href="#Page_461">461</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Bunyan, John, <a href="#Page_497">497</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Burke, Edmund, <a href="#Page_229">229</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Burnet, Dana, <a href="#Page_531">531</a>, <a href="#Page_537">537</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Burns, Robert, <a href="#Page_227">227</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Byron, Lord, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>, <a href="#Page_491">491</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Caine, Hall, <a href="#Page_373">373</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Campanella, Tommaso, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>, <a href="#Page_873">873</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Carlyle, Thomas, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_488">488</a>, <a href="#Page_553">553</a>, <a href="#Page_652">652</a>, <a href="#Page_837">837</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Carman, Bliss, <a href="#Page_625">625</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Carpenter, Edward, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_541">541</a>, <a href="#Page_608">608</a>, <a href="#Page_877">877</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Carter, George, <a href="#Page_150">150</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Catherine of Russia, <a href="#Page_561">561</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Cato, <a href="#Page_452">452</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Cervantes, Miguel de, <a href="#Page_578">578</a>, <a href="#Page_692">692</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Chatterton, Thomas, <a href="#Page_777">777</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Chaucer, Geoffrey, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>, <a href="#Page_691">691</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Chesterton, Gilbert K., <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_573">573</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Chinese, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Chrysostom, St., <a href="#Page_398">398</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Churchill, Winston, <a href="#Page_386">386</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Cicero, <a href="#Page_472">472</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Clemens, Samuel L., <a href="#Page_265">265</a>, <a href="#Page_566">566</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Clement of Alexandria, <a href="#Page_396">396</a></li> - -<li class="indx">de Cleyre, Voltairine, <a href="#Page_337">337</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Clough, Arthur Hugh, <a href="#Page_488">488</a>, <a href="#Page_697">697</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Comfort, Will Levington, <a href="#Page_165">165</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Cone, Helen Gray, <a href="#Page_727">727</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Confucius, <a href="#Page_471">471</a>, <a href="#Page_478">478</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Cowper, William, <a href="#Page_557">557</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Crabbe, George, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Crane, Stephen, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_689">689</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Crosby, Ernest Howard, <a href="#Page_394">394</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Cyprian, St., <a href="#Page_396">396</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Dante, <a href="#Page_467">467</a>, <a href="#Page_469">469</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Davidson, John, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_761">761</a>, <a href="#Page_778">778</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Davies, William H., <a href="#Page_577">577</a>, <a href="#Page_650">650</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Debs, Eugene V., <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_345">345</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Defoe, Daniel, <a href="#Page_204">204</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Dehmel, Richard, <a href="#Page_546">546</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Deming, Seymour, <a href="#Page_535">535</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Dickens, Charles, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_655">655</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Dickinson, G. Lowes, <a href="#Page_510">510</a>, <a href="#Page_615">615</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Dobson, Austin, <a href="#Page_571">571</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Dostojevsky, Féodor, <a href="#Page_412">412</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt, <a href="#Page_512">512</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Dunne, Finley Peter, <a href="#Page_683">683</a>, <a href="#Page_692">692</a>, <a href="#Page_698">698</a>, <a href="#Page_706">706</a>, <a href="#Page_709">709</a>, <a href="#Page_711">711</a>, <a href="#Page_718">718</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Eastman, Max, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>, <a href="#Page_762">762</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Ecclesiastes, <a href="#Page_278">278</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Edwards, Albert, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_814">814</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Egyptian, <a href="#Page_446">446</a>, <a href="#Page_457">457</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Elliott, Ebenezer, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Emerson, Ralph Waldo, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_522">522</a>, <a href="#Page_631">631</a>, <a href="#Page_815">815</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Engels, Frederick, <a href="#Page_514">514</a>, <a href="#Page_802">802</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Enoch, <a href="#Page_471">471</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Euripides, <a href="#Page_440">440</a>, <a href="#Page_466">466</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Evans, Florence Wilkinson, <a href="#Page_638">638</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Ezekiel, <a href="#Page_472">472</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Ferrer, Francisco, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_676">676</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, <a href="#Page_629">629</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Fisher, Jacob, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_884" id="Page_884">[884]</a></span></li> - -<li class="indx">Fogazzaro, Antonio, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Fourier, Charles, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_846">846</a></li> - -<li class="indx">France, Anatole, <a href="#Page_681">681</a>, <a href="#Page_703">703</a>, <a href="#Page_720">720</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Frank, Florence Kiper, <a href="#Page_243">243</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Franklin, Benjamin, <a href="#Page_581">581</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Frederick the Great, <a href="#Page_562">562</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Freiligrath, Ferdinand, <a href="#Page_270">270</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Froude, James Anthony, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Galsworthy, John, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Garrison, William Lloyd, <a href="#Page_233">233</a></li> - -<li class="indx">George, Henry, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li> - -<li class="indx">George, W. L., <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_538">538</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Ghent, W. J., <a href="#Page_750">750</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Gibbins, Henry deB., <a href="#Page_647">647</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson, <a href="#Page_739">739</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>, <a href="#Page_662">662</a>, <a href="#Page_820">820</a>, <a href="#Page_877">877</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Giovannitti, Arturo, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a href="#Page_300">300</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Gissing, George, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_767">767</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Gladstone, William Ewart, <a href="#Page_626">626</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a href="#Page_394">394</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Goldman, Emma, <a href="#Page_147">147</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Goldsmith, Oliver, <a href="#Page_604">604</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Gorky, Maxim, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_544">544</a>, <a href="#Page_617">617</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Gray, Thomas, <a href="#Page_190">190</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Greek, <a href="#Page_471">471</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Greeley, Horace, <a href="#Page_128">128</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Gregory, St., <a href="#Page_398">398</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Guiterman, Arthur, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>, <a href="#Page_693">693</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Habakkuk, <a href="#Page_451">451</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hagedorn, Hermann, <a href="#Page_500">500</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Haggai, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hall, Bolton, <a href="#Page_680">680</a>, <a href="#Page_710">710</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hammurabi, <a href="#Page_460">460</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hanford, Ben, <a href="#Page_809">809</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hanna, Paul, <a href="#Page_166">166</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hapgood, Hutchins, <a href="#Page_320">320</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Harris, Frank, <a href="#Page_281">281</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Harrison, Frederic, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hauptmann, Gerhart, <a href="#Page_258">258</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hearn, Lafcadio, <a href="#Page_232">232</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Heine, Heinrich, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_744">744</a>, <a href="#Page_763">763</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Henderson, C. Hanford, <a href="#Page_673">673</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Herrick, Robert (American), <a href="#Page_99">99</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Herrick, Robert (English), <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Herron, George D., <a href="#Page_730">730</a>, <a href="#Page_792">792</a>, <a href="#Page_799">799</a>, <a href="#Page_832">832</a>, <a href="#Page_843">843</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hertzka, Theodor, <a href="#Page_797">797</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Herwegh, Georg, <a href="#Page_67">67</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hesiod, <a href="#Page_465">465</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, <a href="#Page_220">220</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hill, J., <a href="#Page_707">707</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hindoo, <a href="#Page_474">474</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hitopadesa, <a href="#Page_468">468</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hodgson, Ralph, <a href="#Page_511">511</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Homer, <a href="#Page_459">459</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hood, Thomas, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_485">485</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Horace, <a href="#Page_452">452</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hoshi, Kenkō, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Howells, William Dean, <a href="#Page_685">685</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hugo, Victor, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_637">637</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hubbard, Elbert, <a href="#Page_638">638</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hunter, Robert, <a href="#Page_818">818</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Hutchison, Percy Adams, <a href="#Page_371">371</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Ibsen, Henrik, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Icelandic, <a href="#Page_465">465</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Im Bang, <a href="#Page_453">453</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Ingersoll, Robert G., <a href="#Page_264">264</a>, <a href="#Page_602">602</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Irvine, Alexander, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>, <a href="#Page_671">671</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Isaiah, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>, <a