Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/263

Rh columns of the marchers. I have heard rebel students send it floating thru college halls. I have heard the "International" on the voices of 2,000 Soviet delegates, blending with four military bands, go rolling thru the pillars of the Tauride Palace. But none of these singers looked the "wretched of the earth" They were the sympathizers or representatives of the wretched. These miner-convicts of Cherm were the wretched themselves, most wretched of all. Wretched in garments and looks, and even in voice.

With broken voices, and out of tune they sang, but in their singing one felt the pain and protest of the broken of all ages: the sigh of the captive, the moan of the galley-slave lashed to the oar, the groan of the serf stretched on the wheel, the cries from the cross, the stake and the gibbet, the anguish of myriads of the condemned, welling up out of the long reaches of the past.

These convicts were in apostolic succession to the suffering of the centuries. They were the excommunicate of society, mangled, crushed by its heavy hand, and hurled down into the darkness of this pit.

Now out of the pit rises this victory-hymn of the vanquished. Long bludgeoned into silence, they break into song—a song not of complaint, but of conquest. No longer are they social outcasts, but citizens. More than that—Makers of a New Society!