SOCIAL CAUSES OF UNREST 143 



With beauty God covers the ground; no acre too poor to 



befriend, 

 That thou and I and all men may perceive and comprehend.* 



But in childhood neither did parent speak of love of 

 beauty at home, nor did teacher impart it in school, 

 nor were its fountains in literature discovered. And 

 as a consequence a great human need is unmet. The 

 unesthetic rural mind starves amid scenes "where the 

 spirit of beauty dwelleth," as though seamen should 

 perish of thirst as they sail in the mouth of the broad 

 Amazon. 



There is truth in Edwin Markham's arraignment 

 of society in his greatest poem, " The Man with the 

 Hoe": 



Bound by the weight of centuries, he leans 



Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground; 



The emptiness of ages in his face, 



And on his back the burden of the world. 



Who made him dead to rapture and despair? 



A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, 



Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? 



Who loosened and let down that brutal jaw? 



Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? 



Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? 



What gulfs between him and the seraphim! 



Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him 



Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? 



What the long reaches of the peaks of song, 



The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? 



One perhaps resents the application of this strong por- 

 traiture of the peasant of Europe to any class of our 

 people. One may go further and say: This is what 

 the intuition of the poet saw in the great painting; 

 * Bliss Carman. 



