Page:Rudyard Kipling's verse - Inclusive Edition 1885-1918.djvu/61

Rh And the bigots took in hand

Cess and the falling of rain,

And the measure of sifted sand

The dealer puts in the grain—

Imports by land and sea,

To uttermost decimal worth,

And registration—free—

In the houses of death and of birth.

And fashioned with pens and paper,

And fashioned in black and white,

With Life for a flickering taper

And Death for a blazing light—

With the Armed and the Civil Power,

That his strength might endure for a span—

From Adam's Bridge to Peshawur,

The Much Administered Man.

In the towns of the North and the East,

They gathered as unto rule,

They bade him starve his priest

And send his children to school.

Railways and roads they wrought,

For the needs of the soil within;

A time to squabble in court,

A time to bear and to grin.

And gave him peace in his ways,

Jails—and Police to fight,

Justice—at length of days,

And Right—and Might in the Right.

His speech is of mortgaged bedding,

On his kine he borrows yet,

At his heart is his daughter's wedding,

In his eye foreknowledge of debt.

He eats and hath indigestion,

He toils and he may not stop;

His life is a long-drawn question

Between a crop and a crop.