Swords and Plowshares/The Collection
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I PASSED the plate in church.
There was 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 begin-ning to smolder and curl, half-browned, at the edges.
And then I saw through the smoke into the very sub-stance 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 overworked child, and the suicide of the discharged miner;
I saw 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 alms-houses, insane asylums, and prisons;
I saw ignorance and vice and crime growing rank in stifling, filthy slums;
I saw usury, springing from usury, itself again born of unjust monopoly and purchased laws and legalized violence;
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 them the workman forever spinning it out of his vitals;
I saw all 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 money worshiped as a god, and given grudgingly from hoards so great that it could not be missed, as a bribe from superstition to a dis-honest judge in the expectation of escaping hell.
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 lay 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.
There was 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 begin-ning to smolder and curl, half-browned, at the edges.
And then I saw through the smoke into the very sub-stance 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 overworked child, and the suicide of the discharged miner;
I saw 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 alms-houses, insane asylums, and prisons;
I saw ignorance and vice and crime growing rank in stifling, filthy slums;
I saw usury, springing from usury, itself again born of unjust monopoly and purchased laws and legalized violence;
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 them the workman forever spinning it out of his vitals;
I saw all 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 money worshiped as a god, and given grudgingly from hoards so great that it could not be missed, as a bribe from superstition to a dis-honest judge in the expectation of escaping hell.
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 lay 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.