The Red Flag

There is peace in London !
Not here, as yonder, men blaspheming loud,
Begrimed with slaughter, cruelly aflame,
Drag some dishevelled woman through the crowd
To shoot her with a blundering blind aim :
She with her hopeless hunted face of fear
Grovelling falls, and to her dying ear
Pierce her foul fellows with inhuman jeer.
There, all along the fair arcaded street
Where they are murdering, in sacks lie thrown
Dead men and women ; where the dainty feet
Were wont to loiter ; there the brilliants shown
Lured eyes that vied in lustre with their own.
But these are ghastly, whence the warm lifeflood
Oozing hath stained the flags with human blood !
Alas ! among these women whom with spasm
Of righteous indignation men have slain,
Each fired with spirituous enthusiasm,
Order's disorderly Praetorian,
Among these Frenchwomen whom Frenchmen slew
I well believe there may be more than few
Mothers and wives, who have sublimely stood
Waiting benumbed in snow for scanty food
Through that long winter siege unmurmuring,
Weary'ing away with want ; one little thing
'Neath Mont-Parnasse from hunger, and another
Cold clinging to the worn skirt of a mother,
Shrinking so close from Death, who tears it off.
And laughs " One vermin more ! " with brutal scoff.
Is there a mob-contemning silk aristocrat,
Who spits on man like Death ihe Democrat ?
Alas ! alas ! it was a baleful hour
When the great goddess Order hounded slaves
Fair France's patriot daughters to deflower,
And spurn them into ignominious graves,
Festering under smooth Parisian flags,
That there in peace her delicate Agags
Might mince once more with high-born courtesans
O'er the dead people, weaving pleasant plans,
And praising her, their cannibal god, the
Mother,
Who loves one human child to fatten upon another.
Alas ! alas ! it was a baleful hour
When Frenchmen to the shrines of this grey
Power
Dragged hero-souled sisters by the hair,
Slaking grim Order's thirst for vengeance there.
Revenging horribly that old despair
Wherewith the long-cowed, lashed, mad people flew
At Tyranny's withered throat to bite it through.
Some of these women, when imperial France
Collapsed confused before the foe's advance,
With famine-feeble hand sustained her glor}-,
Passing it flawless on to History ;
Bowed with the awful burden, meekly giving
Their own, their very little children's living
For France's honour, for the Country's Cause.
None but these nobler victims the red jaws
Of Order, that great goddess whom the world
And this great city Paris worshippeth,
Greedily yawn to swallow ; these are hurled
With blind fiend-fury to a dishonoured death :
Men who were fain to shrink before the foeman
Can hustle at least and mangle their own women !

Thus in the world's gay capital to-day
Alva looks from the face of Galifet.
Arm in arm with the World, her old ally,
See how the Church creeps forth to see them die!
Emaciated here may she renew
Her sleek youth in a fresh Bartholomew.
She, while she sips warm blood from her full chalice,
Points with a supernatural smile of malice
Where feudal Bismarck and his master wait
To thrust yon fugitives upon their fate ;
Back to the flames that hurtle all abroad,
Back on the point of an insatiate sword :
She lifts to heaven her cruel falsetto voice ;
But 'tis the damned who hear it and rejoice,
Shrieking responsive to her jubilee,
" Amen ! so perish Man who will be free ! "
Priests, women, soldiers, children, all afire ;
Paris around them roars a foneral pyre,
Screaming, blaspheming ; are the corpses dumb?
Verily here is Pandemonium !

So fills itself another crimson page
Of human story ; so from age to age
Men reap the fruit of hate and wrath and
Death
From the red seed they sowed, and with mad breath
Cherished for harvest: still they strew the same.
Mutual rancour, fear, and scorn, and shame ;
And still it breaks to fury and to flame.
Liberty watereth with many a tear
The growth maturing ; still she hopes to rear
Her own frail flower, but ever hides her eyes
When she beholds the infernal blade arise —
Ever a gory growth, a venomous thing,
Now named Mob-rule, now Slavery to a King.

