The Cry of Justice by Upton Sinclair and Jack London

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Title: The Cry for Justice

An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest

Author: Various

Editor: Upton Sinclair

Contributor: Jack London

Release Date: July 5, 2021 [eBook #65775]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

Produced by: MFR, Splendid Geryon and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRY FOR JUSTICE ***

THE HEAVY SLEDGE
MAHONRI YOUNG

(American sculptor, born 1877)

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

Edited by

UPTON SINCLAIR

Author of “Sylvia,” “The Jungle,” Etc.

With an Introduction by
JACK LONDON

Author of “The Sea Wolf,” “The Call of the Wild,”

“The Valley of the Moon,” Etc., Etc.

ILLUSTRATED WITH REPRODUCTIONS

OF SOCIAL PROTEST IN ART

Published by

UPTON SINCLAIR

NEW YORK CITY AND PASADENA, CALIFORNIA

Dr. John R. Haynes, of Los Angeles, very generously purchased from the publishers the plates and copyright of this
book, in order to make possible the issuing of this edition. I asked Dr. Haynes if he would let me make
acknowledgment to him in the book, and he answered: “Dedicate the book to those unknown ones, who by their dimes
and quarters keep the Socialist movement going; to the poor and obscure people who sacrifice themselves in order to
bring about a better world, which they may never live to see. Write this as eloquently as you can, and it will be the best
possible dedication to ‘The Cry for Justice’.”
I decided, after thinking it over, to combine my own idea with the idea of Dr. Haynes.

Copyright, 1915, by

The John C. Winston Co.

Introduction by Jack London

This anthology, I take it, is the first edition, the first gathering together of the body of the literature and art of the humanist
thinkers of the world. As well done as it has been done, it will be better done in the future. There will be much adding,
there will be a little subtracting, in the succeeding editions that are bound to come. The result will be a monument of the
ages, and there will be none fairer.
Since reading of the Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud has enabled countless devout and earnest right-seeking souls to
be stirred and uplifted to higher and finer planes of thought and action, then the reading of this humanist Holy Book
cannot fail similarly to serve the needs of groping, yearning humans who seek to discern truth and justice amid the dazzle
and murk of the thought-chaos of the present-day world.
No person, no matter how soft and secluded his own life has been, can read this Holy Book and not be aware that the
world is filled with a vast mass of unfairness, cruelty, and suffering. He will find that it has been observed, during all the
ages, by the thinkers, the seers, the poets, and the philosophers.
And such person will learn, possibly, that this fair world so brutally unfair, is not decreed by the will of God nor by any
iron law of Nature. He will learn that the world can be fashioned a fair world indeed by the humans who inhabit it, by
the very simple, and yet most difficult process of coming to an understanding of the world. Understanding, after all, is
merely sympathy in its fine correct sense. And such sympathy, in its genuineness, makes toward unselfishness.
Unselfishness inevitably connotes service. And service is the solution of the entire vexatious problem of man.
He, who by understanding becomes converted to the gospel of service, will serve truth to confute liars and make of
them truth-tellers; will serve kindness so that brutality will perish; will serve beauty to the erasement of all that is not
beautiful. And he who is strong will serve the weak that they may become strong. He will devote his strength, not to the
debasement and defilement of his weaker fellows, but to the making of opportunity for them to make themselves into
men rather than into slaves and beasts.
One has but to read the names of the men and women whose words burn in these pages, and to recall that by far more
than average intelligence have they won to their place in the world’s eye and in the world’s brain long after the dust of
them has vanished, to realize that due credence must be placed in their report of the world herein recorded. They were
not tyrants and wastrels, hypocrites and liars, brewers and gamblers, market-riggers and stock-brokers. They were
givers and servers, and seers and humanists. They were unselfish. They conceived of life, not in terms of profit, but of
service.
Life tore at them with its heart-break. They could not escape the hurt of it by selfish refuge in the gluttonies of brain and
body. They saw, and steeled themselves to see, clear-eyed and unafraid. Nor were they afflicted by some strange
myopia. They all saw the same thing. They are all agreed upon what they saw. The totality of their evidence proves this
with unswerving consistency. They have brought the report, these commissioners of humanity. It is here in these pages.
It is a true report.
But not merely have they reported the human ills. They have proposed the remedy. And their remedy is of no part of all
the jangling sects. It has nothing to do with the complicated metaphysical processes by which one may win to other
worlds and imagined gains beyond the sky. It is a remedy for this world, since worlds must be taken one at a time. And
yet, that not even the jangling sects should receive hurt by the making fairer of this world for this own world’s sake, it is
well, for all future worlds of them that need future worlds, that their splendor be not tarnished by the vileness and
ugliness of this world.
It is so simple a remedy, merely service. Not one ignoble thought or act is demanded of any one of all men and women
in the world to make fair the world. The call is for nobility of thinking, nobility of doing. The call is for service, and, such
is the wholesomeness of it, he who serves all, best serves himself.
Times change, and men’s minds with them. Down the past, civilizations have exposited themselves in terms of power, of
world-power or of other-world power. No civilization has yet exposited itself in terms of love-of-man. The humanists
have no quarrel with the previous civilizations. They were necessary in the development of man. But their purpose is
fulfilled, and they may well pass, leaving man to build the new and higher civilization that will exposit itself in terms of
love and service and brotherhood.
To see gathered here together this great body of human beauty and fineness and nobleness is to realize what glorious
humans have already existed, do exist, and will continue increasingly to exist until all the world beautiful be made over in
their image. We know how gods are made. Comes now the time to make a world.