href="#Page_464">464</a>, <a href="#Page_473">473</a>, <a href="#Page_839">839</a>, <a href="#Page_845">845</a>, <a href="#Page_847">847</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Isaiah II, <a href="#Page_482">482</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">James, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>, <a href="#Page_454">454</a>, <a href="#Page_865">865</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Japanese, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Jaurès, Jean Leon, <a href="#Page_589">589</a>, <a href="#Page_866">866</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Jefferies, Richard, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Jefferson, Thomas, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_596">596</a>, <a href="#Page_600">600</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Jeremiah, <a href="#Page_449">449</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Jerome, St., <a href="#Page_397">397</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Job, <a href="#Page_452">452</a></li> - -<li class="indx">John, <a href="#Page_386">386</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Johnson, Samuel, <a href="#Page_510">510</a>, <a href="#Page_773">773</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Jones, Ernest, <a href="#Page_686">686</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Jones, Henry Arthur, <a href="#Page_425">425</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Jones, Sir William, <a href="#Page_440">440</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Joseph, Chief, <a href="#Page_583">583</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Kauffman, Reginald Wright, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_601">601</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Kautsky, Karl, <a href="#Page_865">865</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Keats, John, <a href="#Page_102">102</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Keller, Helen, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Kelly, Edmond, <a href="#Page_424">424</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Kemp, Harry, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>, <a href="#Page_551">551</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Khayyam, Omar, <a href="#Page_469">469</a></li> - -<li class="indx">King, Edward, <a href="#Page_331">331</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Kingsley, Charles, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_740">740</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Kipling, Rudyard, <a href="#Page_103">103</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Korolenko, Vladimir G., <a href="#Page_840">840</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Kropotkin, Peter, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>, <a href="#Page_745">745</a>, <a href="#Page_828">828</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Lafargue, Paul, <a href="#Page_197">197</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lamennais, Robert de, <a href="#Page_427">427</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lamszus, Wilhelm, <a href="#Page_562">562</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Landor, Walter Savage, <a href="#Page_614">614</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Langland, William, <a href="#Page_447">447</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lankester, E. Ray, <a href="#Page_835">835</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lassalle, Ferdinand, <a href="#Page_624">624</a>, <a href="#Page_802">802</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lavelaye, Émile de, <a href="#Page_395">395</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lawson, John R., <a href="#Page_524">524</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lecky, William E. H., <a href="#Page_168">168</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lee, Gerald Stanley, <a href="#Page_525">525</a></li> - -<li class="indx">LeGallienne, Richard, <a href="#Page_567">567</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Li Hung Chang, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_689">689</a>, <a href="#Page_702">702</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lincoln, Abraham, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_623">623</a>, <a href="#Page_788">788</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lindsay, Vachel, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>, <a href="#Page_599">599</a>, <a href="#Page_672">672</a>, <a href="#Page_699">699</a>, <a href="#Page_811">811</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lindsey, Ben B., <a href="#Page_640">640</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Linn, Charles Weber, <a href="#Page_56">56</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lippmann, Walter, <a href="#Page_779">779</a>, <a href="#Page_870">870</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lisle, Claude Joseph Rouget de., <a href="#Page_806">806</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lloyd, Henry Demarest, <a href="#Page_827">827</a></li> - -<li class="indx">London, Jack, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_519">519</a>, <a href="#Page_609">609</a>, <a href="#Page_649">649</a>, <a href="#Page_732">732</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth., <a href="#Page_580">580</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lowell, James Russell, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>, <a href="#Page_558">558</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lowrie, Donald, <a href="#Page_145">145</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Lucretius, <a href="#Page_468">468</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Luke, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>, <a href="#Page_385">385</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_885" id="Page_885">[885]</a></span></li> - -<li class="indx">Luther, <a href="#Page_451">451</a>, <a href="#Page_453">453</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">McCarthy, P. F., <a href="#Page_560">560</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Macdonald, George, <a href="#Page_495">495</a></li> - -<li class="indx">MacGill, Patrick, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>, <a href="#Page_725">725</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Mackay, Charles, <a href="#Page_657">657</a>, <a href="#Page_747">747</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Mackaye, James, <a href="#Page_631">631</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Mackaye, Percy, <a href="#Page_561">561</a>, <a href="#Page_572">572</a>, <a href="#Page_582">582</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Machiavelli, Niccolo, <a href="#Page_406">406</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Maeterlinck, Maurice, <a href="#Page_786">786</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Manning, Cardinal, <a href="#Page_192">192</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Manu, <a href="#Page_464">464</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Markham, Edwin, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_842">842</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Martial, <a href="#Page_451">451</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Marx, Karl, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_514">514</a>, <a href="#Page_795">795</a>, <a href="#Page_802">802</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Masefield, John, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Matthew, <a href="#Page_358">358</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Mazzini, Giuseppe, <a href="#Page_790">790</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Mencius, <a href="#Page_455">455</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Micah, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>, <a href="#Page_590">590</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Mill, John Stuart, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Milton, John, <a href="#Page_452">452</a>, <a href="#Page_485">485</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Mirbeau, Octave, <a href="#Page_627">627</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Monro, Harold, <a href="#Page_516">516</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Moody, William Vaughn, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_595">595</a></li> - -<li class="indx">More, Sir Thomas, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_490">490</a>, <a href="#Page_616">616</a>, <a href="#Page_851">851</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Morgan, J. Pierpont, <a href="#Page_515">515</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Morris, William, <a href="#Page_793">793</a>, <a href="#Page_855">855</a>, <a href="#Page_873">873</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Negro, <a href="#Page_470">470</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Neihardt, John G., <a href="#Page_239">239</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Nesbit, Wilbur D., <a href="#Page_679">679</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Nietzsche, Friedrich, <a href="#Page_779">779</a>, <a href="#Page_879">879</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Nintoku, <a href="#Page_475">475</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Nizami, <a href="#Page_448">448</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Noel, T., <a href="#Page_690">690</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Nordau, Max, <a href="#Page_68">68</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Norris, Frank, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Noyes, Alfred, <a href="#Page_575">575</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">O’Higgins, Harvey J., <a href="#Page_640">640</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Oppenheim, James, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li> - -<li class="indx">O’Reilly, John Boyle, <a href="#Page_497">497</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Ō-Shi-O, <a href="#Page_756">756</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Owen, Robert, <a href="#Page_813">813</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Paine, Thomas, <a href="#Page_622">622</a></li> - -<li class="indx">“Paint Creek Miner,” <a href="#Page_277">277</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Pankhurst, E. Sylvia, <a href="#Page_305">305</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Pataud, Émile, <a href="#Page_857">857</a>, <a href="#Page_867">867</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Paul, St., <a href="#Page_811">811</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Philippe, Charles-Louis, <a href="#Page_290">290</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Phillips, David Graham, <a href="#Page_684">684</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Phillips, Wendell, <a href="#Page_271">271</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Plato, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>, <a href="#Page_479">479</a>, <a href="#Page_848">848</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Plutarch, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>, <a href="#Page_439">439</a>, <a href="#Page_476">476</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Poole, Ernest, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Pottier, Eugene, <a href="#Page_800">800</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Pouget, Émile, <a href="#Page_857">857</a>, <a href="#Page_867">867</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Psalms, <a href="#Page_150">150</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Ptah-Hotep, <a href="#Page_465">465</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Rabelais, François, <a href="#Page_700">700</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Raleigh, Walter, <a href="#Page_535">535</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Rauschenbusch, Walter, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>, <a href="#Page_393">393</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Renan, Ernest, <a href="#Page_349">349</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Rimbaud, Arthur, <a href="#Page_654">654</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Rockefeller, John D., <a href="#Page_487">487</a>, <a href="#Page_696">696</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Rolland, Romain, <a href="#Page_757">757</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Roosevelt, Theodore, <a href="#Page_860">860</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Rosenfeld, Morris, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_766">766</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Rosny, Joseph-Henry, <a href="#Page_585">585</a>, <a href="#Page_669">669</a>, <a href="#Page_801">801</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Ross, Edward Alsworth, <a href="#Page_517">517</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Rousseau, Jean Jacques, <a href="#Page_478">478</a>, <a href="#Page_583">583</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Runyon, Damon, <a href="#Page_701">701</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Ruskin, John, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_491">491</a>, <a href="#Page_752">752</a>, <a href="#Page_756">756</a>, <a href="#Page_786">786</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Russell, Charles Edward, <a href="#Page_333">333</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Russell, George