There is peace in London.
And in this peace I lately stood before
A mean brick housefront at a dingy door
In a foul street : the place was very near
Where wealthy folk inhabit half the year.
One at an ale-house lounging reeled lowbrowed,
Whose face no fine humanities avowed,
A Pariah, whose human rights ignored.
We hold created for the hangman's cord ;
A social outcast none have sought to tame.
Who hath an old inheritance — his shame.
Then at the base of narrow stairs arriving,
I raised my voice to ask if one were living
Here, a poor ailing woman whom I sought ;
Whereupon some sharp man's voice made retort
Through a bleared twilight: "Well, she's dying here."
Oppressive weighed the reeking atmosphere,
And though the summer sun shone out above,
I for a time peered vainly while I strove
Aught to distinguish in the squalid gloom ;
Yet pushing some black door I found the room.
It was a bare room, void of garniture.
Where first the window did mine eyes allure.
Whose broken panes the grime of years defiles :
Never it feels pure air, nor how God smiles
In heaven ; the haggard eye of this dim den,
Of this foul prison for low-born Englishmen,
Looks on a court of miry walls well filled
With sherds and loathly refuse reckless spilled.
Yet by the window sits a ragged dwarf,
With wolfish, pinched pale features, and a cough :
His nimble, skeleton, sallow fingers ply
At their incessant toil ; a vessel nigh
Smokes with some viscous glue, belike shellac,
Gear of his craft ; his labour-hunched back
Stoops over ; as he straightens it he looks
With eyes half fierce, half dull amid the shocks
Of matted hair grown prematurely grey :
A man yet young — but slaving day by day,
With sorrow and scanty nourishment, can slay
Can age man early — lo ! a wizened elf,
A weird small shadow of the man himself,
Creeps to the father's side, and takes the toy
He has been fingering : ah ! favoured boy,
A stone's throw distant, on thy birthday joy
Shall fly from here to thee ! no wistful eye
Cast thou, poor starveling — lay it down to dry!
" Where is she?" I demanded : he was dumb,
And rose as though he heard me not ; for numb
He surely was with long monotonous sorrow,
That knows no hope of any fair to-morrow.
A tame mechanical, abortive toil
Can all the rainbow from a life despoil
And leave it grey, like pining flowers that lose,
Shut from sweet sunlight, all their native hues.
So sullenly the man resumed his labour :
But now one pointed — some poor female neighbour —
To something cowering in withered weeds :
Is it a Woman's withered face that feeds
On what degraded light may wander through
Her Sudra vault from our palatial Blue?
She lies upon some rags upheaped and coarse
(Her very bed they lately pawned perforce) :
She lies as though unbreathing, still as stone,
Save when at intervals she makes low moan.
"What ails her?" to the neighbour soft I said :
" She will not ail long ; she will soon be dead,"
The other whispered ; " she is very ill :
Tis marvel what the man can earn may still
Keep her alive ; her ailing state required
She should be nourished well, nor overtired,
The doctor told her : why, she used to stitch
From dawn to night : you see it is the rich
Who can take rest with ample food, not we.
If ever one were staf-ved, sir, it is she.
I often shared my little with them — yet
Can ill afford my children to forget.
Parish allows them somewhat : surely ; yes.
But see the children, and his feebleness ! "
Four growing children with the parents here
Dwell, sleep, in one close room from year to year.
Three elder ones are helping the pale sire
At his life-drudgery — the fourth admire !
It clings, an infant, to the neighbour's dress.
Blooming and hale : the Harpy of Distress
Hesitates to pollute so pure a child.
Once, when the mother looked that way, she smiled
Almost, I fancied, yet her infant shrank
Now from herself: how should it know she sank
More swiftly in drear unremembered death,
Because she gave it what sustained her breath ?

This, and the craftsman's tiny glow of fire,
And one poor flower, help one to respire.
Sustain the heart's-breath in this woful air
Of hopeless human suffering : a fair

Fragile geranium leans forth to Ijrealhe
There at the window ; half the mould beneath
Droops from the broken potsherd, and the fine
Fibres denuded like the blossoms pine.
The wife's dim dying face is toward the flower.
And toward her husband ceasing ne'er to cower
Over his toil ; each fairer sight to her,
Whose was the wand of trust that may not err,
Was heaven's window : yea, the "home" so drear,
With these crushed lives, looked only not so clear
Crystalline God Himself hath troubled so,
For ends adorable she may not know.
But ah ! the pain, her weakness, the confusion
Born of her weakness, wrought in fell collusion
With woe of these her kindred to conceal
Often those gleams unearthly that reveal
God dwells with her in very visible glory.
Her soul a holier shrine than all cathedrals hoary !

