Ye Concerts who plan for the welfare of Man
and compose his occasional quarrels,
Whom we properly deem to be teachers supreme
in the sphere of Political Morals,
May you win the renown that your efforts should crown
and reward your assiduous labours
In arranging the cares and embarrassed affairs
that afflict your unfortunate neighbours!
Should a potentate go for his national foe,
and, as soon as he's thoroughly licked him,
Should he dare to demand a concession of land
from his prostrate and paralyzed victim,
It is then you arise and his arm you arrest
when his harvest is ripe for the reaping,
And a people oppressed may in confidence rest
when it's safe in Diplomacy's keeping.
It is you who protest in a horrified tone
at a hint of Integrity's danger,
And the victor is shown that a Concert alone
is of Law and of Fate the arranger:
With a warlike display of your fleets in array
and of Maxims (both empty and loaded)
You establish it plain that his notions of gain
are immoral and also exploded!
Let the blasphemous cry that it's done with an eye
to your ultimate personal profit,
That your chivalrous task is but worn as a mask
till occasion allows you to doff it,
Let the caviller say that the victim to-day
is preserved from a final disaster,
And is saved from the Japs that to-morrow perhaps
he may furnish a meal for their master:
Yet I cannot believe that what Concerts achieve
is by reasons ulterior dictated,
I am perfectly sure that their motives are pure
(by themselves it is frequently stated);
By themselves we are taught that they never in thought
could the Good with the Selfish commingle--
What they do is designed for the good of mankind
with an eye that is simple and single!
For whomever--_e.g._, let us say the Chinee--
you have freed from the fear of invasion,
Should he presently seem in a posture to be
which is open to Moral Persuasion,--
How you take him in hand, a philanthropist band!
how you toil to improve his condition,
With a noble disdain of the trouble and pain
of a wholly unselfish Partition!
For it grieves you, of course, when--ignoring the force
which the doctrine of Mine and of Thine has--
E'en Integrity's self you must lay on the shelf
(I allude, not to Europe's but China's)!
Let detractors contend that your means and your end
are the end and the means of the vulture--
Such an altruist plan must betoken the man
who is bent on diffusion of culture.
Be it yours to assuage for inadequate wage
our unseemly contentions and quarrels,
Be it yours to maintain your respectable reign
in the sphere of Political Morals;
And, relying no more on the shedding of gore
or the rule of torpedoes and sabres,
Make beneficent plots for dividing in lots
the domains of your paralyzed neighbours!