LIPA:--You still have the brazenness to joke? Who gave you the right to do such a thing? Who gave you the power over people? How dare you meddle with what to them is right? How dare you interfere with their life? SAVVA:--Who gave me the right? You gave it to me. Who gave me the power? You gave it to me--you with your malice, your ignorance, your stupidity! You with your wretched impotence! Right! Power! They have turned the earth into a sewer, an outrage, an abode of slaves. They worry each other, they torture each other, and they ask: "Who dares to take us by the throat?" I! Do you understand? I! LIPA:--But to destroy all! Think of it! SAVVA:--What could you do with them? What would _you_ do? Try to persuade the oxen to turn away from their bovine path? Catch each one by his horn and pull him away? Would you put on a frock-coat and read a lecture? Haven't they had plenty to teach them? As if words and thought had any significance to them! Thought--pure, unhappy thought! They have perverted it. They have taught it to cheat and defraud. They have made it a salable commodity, to be bought at auction in the market. No, sister, life is short, and I am not going to waste it in arguments with oxen. The way to deal with them is by fire. That's what they require--fire! LIPA:--But what do you want? What do you want? SAVVA:--What do I want? To free the earth, to free mankind. Man--the man of today--is wise. He has come to his senses. He is ripe for liberty. But the past eats away his soul like a canker. It imprisons him within the iron circle of things already accomplished. I want to do away with everything behind man, so that there is nothing to see when he looks back. I want to take him by the scruff of his neck and turn his face toward the future! The Man Forbid BY JOHN DAVIDSON (Scotch poet and dramatist, 1857-1909; after struggling for many years in London against poverty and ill-health, committed suicide, leaving some of the most striking and original poetry of the present age) This Beauty, this Divinity, this Thought, This hallowed bower and harvest of delight Whose roots ethereal seemed to clutch the stars, Whose amaranths perfumed eternity, Is fixed in earthly soil enriched with bones Of used-up workers; fattened with the blood Of prostitutes, the prime manure; and dressed With brains of madmen and the broken hearts Of children. Understand it, you at least Who toil all day and writhe and groan all night With roots of luxury, a cancer struck In every muscle: out of you it is Cathedrals rise and Heaven blossoms fair; You are the hidden putrefying source Of beauty and delight, of leisured hours, Of passionate loves and high imaginings; You are the dung that keeps the roses sweet. I say, uproot it; plough the land; and let A summer-fallow sweeten all the World. Peasantry (_From "Death and the Child"_) BY STEPHEN CRANE