Nay, but this woman cowering in the gloom,
Dark, speechless, ghastly, starving, haunts the room
With horror — lowest sunken in the fate
That slowly whelms her kindred desolate !
She lurks a silent corpse, and yet alive :
About her all her fainting family strive
With bony fingers tightening their hold ;
While near them lords and ladies drain the gold
That sparkles with exhilarating pleasure,
Fair, in fine raiment, wantoning at leisure.
To starve in London ! on the stones where wealth
Indifferent saunters, dull with food and health !
Surely this infant healthful for an hour,'
Surely the pining, pale geranium flower.
The puny glow that will anon expire,
Are but as little children's hands that tire
In piteous attempt to move some rock
That hath erased a household in the shock,
Wherewith the haughty Mountain - spirit scorning
Hurled it from icy palaces of Morning !
So these can move not the dull Fate that rests
Like tons of stone upon crushed human breasts.

And yet from her, the woman dying there,
Who lately seemed to radiate despair
And darkness in the melancholy room,
Breaks forth a glory softening the doom,
Tinging this horrible embroilment even
With iridescent loveliness from heaven.
The light of Faith ! a marvellous holy light
Breaking from simple souls that sink in night —
Power bursting barriers of woe and wrong,
Prisons wherein the mighty, cruel and strong,
In proud prosperity have pent the weak,
Revealing the Deliverer they seek.
To blind faint lives that writhe beneath the curse
Opening fair vistas of the universe !
While helpless under men's hard feet they groan,
A ray reveals the Father on His throne :
The oppressor trampling on His poor may
Shout, "Who shall stay me when I work my will?"
A voice peals through the echoing worlds :
"I will!"
And let them hearken, or let them forbear,
The poor have heard Him, and the Lord is there !

But woe for him who toils without a hope !
He in base mire of loathed life will grope.
With midnight's cold unconstellated cope
Weighing him graveward : heed how ye despoil
A life, no earthly welfare's kindly soil
Nourishes, of a spiritual air.
Given to sustain a spirit leafing there.
Hold ere ye quench a wavering hope that can
Save from despair a miserable man !
Foes of old superstition ! Do ye know
That God will never right the wrongs of woe ;
That there is ne'er a Lord of life and death,
Who giving, reassumeth every breath ?
What God hath bidden you shout to them that weep,
" God is a fable, death an endless sleep ;
Good news for thee who writhest in the curse !
Thine earthly cage is all the universe."
Ye spurn our worn solutions : but may ye
Solve, by denying, all the mystery ?
Yourselves will help yourselves: alas! we fall.
Where is our help if human help be all ?

And these were happy : they loved one another :
Now by the living corse of her the mother.
Of her the wife yet young, he sits and works,
And looks askance where in the shadow lurks
A ghastly Horror creeping, though he toil
To ban it from the children, innocent spoil.
So sweet to our Destroyer, whose low laugh
Mocks man, as wind mocks the lightheaded chaff!
Are not this London's million ordured courts
Verily curst ineffable resorts
Of ghouls more horrible than Easterns feign ?
Do ye not note them yonder at the pane
Mopping and mowing, spectres foul yet dim
In subtle blue miasma mists that swim.
There at the dingy pane, with dull dead eyes,
Faces wormfretted, lank, with livid dyes,
And loathly trunk slow revelling in slime
Under the windowbrood of folly and crime !
Ye fearful Hydras, Cholera and Fever,
Batten on starving huddled slaves for ever !

