I am the unknown God, my art
Can blind the eyes and steel the heart.
I regulate life, I give to the kiss
A scientific analysis.
The complacent christian I can twist
Into a sleek materialist,
While I burn as a quaking, perfumed joss stick,
My ancient idolatrous agnostic;
Progress needs both of them, Progress is old,
Progress you see blows hot and cold.
SELF-COM.: Yours is a wonderful constitution!
What have you brought us, Evolution?
EVOL.: A genuine education bill!
(He throws it in.
SELF-COM. : Bluff! Too British, fill, come fill!
EVOL.: A treatise on bacteriology:
Two parsons squabbling at theology!
(He throws them in.
SELF-COM.: Still at the old game? Press down the lid.
EVOL.: And a ponderous book by Benjamin Kidd!
(He throws it in.
ALL: Ho, ho, for the melting pot,
Bubbling, simmering, seething hot,
It goes in thus, and it come out, what?
Ho, ho, for the melting pot!
SELF-COM. : Come first, come last! your contribution,
Rabid and wry-necked Revolution?
REVOLUTION: Wry-necked, yes, if the only tune
Were the one that I hummed as British buffoon,
But I'm only rabid when joining the dance
In the red cap and rages I borrow from France.
In England we always damn the eyes
Of all who don't cry 'compromise,'
While now, 'stead of charters and proclamations,
Grand independence declarations,
Uncrownings of kings and such like devices,
It's the strike, the combine, the industrial crisis;
And as for republics, why, now, the deuce! it's
A polite aristocracy in Massachusetts.
In the fulness of Time we shall set an embargo
On even the brazen throat of Chicago.
Republics forsooth! Revolution grows organized
As the world's machinery gets more 'Morganised.'
Yet old mother Progress chuckles and churns,
Watching the cruddle she turns and turns.
SELF-COM.: In with it, cease your mouthing and mystery.
REV.: A crown, and a lesson in cast-off history!
(He throws them in.
SELF-COM.: Men never learn lessons from you!
REV.: They must!
SELF-COM.: Let's see, what next.
REV.: An American Trust!
(He throws it in.
ALL : Ho, ho, for the melting pot,
Bubbling, seething, simmering hot,
It goes in thus, and it comes out, what?
Ho, ho, for the melting pot!
SELF-COM. : Are you still moaning over the schism?
Up and in with it, Radicalism!
RADICALISM: Woe's me, alas! Woe's me, alack!
That have still to bear Harcourt on my back,
And the musty makeshifts of them that befool
The world with the myths of the Manchester school.
While the worst of it is I'm such a sham
That I don't know myself any more what I am.
Fie, mother Progress! was it fair,
First to coquette with 'l'aissez făire,'
And then to allow yourself to be kissed,
By—never mind who—the collectivist!
Can you wonder, so lax in your right & wrong,
That I, your child, know not to whom I belong.
All that's left to the once wild harum-scarum
Is to puff the Pro-Boer and to snarl at old Sarum.
Who'd have thought, now I'm grown so lame and hoary,
That Progress—my Progress!—could ever turn Tory.
SELF-COM.: In with it, in with it! never mind
Though Progress has left you thus behind!
RAD.: They're heavy! all the back volumes of 'Truth,'
And a 'Little England' the dream of my youth!
(He throws them in.
ALL: Ho, ho, for the melting pot,
Bubbling, simmering, seething hot!
It goes in thus, and it comes out, what?
Ho, ho, for the melting pot!
SELF-COM.: Your innings next and let your fling go,
In with its wonted bombast, Jingo!
JINGOISM: Proud of my bombast, proud of my pride,
Proud of my insolence, leaden-eyed,
Proud with the pride of a dilettante
Of my old redoubtable Rosinante
Once ridden by Pam and Disraeli.
Proud of the tongue that shall never fail ye,
Or my manners truculent, sloven and slack,
Proud of the skin that I bear on my back—
Don't be alarmed, it's only a try on,—
The moth-eaten skin of the British Lion:
The ass looks out from beneath, and brays
As of old in a number of different ways.
For I was bred where the Cockney bawls
In his millions among the music halls
Of the largest and loathsomest city, or where
In a still larger, noisier hemisphere
The American Yellow Press teaches him style
In what he knows as the 'Dily Mile.'
East or West what matter to me
The Jingo slips from the self-same tree,
And the 'white man's burden' remains to grapple
As well in the Bowery as in Whitechapel.
Poor little Cockney! however should he know
To synthesise 'Boer' and 'Philipino!'
Let him waste the remains of his wretched lungs
