uth of what inspired those feelings by eliminating or suppressing
the record of them. Rather, let me ask you, whoever you be, to imagine
what the cause was, from the effect in one who was (unhappily) born and
bred into the dominant class, and whose chief care and joy in life was in
the pursuit of a culture which draws back instinctively from the violent
and the terrible. I will go further. I will arraign my country and my
day, because their iniquity would not let me follow out the laws of my
nature, which were for luminosity and quiet, for the wide and genial
view, but made me "take arms against a sea of troubles," hoping only too
often "by opposing to end them." No, we make no apology for bloody sweat
and for tears of fire wrung out of us in the Gethsemane and on the
Calvary of our country: we make no apology to those whom we have the
right to curse.

In the Second Part--"Here and There," the record of a short trip in the
East--the sight of the sin which England has committed not only against
herself, against Ireland, against Scotland, but against India, against
China, against the sweetest and gentlest people in the earth, the
Japanese--the sight of this, and of the signs of England's doom, the
punishment for the abuse of the greatest trust any modern nation has had
given to her, inspires a hatred which only that punishment can appease.
In the Third Part--"Australia"--there is neither ferocity nor
blood-thirstiness. Its key-note is hope, hope that dreads but does not
despair.

I may add that in this edition I have sacrificed all merely personal
aspects of the poems to attempt to give the book a more complete
totality. We know well enough that allowance will rarely be made for any
of these things: that our plea for comprehension will too often be an
idle one. None the less we make it, for the sake of those who are
willing to attempt to realize the social problem and to seek within
themselves what they can do for its solution. We have no care whatever
as to what view they take of it. Let them be with us or against us, it
matters not, if only they will make this effort, if only they will ponder
it in their hearts. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of us are concerned in
this problem. We are all of us true sons of Labour who have suffered the
robbery of the wages of Competition. One word more. The Australian is
apt to deprecate the socialism of the European or the American. The
darker aspects of the European or A