Yet Love Divine who yearns to them that weep.
Finding man's Torturers off guard, sent sleep ;
Stole to the wornout soul in guise of dream.
And soothed her with a sweet celestial gleam.
One night he dreamed of his lost childhood's mirth :
Love culled a leaf from off a happier earth.
A boy and girl beside a cool-toned brook
Bathe their feet laughing, bending oft to look,
Through delicate glumes of grasses and some sedge
That grows with willowherb upon the edge,
\Miere ruffled cresses with the sliding stream
Flow along fresh below the watery gleam.
Near stoops a hollow trunk wherein they played
At being men and women — unafraid !
Singing birds in the leaves are not more glad
Than these two rustic children poorly clad,
Glowing with health, from some fair cottage nigh.
The russet girl is beautiful, her eye
More blue than any fleeting butterfly.
Can it be he, the merry little boy?
And that his sister in her innocent joy ?

She grew a maiden, very fair, but frail :
Some rich man wronged her — now what sounds assail
A waking ear ? — a woman trolls a hoarse
Loose ditty : her young lineaments are coarse
With harlot hues ; she reels from yonder door
Flaring with harsh light out into the pour
On slimy pavements : how the gaudy dress
Clings to her slender, fevered feebleness !
She and her brother have been severed long ;
And so she passes with her ghastly song
Unknowing, while he sees her undefiled :
Love shows her to him as a little child.

Yet very nigh there often pace the street
Casual farers with indifferent feet :
And when the craftsman goes to breathe awhile
Upon the stair, he sees the cheery smile,
Hears happy snatches of a careless talk
From comfortable strangers in their walk. . . .

. . . Now 'tis Dean, who he
ambles by
Raises a question of church-millinery ;
Or in allusion to the squalid street
Observes that, howsoever God may mete
The lot of each, all should be docile, which
One may name "Gospel according to the rich."
If there were no starvation for the mean,
Supplies might fail us for a portly Dean.
Then this fine burst of pulpit eloquence
A threadbare Curate heard in rapt suspense :
"This glorious old edifice of State,
Though finding-fault, black, croaking birds may prate
Around it " — (did the parson mean the rooks.
Rebels, or heretics, or naughty books ?) —
" Is founded on the broad backs of the people;
Our middle-class the buttressed wall ; the steeple,
Or dome, our king and old nobility ;
The Church, yon golden cross that meets the sky ! "
He should have travelled lower than the stones.
Even to the charnel-vault of dead men's bones !
Your grand colossal edifice to-day
Rests on a yawning darkness and decay ;
Beware ! for it is ready to vanish away !
Yea, is it founded on the people's backs ?
Behold ! how as ye walk the sanguine tracks
Ye leave are slipper} with human gore,
The life, the health, the souls of men your floor.
Glance not below; yield to the organ's pealing;
Explore the lonely grandeurs of the ceiling !
Ah! but your tyrannous structure is atremble —
I who behold it dare no more dissemble :
God breathes upon it with the breath of doom:
Phantoms of empire summon from the tomb !
Dominant o'er us glares the cross of gold,
And haughty hierarchies manifold
Brandish the symbol for a flaming sword,
Kneel to the cross, and crucify the Lord !
Friend of the lowly, fainting on the wood.
Behold thy poor upon a golden rood !

. . . Thelonely toiler, gasping for some air,
Listens in shadowy poison of the stair.
Listens, a wounded beast within his lair. . . .
. . . And there is Peace in London !

Now trips a dame who lifts her skirt for fear
Of many a foul contamination here,
Revealing delicate ankles to the friend.
Who (to assist) his manly arm may lend.
"Think what a desperate misery may slink
In these low neighbourhoods from whence we shrink ? "
In silver tones she whispers : " Look ! there prowl
Two terrible ragged ruffians with a scowl."
" Near our town-houses! who could fancy it ? "
Drawls out the dandy with more birth than wit.
She, with a slight quick shiver, half a sigh :
" One's heart aches even to dream such poverty ! "
(It jarred her nervous sensibility.)
" And yet, as Mister Glozeman said in church,
To make the vessel of the State tc lurch,
To shake our ancient Order is the worst
Crime : it deserves the torture, 'tis accurst
Of God and man — he meant the Communist
Canaille in Paris." Then the dandy hissed
With panic fury, " Shoot the draff by millions!
So may our scum here learn to make rebellions ! "
To clear some stray defilement from her dress,
Bending she slightly on his arm may press ;
Then, as if breeding were a little at fault
In that last ardour of her friend's assault
Even on hereditary foes, the mob.
On swarms unclean, who sweat and starve and rob,
She waved aside the subject she had lent
Her glance in passing, drawling as she went,
"They say the poor are so improvident ! "
Half absently she spoke, to weightier themes
Turning anon — to cunning, lordly schemes
For stifling noxious popular low measures :
Then of refined aristocratic pleasures
They babbled — Hurlingham — the ducal ball —
Of a monstrous nobleman turned Radical,
Of latest fashions out, a novel tie,
Or the last sweet thing in adultery.