W., <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_513">513</a>, <a href="#Page_829">829</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Sadi, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>, <a href="#Page_475">475</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Samuel, <a href="#Page_462">462</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Sandburg, Carl, <a href="#Page_574">574</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Savonarola, <a href="#Page_423">423</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Schoonmaker, Edwin Davies, <a href="#Page_392">392</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Schreiner, Olive, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_502">502</a>, <a href="#Page_579">579</a>, <a href="#Page_876">876</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Scudder, Vida D., <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_785">785</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Service, Robert W., <a href="#Page_51">51</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Shakespeare, William, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_492">492</a>, <a href="#Page_507">507</a>, <a href="#Page_533">533</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Shaw, G. Bernard, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>, <a href="#Page_760">760</a>, <a href="#Page_798">798</a>, <a href="#Page_854">854</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Shelley, Percy Bysshe, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>, <a href="#Page_608">608</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Sinclair, Mary Craig, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Sinclair, Upton, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>, <a href="#Page_776">776</a>, <a href="#Page_803">803</a>, <a href="#Page_836">836</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Skipsey, Joseph, <a href="#Page_662">662</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Solon, <a href="#Page_477">477</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Sophocles, <a href="#Page_466">466</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Southey, Robert, <a href="#Page_73">73</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Spargo, John, <a href="#Page_830">830</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Spencer, Herbert, <a href="#Page_460">460</a>, <a href="#Page_787">787</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Spenser, Edmund, <a href="#Page_493">493</a>, <a href="#Page_775">775</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Spingarn, Joel Elias, <a href="#Page_719">719</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Steffens, Lincoln, <a href="#Page_422">422</a>, <a href="#Page_526">526</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Stephen, Sir Leslie, <a href="#Page_271">271</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Sterling, George, <a href="#Page_504">504</a>, <a href="#Page_552">552</a>, <a href="#Page_597">597</a>, <a href="#Page_816">816</a>, <a href="#Page_879">879</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Stokes, Rose Pastor, <a href="#Page_766">766</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Strindberg, August, <a href="#Page_729">729</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Suttner, Bertha von, <a href="#Page_562">562</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Swift, Jonathan, <a href="#Page_659">659</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Swinburne, Algernon Charles, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_637">637</a>, <a href="#Page_788">788</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Swinton, John, <a href="#Page_754">754</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Symonds, John Addington, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>, <a href="#Page_440">440</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Symons, Arthur, <a href="#Page_171">171</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Taft, William Howard, <a href="#Page_134">134</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Tagore, Rabindranath, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, <a href="#Page_77">77</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Tennyson, Alfred, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_486">486</a>, <a href="#Page_652">652</a>, <a href="#Page_838">838</a>, <a href="#Page_854">854</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Tertullian, <a href="#Page_396">396</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Thackeray, William Makepeace, <a href="#Page_496">496</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Thompson, Francis, <a href="#Page_778">778</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Thoreau, Henry David, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_600">600</a>, <a href="#Page_630">630</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Tichenor, Henry M., <a href="#Page_708">708</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Tolstoy, Leo, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>, <a href="#Page_555">555</a>, <a href="#Page_674">674</a>, <a href="#Page_728">728</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Towne, Charles Hanson, <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Traubel, Horace, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_746">746</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Tressall, Robert, <a href="#Page_663">663</a>, <a href="#Page_821">821</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_886" id="Page_886">[886]</a></span></li> - -<li class="indx">“Tribune,” New York, <a href="#Page_623">623</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Turgénev, Ivan, <a href="#Page_311">311</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Twain, Mark, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>, <a href="#Page_566">566</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Underwood, John Curtis, <a href="#Page_648">648</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Untermeyer, Louis, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>, <a href="#Page_515">515</a>, <a href="#Page_699">699</a>, <a href="#Page_709">709</a>, <a href="#Page_763">763</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Upson, Arthur, <a href="#Page_603">603</a>, <a href="#Page_720">720</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Vaillant, Auguste, <a href="#Page_338">338</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Vandervelde, Émile, <a href="#Page_867">867</a></li> - -<li class="indx">van Eeden, Frederik, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Vaughan, Bernard, <a href="#Page_498">498</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Veblen, Thorstein, <a href="#Page_507">507</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Verhaeren, Émile, <a href="#Page_541">541</a>, <a href="#Page_587">587</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Villon, François, <a href="#Page_683">683</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Virgil, <a href="#Page_466">466</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Voltaire, <a href="#Page_674">674</a>, <a href="#Page_694">694</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Waddell, Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>, <a href="#Page_846">846</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wagner, Richard, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_747">747</a>, <a href="#Page_838">838</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Walling, William English, <a href="#Page_812">812</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wallis, Louis, <a href="#Page_276">276</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wang-An-Shih, <a href="#Page_481">481</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Warbasse, James P., <a href="#Page_831">831</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Ward, C. Osborne, <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Washington, George, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>, <a href="#Page_632">632</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Watson, William, <a href="#Page_614">614</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Webster, Daniel, <a href="#Page_604">604</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wells, H. G., <a href="#Page_519">519</a>, <a href="#Page_675">675</a>, <a href="#Page_712">712</a>, <a href="#Page_830">830</a>, <a href="#Page_844">844</a>, <a href="#Page_853">853</a>, <a href="#Page_856">856</a>, <a href="#Page_863">863</a>, <a href="#Page_868">868</a>, <a href="#Page_875">875</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wharton, Edith, <a href="#Page_500">500</a></li> - -<li class="indx">White, Bouck, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Whiteing, Richard, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_651">651</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Whitlock, Brand, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Whitman, Walt, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_578">578</a>, <a href="#Page_726">726</a>, <a href="#Page_835">835</a>, <a href="#Page_878">878</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Whittier, John Greenleaf, <a href="#Page_593">593</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Widdemer, Margaret, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_670">670</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wilde, Lady, <a href="#Page_211">211</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wilde, Oscar, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_852">852</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wilhelm, Kaiser, <a href="#Page_555">555</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wilson, Woodrow, <a href="#Page_594">594</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wood, Clement, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>, <a href="#Page_523">523</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wordsworth, William, <a href="#Page_181">181</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wupperman, Carlos, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Wyckoff, Walter, <a href="#Page_131">131</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Xenophon, <a href="#Page_469">469</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst">Zangwill, Israel, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_717">717</a></li> - -<li class="indx">Zola, Émile, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_631">631</a>, <a href="#Page_871">871</a></li> -</ul> - - - - -<h2>Index of Titles</h2> - -<ul class="index"> -<li class="indx"><b>Ad Valorem</b>, <i>Ruskin</i>, <a href="#Page_752">752</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Agis</b>, <i>Plutarch</i>, <a href="#Page_432">432</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Alton Locke</b>, <i>Kingsley</i>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_740">740</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Alton Locke’s Song</b>, <i>Kingsley</i>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>A Man’s a Man for a’ That</b>, <i>Burns</i>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>America the Beautiful</b>, <i>Bates</i>, <a href="#Page_633">633</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Anatole France</b>, <i>Brandes</i>, <a href="#Page_763">763</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Ancient Lowly</b>, <i>Ward</i>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Antigone</b>, <i>Sophocles</i>, <a href="#Page_466">466</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Antiquity of Freedom</b>, <i>Bryant</i>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Appeal to the Young</b>, <i>Kropotkin</i>, <a href="#Page_745">745</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Arsenal at Springfield</b>, <i>Longfellow</i>, <a href="#Page_580">580</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>As a Strong Bird</b>, <i>Whitman</i>, <a href="#Page_835">835</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Aurora Leigh</b>, <i>Browning</i>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Babble Machines</b>, <i>Wells</i>, <a href="#Page_712">712</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Bad Shepherds</b>, <i>Mirbeau</i>, <a href="#Page_627">627</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Ballade of Misery and Iron</b>, <i>Carter</i>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Ballad in Blank Verse</b>, <i>Davidson</i>, <a href="#Page_778">778</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Ballad of Dead Girls</b>, <i>Burnet</i>, <a href="#Page_531">531</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Ballad of Kiplingson</b>, <i>Buchanan</i>, <a href="#Page_714">714</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Ballad of Reading Gaol</b>, <i>Wilde</i>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Battle Hymn of the Chinese Revolution</b>, <i>Chinese</i>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Batuschka</b>, <i>Aldrich</i>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Beast</b>, <i>Lindsey and O’Higgins</i>, <a href="#Page_640">640</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Bed of Roses</b>, <i>George</i>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_538">538</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Before a Crucifix</b>, <i>Swinburne</i>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Before Sedan</b>, <i>Dobson</i>, <a href="#Page_571">571</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Beggar’s