Honolulu, March 6, 1915.

Acknowledgments

The editor has used his best efforts to ascertain what material in the present volume is protected by copyright. In all such
cases he has obtained the permission of author and publisher for the use of the material. Such permission applies only to
the present volume, and no one should assume the right to make any other use of it without seeking permission in turn. If
there has been any failure upon the editor’s part to obtain a necessary consent, it is due solely to oversight, and he trusts
that it may be overlooked. The following publishers have to be thanked for the permissions which they have kindly
granted; the thanks applying also to the authors of the works.

MITCHELL KENNERLEY

Patrick MacGill, “Songs of the Dead End.” Harry Kemp, “The Cry of Youth.” Charles Hanson Towne, “Manhattan.”
Hjalmar Bergström, “Lynggaard & Co.” Donald Lowrie, “My Life in Prison.” John G. Neihardt, “Cry of the People.”
Frank Harris, “The Bomb.” Vachel Lindsay, “The Eagle that is Forgotten” and “To the United States Senate.” Frederik
van Eeden, “The Quest.” Edwin Davies Schoonmaker, “Trinity Church.” Walter Lippman, “A Preface to Politics.” L.
Andreyev, “Savva.” J. C. Underwood, “Processionals.” Bliss Carman, “The Rough Rider.” Percy Adams Hutchison,
“The Swordless Christ.”

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.

Frank Norris, “The Octopus.” Helen Keller, “Out of the Dark.” Frederik van Eeden, “Happy Humanity.” Bouck White,
“The Call of the Carpenter.” Alexander Irvine, “From the Bottom Up.” John D. Rockefeller, “Random Reminiscences.”
G. Lowes Dickinson, “Letters from a Chinese Official.” Ben B. Lindsey and Harvey J. O’Higgins, “The Beast.” Franklin
P. Adams, “By and Large.” Edwin Markham, “The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems.” Gerald Stanley Lee,
“Crowds.” Woodrow Wilson, “The New Freedom.”

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN CO.

William Vaughn Moody, “Poems.” Vida D. Scudder, “Social Ideals.” Florence Wilkinson Evans, “The Ride Home.”
Peter Kropotkin, “Mutual Aid” and “Memoirs of a Revolutionist.” Helen G. Cone, “Today.” T. B. Aldrich, “Poems.” T.
W. Higginson, “Poems.”

