“Anarchism.”
‘Tis not when I am here,
In these homeless homes,
Where sin and shame and disease
And foul death comes;
‘Tis not when heart and brain
Would be still and forget
Men and women and children
Dragged down to the pit.
But when I hear them declaiming
Of “liberty,” “order” and “law,”
The husk-hearted gentleman
And the mud-hearted bourgeois,
That a sombre, hateful desire
Burns up slow in my breast,
To wreck the great, guilty temple.
And give us rest!
— Francis W. L. Adams.
Francis William Lauderdale Adams, “Anarchism,” Songs of the Army of the Night (London: William Reeves, 1894): 36.
