The heath eats up green grass and delicate herbs; The pines eat up the heath; the grub the pine; The finch the grub; the hawk the silly finch; And man, the mightiest of all beasts of prey, Eats what he lists. The strong eat up the weak; The many eat the few; great nations, small; And he who cometh in the name of all Shall, greediest, triumph by the greed of all, And, armed by his own victims, eat up all. While ever out of the eternal heavens Looks patient down the great magnanimous God, Who, Master of all worlds, did sacrifice All to Himself? Nay: but Himself to all; Who taught mankind, on that first Christmas Day, What ’tis to be a man—to give, not take; To serve, not rule; to nourish, not devour; To lift, not crush; if need, to die, not live. ‘He that cometh in the name of all’—the popular military despot—the ‘saviour of his country’—he is our internecine enemy on both sides of the Atlantic, whenever he arises—the inaugurator of that Imperialism, that Cæsarism into which Rome sank, when not her liberties merely, but her virtues, were decaying out of her—the sink into which all wicked States, whether republics or monarchies, are sure to fall, simply because men must eat and drink for to-morrow they die. The Military and Bureaucratic Despotism which keeps the many quiet, as in old Rome, by _panem et Circenses_—bread and games—or if need be, Pilgrimages; that the few may make money, eat, drink, and be merry, as long as it can last. That, let it ape as it may—as did the Cæsars of old Rome at first—as another Emperor did even in our own days—the forms of dead freedom, really upholds an artificial luxury by brute force; and consecrates the basest of all aristocracies, the aristocracy of the money bag, by the divine sanction of the bayonet. That at all risks, even at the price of precious blood, the free peoples of the earth must ward off from them; for, makeshift and stop-gap as it is, it does not even succeed in what it tries to do. It does not last. Have we not seen that it does not, cannot last? How can it last. This falsehood, like all falsehoods, must collapse at one touch of Ithuriel’s spear of truth and fact. And— ‘Then saw I the end of these men. Namely, how Thou dost set them in slippery places, and casteth them down. ‘Suddenly do they perish, and come to a fearful end. Yea, like as a dream when one awaketh, so shalt Thou make their image to vanish out of the city.’ Have we not seen that too, though, thank God, neither in England nor in the United States? And then? What then? None knows, and none can know.