Or we might recall “The Coming Cry,” by Ebenezer Jones, with its great refrain: 

  “Perhaps it’s better than starvation,—­once we’ll pray, and then
  We’ll all go building workhouses, million, million men!”

Or we might recall Ernest Jones and his “Song of the ‘Lower Classes,’” where the first verse runs: 

  “We plow and sow, we’re so very, very low,
    That we delve in the dirty clay;
  Till we bless the plain with the golden grain
    And the vale with the fragrant hay. 
  Our place we know, we’re so very, very low,
    ’Tis down at the landlord’s feet;
  We’re not too low the grain to grow,
    But too low the bread to eat.”

Or shall we take one verse from the terrible “Easter Hymn,” written by the same true-hearted prisoner for freedom: 

“Like royal robes on the King of Jews,
We’re mocked with rights that we may not use;
’Tis the people so long have been crucified,
But the thieves are still wanting on either side.

Chorus—­Mary and Magdalen, Peter and John,
Swell the sad burden, and bear it on.”

The iteration of the idea throughout the poem is tremendous in effect, and the idea comes close to Swinburne’s ode, “Before a Crucifix”: 

“O sacred head, O desecrate,
O labour-wounded feet and hands,
O blood poured forth in pledge to fate
Of nameless lives in divers lands,
O slain and spent and sacrificed
People, the grey-grown speechless Christ.”

Time would fail to tell of Linton’s “Torch-Dance of Liberty,” or of Massey’s “Men of Forty-eight,” and there are many more—­the utterance of men who spoke from the heart, knowing in their own lives what suffering was.  But let us rather turn for a moment to the prose of a man who, also reared in hardship’s school, had learnt to succour misery.  Speaking at the time when Protection was biting and clawing the ground in the last death-struggle, as all men but the landlords hoped, Carlyle asked this question of the people: 

“From much loud controversy, and Corn-law debating, there rises, loud though inarticulate, once more in these years, this very question among others, Who made the Land of England?  Who made it, this respectable English Land, wheat-growing, metalliferous, carboniferous, which will let readily, hand over hand, for seventy millions or upwards, as it here lies:  who did make it?  ‘We,’ answer the much-consuming Aristocracy; ‘We!’ as they ride in, moist with the sweat of Melton Mowbray:  ’It is we that made it, or are the heirs, assigns and representatives of those who did!’—­My brothers, You?  Everlasting honour to you, then; and Corn-laws many as you will, till your own deep stomachs cry Enough, or some voice of Human pity for our famine bids you Hold!”

So our fathers have told us, and we have forgotten.  It is all very long ago, and the Protectionist says