Complaint</b>, <i>Japanese</i>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Beyond Human Might</b>, <i>Björnson</i>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_339">339</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Biglow Papers</b>, <i>Lowell</i>, <a href="#Page_558">558</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Bomb</b>, <i>Harris</i>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Book of Enoch</b>, <a href="#Page_471">471</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Book of Good Counsels</b>, <i>Sanscrit</i>, <a href="#Page_466">466</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Book of Job</b>, <a href="#Page_452">452</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Book of Proverbs</b>, <a href="#Page_746">746</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Book of Samuel</b>, <a href="#Page_462">462</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Book of Snobs</b>, <i>Thackeray</i>, <a href="#Page_496">496</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Book of The People</b>, <i>Lamennais</i>, <a href="#Page_427">427</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Boston Hymn</b>, <i>Emerson</i>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Bound</b>, <i>Beals</i>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Bread and Roses</b>, <i>Oppenheim</i>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Bread Line</b>, <i>Braley</i>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Breshkovskaya</b>, <i>Barker</i>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Bridge of Sighs</b>, <i>Hood</i>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Bryanism</b>, “<i>Tribune</i>”, <a href="#Page_623">623</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Butcher’s Stall</b>, <i>Verhaeren</i>, <a href="#Page_541">541</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Buttons</b>, <i>Sandburg</i>, <a href="#Page_574">574</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>By-the-Way</b>, <i>MacGill</i>, <a href="#Page_725">725</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Caesar and Cleopatra</b>, <i>Shaw</i>, <a href="#Page_854">854</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Caliban in the Coal Mines</b>, <i>Untermeyer</i>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Call of the Carpenter</b>, <i>White</i>, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Canterbury Tales</b>, <i>Chaucer</i>, <a href="#Page_423">423</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Capital</b>, <i>Marx</i>, <a href="#Page_795">795</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Catechism for Workers</b>, <i>Strindberg</i>, <a href="#Page_729">729</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Chants Communal</b>, <i>Traubel</i>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_746">746</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Charity</b>, <i>Lawson</i>, <a href="#Page_524">524</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Child Labor</b>, <i>Gilman</i>, <a href="#Page_662">662</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Children of the Dead End</b>, <i>MacGill</i>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_406">406</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Children of the Ghetto</b>, <i>Zangwill</i>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Children of the Poor</b>, <i>Hugo</i>, <a href="#Page_637">637</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Children’s Auction</b>, <i>Mackay</i>, <a href="#Page_657">657</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Chillon</b>, <i>Byron</i>, <a href="#Page_340">340</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Christian Church, Early</b>, <a href="#Page_396">396</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Christianity and the Social Crisis</b>, <i>Rauschenbusch</i>, <a href="#Page_346">346</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Church and the Workers</b>, <i>Rauschenbusch</i>, <a href="#Page_393">393</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>City of the Sun</b>, <i>Campanella</i>, <a href="#Page_873">873</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Code of Hammurabi</b>, <a href="#Page_460">460</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Collection</b>, <i>Crosby</i>, <a href="#Page_394">394</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Collectivism and Industrial Evolution</b>, <i>Vandervelde</i>, <a href="#Page_867">867</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Coming of War</b>, <i>Tolstoy</i>, <a href="#Page_555">555</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Coming Singer</b>, <i>Sterling</i>, <a href="#Page_879">879</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Communist Manifesto</b>, <i>Marx and Engels</i>, <a href="#Page_514">514</a>, <a href="#Page_802">802</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Complaint to My Empty Purse</b>, <i>Chaucer</i>, <a href="#Page_691">691</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Comrade Yetta</b>, <i>Edwards</i>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_814">814</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court</b>, <i>Twain</i>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Consecration</b>, <i>Masefield</i>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Conventional Lies of Our Civilization</b>, <i>Nordau</i>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Convivio</b>, <i>Dante</i>, <a href="#Page_467">467</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Co-operation and Nationality</b>, <i>Russell</i>, <a href="#Page_513">513</a>, <a href="#Page_829">829</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Crowds</b>, <i>Lee</i>, <a href="#Page_525">525</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Crown of Wild Olive</b>, <i>Ruskin</i>, <a href="#Page_491">491</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Crusaders</b>, <i>Waddell</i>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Cry from the Ghetto</b>, <i>Rosenfeld</i>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Cry of the Children</b>, <i>Browning</i>, <a href="#Page_644">644</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Cry of the People</b>, <i>Neihardt</i>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Dauber</b>, <i>Masefield</i>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Dawn</b>, <i>Verhaeren</i>, <a href="#Page_587">587</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Dead to the Living</b>, <i>Freiligrath</i>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Death and the Child</b>, <i>Crane</i>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>December 31st</b>, <i>Abercrombie</i>, <a href="#Page_537">537</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Democratic Vistas</b>, <i>Whitman</i>, <a href="#Page_726">726</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Deserted Village</b>, <i>Goldsmith</i>, <a href="#Page_604">604</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Desire of Nations</b>, <i>Markham</i>, <a href="#Page_842">842</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Despair</b>, <i>Lady Wilde</i>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Deuteronomy</b>, <a href="#Page_477">477</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Dinner à la Tango</b>, <i>Björkman</i>, <a href="#Page_505">505</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Diomedes the Pirate</b>, <i>Villon</i>, <a href="#Page_683">683</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Dipsychus</b>, <i>Clough</i>, <a href="#Page_488">488</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Discourse on the Origin of Inequality</b>, <i>Rousseau</i>, <a href="#Page_478">478</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Doll’s House</b>, <i>Ibsen</i>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_888" id="Page_888">[888]</a></span></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Dooley, Mr.</b>, <a href="#Page_683">683</a>, <a href="#Page_692">692</a>, <a href="#Page_698">698</a>, <a href="#Page_706">706</a>, <a href="#Page_709">709</a>, <a href="#Page_711">711</a>, <a href="#Page_718">718</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Don Juan</b>, <i>Byron</i>, <a href="#Page_491">491</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Don Quixote</b>, <i>Cervantes</i>, <a href="#Page_578">578</a>, <a href="#Page_692">692</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Doubt</b>, <i>Mackaye</i>, <a href="#Page_572">572</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Duties of Man</b>, <i>Mazzini</i>, <a href="#Page_790">790</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Duty of Civil Disobedience</b>, <i>Thoreau</i>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_600">600</a>, <a href="#Page_630">630</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Dying Boss</b>, <i>Steffens</i>, <a href="#Page_526">526</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Eagle That Is Forgotten</b>, <i>Lindsay</i>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Early Church</b>, <a href="#Page_396">396</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Easter Children</b>, <i>Barker</i>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Ecclesiastes</b>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>, <a href="#Page_488">488</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Ecclesiasticus</b>, <a href="#Page_690">690</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Edda</b>, <a href="#Page_463">463</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard</b>, <i>Gray</i>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Eloquent Peasant</b>, <i>Egyptian</i>, <a href="#Page_457">457</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>England in 1819</b>, <i>Shelley</i>, <a href="#Page_608">608</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Essay on Liberty</b>, <i>Mill</i>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Europe</b>, <i>Whitman</i>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Exit Salvatore</b>, <i>Wood</i>, <a href="#Page_409">409</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Exodus</b>, <a href="#Page_437">437</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Factories</b>, <i>Widdemer</i>, <a href="#Page_670">670</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Faerie Queene</b>, <i>Spenser</i>, <a href="#Page_493">493</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Farewell Address</b>, <i>Washington</i>, <a href="#Page_632">632</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe</b>, <i>Defoe</i>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Fifth Avenue, 1915</b>, <i>Hagedorn</i>, <a href="#Page_500">500</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Fires</b>, <i>Gibson</i>, <a href="#Page_739">739</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>First Machine</b>, <i>Antiparos</i>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Fleet Street Eclogues</b>, <i>Davidson</i>, <a href="#Page_761">761</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Flower Factory</b>, <i>Evans</i>, <a href="#Page_638">638</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Fomá Gordyéeff</b>, <i>Gorky</i>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_544">544</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>For Hire</b>, <i>Rosenthal</i>, <a href="#Page_766">766</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>For Lyric Labor</b>, <i>Waddell</i>, <a href="#Page_846">846</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>For the other <a href="#Page_364">364</a> Days</b>, <i>Adams</i>, <a href="#Page_695">695</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Fredome</b>, <i>Barbour</i>, <a href="#Page_470">470</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Freebooter’s Prayer</b>, <i>Guiterman</i>, <a href="#Page_693">693</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Freedom</b>, <i>Lowell</i>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Frogs</b>, <i>Aristophanes</i>, <a href="#Page_449">449</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>From Revolution to Revolution</b>, <i>Herron</i>, <a href="#Page_792">792</a>, <a href="#Page_799">799</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>From the Bottom Up</b>, <i>Irvine</i>, <a href="#Page_385">385</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Furred Law-Cats</b>, <i>Rabelais</i>, <a href="#Page_700">700</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Gentleman Inside</b>, <i>Runyon</i>, <a href="#Page_701">701</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Girl Strike-Leader</b>, <i>Frank</i>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Gitanjali</b>, <i>Tagore</i>, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Gloucester Moors</b>, <i>Moody</i>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>God and My Neighbor</b>, <i>Blatchford</i>, <a href="#Page_383">383</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>God and the Strong Ones</b>, <i>Widdemer</i>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Gospel of Buddha</b>, <a href="#Page_461">461</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Happiness of Nations</b>, <i>Mackaye</i>, <a href="#Page_631">631</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Happy Humanity</b>, <i>Van Eeden</i>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Harbor</b>, <i>Poole</i>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Heirs of Time</b>, <i>Higginson</i>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Heloise sans Abelard</b>, <i>Spingarn</i>, <a href="#Page_719">719</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>History