A Fool
HE asked me of my friend — 'a clever man;
Such various talent, business, journalism;
A pen that might some day have sent out ‘leaders’
From our greatest newspapers.' — 'Yes, all this,
All this,' I said, — 'And yet he will not rise?
He'll stay a ‘comp.,’ a printer all his life?' —
I said: 'Just that, a workman all his life.'
But, as my questioner was a business man,
One of the sons of Capital, a sage
Whose Practicality saw (I can suppose)
Quite to his nose-tip or even his finger-ends,
I vouchsafed explanation. 'This young man,
My friend, was born and bred a workman. All
His heart and soul (and men have souls and hearts
Other than those the doctor proses of,
The parson prates of, and both make their trade)
Were centred in his comradeship and love.
His friends, his ‘mates’ were workmen, and the girl
He wooed, and made a happy wife and mother,
Had heart and soul like him in whence she sprung.
Observe now! When he came to think and read,
He saw (it seemed to him he saw) in what
Capitalists, Employers, men like you,
Think and call ‘justice’ in your inter-dealings,
Some slight mistakes (I fancy he'd say ‘wrongs’)
Whereby his order suffered. So he wonders:
‘Cannot we change this?’ And he tries and tries,
Knowing his fellows and adapting all
His effort in the channels that they know.
You understand? He's ‘only an Unionist!’
Now for the second point. This man believes
That these mistakes — these wrongs (we'll pass the word)
Spring from a certain thing called ‘competition’
Which you (and I) know is a God-given thing
Whereby the fittest get up to the top
(That's I — or you) and tread down all the others.
Well, this man sees how by this God-given thing
He has the chance to use his extra wits
And clamber up: he sees how others have —
(Like you — or me; my father's father's father
Was a market-gardener and, I trust, a good one).
He sees, moreover, how perpetually
Each of his fellows who has extra wits
Has used them as the fox fallen in the well
Used the confiding goat, and how the goats
More and more wallow there and stupefy,
Robbed of the little wit the hapless crowd
Had in their general haplessness. Well, then
This man of mine (this is against all law,
Human, divine and natural, I admit)
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poem by Francis William Lauderdale Adams
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