A few words of preface seem necessary in sending out this little book.
It is to be looked on as the product of the life of a social worker in
England, in his travels, and in Australia. The key-note of the First
Part--"England"--is desperation, or, if any hope, then "desperate hope."
A friend once reported to me a saying of Matthew Arnold's, that he did
not believe in any man of intelligence taking a desperate view of the
social problem in England. I am afraid that saying relegates me to the
ranks of the fools, but I am content to remain there. I believe that
never since 1381, which is the date of the Peasants' Revolt, has England
presented such a spectacle of the happiness of the tens, of the misery of
the millions. It is not by any means the artisan, or the general or the
agricultural labourer, who is the only sufferer. All society groans
under the slavery of stupendous toil and a pittance wage. The negro
slavery of the Southern States of America was better than the white
slavery of to-day all over the earth, but more particularly in Europe and
in America. Capitalism is built on the dreadful wrong of recompensing
Labour, not according to the worth of its work, but according to the
worth of its members in the market of unlimited competition, and that
soon comes to mean the payment of what will hold body and soul together
when in the enjoyment of health and strength. Landlordism is built on
the dreadful wrong of sharing with Capitalism the plunder of Labour. Why
are rents high in Australia? Because here Labour is scarcer, its wages
correspondingly higher, and therefore Landlordism steps in to filch from
Labour its hard-won comforts, and once more reduce it to the necessities
of existence. The American slavers had to spend more in housing and
keeping any fixed number of their slaves in serviceable condition than
Capitalism spends in wages. Capitalism and Landlordism, like good
Christian Institutions, leave the living to keep alive their living, and
the dead to bury their dead. This cannot continue for ever. At least
all the intelligent portion of the community will grow to see the
injustice and attempt to abolish it. But when will the great mass of
unintelligent people who have won a large enough share of the plunder of
their fellows to minister to their own comforts--when will these, also,
awake and see? England will realize the desperation of her social
problem when its desperation is shown her by fire and blood--then, and
not till then! What shall teach her her sins to herself is what is even
now teaching her her sins to Ireland.
I make no apology for several poems in the First Part which are fierce,
which are even blood-thirsty. As I felt I wrote, and I will not lessen
the truth of what inspired those feelings by eliminating or suppressing
the record of them. Rather, let me ask you, whoever you be, to imagine
what the cause was, from the effect in one who was (unhappily) born and
bred into the dominant class, and whose chief care and joy in life was in
the pursuit of a culture which draws back instinctively from the violent
and the terrible. I will go further. I will arraign my country and my
day, because their iniquity would not let me follow out the laws of my
nature, which were for luminosity and quiet, for the wide and genial
view, but made me "take arms against a sea of troubles," hoping only too
often "by opposing to end them." No, we make no apology for bloody sweat
and for tears of fire wrung out of us in the Gethsemane and on the
Calvary of our country: we make no apology to those whom we have the
right to curse.
In the Second Part--"Here and There," the record of a short trip in the
East--the sight of the sin which England has committed not only against
herself, against Ireland, against Scotland, but against India, against
China, against the sweetest and gentlest people in the earth, the
Japanese--the sight of this, and of the signs of England's doom, the
punishment for the abuse of the greatest trust any modern nation has had
given to her, inspires a hatred which only that punishment can appease.
In the Third Part--"Australia"--there is neither ferocity nor
blood-thirstiness. Its key-note is hope, hope that dreads but does not
despair.
I may add that in this edition I have sacrificed all merely personal
aspects of the poems to attempt to give the book a more complete
totality. We know well enough that allowance will rarely be made for any
of these things: that our plea for comprehension will too often be an
idle one. None the less we make it, for the sake of those who are
willing to attempt to realize the social problem and to seek within
themselves what they can do for its solution. We have no care whatever
as to what view they take of it. Let them be with us or against us, it
matters not, if only they will make this effort, if only they will ponder
it in their hearts. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of us are concerned in
this problem. We are all of us true sons of Labour who have suffered the
robbery of the wages of Competition. One word more. The Australian is
apt to deprecate the socialism of the European or the American. The
darker aspects of the European or American civilization are not striking
here. They are here; they are more than incipient, very much more; but
they are not striking. Let such an one pause. "We speak of that which
we do know," and, for the rest, not only do we bid "him that has ears, to
hear," but "him that has eyes, to see."
Brothers all over the earth, brothers and sisters, you of that silent
company whose speech is only in the unknown deeds of love, the unknown
devotions, the unknown heroisms, it is to you we speak! Our heart is
against your heart; you can feel it beat. Soul speaks to soul through
lips whose utterance is a need. In your room alone, in your lonely
walks, in the still hours of day and night, we will be with you. We will
speak with you, we will plead with you, for these piteous ones. In the
evening trees you shall hear the sound of our weeping. Our sobs shall
shake in the wind of wintry nights. We are the spirit of those piteous
ones, the wronged, the oppressed, the robbed, the murdered, and we bid
you open your warm heart, your light-lit soul to us! We will thrill you
with the clarion of hate and defiance and despair in the tempest of land
and sea. You shall listen to us there also. We will touch your eyes and
lips with fire. No, we will never let you go, till you are ours and
theirs! And you too, O sufferers, you too shall stay with us, and shall
have comfort. Look, we have suffered, we have agonized, we have longed
to hasten the hour of rest. But beyond the darkness there is light,
beyond the turbulence peace. "Courage, and be true to one another."
"_We bid you hope_!"