Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/63

This side for gold and lands, on that for bread;
The brawl is made a people's massacre.
For subtler arms they leave the spear and shield,
To overcome with fraud the slower mind,
With cunning to beguile the freer heart,
Purloining this man's substance, that one's hopes;
The myriads fall, the few rise eminent,
And death delaying limps as slavery,
One name of many shapes, or bond or free.
Children must eat, and women's tears be dried:
Toil on, O Worker, these are chains indeed,
And well the masters know to make them bite.
The curse be on them! men of barren greed,
Who in the sweet necessities of life
Forge the sharp axes of their fierce misrule;
Who loose the whips of hunger o'er the poor,
Themselves in plenty, fenced in sabred law,
Voracious mouths, and unrelaxing hands;
True slavers they, and traffic in their kind;
The plough, the loom, the engine,—that's the man,
And they the owners! O the ignominy!
'When? when?' the people cry, and troop to death.
The viperous knot, how hard they reach and strain!
O well may Nature trample on the brood,
And rot, a famine, where he sows the seed,

And pour, an inundation, o'er his fields,