Songs of the Workers (15th edition)/We Have Fed You All for a Thousand Years

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WE HAVE FED YOU ALL FOR A THOUSAND YEARS
Poem—by an Unknown Proletarian.
Music—by Rudolf von Liebich, of the General Recruiting Union, Chicago, and Composer of Music for the Working Class.

We have fed you all, for a thousand years
And you hail us still unfed,
Though there's never a dollar of all your wealth
But marks the worker's dead.
We have yielded our best to give you rest
And you lie on crimson wool.
Then if blood be the price of all your wealth,
Good God! We have paid it in full.

There is never a mine blown skyward now
But we're buried alive for you.
There's never a wreck drifts shoreward now
But we are its ghastly crew.
Go reckon our dead by the forges red
And the factories where we spin.
If blood be the price of your cursed wealth
Good God! we have paid it in.

We have fed you all for a thousand years—
For that was our doom you know,
From the days when you chained us in your fields

To the strike of a week ago
You have taken our lives, and our babies and wives
And we're told it's your legal share;
But if blood be the price of your lawful wealth
Good God! we have bought it fair.

This work was published in 1908 and is anonymous or pseudonymous due to unknown authorship. It is in the public domain in the United States as well as countries and areas where the copyright terms of anonymous or pseudonymous works are 115 years or less since publication.

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