Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/763

 *rience. The derangements and miseries of mankind are precisely due to the ignorant and arrogant rule of "superior" classes and persons. The mental and spiritual capacity of these classes is a myth; their so-called culture but thinly veneers their essential savagery, their social rapacity and impudence

The system that divides society into classes can bring forth no true knowledge, no living truth, no industrial competence, no fundamental social decency. It can only continue the desolation of labor and increase the blindness and depravity of the privileged. So long as some people own the tools upon which others depend for bread, so long as the few possess themselves of the fruits of the labor of the many, so long as the arts and the institutions and the sciences are built upon exploited workers, just so long will our so-called progress be through the perennial exhaustion of generations and races; just so long will successive civilizations be but voracious parasites upon the spirit and body of mankind.

The Midnight Lunch Room

(From "The Frozen Grail and Other Poems")

(See pages 315, 359)

With little silver one may enter here, And yet those hungry faces watch outside The frosty window—and the door is wide! The clatter to my unaccustomed ear Of dishes and harsh tongues, is like a spear Shaken within the sensitive wounded side Of Silence. Soiled, indifferent hands provide Pitiful fare, and cups of pallid cheer.