Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/636

 England in 1819

(See page 272)

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,— Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn—mud from a muddy spring,— Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, But leech-like to their fainting country cling, Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow— A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,— An army, which liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,— Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed; A Senate,—Time's worst statute unrepealed,— Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

The Victorian Age

(See pages 186, 541)

I found myself—and without knowing where I was—in the middle of that strange period of human evolution, the Victorian Age, which in some respects, one now thinks, marked the lowest ebb of modern civilized society; a period in which not only commercialism in public life, but cant in religion, pure materialism in science, futility in social conventions, the worship of stocks and shares, the starving of the human heart, the denial of the human