Poor Poverty! how agonizing must thy hunger be where others swell in scornful superfluity! And when some one casts with indifferent hand a crust into thy lap, how bitter must the tears be wherewith thou moistenest it! Thou poisonest thyself with thine own tears. Well art thou in the right when thou alliest thyself to Vice and Crime. Outlawed criminals often bear more humanity in their hearts than those cold, blameless citizens of virtue, in whose white hearts the power of evil is quenched; but also the power of good. I have seen women on whose cheeks red vice was painted, and in whose hearts dwelt heavenly purity. London BY WILLIAM BLAKE (English poet and painter of strange and terrible visions. 1757-1827) I wander through each chartered street, Near where the chartered Thames does flow; A mark in every face I meet, Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every man, In every infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forged manacles I hear: How the chimney-sweeper's cry Every blackening church appals, And the hapless soldier's sigh Runs in blood down palace-walls. But most, through midnight streets I hear How the youthful harlots curse Blasts the new-born infant's tear, And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse. A Life for a Life[A] [A] By permission of the Macmillan Co. BY ROBERT HERRICK (American novelist, professor in the University of Chicago; born 1868. In this novel a young American, hungering for success and about to marry the daughter a great captain of industry, is taken by a strange man, "the bearded Anarch," and shown the horrors of American industrialism) And thus this strange pilgrimage, like another descent into purgatory and even unto hell, continued,--the shabby bearded Anarch leading his companion from factory, warehouse, and mill to mine and railroad and shop, teaching him by the sight of his own eyes what life means to the silent multitude upon whose bent shoulders the fabric of society rests,--what that "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"--brave aspirations of the forefathers--has brought to the common man in this land of destiny and desire. The wanderer breathed the deadly fumes of smelter and glass works, saw where men were burned in great converters, or torn limb from limb upon the whirling teeth of swift machines,--done to death in this way and that, or maimed and cast useless upon the rubbish heap of humanity,--waste product of the process. "For," as his guide repeated, "in this country, where Property is sacred, nothing is cheaper than human life. For, remember, the supply of raw labor is inexhaustible."