Page:The New Arcadia (Tucker).djvu/227

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BETWEEN DEVIL AND DEEP SEA.
217

resources of the lands across the sea. Eager trembling voices begged—

"Oh, sir, for God's sake help us! Take us to where is hope and work."

These faces haunted him. Long he conferred with early friends, now in authority, but ever with the same result.

England would keep her battalions of abjects, that she might have a ragged army from which to select her underpaid hirelings.

"If you take the best, we must pay higher wages to the worst," they argued.

So, for the sake of gain, masters clung to their shivering, starving slaves, and cried—

"After us the Deluge. Though the great arising come, please God it be not in our time." Meanwhile they held to cheap labour and abundance to choose from, in the course of the infernal barter of flesh and blood for wage.

From Victoria Street, Westminster, came the echo of an equally coward cry across the sea—"If these men come to the Island' Continent that a handful hold, then our monopoly fails, our wages fall."

So between the grasping ones who would keep and the greedy ones who would not have, our doctor beat his wings against the iron bars of a hideous custom in which he found himself enclosed. None dared help him open up a highway between the landless people and the unpeopled lands of a world-embracing empire of lust and greed.

"One day," he remarked to some, whose appeals rang long in his ears as he afterwards moved in bright, distant scenes, "one day I may return, and thousands of you, carefully gathered, shall be borne away, in fleets bringing