of European Morals</b>, <i>Lecky</i>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Hitopadesa</b>, <i>Hindu</i>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Hong’s Experiences in Hades</b>, <i>Im Bang</i>, <a href="#Page_453">453</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>House of Bondage</b>, <i>Kauffman</i>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_601">601</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>House of Mirth</b>, <i>Wharton</i>, <a href="#Page_500">500</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Human Slaughter-House</b>, <i>Lamszus</i>, <a href="#Page_562">562</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Hymn</b>, <i>Chesterton</i>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Ibsen</b>, <a href="#Page_764">764</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Illusion of War</b>, <i>Le Gallienne</i>, <a href="#Page_567">567</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Image in the Forum</b>, <i>Buchanan</i>, <a href="#Page_367">367</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Impressions</b>, <i>Monro</i>, <a href="#Page_516">516</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>In Bohemia</b>, <i>O’Reilly</i>, <a href="#Page_497">497</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Incentives</b>, <i>Fourier</i>, <a href="#Page_846">846</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Industrial History of England</b>, <i>Gibbins</i>, <a href="#Page_647">647</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>In Memoriam</b>, <i>Tennyson</i>, <a href="#Page_838">838</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Inside of the Cup</b>, <i>Churchill</i>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Insouciance in Storm</b>, <i>Kemp</i>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Instructions of Ptah-Hotep</b>, <a href="#Page_465">465</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Internationale</b>, <i>Pottier</i>, <a href="#Page_800">800</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>In the Days of the Comet</b>, <i>Wells</i>, <a href="#Page_853">853</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>In the Market-Place</b>, <i>Sterling</i>, <a href="#Page_504">504</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>In the Shadows</b>, <i>Upson</i>, <a href="#Page_720">720</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>In the Strand</b>, <i>Symons</i>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>In Trafalgar Square</b>, <i>Adams</i>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Isabella</b>, <i>Keats</i>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>I Sing the Battle</b>, <i>Kemp</i>, <a href="#Page_551">551</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Jean-Christophe</b>, <i>Rolland</i>, <a href="#Page_757">757</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Jesus</b>, <i>Debs</i>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Jesus</b>, <i>Renan</i>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Jimmie Higgins</b>, <i>Hanford</i>, <a href="#Page_809">809</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Journalism</b>, <i>Swinton</i>, <a href="#Page_754">754</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Journal of Arthur Stirling</b>, <i>Sinclair</i> <a href="#Page_776">776</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Jungle</b>, <i>Sinclair</i>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_803">803</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Kingdom of Man</b>, <i>Lankester</i>, <a href="#Page_835">835</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>King Hunger</b>, <i>Andreyev</i>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Koran</b>, <a href="#Page_475">475</a>, <a href="#Page_479">479</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Kruppism</b>, <i>Mackaye</i>, <a href="#Page_561">561</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Labor</b>, <i>Anonymous</i>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Labor</b>, <i>Zola</i>, <a href="#Page_871">871</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Labor and Capital Are One</b>, <i>Hall</i>, <a href="#Page_710">710</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Lady Poverty</b>, <i>Fisher</i>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Land Titles</b>, <i>Spencer</i>, <a href="#Page_787">787</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Last Verses</b>, <i>Chatterton</i>, <a href="#Page_777">777</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Last Word</b>, <i>Arnold</i>, <a href="#Page_744">744</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Latest Decalogue</b>, <i>Clough</i>, <a href="#Page_697">697</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Laws of Social Evolution</b>, <i>Hertzka</i>, <a href="#Page_797">797</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Lawyer and the Farmer</b>, <i>Egyptian</i>, <a href="#Page_446">446</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Lay Down Your Arms</b>, <i>von Suttner</i>, <a href="#Page_568">568</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Lay Sermon to Preachers</b>, <i>Jones</i>, <a href="#Page_425">425</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Lazarus</b>, <i>Anonymous</i>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Leaden-Eyed</b>, <i>Lindsay</i>, <a href="#Page_672">672</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Leisure Classes</b>, <i>Anonymous</i>, <a href="#Page_684">684</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Letters from a Chinese Official</b>, <i>Dickinson</i>, <a href="#Page_510">510</a>, <a href="#Page_615">615</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Letter to Chesterfield</b>, <i>Johnson</i>, <a href="#Page_773">773</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Let the People Vote on War</b>, <i>Benson</i>, <a href="#Page_584">584</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Leviticus</b>, <a href="#Page_477">477</a>, <a href="#Page_852">852</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Liberator</b>, <i>Garrison</i>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Life for a Life</b>, <i>Herrick</i>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_889" id="Page_889">[889]</a></span></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Light Upon Waldheim</b>, <i>de Cleyre</i>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Lincoln-Douglas Debates</b>, <i>Lincoln</i> <a href="#Page_234">234</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Lines</b>, <i>Crane</i>, <a href="#Page_689">689</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Lines to a Pomeranian Puppy</b>, <i>Untermeyer</i>, <a href="#Page_709">709</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Locksley Hall Fifty Years After</b>, <i>Tennyson</i>, <a href="#Page_652">652</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>London</b>, <i>Blake</i>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>London</b>, <i>Heine</i>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Looking Backward</b>, <i>Bellamy</i>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_861">861</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Lost Leader</b>, <i>Browning</i>, <a href="#Page_753">753</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Lotus Eaters</b>, <i>Tennyson</i>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Love’s Coming of Age</b>, <i>Carpenter</i>, <a href="#Page_541">541</a>, <a href="#Page_877">877</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Lynggaard & Co.</b>, <i>Bergström</i>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Major Barbara</b>, <i>Shaw</i>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Makar’s Dream</b>, <i>Korolenko</i>, <a href="#Page_840">840</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Mammon Marriage</b>, <i>MacDonald</i>, <a href="#Page_495">495</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Man Forbid</b>, <i>Davidson</i>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Manhattan</b>, <i>Towne</i>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Man’s World</b>, <i>Edwards</i>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Man the Reformer</b>, <i>Emerson</i>, <a href="#Page_522">522</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Man Under the Stone</b>, <i>Markham</i>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Man With the Hoe</b>, <i>Markham</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Marching Song</b>, <i>Swinburne</i>, <a href="#Page_788">788</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>March of the Workers</b>, <i>Morris</i>, <a href="#Page_793">793</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Marseillaise</b>, <i>de Lisle</i>, <a href="#Page_806">806</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Mask of Anarchy</b>, <i>Shelley</i>, <a href="#Page_272">272</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Measure of the Hours</b>, <i>Maeterlinck</i>, <a href="#Page_786">786</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Medea</b>, <i>Euripides</i>, <a href="#Page_466">466</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Memoirs</b>, <i>Li Hung Chang</i>, <a href="#Page_689">689</a>, <a href="#Page_702">702</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Memoirs of a Revolutionist</b>, <i>Kropotkin</i>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Menagerie</b>, <i>Sinclair</i>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Merrie England</b>, <i>Blatchford</i>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_783">783</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Midnight Lunch Room</b>, <i>Barker</i>, <a href="#Page_731">731</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Midstream</b>, <i>Comfort</i>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Mill Children</b>, <i>Underwood</i>, <a href="#Page_648">648</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Miner’s Tale</b>, <i>Beals</i>, <a href="#Page_533">533</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Miserables, Les</b>, <i>Hugo</i>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Miss Kilmansegg</b>, <i>Hood</i>, <a href="#Page_485">485</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Moderation</b>, <i>Hearn</i>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Modern Utopia</b>, <i>Wells</i>, <a href="#Page_844">844</a>, <a href="#Page_856">856</a>, <a href="#Page_863">863</a>, <a href="#Page_868">868</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Modest Proposal</b>, <i>Swift</i>, <a href="#Page_659">659</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Monthly Rent</b>, <i>Hall</i>, <a href="#Page_680">680</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Mother Hubbard’s Tale</b>, <i>Spenser</i>, <a href="#Page_775">775</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Mother Wept</b>, <i>Skipsey</i>, <a href="#Page_662">662</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Motley</b>, <i>Galsworthy</i>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Mutual Aid</b>, <i>Kropotkin</i>, <a href="#Page_828">828</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>My Lady of the Chimney-Corner</b>, <i>Irvine</i>, <a href="#Page_671">671</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>My Life</b>, <i>Bebel</i>, <a href="#Page_807">807</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>My Life in Prison</b>, <i>Lowrie</i>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>My Religion</b>, <i>Tolstoy</i>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>New Grub Street</b>, <i>Gissing</i>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_767">767</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>New Nationalism</b>, <i>Roosevelt</i>, <a href="#Page_860">860</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>New Rome</b>, <i>Buchanan</i>, <a href="#Page_412">412</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>News from Nowhere</b>, <i>Morris</i>, <a href="#Page_855">855</a>, <a href="#Page_873">873</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>New Worlds for Old</b>, <i>Wells</i>, <a href="#Page_675">675</a>, <a href="#Page_830">830</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Night’s Lodging</b>, <i>Gorky</i>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>No. <a href="#Page_5">5</a> John Street</b>, <i>Whiteing</i>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_651">651</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>No Enemies</b>, <i>Mackay</i>, <a href="#Page_747">747</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Northern Farmer: New Style</b>, <i>Tennyson</i>, <a href="#Page_486">486</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Not Guilty</b>, <i>Blatchford</i>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Octopus</b>, <i>Norris</i>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Ode in Time of Hesitation</b>, <i>Moody</i>, <a href="#Page_595">595</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Oh, Freedom</b>, <i>Negro</i>, <a href="#Page_470">470</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Old Suffragist</b>, <i>Widdemer</i>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Oliver Twist</b>, <i>Dickens</i>, <a href="#Page_655">655</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>On a Steamship</b>, <i>Sinclair</i>, <a href="#Page_836">836</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Open Letter to the Employers</b>, <i>Russell</i>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Organization of Labor</b>, <i>Blanc</i>, <a href="#Page_796">796</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Our