Before the beginning of years There came to the rule of the State Men with a pair of shears, Men with an Estimate-- Strachey with Muir for leaven, Lytton with locks that fell, Ripon fooling with Heaven, And Temple riding like H--ll! And the bigots took in hand Cess and the falling of rain, And the measure of sifted sand The dealer puts in the grain-- Imports by land and sea, To uttermost decimal worth, And registration--free-- In the houses of death and of birth. And fashioned with pens and paper, And fashioned in black and white, With Life for a flickering taper And Death for a blazing light-- With the Armed and the Civil Power, That his strength might endure for a span-- From Adam's Bridge to Peshawur, The Much Administered Man. In the towns of the North and the East, They gathered as unto rule, They bade him starve his priest And send his children to school. Railways and roads they wrought, For the needs of the soil within; A time to squabble in court, A time to bear and to grin. And gave him peace in his ways, Jails--and Police to fight, Justice--at length of days, And Right--and Might in the Right. His speech is of mortgaged bedding, On his kine he borrows yet, At his heart is his daughter's wedding, In his eye foreknowledge of debt. He eats and hath indigestion, He toils and he may not stop; His life is a long-drawn question Between a crop and a crop. THE MARE'S NEST Jane Austen Beecher Stowe de Rouse Was good beyond all earthly need; But, on the other hand, her spouse Was very, very bad indeed. He smoked cigars, called churches slow, And raced--but this she did not know. For Belial Machiavelli kept The little fact a secret, and, Though o'er his minor sins she wept, Jane Austen did not understand That Lilly--thirteen-two and bay Absorbed one-half her husband's pay. She was so good, she made him worse; (Some women are like this, I think;) He taught her parrot how to curse, Her Assam monkey how to drink. He vexed her righteous soul until She went up, and he went down hill. Then came the crisis, strange to say, Which turned a good wife to a better. A telegraphic peon, one day, Brought her--now, had it been a letter For Belial Machiavelli, I Know Jane would just have let it lie.