ABSTRACT
Source: Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Advertiser, 14 May 1881, Vol. 54, No. 20, p. 3; Originally Published in Fife Herald, Kinross, Strathearn, and Clackmannan Advertiser, 2 October 1879, No. 3072, p. 4 1 A New Zollverein<xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn67_2"> <sup>2</sup> </xref>,<xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn67_3">*</xref> Have we an empire stretching around the world? “Oh, no” – with scorn the Quaker’s lip is curled – “We are about a crowded fraction of the race, And have no right to claim a wider place; Let Afric, Indian, Asian frontiers go, Our Transatlantic bounds be levelled low; And all mankind with Gladstone and with Bright, Be champions of humanity and right – Let every warring competition cease, And, like those heroes, live with foes at peace.” Fair sounding and fallacious fairy tale, Taught by the masters of the heart to rail Millennial dreams of poets, made the prize Of mouthing demagogues, as party cries, Who deaf to fact and reason still repeat Exploded nostrums of their own conceit; Cervantes laughed old Chivalry away, But that was honest in an earlier day. What satirist shall prick the bubble through, Of Quixote schemes that make the people rue, And bring their brokers fame and profit too? What mean these praters? that our widowed isle Shall dwindle to a pulpit while the guile Of shrewder nations lower our trade astray, And leave us to their visions and decay; Ere ruin falls, restrain your headlong pace And steps in hurry made in calm retrace, Proclaim to foreign lands the equal law Of Tit for Tat – in trade no sounder saw – Let German, Frenchman, Yankee, have his will, But keep our Colonies around us still. These be the favoured bulwarks of our power, Their marts be free for grain and fruit and flower – Fling open doors on either side the line, To all who join the British Zollverein, So strong on our own base, the rest may be Constrained by Freedom’s triumph to be Free. J. N.
