Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlots curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.
A Life for a Life[H]
By Robert Herrick
(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)
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.
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.