These many years the papers I have read with rapt attention,
   Seeking items for a book I meditate -
Should you meet the facts I ask for, you'll oblige me if you mention
   Both the title of the journal and its date.
I have learnt, with awe and wonder, that the cynic Fates, in giving
   Man the burden and the weariness of breath,
Have imposed upon the multitude the privilege of living,
   But by constantly and boldly courting Death.


All the daly papers tell me, with an awful iteration,
   Of the workers, men and women, how they die,
At the forge and in the factory, in the mine, and excavation,
   Where the sight of Death has ceased to terrify.
And I know the blood of toilers in a flood is ever flowing,
   How the dynamite and noxious gases kill,
How the pallid girls, in thousands, with enfeebled gait are going
   To the graveyard from the workroom and the mill.


Now, I seek reports authentic of a few ill-starred directors
   Who were crushed beneath a heavy fall of stone,
Or who come from lower levels like a dripping band of spectres,
   With the poison working in their blood and bone.
Are these stories of scrip-holders who were blinded at their toil, or
   Who have fought the black-flood waters down below,
Who've gone Hell-ward 'neath the drift sand, or gone Heaven-ward with the boiler -
   Fellow-pictures to the horrors that I know?


And the journals never tell me that a plucky speculator,
   In endeavouring to save another's life,
Last night was blown to atoms in the Northern Indicator -
   The deceased leaves several children and a wife;
All in vain I've sought description of ship-owners' loathsome quarters,
   Of the storms and stress the merchant-skipper braves,
Of the firm adrift and dying on the mocking waste of waters,
   Or of bankers snatched to glory by the waves.


Are there tear-compelling legends of the influential masters
   In the grip of fell diseases that are bred
In their dens and in their foundries, or involved in dire disasters
   When the coal-pits claim their offering of dead?
In apportioning the profits and risks, alas! they measure
   Mere investors' risks 'gainst Labour's blood and breath,
Give to capital the comforts, and the riches, and the leisure,
   Whilst the worker gets "a living" - or a death! 

"Edward Dyson"
The Bulletin, 6 May 1893, p5