week! Hundreds and hundreds of lives are lost or ruined every year by
the perilous nature of the work, and absolutely without compensation.
Yet so fierce is the competition that men are not unfrequently maimed or
even killed in the desperate struggles at the gates for the tickets of
employment, guaranteeing a "pay" which often does not amount to more than
a few pence! The streets and houses inhabited by this unfortunate class
are of the lowest kind--haunts of vice, disease, and death, and the
monopolistic companies are thus directly able to profit by their
wholesale demoralization by ruthlessly crushing out, through the
contractors, all efforts at organisation on the part of the men. To see
these immense docks, the home of that more immense machine, British
Commerce, crowded with huge and stately ships, steamers, and sailors the
first in the world, and to watch with intelligent eyes by what means the
colossal work of loading and unloading them is carried out; this is to
face a sacrificial orgy of human life--childhood, youth, manhood,
womanhood, and age, with everything that makes them beautiful and
ennobling, and not merely a misery and a curse--far more appalling than
any Juggernaut progress or the human holocausts that were offered up to
Moloch.]

I stood in the ghastly gleaming night by the swollen, sullen flow
Of the dreadful river that rolls her tides through the City of Wealth
and Woe;
And mine eyes were heavy with sleepless hours, and dry with desperate
grief,
And my brain was throbbing and aching, and mine anguish had no relief.
For never a moment--no; not one--through all the dreary day,
And thro' all the weary night forlorn, would the pitiless pulses stay
Of the thundering great Machinery that such insistence had,
As it crushed out human hearts and souls, that it slowly drove me mad.

And there, in the dank and foetid mist, as I, silent and tearless,
stood,
And the river's exhalations, sweating forth their muddy blood,
Breathed full on my face and poisoned me, like the slow, putrescent
drain
That carries away from the shambles the refuse of flesh and brain--
There rose up slowly before me, in the dome of the city's light,
A vast and shadowy Substance, with shafts and wheels of might,
Tremendous, ruthless, fatal; and I knew the visible shape
Of that thundering great Machinery from which there was no escape.

It stood there high in the hea