"Child, what hast thou with sleep to do?
Awake, and dry thine eyes!
Thy tiny hands must labour too;
Our bread is tax'd--arise!
Arise, and toil long hours twice seven,
For pennies two or three;
Thy woes make angels weep in Heaven--
But England still is free."
Or we might recall "The Coming Cry," by Ebenezer Jones, with its great
refrain:
"Perhaps it's better than starvation,--once we'll pray, and then
We'll all go building workhouses, million, million men!"
Or we might recall Ernest Jones and his "Song of the 'Lower Classes,'"
where the first verse runs:
"We plow and sow, we're so very, very low,
That we delve in the dirty clay;
Till we bless the plain with the golden grain
And the vale with the fragrant hay.
Our place we know, we're so very, very low,
'Tis down at the landlord's feet;
We're not too low the grain to grow,
But too low the bread to eat."
Or shall we take one verse from the terrible "Easter Hymn," written by
the same true-hearted prisoner for freedom:
"Like royal robes on the King of Jews,
We're mocked with rights that we may not use;
'Tis the people so long have been crucified,
But the thieves are still wanting on either side.
_Chorus_--Mary and Magdalen, Peter and John,
Swell the sad burden, and bear it on."
The iteration of the idea throughout the poem is tremendous in effect,
and the idea comes close to Swinburne's ode, "Before a Crucifix":
"O sacred head, O desecrate,
O labour-wounded feet and hands,
O blood poured forth in pledge to fate
Of nameless lives in divers lands,
O slain and spent and sacrificed
People, the grey-grown speechless Christ."
Time would fail to tell of Linton's "Torch-Dance of Liberty," or of
Massey's "Men of Forty-eight," and there are many more--the utterance of
men who spoke from the heart, knowing in their own lives what suffering
was. But let us rather turn for a moment to the prose of a man who, also
reared in hardship's school, had learnt to succour misery. Speaking at
the time when Protection was biting and clawing the ground in the last
death-struggle, as all men but the landlords hoped, Carlyle asked this
question of the people:
"From much loud controversy, and Corn-law debating, there
rises, loud though inarticulate, once more in these years, this
very question among others, Who made the Land of England?
Who made it, this respectable English Land, wheat-growing,
metalliferous, carboniferous, which will let readily, hand over
hand, for seventy millions or upwards, as it here lies: who did
make it? 'We,' answer the much-consuming Aristocracy;
'We!' as they ride in, moist with the sweat of Melton Mowbray:
'It is we that made it, or are the heirs, assigns and representatives
of those who did!'--My brothers, You? Everlasting honour
to you, then; and Corn-laws many as you will, till your own
deep stomachs cry Enough, or some voice of Human pity for
our famine bids you Hold!"
So our fathers have told us, and we have forgotten. It is all very long
ago, and the Protectionist says that times have changed. Certainly times
have changed, and it was deliverance from Protection that changed them
most. But if landowners have changed, if they are now more alien from
the people, and richer from other sources than land, we have no reason
to suppose them less greedy or more pitiful; nor can a nation live on
the off-chance of pity. Seventy years ago the net encompassed the land.
We have seen how the people suffered under its entanglement. In the
sight of all, landowners and speculators are now trying to spread that
net again. Are we to suppose the English people have not the hereditary
instinct of sparrows to keep them outside its meshes?