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

H. G. Wells, “A Modern Utopia.” Björnstjerne Björnson, “Beyond Human Power.” Edith Wharton, “The House of
Mirth.” John Galsworthy, “A Motley.” Maxim Gorky, “Fóma Gordyéeff.” J. M. Barrie, “Farm Laborers.” Walter
Wyckoff, “The Workers.”

THE MACMILLAN CO.

John Masefield, “Dauber” and “A Consecration.” Jack London, “The People of the Abyss” and “Revolution.” Robert
Herrick, “A Life for a Life.” Israel Zangwill, “Children of the Ghetto.” Albert Edwards, “A Man’s World” and
“Comrade Yetta.” Walter Rauschenbusch, “Christianity and the Social Crisis.” Winston Churchill, “The Inside of the
Cup.” Rabindranath Tagore, “Gitanjali.” Thorstein Veblen, “The Theory of the Leisure Class.” Edward Alsworth Ross,
“Sin and Society.” W. J. Ghent, “Socialism and Success.” Vachel Lindsay, “The Congo.” Wilfrid Wilson Gibson,
“Fires.” Percy Mackaye, “The Present Hour.” Robert Hunter, “Violence and the Labor Movement.” Ernest Poole,
“The Harbor.”

THE CENTURY CO.

Louis Untermeyer, “Challenge.” Richard Whiteing, “No. 5 John Street.” George Carter, “Ballade of Misery and Iron.”
James Oppenheim, “Songs for the New Age.” H. G. Wells, “In the Days of the Comet.” Alex. Irvine, “My Lady of the
Chimney Corner.” Edwin Björkman, “Dinner à la Tango.”

SMALL, MAYNARD & CO.

Charlotte P. Gilman, “In this Our World” and “Women and Economics.” Finley P. Dunne, “Mr. Dooley.”

BRENTANO

G. Bernard Shaw, “Preface to Major Barbara” and “The Problem Play.” Eugene Brieux, “The Red Robe.” W. L.
George, “A Bed of Roses.”

DUFFIELD & CO.

Elsa Barker, “The Frozen Grail.” H. G. Wells, “Tono-Bungay.”

B. W. HUEBSCH

James Oppenheim, “Pay Envelopes.” Gerhart Hauptmann, “The Weavers.” Maxim Gorky, “Tales of Two Countries.”

G. P. PUTNAM SONS

Antonio Fogazzaro, “The Saint.” J. L. Jaurès, “Studies in Socialism.”

GEORGE H. DORAN CO.

Will Levington Comfort, “Midstream.” Charles E. Russell, “These Shifting Scenes.”

FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.

Robert Tressall, “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.” Wilhelm Lamszus, “The Human Slaughter House.” Olive
Schreiner, “Woman and Labor.” Alfred Noyes, “The Wine Press.”

MCCLURE PUBLISHING CO.

Dana Burnet, “A Ballad of Dead Girls.” Lincoln Steffens, “The Dying Boss” and “The Reluctant Grafter.”

THE “MASSES”

John Amid, “The Tail of the World.” Dana Burnet, “Sisters of the Cross of Shame.” Carl Sandburg, “Buttons.” J. E.
Spingarn, “Heloise sans Abelard.” Louis Untermeyer, “To a Supreme Court Judge.”

JAMES POTT & CO.

David Graham Phillips, “The Reign of Gilt.”

BARSE & HOPKINS

R. W. Service, “The Spell of the Yukon.”

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

August Bebel, “Memoirs.”

CHARLES H. SERGEL CO.

Verhaeren, “The Dawn: Translation by Arthur Symons.”

ALBERT AND CHARLES BONI

Horace Traubel, “Chants Communal.”

A. C. MCCLURG & CO.

W. E. B. du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk.”

MOTHER EARTH PUBLISHING CO.

A. Berkman, “Prison Memories of an Anarchist.” Voltairine de Cleyre, “Works.” Emma Goldman, “Anarchism.”

MOFFAT, YARD & CO.

Reginald Wright Kauffman, “The House of Bondage.”

JOHN LANE

Anatole France, “Penguin Island.” William Watson, “Poems.”

BOBBS-MERRILL CO.

Brand Whitlock, “The Turn of the Balance.”

