Explore "The Voices of the People" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Oh! I hear the people calling through the day time and the night time, / They are calling, they are crying for the coming of the right time. / It behooves you, men and women, it behooves you to be heeding, / For there lurks a note of menace underneath their plaintive pleading.
Let the land usurpers listen, let the greedy-hearted ponder, / On the meaning of the murmur, rising here and swelling yonder, / Swelling louder, waxing stronger, like a storm-fed stream that courses / Through the valleys, down abysses, growing, gaining with new forces.
Day by day the river widens, that great river of opinion, / And its torrent beats and plunges at the base of greed's dominion. / Though you dam it by oppression and fling golden bridges o'er it, / Yet the day and hour advances when in fright you'll flee before it.
Yes, I hear the people calling, through the night time and the day / time, / Wretched toilers in life's autumn, weary young ones in life's May / time- / They are crying, they are calling for their share of work and pleasure; / You are heaping high your coffers while you give them scanty measure,- / You have stolen God's wide acres, just to glut your swollen purses- / Oh! restore them to His children ere their pleading turns to curses.