I passed the plate in church.
There was a little silver, but the crisp bank-notes heaped
themselves up high before me;
And ever as the pile grew, the plate became warmer and warmer, until
it fairly burned my fingers, and a smell of scorching flesh rose
from it, and I perceived that some of the notes were beginning
to smolder and curl, half-browned, at the edges.
And then I saw through the smoke into the very substance of the
money, and I beheld what it really was:
I saw the stolen earnings of the poor, the wide margin of wages
pared down to starvation;
I saw the underpaid factory girl eking out her living on the street,
and the over-worked child, and the suicide of the discharged
miner;
I saw the poisonous gases from great manufactories, spreading
disease and death;
I saw despair and drudgery filling the dram-shop;
I saw rents screwed out of brother men for permission to live on
God's land;
I saw men shut out from the bosom of the earth and begging for the
poor privilege to work, in vain, and becoming tramps and paupers
and drunkards and lunatics, and crowding into almshouses, insane
asylums and prisons;
I saw ignorance and vice and crime growing rank in stifling, filthy
slums;
I saw shoddy cloth and adulterated food and lying goods of all
kinds, cheapening men and women, and vulgarizing the world;
I saw hideousness extending itself from coal-mine and foundry over
forest and river and field;
I saw money grabbed from fellow grabbers and swindled from fellow
swindlers, and underneath the workman forever spinning it out of
his vitals;
I saw the laboring world, thin and pale and bent and care-worn and
driven, pouring out this tribute from its toil and sweat into
the laps of the richly dressed men and women in the pews, who
only glanced at them to shrink from them with disgust;
I saw all this, and the plate burned my fingers so that I had to
hold it first in one hand and then in the other; and I was glad
when the parson in his white robes took the smoking pile from me
on the chancel steps and, turning about, lifted it up and laid
it on the altar.
It was an old-time altar, indeed, for it bore a burnt offering of
flesh and blood--a sweet savor unto the Moloch whom these people
worship with their daily round of human sacrifices.
The shambles are in the temple as of yore, and the tables of the
money-changers waiting to be overturned.
--_Ernest Crosby_.