The lonely toiler, gasping for some air,
Listens in shadowy poison of the stair,
Listens, a hunted beast within his lair. . . .
. . . And there is Peace in London !

It happened once two gentlemen were stayed
Here, waiting some companion delayed.
Sauntering to and fro they smoking walked,
Or leant against the house-wall while they talked.

One was an oldish man ; the other, he
Spake as one claiming great authority.
His dust-hued head was growing grey in part —
From tardy fellow-feeling with his heart.
" Not to admire" the only art he knew
To keep him comfortable as he grew.
What might have moved the vulgar to distraction
Moved him to limp distaste or satisfaction.
He viewed with very philosophic calm
All human ills — that did himself no harm.
But he had taken honours at his college,
And deemed himself a microcosm of knowledge.
Outside he looked a thicket of stiff bristles ;
Inside he looked a jungle of prickly thistles.
Which, though from them no figs for men be reared.
Seem dainties to the stubborn race long-eared-
A sort of sour old maid the man was born ;
He could secrete but weak incontinent scorn ;
Sterile to foster, organise, produce —
Aught but sophistic pleas for some abuse.
Moreover, one might notice with surprise
The sort of things that made his gorge to rise ;
Always the wrong thing — for his heart would bleed
If generous enterprise or kindly deed
Not failed, but seemed in danger of succeeding.
This turned him yellow, set his heart ableeding !
So may base cruelty arouse the rage
In vulgar bosoms : yet methinks a sage
Should be more tolerant in middle-age.
Restless he itches till he settle in blight
On springing hopes with envious little spite ;
Yet nipping buds of generous resolve,
Should one survive his yearning to dissolve.
Become respectable, accomplished thing,
He fulsome fawns on that beslavering.
Every frail human hope that pleads for air,
Wistfully peering generous and fair.
He burns to foul — to squat in mockery there.
He, a boy prig, once laughed at by a woman,
Became the sex's indiscriminate foeman :
He must have had a sister or a mother.
And yet insults, asperses every other.
Politely-cultured loungers at the club
Take for Sir Oracle the fluent cub ;
Anonymous in his periodical
Large, vague he looms ; who, dullard thoughts of all
Dishing up deftly, flatters each fool so,
It fondly fancies it may strut as though
Itself were some potential Rochefoucauld.
He could be lively only when he hated :
Pungent aromas all evaporated,
When he with heavy hand, with heavier face,
Apotheosised English commonplace ;
A Rubens' cherub cumbersomely squat.
Labouring to upheave some royal fat
Skyward — the whole falls marvellously flat !
With ponderous platitude his smart review
Lumbers along when it proclaims the true
Plethoric gospel of the well-to-do.
Man of a petite culture, whose college culture
Is but a whited sepulchre sepulture
Of living manhood — his in sooth was small :
Only a castrate creature's after all.

His elder comrade, green as a vegetable,
Lives much as did the dogs in sacred fable ;
He picks up crumbs from off a rich man's table.
With tact he courts the upper ten for dinners,
No friend of publicans and bourgeois sinners.
While footmen hand you many a dainty meat,
And butlers pour you out some choice Lafitte,
He undertakes the dinner- wit to furnish ;
Which is a trifle flyblown, wants a burnish.
The saltcellar with warranted Attic grains
Serves for so many boards, the flavour wanes.
Less delicately now he spins the slander,
For toil wears even a fashionable pander.
Still when he speaks unwholesome simpers fly
Around the high
Distinguished circle of mahogany.
Egyptians played with monkeys when they dined ;
Our kings kept jesters of a motley kind;
IVe fit our cap and bells on " men of mind."

From condescension to humanity
(A piece of luck for Christianity),
These men their Kgis of sublime protection
Spread over Jesus and the Resurrection.

