THE EMPIRE BUILDER
(On the death of a Catholic gentleman)
By John Jerome Rooney
I
This is the song of the Empire Builder,
Who out of the ends of the earth,
Thro' travail of war and of carnage
Brings strange, new realms to birth.
This is the boast of the Empire Builder:
Give heed to the deeds of his hands
And scorn thou not the glory he hath
In his gold and his wasted lands.
He hath counted his neighbors' cattle
With the cold, gray eye of greed:
He hath marked for his own the fields of wheat
Where he never had sown the seed:
The vine-clad cot by the hillside,
Where the farmer's children play,—
"This shall fit in my plan," he said;
"What use for such as they?"
And so, in the dusk of evening,
He brought his arméd men,
And where had shone the clustering grapes
There stretched a waste again.
Homeless, the children wandered
Thro' the fields their father won:
