their studies to enter the ministry, while 20 per cent took up the practice of law, medicine or business, of the students graduated by the Eastern universities last year only 2 1-2 per cent were trained for the ministry. This meant only one minister for every twenty-five pupils in the East.

"The majority of students who now enter colleges to study for the ministry leave their studies to take up law, medicine, dentistry or business. The atmosphere of the institutions in which they receive their trainng is to be lamented.

"In this materialistic age, the dearth of ministers is due, at least to some extent, to the small salaries to be had."

And so Mr. Kidd's theory that religion is alone responsible for the continued submission of the working class is steadily and rather rapidly losing ground, so that propaganda limited to modern liberalism free-thought has already become an anachronism. Capitalism has filled its armory with intellectual weapons that are more effective because more modern. Among its choicest are the press and the lecture platform. The workers are beginning to realize more than ever that the only remedy for this is a platform and a press of its own, As this realization becomes more vivid new Socialist platforms. are established and Socialist papers are born over-night.

Thus does the working class fight fire with fire. It develops its own social intelligence and promotes a revolutionary psychology; a psychology which grows out of the economic world, the world of real things, freed from superstitions theological and otherwise, a psychology which when it has gathered sufficient force and begins to find mass-expression will relegate to history the last form of economic slavery.

ARTHUR M. LEWIS.

T

Poetry and the Social Unrest.

AKE up the latest magazine, read through its scant bits of verse, and see if you can find therein an answer to the canting wail, "Why have we not poets nowadays?" Most of our versifiers with Byron still echoing in their ears and modern esthetics crowded into some segregated section of their brains -are classical and unashamed. By "classical" I mean stilted, formal, conventional. In the great periods of English literature poetic souls have been touched by song of lark and nightingale, and now the tuneful pair go wailing together thru the verses of Americans whose experience with them has been limited to natural history museums. Keats and Tennyson look as sad in the broken lines of our periodicals as did Virgil and Horace in their eighteenth century couplets.

This goes to show that our "poets" are not genuine. And like unto this truth is the next. Not being genuine they lack the breadth of interest which was characteristic of their great originals. Shelley and Byron, Wordsworth and Tennyson wrote of birds and flowers, of river and mead, but their feeling for landscape beauty, just because it was real, did not stand alone. Any man who cares for bird-song or violet or the infinite stretches of green below and blue above will care most of all for his fellow beings nothing human will be alien to him. Read over the titles to the poems of any of the men mentioned: see how wide were their sympathies, how far-flashing their hates, how they stood near the center of the world movement of their time. If Shelley penned "To Constantia Singing," we owe to him also a "Song to the men of England," a cry of encouragement "To the Republicans of North America," and a sad stanza which still gives voice to the woes of Ireland. Byron wrote much of love and women, but when the great cry went forth from struggling Greece it was in his trumpet lines that it reached the corners of the earth.

Mind you I am not saying that these men were political or didactic poets, or that poetry should deal largely with passing human struggles. But a great poet must feel the length and breadth, the height and depth of our nature; must be able to speak out of the inmost core of our racial being, out of that soul of us that can perish only with our kind. And how can he know humanity except through the aspirations and defeats, the spiritual rending and tearing and readjusting which he can feel in the society of his own time? The man who lives in this moving,

breathing world of ours blind and deaf to these will never be a poet for all his pretty lines to skylark and nightingale.

But our versifiers do not speak out of the heart of their time or of any time. Not strange then appears the fact that the great social unrest of the twentieth century should find so little echo in their stanzas. In otner lands, to be sure, the cry of the proletariat has found eloquent voice in picture and statue and poem; but here in America we are timid and tardy. There are signs, however, of better things to come: what a few years may bring forth no man can tell.

With this in mind the reader may take more than a passing interest in the poems which these paragraphs are designed to introduce. Their author would be the last to claim for them any transcendent qualities. But they deal with a theme of transcendent interest to the readers of THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST REVIEW, and deal with it in a manner which seems to me vigorous and effective. The first two picture forth two of the results of our heartless civilization: the others are a call to us to rise in revolt.

Wм. E. BOHN.

WHO DROVE THEM FORTH?

Written on occasion of the lay-off of ten thousand employees of the Union Pacific Railroad.

The frost-king howls his frenzy down the skies,

The scraggling pines like spears point to the south;
And huddled there in the mountain's gaping mouth,

A countless herd of starving cattle dies.

Only the shadows hear their shuddering cries,

As hungry coyotes tear their helpless shanks;
Only the snows in blizzard-driven banks

Can sense where, winding, rough, the black trail lies.

Who drove them forth? Where doth God's finger point?
Let quail these cruel and cowardly souls, for now,
My fellows, will we make the tyrants bow,
And doubly cruel, will rend them joint and joint.

Loud howl the winter winds, low hangs the sky;
Helpless the cattle starve,-they can but die!

Eric Dale.

A MACHINE-MADE SONG.

The crush of the city is in my heart
Like the voice of a long North night,
And fear-spent eyes like an icy dart

Chill my own sick heart with fright.

'T is a fear of the end, of the flitting years,
Of a time when smiles are few;

When my own spent eyes are a mist of tears,
And all life is bitter rue.

'T is a dreary fight, 't is a fight to death,
Yet the heart cries out in a sobbing breath,
"Fight on!"

The crush of the city is in my breast
Like the surge of a turbulent sea;
The hopeless hurry, the white unrest
Blast the hope in the heart of me:-
What use to toil with a nerveless hand
In a day so blight with woe?

And how may the hope of an Afterland
Steal the sting of the world we know,
When the end so near is fraught with death?-
Yet the heart cries out in a sobbing breath,
"Fight on!"

The crush of the city is hushed and still,
But the darkness is a-fare

With the flashing lights from a tireless mill,
Which hums in the slumbrous air.-
Grind on, you wheels, till the remnant soul
Is lost in the rattle and hate!

Toil on, you men, till the funeral toll

Sounds the last cold knell of Fate!

For we're all in the fight. 't is a fight to death,
And we all will sob in the last short breath,

"Fight on!"

DOWN WITH THE AUTOCRATS!

Could I but have the hungry flesh-red lash

That Cheops wielded from his pyramid,
And all the hate which from his living-dead
Flashed up in fire to wither to slow ash;

Eric Dale

Could I but have the sinew and the brawn

On which that brute insatiate lash was fed,
And all the hope those flouted armies bled

That stone might vaunt when Egypt's might were gone;

Could I but have them all, just these,—ah then,
My fellows, would I flay the vultures red
Who glut more, life-blood than e'er Cheops did,
And lash till their gaunt hearts were those of men!

Come! Drive the damned tyrants from their shade,
And taste the sweets your own long labor made!

Eric Dale.

THE SLEEPING SLAVES.

With silent stealth these hideous birds of power,
From fevered mires and fens of lustful greed,
Like vultures swarm to pillage and to bleed,
And frighten slaves to wheedle and to cower.

With songs of tinseled lust they tone the hour,
Soft wily cries the myriad slaves enfold;
Yet we sleep on, dream all our tinsel gold,
Nor wake to find all rancid, rank, and sour.

What are we men that on starvation feed

When mellow fruit bleeds in their dripping claws?
Come, sluggards, rise! List to their coarse guffaws
Mock our inaction, misery, and need!

Rend wing and wing these vultures and their like;
Come! Wake from this black lethargy and strike!

Eric Dale.