Should a potentate go for his national foe,
      and, as soon as he’s thoroughly licked him,
  Should he dare to demand a concession of land
      from his prostrate and paralyzed victim,
  It is then you arise and his arm you arrest
      when his harvest is ripe for the reaping,
  And a people oppressed may in confidence rest
      when it’s safe in Diplomacy’s keeping.

  It is you who protest in a horrified tone
      at a hint of Integrity’s danger,
  And the victor is shown that a Concert alone
      is of Law and of Fate the arranger: 
  With a warlike display of your fleets in array
      and of Maxims (both empty and loaded)
  You establish it plain that his notions of gain
      are immoral and also exploded!

  Let the blasphemous cry that it’s done with an eye
      to your ultimate personal profit,
  That your chivalrous task is but worn as a mask
      till occasion allows you to doff it,
  Let the caviller say that the victim to-day
      is preserved from a final disaster,
  And is saved from the Japs that to-morrow perhaps
      he may furnish a meal for their master: 

  Yet I cannot believe that what Concerts achieve
      is by reasons ulterior dictated,
  I am perfectly sure that their motives are pure
      (by themselves it is frequently stated);
  By themselves we are taught that they never in thought
      could the Good with the Selfish commingle—­
  What they do is designed for the good of mankind
      with an eye that is simple and single!

  For whomever—­e.g., let us say the Chinee—­
      you have freed from the fear of invasion,
  Should he presently seem in a posture to be
      which is open to Moral Persuasion,—­
  How you take him in hand, a philanthropist band!
      how you toil to improve his condition,
  With a noble disdain of the trouble and pain
      of a wholly unselfish Partition!

  For it grieves you, of course, when—­ignoring the force
      which the doctrine of Mine and of Thine has—­
  E’en Integrity’s self you must lay on the shelf
      (I allude, not to Europe’s but China’s)! 
  Let detractors contend that your means and your end
      are the end and the means of the vulture—­
  Such an altruist plan must betoken the man
      who is bent on diffusion of culture.

  Be it yours to assuage for inadequate wage
      our unseemly contentions and quarrels,
  Be it yours to maintain your respectable reign
      in the sphere of Political Morals;
  And, relying no more on the shedding of gore
      or the rule of torpedoes and sabres,
  Make beneficent plots for dividing in lots
      the domains of your paralyzed neighbours!

THE ARREST (1881)

  Come hither, Terence Mulligan, and sit upon the floor,
  And list a tale of woe that’s worse than all you heard before: 
  Of all the wrongs the Saxon’s done since Erin’s shores he trod
  The blackest harm he’s wrought us now—­sure Doolan’s put in quod!