In the year 1914 there occurred in Colorado, in the Rocky Mountains cold, the “Ludlow massacre” of the wives and children of miners on strike. It caused a demonstration in front of the office of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., at 26 Broadway, New York, about which you may read in “The Brass Check.” A young poet who happened at that time to be my secretary, and who has since made a success as a novelist, was moved by these events to write a sonnet, which I sent to the Scripps newspapers, getting for the poet the unprecedented sum of twenty-five dollars. I now quote the sonnet, and invite you to study the two, comparing them by all tests of poetry known to you. I give my own opinion: that in their propaganda impulse these two sonnets are identical; that in simplicity, directness, and fervor of feeling they are as nearly identical as two art works can be; and that in technical skill the modern work is superior. TO A CERTAIN RICH YOUNG RULER By Clement Wood White-fingered lord of murderous events, Well are you guarding what your father gained; With torch and rifle you have well maintained The lot to which a heavenly providence Has called you; laborers risen in defense Of liberty and life, lie charred and brained About your mines, whose gutted hills are stained With slaughter of these newer innocents. Ah, but your bloody fingers clenched in prayer! Your piety, which all the world has seen! The godly odor spreading through the air From your efficient charity machine! Thus you rehearse for your high rôle up there, Ruling beside the lowly Nazarene! CHAPTER XXXVIII COMRADE’S PROGRESS There is another artist of English Puritanism we must not overlook. We shall have no trouble in proving this one a propagandist; so obviously was he preaching, that the critics of his own time overlooked him entirely. The elegant men of letters of the Restoration period, gossiping in their coffee houses, dicing in their taverns, and carrying on their fashionable intrigues, would have been moved to witty couplets by the notion that an ignorant tinker, a street-corner tub-thumper locked up in Bedford gaol, was engaged in composing one of the immortal classics of English literature. As soon might you attempt to tell one of the clever “colyumnists” of the New York newspapers, stumping his last cigarette in his coffee saucer at luncheon in the Algonquin, that an immortal classic of American literature was running serially in the “Appeal to Reason” or the “Daily Worker.”