TO THE EMPEROR WILLIAM.
London, May 15, 1889.—“The promised interview with the Emperor William was granted to-day to the delegates from the coal-miners now on strike in Westphalia; but the audience lasted for only ten minutes. The men asked that the Emperor would inquire into the merits of their case and the hardships under which they suffered. His Majesty replied that he was already inquiring into the matter. He then warned the miners that he would employ all his great powers to repress socialistic agitation and intrigue. If the slightest resistance was shown he would shoot every man so offending. On the other hand, he promised to protect them if peaceable.”—Cablegram.
Son of a Man and grandson of a Man,
Mannikin most miserable in thy shrunken shape
And peevish, shrivelled-soul, is’t thou wouldst ape
The thunder-bearer of Fate’s blustering clan?
Know, then, that never, since the years began,
The terrible truth was surer of this word:
“Who takes the sword, shall perish by the sword!”
For mankind’s nod makes mannikin and man.
Surely it was not shed too long ago,
That Emperor’s blood that stained the Northern snow,
O thou King Stork aspiring that art King Log,
Wild-boar that wouldst be, reeking there all hog;
To teach thy brutish brainlessness to know
Those who pulled down a lion can shoot a dog.
A STORY.
(For the Irish Delegates in Australia.)
Do you want to hear a story
With a nobler praise than “glory,”
Of a man who loved the right like heaven and loathed the wrong like hell?
Then, that story let me tell you
Once again, though it as well you
Know as I—the splendid story of the man they call Parnell!
By the wayside of the nations,
Lashed with whips and execrations,
Helpless, hopeless, bleeding, dying, she, the Maiden Nation, lay;
And the burthen of dishonour
Weighed so grievously upon her
That her very children hid their eyes and crept in shame away.
And there as she was lying
Helpless, hopeless, bleeding, dying,
All her high-born foes came round her, fleering, jeering, as they said:
“What is freedom fought and won for?
She is dead! She’s down and done for!”
And her weeping children shuddered as they crouched and whispered: “Dead!”
Then suddenly up-starting,
All that throng before him parting,
See, a man with firm step breaking through that central knot that gives;
And, as by some dear lost sister,
He knelt down, and softly kissed her,
And he raised his pale, proud face, and cried: “She is not dead. She lives!
“O she lives, I say, and I here,
I am come to fight and die here
For the love my heart has for her like a slow consuming fire;
For the love of her low lying,
For the hatred deep, undying
Of the robber lords who struck and stabbed and trod her in the mire!”
Then upon that cry bewildering,
Some of them, her hapless children—
In their hearts there leaped up hope like light when night gives birth to day;
And, as mocks and threats defied him,
One by one they came beside him,
Till they stood, a band of heroes, sombre, desperate, at bay!
And the battle that they fought there,
And the bitter truth they taught there
To the blinded Sister-Nation suffering grievously alway,
All the wrong and rapine past hers,
Of her lords and her task masters,
Is not this the larger hope of all as night gives birth to day!
For the lords and liars are quaking
At the People’s stern awaking
From their slumber of the ages; and the Peoples slowly rise,
And with hands locked tight together,
One in heart and soul for ever,
Watch the sun of Light and Liberty leap up into the skies!
That’s the story, that’s the story
With a nobler praise than “glory,”
Of the Man who loved the right like heaven and loathed the wrong like hell,
And with calm, proud exultation
Bade her stand at last a nation,
Ireland, Ireland that is one name with the name of Charles Parnell!
AT THE INDIA DOCKS.
A Memory of August, 1883.
[The spectacle of the life of the London Dock labourers is one of the most terrible examples of the logical outcome of the present social system. In the six great metropolitan docks over 100,000 men are employed, the great bulk of whom are married and have families. By the elaborate system of sub-contracts their wages have been driven down to 4d., 3d., and even 2d. for the few hours they are employed, making the average weekly earnings of a man amount to 7, 6, and even 5 shillings a week! Hundreds and hundreds of lives are lost or ruined every year by the perilous nature of the work, and absolutely without compensation. Yet so fierce is the competition that men are not unfrequently maimed or even killed in the desperate struggles at the gates for the tickets of employment, guaranteeing a “pay” which often does not amount to more than a few pence! The streets and houses inhabited by this unfortunate class are of the lowest kind—haunts of vice, disease, and death, and the monopolistic companies are thus directly able to profit by their wholesale demoralization by ruthlessly crushing out, through the contractors, all efforts at organisation on the part of the men. To see these immense docks, the home of that more immense machine, British Commerce, crowded with huge and stately ships, steamers, and sailors the first in the world, and to watch with intelligent eyes by what means the colossal work of loading and unloading them is carried out; this is to face a sacrificial orgy of human life—childhood, youth, manhood, womanhood, and age, with everything that makes them beautiful and ennobling, and not merely a misery and a curse—far more appalling than any Juggernaut progress or the human holocausts that were offered up to Moloch.]
