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HYMN.
[Men! ye, who sow the earth with good!]
1
Men! ye, who sow the earth with good!Men! ye who earn the price of food;
Strong Toil, and mightier Skill!
God's Chosen! do his will;
Ere Ruin mock his overthrow,
His life of wrong, his death of shame,
His shroud and grave of blood and flame!
Haste! cry aloud to all, “By good for good men live!
Build not on broken hearts! nor take unless ye give!”
2
Shall savage drones, in baseness blind,Breathe plagues, beneath the light of mind?
And curse the foodful soil,
To famish Skill and Toil?
From cultur'd man the savage flies;
Then, peasant, merchant, artisan,
Transform the biped-brute to man!
Bid truth, bid knowledge turn his mindless night to day!
Bid love and mercy drive the human wolf away!
3
Men! not allow'd to earn your bread;Men! feeding all, yourselves half-fed;
Why ask for work in vain?
Or toil for death and pain?
Shall brutal things, in human form,
Feed on your souls like rat and worm?
Say to your wives, “Ye shall not eat?”
Bid son with sire for graves compete?
And mothers kill their babes, in flight from law and life,
Till lawless law become th' assassin's match and knife?
4
Tool-Making Man! whose foodful mindWith harvest freights the wave and wind,
The bread and life of states!
Say to the fed on tears and blood,
“Production is the root of good!”
And starve ye them who all produce,
Ye costliest things of smallest use?
Live ye in barren pomp, worst, bloodiest sons of Cain!
To shake your fists at God, and turn his good to bane?
5
The child, that vainly toils, to aidParents, death-doom'd by fetter'd trade;
The sire, whose hopeless son
Lives, but to be undone;
The townsman, paid with less and less;
The homeless thrall of hopelessness;
The peasant, spurn'd, starv'd, hunted, jail'd,
Because his law-made doom prevail'd;
Still shall they feed with pangs the Moloch of the land,
That Rapine o'er crush'd hearts may drive his four-in-hand?
6
Barbarians, no! in vain ye striveTo keep a world's despair alive:
Your smitten darkness light:
Mend! ere your crimes set bondage free:
Christ said, Let children come to me!
And shall ye curse the marriage-bed?
No! men shall wed, and babes be fed:
Our daughters shall not bring forth slaves;
Nor childless sons seek workhouse graves!
Nor idlers say to Toil, “Thou shalt not love and live!”
Nor blind brutes say to Skill, “We take, and thou shalt give!”
Are the philosophers of the Gun and Standard, who pray for the destruction of trade, aware that six adults are sufficient for the cultivation of one hundred arable acres, and that, if the profits of trade failed to furnish other consumers with an equivalent for the produce, the only cultivated portion of every cultivable hundred acres in Britain would be that alone which is required for the maintenance of six adults and their families? It is of little importance to us what becomes of Messrs. Gun and Standard, but it might be well for them to take into their sapient consideration the possibility, in such a case, of the surplus of victims taking possession of the land, and the certainty that, without capital, they could not cultivate it. What, then, would happen, oh, sages of the Gun and Standard? Before the inventions of Watt and Arkwright, the people depended on the land for subsistence; they have since depended on the profits of those inventions, the landlords pocketing the surplus profits both of trade and agriculture. Destroy the profits of trade, and the landlords, with two-thirds of the people, must perish, unless the displaced population, seizing the land, can also appropriate capital previously amassed. But perhaps Messrs. Gun and Standard have really nothing to lose?
My late fellow-townsmen, having discovered that it is the unemployed workman who brings wages down, will, I trust, soon experience that where free trade is an unemployed workman is a prodigy.
I say not that man's hand is his mind; but, had he not possessed that thumbed implement, I doubt whether his mind, with his powers of communicating and accumulating ideas, could have raised him to his present intellectual eminence. Given a jack-plane, he might have stuck it in his mouth, and worked with it; but what sort of a jack-plane could he have made with his teeth? To his hand principally he is indebted for his success in tool making; and it is as a toolmaker, or manufacturer of such things as spades, ploughs, steam-engines, and railroads, that he has wrought all his wonders. One of our most reverend doctors calls the population of such towns as Sheffield extrinsic; not seeming to know that till there was a manufacturer there could be no agriculture, unless finger-grubbing for pignuts deserve that name. The first toolmaker was the first gardener; he put an end to finger-grubbing for pignuts, and called agriculture into existence. He, and subsequent toolmakers, may truly be said to have created every ounce of food which industrial skill has since produced. If any population deserves to be called intrinsic, it is that which can enable a hundred acres of land, cultivated commercially, to maintain more people than any ten thousand acres, cultivated agriculturally, ever yet did. About eight hundred acres of land at Leeds, cultivated commercially, maintain a hundred and forty thousand persons;—where shall we find a hundred thousand acres, cultivated agriculturally, maintaining an equal number? Had there never been a manufacturer, a few hordes of savages, fighting with the bears for roots, would now have constituted the words intrinsic population.
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