 | The collected works of Ambrose Bierce |  |
LAND OF THE PILGRIMS' PRIDE
I dreamed, and in my dream came one who said:“Because thou art all sullen; and because
Thou sayest thou hast not for thy country, love;
Because thou dost begrudge the foolish blood
That in the far heroic days thou didst
(Or sayst thou didst) pour from thy riven vein
In testimony to thy patriot zeal;
Because thou seekest ever to promote
Distrust of the benign and wholesome rule
Of the Majority—God's Ministers;
Because thou hearest in the People's voice
Naught but the mandate of an idiot will
Clamoring in the wilderness, but what
Or why it knoweth not; because all this
And much beside is true, I come—”
79
Too well I know it for the sword, the scales,
The shrouded eyes (albeit methinks I catch
A twinkle now and then beneath the band)
Speak to my conscience of a traitor's doom!
Strike, then, but hear. To westward, roaring up
From far beyond the earth's vast curvature,
Come sounds of discord horrible—the jar
And thunder of exploding bombs;
The crackle of the flames that eat away
The means of life of those who kindle them;
The shouts and curses of the robber mob,
Drunk with a sense of numbers—like the wolves,
Numerically brave—on ravin bent
And murder! Hear the moans of honest men,
With shameful by-name vilified, denied
The right to earn their bread, and with a blind,
Mad cruelty the devil would weep to see,
Beaten and tortured, even by the hands
Of the barbarian's female and his whelps!
Meanwhile the coward rulers of the land
Prate of ‘the People's wrongs.’ The coward press
(Thrifty withal to purse a double gain
By two-faced flattery) prates like a fool
Of the conservative and saving strength
Of Anglo-Saxon institutions, or
With magic words, as ‘freedom,’ and the like,
Would conjure order from inharmony.
80
Our shame and downfall. Even the women rise
And seeing the rack and ruin men have wrought,
Strip their weak bodies with a silly zeal
Something to save from the chaotic wreck;
And in the reek and sweat of their absurd
And awkward efforts, lose even what remained—
Their own morality and men's respect.
Therefore I say to you—”
“Nay say no more,”
Cried she who came into my dream, “for thou
Dost wander. What, pray, has all this to do
With what thou'rt charged with?—that thou dost not love—
Such as it is—thy country?”
Faith, I would,
But 'tis infested by my countrymen!”
What she replied I know not, for a bomb,
Spitting and sputtering on my chamber floor,
Awoke me and I fled into the night.
| The collected works of Ambrose Bierce | |