E. P. DUTTON & CO.

Patrick MacGill, “Children of the Dead End.”

CHARLES H. KERR CO.

“When the Leaves Come Out.”

HILLACRE BOOKHOUSE

Arturo Giovannitti, “The Walker.”

HENRY HOLT & CO.

Romain Rolland, “Jean-Christophe.”

RICHARD G. BADGER (Poet Lore)

Andreyev, “King Hunger.” Gorky, “A Night’s Lodging.”

MRS. ARTHUR UPSON

Poems by Arthur Upson.

New York Times

Elsa Barker, “Breshkovskaya.”

Collier’s Weekly

Herman Hagedorn, “Fifth Avenue, 1915.”

Poetry: A Magazine of Verse

F. Kiper Frank, “A Girl Strike Leader.”

Life

Max Eastman, “To a Bourgeois Litterateur.”

WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING CO.

(P. P. Simmons Co., New York)

Joseph Skipsey, “Mother Wept.” Jethro Bithell’s translation of Verhaeren in “Contemporary Belgian Poetry” and of
Dehmel in “Contemporary German Poetry.” Rimbaud’s “Waifs and Strays” in “Contemporary French Poetry.”

ELKIN MATHEWS & CO.

William H. Davies, “Songs of Joy.”

CONSTABLE & CO.

Harold Monro, “Impressions.”

DUCKWORTH & CO.

Hilaire Belloc, “The Rebel.”

SWAN, SONNENSCHEIN & CO.

Edward Carpenter, “Towards Democracy.”

Acknowledgments have also to be made to the following artists, who have kindly consented to have their works used in
the volume: Mahonri Young, Wm. Balfour Ker, Ryan Walker, Charles A. Winter, Abastenia Eberle, John Mowbray-
Clarke, Isidore Konti, Walter Crane, and Will Dyson. Also to Life Publishing Co. and the New Age, London, for
permission to use a drawing from their files.