They with a crooked tongue in hollow cheek
Commend His]Gospel to the poor and weak.
These, who have measured God with half an eye,
Damn with faint praise the blessed Trinity.
Faith relegated to the lower orders,
A panacea for popular disorders,
A pap for babes and women, once upheaved
Mountains and .hurled them headlong, once achieved
The impossible, taught saviours on the cross
And in the fire to triumph in their loss ;
A flame by night, an awful cloud by day.
Guided Mankind on their eternal way.
Now it fulfils a somewhat humbler function :
From it sleek priests distil the pulpit unction :
While clever Barnums, cleverer and stronger
Than all old heroes, needing faith no longer,
Reduce our gods to dolls wherewith a showman
Hoodwinks the rabble, and the babes and women.
Still the old creed is a propriety.
An heirloom, a respectability ;
One can conceive it true ; be civil to it ;
Were you uncivil you might come to rue it.
So at a possible future judgment you
May tell the Lord, you said it might be true :
Yea, should it menace — you have thought of that—
And left yourself with ample room to rat.
Oh ! what an irony of secret fate !
Oh ! what declension from a royal state !
That Faith, who once God's favourite angel flew.
Now drudges for a Saturnine review.
Yet though they give two fingers to the Saviour
Best clothes on Sunday and demure behaviour,
Men of the world on every working day
Put the old creed with childish things away.
Measure the infinite God on pain of hell ;
But do not heed Him when you buy or sell.
Call Jesus Lord decorously on Sunday,
But treat Him as a genial fool on Monday.
Lift up your pious eyes at Darwin's creed ;
Yet try to prove him right about your breed,
Dear fellow-Christians ! who live as though
Not even now you'd struggled from below.
For beasts of prey with all their savage strife
Are still the cherished models of your life.
Ye war with all your fellows for existence,
And when you've thrown them, still with fierce insistence,
Grind them beneath you, crush them all to death,
That you may breathe a more luxurious breath.
Hail ! weaponed man of grand expanding brain.
Most formidable beast of all that stain
Our mother earth with fratricidal blood !
Tigers but raven hungry for their food ;
But thou, to fling one shining bauble more
In coffers bursting with thy gold before,
Starvest the babes and women at thy door !

How these two friends congenial conversed
Here, as the listener heard it, is rehearsed.
As from his slightly varied point of view
It might have sounded to the speakers too.
"Shopkeeping England trades without obstruction ;
Early and late we're toiling at production.
If many starve to swell our opulence.
That's an arrangement due to providence.
Who prates of wealth's more equal distribution,
Or generous masters, means the revolution.
Gravity's one law ; this another ; profit
Can never bear a farthing taken off it.
Perish the human race to verify
Our pet Political Economy !
Men start not fair ; one weighted from the first
Must live and die, as he was born, accurst.
Yet who in social questions may go deeper
Than he that asked, ' Am I my brother's keeper ? '
Though the well-taught indulges every whim,
A boor should know 'tis criminal in him.
Sharp lucky grandsires earned our life of play ;
The poor must pare their children's crumbs away,
For storing up against an evil day.

" How frail is human nature ! how will pity
Confuse a fool's heart in a crowded city !
He would remove the squalor and distress.
Nay, makes a virtue of his feebleness —
Removing makes it more instead of less.
Let us with one vain luxury dispense,
The luxury of our benevolence.
We feel a fatuous longing to relieve
The culpable incapables who grieve :
(They're either drunk or stupid, all the cant
Can't alter facts, else why are they in want?)
Track home the fatuous longing at your leisure.
You'll find (see Mill) 'tis only selfish pleasure
This lachrymose desire to benefit
Other men aims at, selfish every bit —
We virtuous men must learn to bridle it."
" It must have cost you many a prayerful tear"
(His waggish friend interpolated here)
"Arriving at this holy consummation.
Last economic test of one's salvation :
You from a child have striven early and late
With this sad sign of the unregenerate.
This corrupt passion more in you than others
Blighted sweet innocence ; for when your brothers.
Or any other baby, sought your toy.
You always gave it up with tears — of joy.
And then one's mother, she was much to blame :
Did she brand generosity with shame ?
She punished what she termed our ' selfishness ! '
With her old-world ideas she could not guess.
Poor thing ! our last discovery in mind.
That it is very selfish to be kind.
We patronise, she lived, her Christianity —
Such saintship is a pestilent insanity ;
But what if some unshamed iconoclast,
Crumbling old fetish-raiments of the past.
Rouse from dead cerements the Christ at last ?
What if men take to following where He leads.
Weary of mumbling Athanasian creeds ? "