Country</b>, <i>Whittier</i>, <a href="#Page_593">593</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Out of the Dark</b>, <i>Keller</i>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Panama-Pacific Ode</b>, <i>Sterling</i>, <a href="#Page_816">816</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Pantagruel</b>, <i>Rabelais</i>, <a href="#Page_700">700</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Parable</b>, <i>Lowell</i>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Paradise Lost</b>, <i>Milton</i>, <a href="#Page_485">485</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Paris</b>, <i>Zola</i>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_631">631</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Parish Workhouse</b>, <i>Crabbe</i>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Past and Present</b>, <i>Carlyle</i>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_488">488</a>, <a href="#Page_652">652</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Pauper’s Drive</b>, <i>Noel</i>, <a href="#Page_690">690</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Pay Envelopes</b>, <i>Oppenheim</i>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Penguin Island</b>, <i>France</i>, <a href="#Page_681">681</a>, <a href="#Page_703">703</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>People</b>, <i>Campanella</i>, <a href="#Page_438">438</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>People of the Abyss</b>, <i>London</i>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_631">631</a>, <a href="#Page_649">649</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>People’s Anthem</b>, <i>Elliott</i>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Père Perdrix</b>, <i>Philippe</i>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Pilgrim’s Progress</b>, <i>Bunyan</i>, <a href="#Page_497">497</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Pittsburgh</b>, <i>Oppenheim</i>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Played Out</b>, <i>MacGill</i>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Plutus</b>, <i>Aristophanes</i>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Political Violence</b>, <i>Anonymous</i>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Politics</b>, <i>Aristotle</i>, <a href="#Page_523">523</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Portrait of an American</b>, <i>Untermeyer</i>, <a href="#Page_515">515</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Portrait of a Supreme Court Judge</b>, <i>Untermeyer</i>, <a href="#Page_699">699</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Poverty</b>, <i>Alcaeus</i>, <a href="#Page_440">440</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Prayer of the Peoples</b>, <i>Mackaye</i>, <a href="#Page_582">582</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Preacher</b>, <i>Chaucer</i>, <a href="#Page_423">423</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Preacher and the Slave</b>, <i>Hill</i>, <a href="#Page_707">707</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Preface to Politics</b>, <i>Lippmann</i>, <a href="#Page_779">779</a>, <a href="#Page_870">870</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Priest and the Devil</b>, <i>Dostoyevsky</i>, <a href="#Page_412">412</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Priests</b>, <i>Oppenheim</i>, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Prince</b>, <i>Machiavelli</i>, <a href="#Page_406">406</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Prince Hagen</b>, <i>Sinclair</i>, <a href="#Page_403">403</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist</b>, <i>Berkman</i>, <a href="#Page_320">320</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Prisons</b>, <i>Goldman</i>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Problem Play</b>, <i>Shaw</i>, <a href="#Page_760">760</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Progress and Poverty</b>, <i>George</i>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Progress in Medicine</b>, <i>Warbasse</i>, <a href="#Page_831">831</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Progressivism and After</b>, <i>Walling</i>, <a href="#Page_812">812</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Project for a Perpetual Peace</b>, <i>Rousseau</i>, <a href="#Page_583">583</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Prophetic Book Milton</b>, <i>Blake</i>, <a href="#Page_743">743</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Proverbs</b>, <a href="#Page_746">746</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Psalms</b>, <a href="#Page_479">479</a>, <a href="#Page_481">481</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Quest</b>, <i>van Eeden</i>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists</b>, <i>Tressall</i>, <a href="#Page_663">663</a>, <a href="#Page_821">821</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_890" id="Page_890">[890]</a></span></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Random Reminiscences</b>, <i>Rockefeller</i>, <a href="#Page_696">696</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Rebel</b>, <i>Belloc</i>, <a href="#Page_755">755</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Red Robe</b>, <i>Brieux</i>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Red Wave</b>, <i>Rosny</i>, <a href="#Page_585">585</a>, <a href="#Page_669">669</a>, <a href="#Page_801">801</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Refusal</b>, <i>Beranger</i>, <a href="#Page_748">748</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Reign of Gilt</b>, <i>Phillips</i>, <a href="#Page_684">684</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Reluctant Briber</b>, <i>Steffens</i>, <a href="#Page_422">422</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Republic</b>, <i>Plato</i>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>, <a href="#Page_479">479</a>, <a href="#Page_848">848</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Reserved Section</b>, <i>Nesbit</i>, <a href="#Page_679">679</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Resurrection</b>, <i>Tolstoy</i>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_416">416</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Revolution</b>, <i>London</i>, <a href="#Page_732">732</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Revolution</b>, <i>Wagner</i>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_747">747</a>, <a href="#Page_838">838</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Revolution in the Mind</b>, <i>Owen</i>, <a href="#Page_813">813</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Revolutionist</b>, <i>Turgenev</i>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Riches</b>, <i>Bacon</i>, <a href="#Page_480">480</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Rights of Labor</b>, <i>Lincoln</i>, <a href="#Page_788">788</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Rights of Man</b>, <i>Paine</i>, <a href="#Page_622">622</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Right to Be Lazy</b>, <i>Lafargue</i>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Romance</b>, <i>Deming</i>, <a href="#Page_535">535</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Rough Rider</b>, <i>Carman</i>, <a href="#Page_625">625</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Sad Sight of the Hungry</b>, <i>Li Hung Chang</i>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Saint</b>, <i>Fogazzaro</i>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Sartor Resartus</b>, <i>Carlyle</i>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_553">553</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Savva</b>, <i>Andreyev</i>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Sayings of Mencius</b>, <a href="#Page_455">455</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Seven That Were Hanged</b>, <i>Andreyev</i>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>She-ching</b>, <i>Chinese</i>, <a href="#Page_463">463</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>She Who Is to Come</b>, <i>Gilman</i>, <a href="#Page_877">877</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Sign of the Son of Man</b>, <i>Scudder</i>, <a href="#Page_785">785</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Sin and Society</b>, <i>Ross</i>, <a href="#Page_517">517</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Sins of Society</b>, <i>Vaughan</i>, <a href="#Page_498">498</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Sisterhood</b>, <i>Sinclair</i>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Sisters of the Cross of Shame</b>, <i>Burnet</i>, <a href="#Page_537">537</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Slavery</b>, <i>Cowper</i>, <a href="#Page_557">557</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Slum Children</b>, <i>Davies</i>, <a href="#Page_650">650</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Social Ideals</b>, <i>Scudder</i>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Socialism and Motherhood</b>, <i>Spargo</i>, <a href="#Page_830">830</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Social Revolution and After</b>, <i>Kautsky</i>, <a href="#Page_865">865</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Sociological Study of the Bible</b>, <i>Wallis</i>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Soldier’s Oath</b>, <i>Kaiser Wilhelm</i>, <a href="#Page_555">555</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Solon</b>, <i>Plutarch</i>, <a href="#Page_476">476</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Song of the Exposition</b>, <i>Whitman</i>, <a href="#Page_578">578</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Song of the Lower Classes</b>, <i>Jones</i>, <a href="#Page_686">686</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Song of the Shirt</b>, <i>Hood</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Song of the Wage Slave</b>, <i>Service</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Sons of Martha</b>, <i>Kipling</i>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Soul of Man Under Socialism</b>, <i>Wilde</i>, <a href="#Page_852">852</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Soul’s Errand</b>, <i>Raleigh</i>, <a href="#Page_535">535</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Souls of Black Folk</b>, <i>Du Bois</i>, <a href="#Page_512">512</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>South-Sea Islander</b>, <i>Adams</i>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Springtime of Peace</b>, <i>Jaurès</i>, <a href="#Page_589">589</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Statue of Liberty</b>, <i>Upson</i>, <a href="#Page_603">603</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Straight Road</b>, <i>Hanna</i>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Studies in Socialism</b>, <i>Jaurès</i>, <a href="#Page_589">589</a>, <a href="#Page_866">866</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Stupidity Street</b>, <i>Hodgson</i>, <a href="#Page_511">511</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Subjection of Women</b>, <i>Mill</i>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Suffragette</b>, <i>Pankhurst</i>, <a href="#Page_305">305</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Sunday</b>, <i>Untermeyer</i>, <a href="#Page_418">418</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Swordless Christ</b>, <i>Hutchison</i>, <a href="#Page_371">371</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth</b>, <i>Pataud and Pouget</i>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Tail of the World</b>, <i>Amid</i>, <a href="#Page_720">720</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Tainted Wealth</b>, <i>Goethe</i>, <a href="#Page_394">394</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Tale of Two Cities</b>, <i>Dickens</i>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Tales of Two Countries</b>, <i>Gorky</i>, <a href="#Page_617">617</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Theory of the Leisure Class</b>, <i>Veblen</i>, <a href="#Page_507">507</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>These Shifting Scenes</b>, <i>Russell</i>, <a href="#Page_333">333</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Thus Spake Zarathustra</b>, <i>Nietzsche</i>, <a href="#Page_779">779</a>, <a href="#Page_879">879</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Tiberius Gracchus</b>, <i>Plutarch</i>, <a href="#Page_439">439</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>To a Bourgeois Litterateur</b>, <i>Eastman</i>, <a href="#Page_762">762</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>To a Certain Rich Young Ruler</b>, <i>Wood</i>, <a href="#Page_523">523</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire</b>, <i>Whitman</i>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>To a Nine-inch Gun</b>, <i>McCarthy</i>, <a href="#Page_560">560</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Today</b>, <i>Cone</i>, <a href="#Page_727">727</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>To Labor</b>, <i>Gilman</i>, <a href="#Page_820">820</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>To the Retainers</b>, <i>Ghent</i>, <a href="#Page_750">750</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Tom Dunstan</b>, <i>Buchanan</i>, <a href="#Page_687">687</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Tonight</b>, <i>Wupperman</i>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Tono-Bungay</b>, <i>Wells</i>, <a href="#Page_519">519</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>To