Contents

BOOK

PAGE

I.
Toil
27

II.
The Chasm
73

III.
The Outcast
121

IV.
Out of the Depths
179

V.
Revolt
227

VI.
Martyrdom
289

VII.
Jesus
345

VIII.
The Church
383

IX.
The Voice of the Ages
431

X.
Mammon
485

XI.
War
551

XII.
Country
593

XIII.
Children
637

XIV.
Humor
679

XV.
The Poet
725

XVI.
Socialism
783

XVII.
The New Day
835

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.
For this reason I may without suspicion of egotism say what I think about the volume. It was significant to me that
several persons reading the manuscript and writing quite independently, referred to it as “a new Bible.” I believe that it
is, quite literally and simply, what the old Bible was—a selection by the living minds of a living time of the best and truest
writings known to them. It is a Bible of the future, a Gospel of the new hope of the race. It is a book for the apostles of
a new dispensation to carry about with them; a book to cheer the discouraged and console the wounded in humanity’s
last war of liberation.
The standards of the book are those of literature. If there has been any letting down, it has been in the case of old
writings, which have an interest apart from that of style. It brings us a thrill of wonder to find, in an ancient Egyptian
parchment, a father setting forth to his son how easy is the life of the lawyer, and what a dog’s life is that of the farmer. It
amuses us to read a play, produced in Athens two thousand, two hundred and twenty-three years ago, in which is
elaborately propounded the question which thousands of Socialist “soap-boxers” are answering every night: “Who will
do the dirty work?” It makes us shudder, perhaps, to find a Spaniard of the thirteenth century analyzing the evil devices
of tyrants, and expounding in detail the labor-policy of some present-day great corporations in America.
Let me add that I have not considered it my function to act as censor to the process of social evolution. Every aspect of
the revolutionary movement has found a voice in this book. Two questions have been asked of each writer: Have you
had something vital to say? and Have you said it with some special effectiveness? The reader will find, for example, one
or two of the hymns of the “Christian Socialists”; he will also find one of the parodies on Christian hymns which are sung
by the Industrial Workers of the World in their “jungles” in the Far West. The Anarchists and the apostles of
insurrection are also represented; and if some of the things seem to the reader the mere unchaining of furies, I would say,
let him not blame the faithful anthologist, let him not blame even the writer—let him blame himself, who has acquiesced
in the existence of conditions which have driven his fellow-men to the extremes of madness and despair.
In the preparation of this work I have placed myself under obligation to so many people that it would take much space
to make complete acknowledgments. I must thank those friends who went through the bulky manuscript, and gave me
the benefit of their detailed criticism: George Sterling, Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Clement Wood, Louis Untermeyer,
and my wife. I am under obligation to a number of people, some of them strangers, who went to the trouble of sending
me scrap-books which represented years and even decades of collecting: Elizabeth Balch, Elizabeth Magie Phillips,
Frank B. Norman, Frank Stuhlman, J. M. Maddox, Edward J. O’Brien, and Clement Wood. Among those who helped
me with valuable suggestions were: Edwin Björkman, Reginald Wright Kauffman, Thomas Seltzer, Jack London, Rose
Pastor Stokes, May Beals, Elizabeth Freeman, Arthur W. Calhoun, Frank Shay, Alexander Berkman, Joseph F. Gould,
Louis Untermeyer, Harold Monro, Morris Hillquit, Peter Kropotkin, Dr. James P. Warbasse, and the Baroness von
Blomberg. The fullness of the section devoted to ancient writings is in part due to the advice of a number of scholars: Dr.
Paul Carus, Professor Crawford H. Toy, Professor William Cranston Lawton, Professor Charles Burton Gulick,
Professor Thomas D. Goodell, Professor Walton Brooks McDaniels, Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Professor George F.
Moore, Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch, and Professor Charles R. Lanman.
With regard to the illustrations in the volume, I endeavored to repeat in the field of art what had been done in the field of
literature: to obtain the best material, both old and new, and select the most interesting and vital. I have to record my
indebtedness to a number of friends who made suggestions in this field—Ryan Walker, Art Young, John Mowbray-
Clarke, Martin Birnbaum, Odon Por, and Walter Crane. Also I must thank Mr. Frank Weitenkampf and Dr. Herman
Rosenthal of the New York Public Library, and Dr. Clifford of the Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To the

artists whose copyrighted work I have used I owe my thanks for their permission: as likewise to the many writers whose
copyrighted books I have quoted. Elsewhere in the volume I have made acknowledgments to publishers for the rights
they have kindly granted. Let me here add this general caution: The copyrighted passages used have been used by
permission, and any one who desires to reprint them must obtain similar permission.
One or two hundred contemporary authors responded to my invitation and sent me specimens of their writings. Of these
authors, probably three-fourths will not find their work included—for which seeming discourtesy I can only offer the
sincere plea of the limitations of space which were imposed upon me. I am not being diplomatic, but am stating a fact
when I say that I had to leave out much that I thought was of excellent quality.
What was chosen will now speak for itself. Let my last word be of the hope, which has been with me constantly, that
the book may be to others what it has been to me. I have spent with it the happiest year of my lifetime: the happiest,
because occupied with beauty of the greatest and truest sort. If the material in this volume means to you, the reader,
what it has meant to me, you will live with it, love it, sometimes weep with it, many times pray with it, yearn and hunger
with it, and, above all, resolve with it. You will carry it with you about your daily tasks, you will be utterly possessed by
it; and again and again you will be led to dedicate yourself to the greatest hope, the most wondrous vision which has
ever thrilled the soul of humanity. In this spirit and to this end the book is offered to you. If you will read it through
consecutively, skipping nothing, you will find that it has a form. You will be led from one passage to the next, and when
you reach the end you will be a wiser, a humbler, and a more tender-hearted person.

A Consecration

BY JOHN MASEFIELD

Not of the princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers
Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the years,
Rather the scorned—the rejected—the men hemmed in with the spears;

The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies,
Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries,
The men with the broken heads and the blood running into their eyes.

Not the be-medalled Commander, beloved of the throne,
Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown,
But the lads who carried the koppie and cannot be known.

Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the road,
The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad,
The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load.