" Self-interest enlightened is our rule :
Peri.sh the pauper, and the general fool ! —
Well for the luckier or shrewder man !
For he, by Heaven's especial favour, can

Lodge duller rivals in foul dens like these,
And feed them with rank garbage if he please.
Mercy is an exploded superstition ;
Men are but brutes in bloodier competition.

" The State ! what call has that to interfere ?
Are we not free-born Britons living here ?
If these like not their scrofulous dens, you know.
They're free to change their quarters ; let them go.
Why one of these may struggle uppermost !
Himself may trample on the writhing host.
They cursing him, he cursing from above —
Hatred and Hell are finer things than Love !
The State forbids that paupers should be slain
With knives and guns ; but as for stench and drain,
And putrefying styes they build so small,
'Tis suicide to breathe in them at all,
Breath turns to poison — that's another thing —
See Malthus on prolific littering !
Children are luxuries — let these dispense
With offspring — we ourselves to save expense
Lop off the babes, and the benevolence.
Mother ! with murderous unflinching eye
Gaze on your moaning babe about to die.
Ring in the rich man's child with jubilation,
And ring the poor man's out, O happy nation !
Woman, your babe is ' surplus population ' !
Why take such constant thought about the body?
Man shall not live by bread" — " but ly his toddy,
Margeaux, and Bisque-soup rather," quoth the wag.
" Don't chaff, nor let your rapt attention flag,"
Resumed the Gigadibs, who seemed offended,
" My argvnnents will be the sooner ended.
What was I saying ? well these Radicals
Pamper the carnal part of pauper pals
Unduly ; why not teach them to endure
With fortitude these ills they cannot cure ?
Throw them a sop of wholesome moral saws —
(Ah ! pestilent ' education ' — thafs the cause,
Which fiiakes them carp at our existing laws)
The dogs are always yelping for a bone :
Fling them to bite a weighty moral stone !
" A man must grab whatever he can get ;
We human creatures are not angels yet.
Vou must not stab, nor strangle, a poor neighbour ;
For, if you did, why you would lose his labour.
No ; take advantage of his cramped position
To mangle him with your cruellest condition.
Rob soul and body by superior wit
And fortune ; ignorant hunger will submit.
If he should gash you, that were ugly murder :
Dribble his life-blood slowly — you're in order.
Nay, surely 'tis a very venial vice
To buy one's workman at the market price.
He may impose his terms ; contract is free."
" True," says the other, "yet it seems to me
Manacled blacks, thrust huddled in the hold
Of a rotten slaveship, might as well be told
To bargain with the master of the slaver ;
They're slaves for all your plausible palaver ! "
" Nay, in free England every man may rise
To be Prime Minister before he dies ! "
Quoth the bon-vivant with a playful nudge,
" Blifil, for next week's copy keep that fudge ! "

. . . The lonely toiler, gasping for some air.
Listens in shadowy poison of the stair,
Listens, a wounded beast within his lair, . . .
And there is Peace in London !

A Man grew God upon the shadowy cross.
And taught the world to triumph in love's loss.
Following Him they took for great and holy.
Men helped the weak, forbore to insult the lowly ;
The mighty made them ministers of woe,
Because the Lord had served us high and low :
Now Love and Chivalry lie done to death ;
Stony-eyed monsters feed on human breath :
In Christ's forgotten grave we have buried weakness.
Justice, and Mercy, and Righteousness, and
Meekness !

. . . Then fell the night : there rose a mighty roar.
As though I neared a thunderous ocean-shore :
Hoary old Ocean feels his bounds no more,
Rioting over earth a conqueror !

