he has over the motions of the solar system. That under such circumstances he loses the essential quality of manhood. He becomes a slave, a machine, a commodity, a thing in some respects lower than the animal, for he looks to crime and drunkenness as the only hopeful sources of relief.

In the days of cannibalism, says Ingersoll, the strong devoured the weak, actually ate their flesh. In spite of all the laws that man has made, in spite of all the advances of science, the strong still live upon the weak,25 the unfortunate, the foolish. True, they do not eat their flesh and drink their blood, but they live on their labor. The man who deforms himself by toil, who labors for his wife and children through all his barren wasted life, and goes to his grave without having tasted a single luxury, has been the food of others. The poor woman living in her lonely room, cheerless and fireless, sewing night and day to keep starvation from her child, is slowly being eaten alive by her fellow men.26 When I take into consideration the agony of civilized life, the failures and anxieties, the tears and withered hopes, the bitter realities, the hunger," crime, drunkenness, ignorance and humiliation, I am almost forced to say that cannibalism, after all, is the most merciful form in which man has lived upon his fellow men.

In this connection Markham's great poem recently written, after seeing Millet's famous picture of The Man With the Hoe, deserves quotation;

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,

The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?

Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

Is this the thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over all the land;

To trace the stars and search the heavens for

power;

To fell the passion of Eternity?

Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And pillared the blue firmament with light?

Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf

There is no shape more terrible than this—

More tongued with censure of the world's blind

greed

More filled with signs and portents for the soul

More fraught with menace to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him

Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,

The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?

Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;

Through this dead shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,

Cries protest to the Judges of the world,

A protest that is also prophecy.

O, masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

Is this the handiwork you give to God,

This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild it in the music and the dream;
Touch it again with immortality;
Make right the immemorial infamies
Perfidious wrongs, immediable woes?

O, masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this man?
How answer this brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with Kings-
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb error shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?

This the truest and most forcible accusation ever launched by genius against the existing conditions of society. It is a fitting climax to Hood's "Song of the Shirt," Burns' "O'er Labored Wight" and Mrs. Browning's impassioned cry to "Hear the Children Weeping."

These only describe the pitiable facts, but the great merit of Markham's poem consists in his pointing out the cause, and its inestimable value lies in the fact that when the cause of any great evil becomes known and recognized by the masses of the people it is sure to be removed.

Oh, landlords, masters, and rulers of the soil, is this the handiwork you give to God? It is by you humanity has been betrayed, plundered, profaned and disinherited. It is you who have shaped him