The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout,
The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to the shout,
The drowsy man at the wheel and the tired lookout.

Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth,
The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;—
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth!

Theirs be the music, the color, the glory, the gold;
Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould.
Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold—

Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tale be told.

Amen.

BOOK I

Toil

The dignity and tragedy of labor; pictures of the actual conditions under which men and women work in mills

and factories, fields and mines.

[A]

The Man With the Hoe

BY EDWIN MARKHAM

(This poem, which was written after seeing Millet’s world-famous painting, was published in 1899 by
a California school-principal, and made a profound impression. It has been hailed as “the battle-cry of
the next thousand years”)

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

Is this the thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this—
More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed—
More filled with signs and portents for the soul—
More fraught with menace to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?

Country Life

(From “The Village”)

[A]

BY GEORGE CRABBE

(One of the earliest of English realistic poets, 1754-1832; called “The Poet of the Poor”)

Or will you deem them amply paid in health,
Labor’s fair child, that languishes with wealth?
Go then! and see them rising with the sun,
Through a long course of daily toil to run;
See them beneath the dog-star’s raging heat,
When the knees tremble and the temples beat;
Behold them, leaning on their scythes, look o’er
The labor past, and toils to come explore;
See them alternate suns and showers engage,
And hoard up aches and anguish for their age;
Through fens and marshy moors their steps pursue,
Where their warm pores imbibe the evening dew;
Then own that labor may as fatal be
To these thy slaves, as thine excess to thee.

An Aged Laborer

BY RICHARD JEFFERIES

(English essayist and nature student, 1848-1887)

For weeks and weeks the stark black oaks stood straight out of the snow as masts of ships with furled sails frozen and
ice-bound in the haven of the deep valley. Never was such a long winter.
One morning a laboring man came to the door with a spade, and asked if he could dig the garden, or try to, at the risk
of breaking the tool in the ground. He was starving; he had had no work for six months, he said, since the first frost
started the winter. Nature and the earth and the gods did not trouble about him, you see. Another aged man came once
a week regularly; white as the snow through which he walked. In summer he worked; since the winter began he had had
no employment, but supported himself by going round to the farms in rotation. He had no home of any kind. Why did he
not go into the workhouse? “I be afeared if I goes in there they’ll put me with the rough ‘uns, and very likely I should get
some of my clothes stole.” Rather than go into the workhouse, he would totter round in the face of the blasts that might
cover his weak old limbs with drift. There was a sense of dignity and manhood left still; his clothes were worn, but clean
and decent; he was no companion of rogues; the snow and frost, the straw of the outhouses, was better than that. He
was struggling against age, against nature, against circumstances; the entire weight of society, law and order pressed
upon him to force him to lose his self-respect and liberty. He would rather risk his life in the snow-drift. Nature, earth
and the gods did not help him; sun and stars, where were they? He knocked at the doors of the farms and found good
in man only—not in Law or Order, but in individual man alone.

Farm Laborers

BY JAMES MATTHEW BARRIE

(English poet, playwright and novelist, born 1860)

Grand, patient, long-suffering fellows these men were, up at five, summer and winter, foddering their horses, maybe,
hours before there would be food for themselves, miserably paid, housed like cattle, and when rheumatism seized them,
liable to be flung aside like a broken graip. As hard was the life of the women: coarse food, chaff beds, damp clothes
their portion, their sweethearts in the service of masters who were loath to fee a married man. Is it to be wondered that
these lads who could be faithful unto death drank soddenly on their one free day; that these girls, starved of
opportunities for womanliness, of which they could make as much as the finest lady, sometimes woke after a holiday to
wish that they might wake no more?

Helotage

(From “Sartor Resartus”)

BY THOMAS CARLYLE

(One of the most famous of British essayists, 1795-1881; historian of the French Revolution, and master of a vivid and picturesque

prose-style)

It is not because of his toils that I lament for the poor: we must all toil, or steal (howsoever we name our stealing), which
is worse; no faithful workman finds his task a pastime. The poor is hungry and athirst; but for him also there is food and