the “Christians,”</b> <i>Adams</i>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>To the Goddess of Liberty</b>, <i>Sterling</i>, <a href="#Page_597">597</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>To the Preacher</b>, <i>Gilman</i>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>To the United States Senate</b>, <i>Lindsay</i>, <a href="#Page_599">599</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Towards Democracy</b>, <i>Carpenter</i>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Tramp’s Confession</b>, <i>Kemp</i>, <a href="#Page_351">351</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Traveler from Altruria</b>, <i>Howells</i>, <a href="#Page_685">685</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Trinity Church</b>, <i>Schoonmaker</i>, <a href="#Page_392">392</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>True Imperialism</b>, <i>Watson</i>, <a href="#Page_614">614</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Turn of the Balance</b>, <i>Whitlock</i>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Twentieth Century Socialism</b>, <i>Kelly</i>, <a href="#Page_424">424</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Two Songs</b>, <i>Blake</i>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Utopia</b>, <i>More</i>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_490">490</a>, <a href="#Page_616">616</a>, <a href="#Page_851">851</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Vanity Fair</b>, <i>Bunyan</i>, <a href="#Page_497">497</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Vanity of Human Wishes</b>, <i>Johnson</i>, <a href="#Page_510">510</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Veins of Wealth</b>, <i>Ruskin</i>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Venus Pandemos</b>, <i>Dehmel</i>, <a href="#Page_546">546</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Victorian Age</b>, <i>Carpenter</i>, <a href="#Page_603">603</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Village</b>, <i>Crabbe</i>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Vindication of Natural Society</b>, <i>Burke</i>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Violence and the Labor Movement</b>, <i>Hunter</i>, <a href="#Page_818">818</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Vision of Piers Plowman</b>, <i>Langland</i>, <a href="#Page_447">447</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Waifs and Strays</b>, <i>Rimbaud</i>, <a href="#Page_654">654</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Walker</b>, <i>Giovannitti</i>, <a href="#Page_300">300</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>War</b>, <i>Chief Joseph</i>, <a href="#Page_583">583</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>War</b>, <i>Davies</i>, <a href="#Page_577">577</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>War</b>, <i>Sterling</i>, <a href="#Page_552">552</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_891" id="Page_891">[891]</a></span></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>War and Peace</b>, <i>Franklin</i>, <a href="#Page_581">581</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Warning</b>, <i>Heine</i>, <a href="#Page_763">763</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>War Prayer</b>, <i>Twain</i>, <a href="#Page_566">566</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Wat Tyler</b>, <i>Southey</i>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Wealth Against Commonwealth</b>, <i>Lloyd</i>, <a href="#Page_827">827</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Weavers</b>, <i>Hauptmann</i>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Weavers</b>, <i>Heine</i>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>What Is Art?</b> <i>Tolstoy</i>, <a href="#Page_728">728</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>What Is It To Be Educated?</b> <i>Henderson</i>, <a href="#Page_673">673</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>What Life Means to Me</b>, <i>London</i>, <a href="#Page_732">732</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>What Meaneth a Tyrant</b>, <i>Alfonso the Wise</i>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>What the Moon Saw</b>, <i>Lindsay</i>, <a href="#Page_699">699</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>What To Do</b>, <i>Tolstoy</i>, <a href="#Page_674">674</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>When the Leaves Come Out</b>, <i>Paint Creek Miner</i>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>When the Sleeper Wakes</b>, <i>Wells</i>, <a href="#Page_712">712</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket</b>, <i>Lindsay</i>, <a href="#Page_811">811</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Why the Socialist Party Is Growing</b>, <i>Adams</i>, <a href="#Page_711">711</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Wife of Flanders</b>, <i>Chesterton</i>, <a href="#Page_573">573</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Will of Francisco Ferrer</b>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Wine Press</b>, <i>Noyes</i>, <a href="#Page_575">575</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Wolf at the Door</b>, <i>Gilman</i>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Woman</b>, <i>Bebel</i>, <a href="#Page_817">817</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Woman and Labor</b>, <i>Schreiner</i>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>, <a href="#Page_502">502</a>, <a href="#Page_579">579</a>, <a href="#Page_876">876</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Woman’s Execution</b>, <i>King</i>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Women and Economics</b>, <i>Gilman</i>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Work According to the Bible</b>, <i>Bondareff</i>, <a href="#Page_414">414</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Work and Pray</b>, <i>Herwegh</i>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Workers</b>, <i>Wyckoff</i>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Work for All but Father</b>, <i>Tichenor</i>, <a href="#Page_708">708</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Workingman’s Program</b>, <i>Lassalle</i>, <a href="#Page_802">802</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>World’s Way</b>, <i>Shakespeare</i>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Written in London, September, 1802</b>, <i>Wordsworth</i>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a></li> - -<li class="indx"><b>Wrongfulness of Riches</b>, <i>Allen</i>, <a href="#Page_613">613</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Yeast</b>, <i>Kingsley</i>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a></li> - - -<li class="ifrst"><b>Zadig</b>, <i>Voltaire</i>, <a href="#Page_674">674</a>, <a href="#Page_694">694</a></li> -</ul> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<h2><i>Books by</i> UPTON SINCLAIR</h2> -</div> - - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">Mammonart</span>,” an economic interpretation of literature and the -arts. $2 cloth, $1 paper.</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">The Goose-step</span>,” a study of the American colleges. $2 cloth, -$1 paper.</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">The Goslings</span>,” a study of the American schools. $2 cloth, -$1 paper. 3 copies of any of the above books, cloth, $4, -paper $2.</p></div> - -<p><i>The following at $1.50 cloth, $1 paper</i>:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">Manassas</span>,” called by Jack London, “the best Civil War book -I’ve read.”</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">The Metropolis</span>,” a picture of the “Four Hundred” of New York.</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">The Journal of Arthur Stirling</span>,” the literary sensation of 1903.</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">The Fasting Cure</span>,” a health study.</p></div> - -<p><i>The following at $1 in “hard covers”</i>:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">Samuel the Seeker</span>,” a story of Socialism.</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">Jimmie Higgins</span>,” a novel of the World War, a best seller in -Russia, Italy, France, Germany and Austria.</p></div> - -<p><i>Complete set of above six reprinted books, $6 cloth, $4 paper-bound.</i></p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">Sonnets</span> by M. C. S.,” 25 cents a copy, eight for $1.</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">Hell</span>” and “<span class="smcap">Singing Jailbirds</span>,” two plays, 25 cents each, -8 for $1.</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">They Call Me Carpenter: A Tale of the Second Coming</span>,” -cloth $1.50, paper $1.00.</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of -Social Protest</span>,” cloth $2, paper $1.25.</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">The Book of Life</span>,” cloth-bound only, $2.</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">Damaged Goods</span>,” novelized from the play by Brieux; cloth-bound -only, $1.20.</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">Sylvia</span>,” a novel, cloth-bound only, $1.20.</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">Sylvia’s Marriage</span>,” a novel; “hard covers,” $1.</p></div> - -<p><i>The following at $1.50, cloth, and $1, paper</i>:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism.</span>”</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">100%: The Story of a Patriot.</span>”</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">The Profits of Religion.</span>”</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">King Coal</span>,” a novel of the Colorado coal country.</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">The Jungle</span>,” a novel of the Chicago stock-yards; new edition, -cloth-bound only, $1.50.</p> - -<p>The following works in the Haldeman-Julius 5-cent Pocket -Library: “<span class="smcap">The Jungle</span>” (6 vols.), “<span class="smcap">The Millennium</span>” (3 -vols.), “<span class="smcap">The Overman</span>,” “<span class="smcap">The Pot-Boiler</span>,” “<span class="smcap">The Second-Story -Man</span>,” “<span class="smcap">The Nature Woman</span>,” “<span class="smcap">Prince Hagen</span>,” -“<span class="smcap">The Machine</span>,” “<span class="smcap">A Captain of Industry</span>” (2 vols.). -Price for 17 volumes, 85 cents.</p></div> - - -<p> -UPTON SINCLAIR - Pasadena, California -</p> - - - - -<p class="ph2"><a name="Concerning" id="Concerning">Concerning</a></p> - -<p class="ph3">The Jungle</p> - - -<p>Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous -has there been such an example of world-wide celebrity -won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair.—<i>New -York Evening World.</i></p> - -<p>It is a book that does for modern industrial slavery what -“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” did for black slavery. But the work is -done far better and more accurately in “The Jungle” than in -“Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”—<i>Arthur Brisbane in the New York -Evening Journal.</i></p> - -<p>I never expected to read a serial. I am reading “<i>The Jungle</i>” -and I should be afraid to trust myself to tell how it -affects me. It is a great work. I have a feeling that you -yourself will be dazed some day by the excitement about it. -It is impossible that such a power should not be felt. It is so -simple, so true, so tragic and so human. It is so eloquent, and -yet so exact. I must restrain myself or you may misunderstand.—<i>David -Graham Phillips.</i></p> - -<p>In this fearful story the horrors of industrial slavery are -as vividly drawn as if by lightning. It marks an epoch in -revolutionary literature.—<i>Eugene V. Debs.</i></p> - -<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - <div class="verse">Mr. Heinemann isn’t a man to bungle;</div> - <div class="verse">He’s published a book which is called “The Jungle.”</div> - <div class="verse">It’s written by Upton Sinclair, who</div> - <div class="verse">Appears to have heard a thing or two</div> - <div class="verse">About Chicago and what men do</div> - <div class="verse">Who live in that city—a loathsome crew.</div> - <div class="verse">It’s there that the stockyards reek with blood,</div> - <div class="verse">And the poor man dies, as he lives, in mud;</div> - <div class="verse">The Trusts are wealthy beyond compare,</div> - <div class="verse">And the bosses are all triumphant there,</div> - <div class="verse">And everything rushes without a skid</div> - <div class="verse">To be plunged in a hell which has lost its lid.</div> - <div class="verse">For a country where things like that are done</div> - <div class="verse">There’s just one remedy, only one,</div> - <div class="verse">A latter-day Upton Sinclairism</div> - <div class="verse">Which the rest of us know as Socialism.</div> - <div class="verse">Here’s luck to the book! It will make you cower,</div> - <div class="verse">For it’s written with wonderful, thrilling power.</div> - <div class="verse">It grips your throat with a grip Titanic,</div> - <div class="verse">And scatters shams with a force volcanic.</div> - <div class="verse">Go buy the book, for I judge you need it,</div> - <div class="verse">And when you have bought it, read it, read it.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<p> -—<i>Punch</i> (<i>London</i>). -</p> - - - - -<p class="ph2"><i>A book which has been absolutely boycotted by the -literary reviews of America.