I stood in the ghastly gleaming night by the swollen, sullen flow
Of the dreadful river that rolls her tides through the City of Wealth and Woe;
And mine eyes were heavy with sleepless hours, and dry with desperate grief,
And my brain was throbbing and aching, and mine anguish had no relief.
For never a moment—no; not one—through all the dreary day,
And thro’ all the weary night forlorn, would the pitiless pulses stay
Of the thundering great Machinery that such insistence had,
As it crushed out human hearts and souls, that it slowly drove me mad.
And there, in the dank and foetid mist, as I, silent and tearless, stood,
And the river’s exhalations, sweating forth their muddy blood,
Breathed full on my face and poisoned me, like the slow, putrescent drain
That carries away from the shambles the refuse of flesh and brain—
There rose up slowly before me, in the dome of the city’s light,
A vast and shadowy Substance, with shafts and wheels of might,
Tremendous, ruthless, fatal; and I knew the visible shape
Of that thundering great Machinery from which there was no escape.
It stood there high in the heavens, fronting the face of God,
And the spray it sprinkled had blasted the green and flowery sod
All round where, through stony precincts, its Cyclopean pillars fell
To its adamantine foundations that were fixed in the womb of hell.
And the birds that, wild and whirling, and moth-like, flew to its glare
Were struck by the flying wheel-spokes, and maimed and murdered there;
And the dust that swept about its black panoply overhead,
And the din of it seemed to shatter and scatter the sheeted dead.
But mine eyes were fixed on the people that sought this horrible den,
And they mounted in thronged battalions, children and women and men,
Right out from the low horizons, more far than the eye could see,
From the north and the south and the east and the west, they came perpetually—
Some silent, some raving, some sobbing, some laughing, some cursing, some crying,
Some alone, some with others, some struggling, some dragging the dead and the dying
Up to the central Wheel enormous with its wild devouring breath
That winnowed the livid smoke-clouds and the sickening fume of death.
Then suddenly, as I watched it all, a keen wind blew amain,
And the air grew clearer and purer, and I could see it plain—
How under the central Wheel a black stone Altar stood,
And a great, gold Idol upon it was gleaming like fiery blood.
And there, in front of the Altar, was a huge, round lurid Pit,
And the thronged battalions were marching to the yawning mouth of it
In the clangour of the Machinery and the Wheel’s devouring breath
That winnowed the livid smoke-clouds and the sickening fume of death.
And once again as I gazed there, and the keen wind still blew on,
I saw the shape of the Idol like a king turned carrion,
Yet crowned and more terrific thus for his human fleshly loss,
And with one clenched hand he brandished a lash, and the other held up a cross!
And all around the Altar were seated, joyous and free,
In garments richly-coloured and choice, a goodly company,
Eating and drinking and wantoning, like gods that scorned to know
Of the thundering great Machinery and the crowds and the Pit below.
Ah, Christ! the sights and the sounds there that every hour befell
Would wring the heart of the devils spinning ropes of sand in hell,
But not the insolent Revellers in their old lascivious ease—
Children hollow-eyed, starving, consumed alive with disease;
Boys and men tortured to fiends and branded with shuddering fire;
Girls and women shrieking caught, and whored, and trampled to death in the mire;
Babyhood, youth, and manhood and womanhood that might have been,
Kneaded, a bloody pulp, to feed the gold-grinding murderous Machine!
And still, with aching eyeballs, I stared at that hateful sight,
At the long dense lines of the people and the shafts and wheels of might,
When slowly, slowly emerging, I saw a great Globe rise,
Blood-red on the dim horizon, and it swam up into the skies.
But whether indeed it were the sun or the moon, I could not say,
For I knew not now in my watching if it were night or day.
But when that Great Globe steadied above the central Wheel,
The thronged battalions wavered and paused, and an awful silence fell.
