List of Illustrations
| The Heavy Sledge, Mahonri Young | [Frontispiece] |
|---|---|
| PAGE | |
| The Man with the Hoe, E. M. Lilien | [32] |
| The Vampire, E. M. Lilien | [33] |
| King Canute, William Balfour Ker | [93] |
| The Hand of Fate, William Balfour Ker | [92] |
| Without a Kennel, Ryan Walker | [136] |
| The White Slave, Abastenia St. Leger Eberle | [137] |
| Cold, Roger Bloche | [200] |
| The People Mourn, Jules Pierre van Biesbroeck | [201] |
| The Liberatress, Theophile Alexandre Steinlen | [233] |
| Outbreak, Käthe Kollwitz | [232] |
| The End, Käthe Kollwitz | [297] |
| The Surprise, Ilyá Efímovitch Repin | [296] |
| Ecce Homo, Constantin Meunier | [368] |
| Despised and Rejected of Men, Sigismund Goetze | [369] |
| “To Sustain the Body of the Church, if You Please,” Denis Auguste Marie Raffet | [392] |
| Christ, John Mowbray-Clarke | [393] |
| The Despotic Age, Isidore Konti | [456] |
| “Courage, Your Majesty, Only One Step More!” | [457] |
| Marriage à la Mode, William Hogarth | [489] |
| Mammon, George Frederick Watts | [488] |
| War, Arnold Böcklin | [584] |
| London, Paul Gustave Doré | [585] |
| A Citizen Lost, Ryan Walker | [649] |
| “Oliver Twist Asks for More,” George Cruikshank | [648] |
| The Coal Famine, Thomas Theodor Heine | [680] |
| My Solicitor Shall Hear of This, Will Dyson | [681] |
| The Militant, Charles A. Winter | [744] |
| The Death of Chatterton, Henry Wallis | [745] |
| Once Ye Have Seen My Face Ye Dare Not Mock | [808] |
| Justice, Walter Crane | [809] |
Editor’s Preface
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.
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.
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.
To a certain extent, of course, the selection was self-determined. No anthology of social protest could omit “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.