</i></p> - -<p class="ph3">THE PROFITS OF RELIGION</p> - -<div class="pleasehide"> -<hr class="chap" /> -</div> - - - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By Upton Sinclair</span></p> - - -<p>A study of Supernaturalism as a Source of -Income and a Shield to Privilege; the first -examination in any language of institutionalized -religion from the economic point of view. “Has the -labour as well as the merit of breaking virgin soil,” -writes Joseph McCabe. The book has had practically -no advertising and only two or three reviews in -radical publications; yet forty thousand copies have -been sold in the first year.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><i>From the Rev. John Haynes Holmes</i>: “I must confess -that it has fairly made me writhe to read these pages, not -because they are untrue or unfair, but on the contrary, because -I know them to be the real facts. I love the church -as I love my home, and therefore it is no pleasant experience -to be made to face such a story as this which you have told. -It had to be done, however, and I am glad you have done -it, for my interest in the church, after all, is more or less -incidental, whereas my interest in religion is a fundamental -thing.... Let me repeat again that I feel that you have -done us all a service in the writing of this book. Our -churches today, like those of ancient Palestine, are the abode -of Pharisees and scribes. It is as spiritual and helpful a -thing now as it was in Jesus’ day for that fact to be revealed.”</p> - -<p><i>From Luther Burbank</i>: “No one has ever told ‘the -truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’ more -faithfully than Upton Sinclair in ‘The Profits of Religion.’”</p> - -<p><i>From Louis Untermeyer</i>: “Let me add my quavering -alto to the chorus of applause of ‘The Profits of Religion.’ -It is something more than a book—it is a Work!”</p></div> - - -<p>Cloth $1.50; paper $1.00</p> - - -<p> -UPTON SINCLAIR<br /> -Station A, Pasadena, California -</p> - - - - -<p class="ph2"><a name="CO-OP" id="CO-OP">CO-OP</a></p> - -<p class="ph3"><i>A Novel of Living Together</i></p> - -<p><i>By</i> <span class="smcap">Upton Sinclair</span></p> - - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><i>From a Sociologist</i>:</p></div> - -<p>Every evening at 10:30 and again at 11:00 I lay down Sinclair’s “Co-op” -to go to bed, but in half a minute I pick it up and go on. It is the best thing -of his I have ever read. It abounds in character-drawing, incident, adventure, -tension, climax, humor and instruction. It is a ripping story. May it circulate -a million!</p> - -<p> -E. A. ROSS, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN. -</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><i>From a Philosopher</i>:</p></div> - -<p>I began reading “Co-op” Friday p. m. and hardly laid it down till I -finished it Saturday. It is one of the finest things you have done—or anybody -else on the American scene has done.</p> - -<p> -JOHN DEWEY -</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><i>From a Novelist</i>:</p></div> - -<p>I feel that it is socially important and that it would be a fortunate thing -for this country if it were widely read. I really feel that if most of the previous -works of Sinclair, particularly “Oil,” “The Brass Check,” “The Profits -of Religion,” “King Coal,” “100%,” “The Goose Step,” “Money Writes,” -had been widely read and distributed, this country would be in a much better -position to understand itself than it is now. “Co-op” is a logical outcome of -all the things which Sinclair has protested against during his literary life. I -certainly wish for it a wide sale and consideration.</p> - -<p> -THEODORE DREISER. -</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><i>From an Editor</i>:</p></div> - -<p>Every word is priceless. It’s a GRAND JOB, Uppie, and I will sing its -song.... Your “Co-op” is a thrilling tale, beautifully done.</p> - -<p> -ROB WAGNER. -</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><i>From a Reviewer</i>:</p></div> - -<p>This is an engrossing, great-hearted and, of course, desperately earnest -novel that Upton Sinclair has written in celebration of and pleading for the -250 co-operatives of unemployed in America, most of them in California.... -Not for a long time has Upton Sinclair written so absorbing a novel, as a -novel, giving us fine human stories, produced so moving and warming a book. -It is a book as honest as the day is long.... Don’t get it into your head that -because this is a novel of immediate intent it is a bore like campaign biographies -and novels of campaign issues and propaganda tracts. You don’t have -to believe in the future of EPIC any more than I do to recognize it as a great -humanitarian story, alive and powerful—and effective. It belongs to our times -as “The Jungle” belonged to its time. It belongs, too, on that shelf which -contains the noblest of social literature.</p> - -<p> -FRED T. MARSH, IN NEW YORK HERALD-TRIBUNE. -</p> - - -<p>Cloth bound, 435 pages. Price $1.50</p> - -<p>Upton Sinclair, New York City and Pasadena, California</p> - - - - -<p class="ph2"><a name="The_Brass_Check" id="The_Brass_Check">The Brass Check</a></p> - -<p><i>A Study of American Journalism</i></p> - - -<p>Who owns the press and why?</p> - -<p>When you read your daily paper, are you reading -facts or propaganda? And whose propaganda?</p> - -<p>Who furnishes the raw material for your thoughts about -life? Is it honest material?</p> - -<p>No man can ask more important questions than these; -and here for the first time the questions are answered in -a book.</p> - -<p>The first edition of this book, 23,000 copies, was sold -out two weeks after publication. Paper could not be obtained -for printing, and a carload of brown wrapping -paper was used. The printings to date amount to 144,000 -copies. The book is being published in Great Britain and -colonies, and in translations in Germany, France, Holland, -Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Hungary and Japan.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p><i>HERMANN BESSEMER, in the “Neues Journal,” Vienna</i>:</p> - -<p>“Upton Sinclair deals with names, only with names, with -balances, with figures, with documents, a truly stunning, -gigantic fact-material. His book is an armored military train -which with rushing pistons roars through the jungle of -American monster-lies, whistling, roaring, shooting, chopping -off with Berserker rage the obscene heads of these evils. -A breath-taking, clutching, frightful book.”</p> - -<p><i>From the pastor of the Community Church, New York</i>:</p> - -<p>“I am writing to thank you for sending me a copy of your -new book, ‘The Brass Check.’ Although it arrived only a few -days ago, I have already read it through, every word, and -have loaned it to one of my colleagues for reading. The book -is tremendous. I have never read a more strongly consistent -argument or one so formidably buttressed by facts. You have -proved your case to the handle. I again take satisfaction in -saluting you not only as a great novelist, but as the ablest -pamphleteer in America today. I am already passing around -the word in my church and taking orders for the book.”—John -Haynes Holmes.</p></div> - - -<p>Single copy, cloth, $2.00; paper, $1.00 postpaid</p> - - -<p>UPTON SINCLAIR, Pasadena, California</p> - - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<div class="tnote"> -<h3>Transcriber’s Notes:</h3> -<ul> -<li>Obvious printer’s errors corrected, including unambiguous typos, missing periods at the end of several sentences, and the like.</li> - -<li>Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings, non-standard punctuation, inconsistently hyphenated words, and other inconsistencies.</li> -</ul> -</div> - -<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_1" id="Footnote_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> By permission of Doubleday, Page & Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_2" id="Footnote_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2"><span class="label">[B]</span></a> A “model” is an English resort for wayfarers, maintained by charity.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_3" id="Footnote_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3"><span class="label">[C]</span></a> By permission of the Macmillan Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_4" id="Footnote_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4"><span class="label">[D]</span></a> By permission of the Macmillan Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_5" id="Footnote_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5"><span class="label">[E]</span></a> By permission of E. P. Dutton & Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_6" id="Footnote_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6"><span class="label">[F]</span></a> By permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_7" id="Footnote_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7"><span class="label">[G]</span></a> By permission of the Macmillan Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_8" id="Footnote_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8"><span class="label">[H]</span></a> By permission of the Macmillan Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_9" id="Footnote_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9"><span class="label">[I]</span></a> By permission of Doubleday, Page & Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_10" id="Footnote_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10"><span class="label">[J]</span></a> By permission of E. P. Dutton & Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_11" id="Footnote_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11"><span class="label">[K]</span></a> By permission of the Macmillan Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_12" id="Footnote_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12"><span class="label">[L]</span></a> By permission of the Macmillan Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_13" id="Footnote_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13"><span class="label">[M]</span></a> Copyright, 1907. Used by special permission of the publishers, Bobbs-Merrill -Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_14" id="Footnote_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14"><span class="label">[N]</span></a> By permission of the Macmillan Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_15" id="Footnote_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15"><span class="label">[O]</span></a> By permission of the Macmillan Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_16" id="Footnote_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16"><span class="label">[P]</span></a> By permission of Doubleday, Page & Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_17" id="Footnote_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17"><span class="label">[Q]</span></a> <i>Tout cela criait comme une grimace, comme une serrure, comme une clé.</i></p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_18" id="Footnote_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18"><span class="label">[R]</span></a> By permission of the Macmillan Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_19" id="Footnote_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19"><span class="label">[S]</span></a> By permission of Doubleday, Page & Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_20" id="Footnote_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20"><span class="label">[T]</span></a> By permission of the Macmillan Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_21" id="Footnote_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21"><span class="label">[U]</span></a> By permission of Doubleday, Page & Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_22" id="Footnote_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22"><span class="label">[V]</span></a> By permission of E. P. Dutton & Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_23" id="Footnote_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23"><span class="label">[W]</span></a> As used in the Bible, and other ancient writings, the word usury means, not -excessive interest-taking, but all interest-taking whatever.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_24" id="Footnote_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24"><span class="label">[X]</span></a> Copyright, 1905. By permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_25" id="Footnote_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25"><span class="label">[Y]</span></a> By permission of the Macmillan Co.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_26" id="Footnote_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26"><span class="label">[Z]</span></a> (Quoted by special permission of Harper & Brothers.)</p></div> -</div> - -<div class="tnote"> - -<h3>Transcriber’s Notes:</h3> -<ul> -<li>Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.</li> - -<li>Obvious printer’s errors corrected, including unambiguous typos, missing periods at the end of several sentences, and the like.</li> - -<li>Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings, non-standard punctuation, inconsistently hyphenated words, and other inconsistencies.</li> - -<li>Duplicate/incorrect listings at the end of the List of Illustrations removed.</li> -</ul> - -</div> - - -<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRY FOR JUSTICE ***</div> -<div style='text-align:left'> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will -be renamed. -</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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