Then (I know not how, but so it was) in a moment the flash of an eye—
A murmur ran and rose to a voice, and the voice to a terrible cry:
“Enough, enough! It has had enough! We will march no more till we drop
In the furnace Pit. Give us food! Give us rest! Though the accursed Machinery stop!”
And then, with a shout of angry fear, the Revellers sprang to their feet,
And the call was for cannon and cavalry, for rifle and bayonet.
And one rose up, a leader of them, lifting a threatening rod.
And “Stop the Machinery!” he yelled, “you might as well stop God!”
But the terrible thunder-cry replied: “If this indeed must be,
It is you should be cast to the furnace Pit to feed the Machine—not we!”
And the central Wheel enormous slowed down in groaning plight,
And all the ærial movement ceased of the shafts and wheels of might,
And a superhuman clamour leaped madly to where overhead
The great Globe swung in the gathering gloom, portentous, huge, blood-red!
But my brain whirled round and my blinded eyes no more could see or know,
Till I struggling seemed to awake at last by the swollen, sullen flow
Of the dreadful river that rolls her tides through the City of Wealth and Woe!
DIRGE.
(Brisbane.)
“A little Soldier of the Army of the Night.”
Bury him without a word!
No appeal to death;
Only the call of the bird
And the blind spring’s breath.
Nature slays ten, yet the one
Reaches but to a part
Of what’s to be done, to be sung.
Keep we a proud heart!
Let us not glose her waste
With lies and dreams;
Fawn on her wanton haste,
Say it but seems.
Comrades, with faces unstirred,
Scorning grief’s dole,
Though with him, with him lies interred
Our heart and soul,
Bury him without a word!
No appeal to death;
Only the call of the bird
And the blind spring’s breath.
TO QUEEN VICTORIA IN ENGLAND.
an address on her jubilee year.
Madam, you have done well! Let others with praise unholy,
Speech addressed to a woman who never breathed upon earth,
Daub you over with lies or deafen your ears with folly,
I will praise you alone for your actual imminent worth.
Madam, you have done well! Fifty years unforgotten
Pass since we saw you first, a maiden simple and pure.
Now when every robber landlord, capitalist rotten,
Hated oppressors, praise you—Madam, we are quite sure!
Never once as a foe, open foe, to the popular power,
As nobler kings and queens, have you faced us, fearless and bold:
No, but in backstairs fashion, in the stealthy twilight hour,
You have struggled and struck and stabbed, you have bartered and bought and sold!
Melbourne, the listless liar, the gentleman blood-beslavered,
Disraeli, the faithless priest of a cynical faith out-worn,
These were dear to your heart, these were the men you favoured.
Those whom the People loved were fooled and flouted and torn!
Never in one true cause, for your people’s sake and the light’s sake,
Did you strike one honest blow, did you speak one noble word:
No, but you took your place, for the sake of wrong and the night’s sake,
Ever with blear-eyed wealth, with the greasy respectable herd.
Not as some robber king, with a resolute minister slave to you, [110]
Did you swagger with force against us to satisfy your greed:
No, but you hoarded and hid what your loyal people gave to you,
Golden sweat of their toil, to keep you a queen indeed!
Pure at least was your bed? pure was your Court?—We know not.
Were the white sepulchres pure? Gather men thorns of grapes?
Your sons and your blameless spouse’s, certes, as Galahads show not.
Round you gather a crowd of bloated hypocrite shapes!
Never, sure, did one woman produce in such sixes and dozens
Such intellectual canaille as this that springs from you;
Sons, daughters, grandchildren, with uncles, aunts, and cousins,
Not a man or a woman among them—a wretched crew!
Madam, you have done well! You have fed all these to repletion—
You have put a gilded calf beside a gilded cow,
And bidden men and women behold the forms of human completion—
Albert the Good, Victoria the Virtuous, for ever—and now!
But what to you were our bravest and best, man of science and poet,
Struggling for Light and Truth, or the Women who would be free?
Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Arnold? We know it—
Tennyson slavers your hand; Argyll fawns at your knee!
Good, you were good, we say. You had no wit to be evil.
Your purity shines serene over Floras mangled and dead.
You wasted not our substance in splendour, in riot or revel—
You quietly sat in the shade and grew fat on our wealth instead.
Madam, you have done well! To you, we say, has been given
A wit past the wit of women, a supercomputable worth.
Of you we can say, if not “of such are the Kingdom of Heaven,”
Of such (alas for us!), of such are the Kingdom of Earth!