The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest / The writings of philosophers, poets, novelists, social reformers, and others who have voiced the struggle against social injustice; selected from twenty-five languages; covering a period of five thousand years

by Unknown

Freedom

By James Russell Lowell

(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)

Men! whose boast it is that ye

Come of fathers brave and free,

If there breathe on earth a slave,

Are ye truly free and brave?

If ye do not feel the chain

When it works a brother’s pain,

Are ye not base slaves indeed,