Nay, these are human cries ! In sooth they sound
More wrathful, turbulent, than sea's rebound !
Fire ruddies all the city ! towered Thames
Rolls like the Seine, a tide of eddying flames ;
Vessel, and wharf, and every striding arch
Glows in the fire- fiend's victorious march.
Hark! to the huge bell, whose portentous boom
Ponderous falling fills the soul with doom.
Lo ! surging human seas arise and fall
Around the lurid grandeur of St. Paul.
Torches illume their wild convulsive toils,
Windily flaring ; all around there boils
Vile human refuse, for the dainty spoils
They have wrung from others wrangling fierce and hoarse.
Ah ! turn away ! with what a hideous force
They soil our beautiful, both body and soul —
Famished beasts bursting loose from our control.
They pour the life of venerable age ;
Infiints and women perish in their rage ! . . .
. . . Then must avenging butchery begin : I
Their sin we strangle with our stronger sin. i
England must join the anarchic devil's dance.
That wilders and exhausts delirious France ! !

Who declared war? for ye shall bear the ;
blame ! i
tlistory seeks your insignificant name i
To pillory with everlasting shame !
Who declared war ? The man who dared to teach
That men are natural enemies each to each ;
Set in uncompromising battle array
Labour and wealth : the fruit you eat to-day
Glares very crimson, scribbling Galifet !
What ! shall Wealth kneel upon the fainting forms
Of millions whom scarce a raiment warms.
Draining their very heart's blood leisurely.
And shall we wonder when with frenzied cry.
Beyond endurance urged, at last they leap
To murder gorged wealth as it lies asleep ;
The legal armed oppressor of his neighbour.
He who hath goaded overdriven labour,
A peaceful tyrant, the Red Flag unfurled :
He stands accurst of God, and of the world !
" A man must grab whatever he can get :
We human creatures are not angels yet " —
So chuckle, cynic Mephistopheles!
Relish you violent replies like these ?
Bring forth your mitrailleuse ! but, hypocrite,
It was yourself who nursed the need for it.
Yea, you may shoot them ; you may drown the people
In their own life-blood ; every Christian steeple
May echo to the clang of jubilant bells
Reeling, aflame with flags of joy for hells
Of cruel vengeance underneath the cross !
Peal with Te Deums for a people's loss.
Cathedral organs golden in the gloom !
Yet know that these from every vengeful doom
Arise more terrible ! their ghosts assume
More formidable forms, and multiply !
Ah ! the red sea returns to whelm you horribly !
Merciless mow them ! form the Holy Alliance,
To ravening hungry brethren breathe defiance ;
For weapons brandish, oh ye monarchs holy,
Dead hands of Him who living helped the lowly ;
Yea, in the name of Christ, the poor man's God,
Stamp down his carcass in the bloody sod ! . . .
. . . There is War in London !

. . . Then I cried, "Lord, how long?
what hope is ours ? "
Then dawned a twilit winter morn of showers.
I heard not the artillery's loud roar.
Nor plunge of shrieking shells, nor any more
Horrible human screams of civil war.
My soul had but foreboded the fell riot :
In the foul alley reigned unbroken quiet.
Even as erst : three figures made their way
To where the unhappy starving woman lay :
Three mutual strangers from a diff'erent home,
Each wondering why the other one has come.
The first, an old and venerable man,
From whose grand countenance there falls a ban
On our vain follies, on our wallowing sin.
When we are blessed enough a glance to win ;
He seeks admittance, he will enter in.
The other is a woman past her prime,
Still beautiful, although the wintry rime
Silvers her forehead ; she is pure and cahn,
And from her loving visage heavenly balm
Falls for the sorrowful ; she has lived her sorrow.
Both of these angels facelight seem to borrow
From the same Jesus with the younger one ;
Who smiles, a sweet yet homely-featured nun.
I know not with what form the old man's thought
Invested his divine lore when he taught :
That elder highborn lady, as you list,
You may call Puritan, or Calvinist.
The younger woman held the ancient creed
Of Christendom : in soul, and life and deed,
They differ little ; in explaining much :
One feels the Christ arisen when they touch.
Do they not bear a living love to her.
And him who darkens by the sufferer ?
I turned ; for in mine ears one spake with pity,
"If there be ten there, I will spare the city." . . .
. . . There is Peace in London !