A Humble Reminder : To the Propertied Classes ['We have fed you all a thousand years']

(Slightly altered from Rudyard Kipling’s Ode in praise of English Enterprise.) 

We have fed you all for a thousand years, 
And you hail us still unfed, 
Though there’s never a pound of all your pounds 
But marks the workers’ dead; 
We have yielded our best to give you rest, 
And you lie on a crimson wool, 
For if blood be the price of England’s wealth, 
Good God, we ha’ paid in full. 

There’s never a mine blown skyward now 
But we’re buried alive for you; 
There’s never a wreck drifts shoreward now 
But it’s we are the ghastly crew; 
Go, reckon our dead by the forges red, 
And the factories where we spin; 
If blood be the price of England’s wealth, 
Good God, we ha’ paid it in. 

We have fed you all for a thousand years, 
For that was our doom, you know, 
From the days when you chained us in your fields 
To the strike of a week ago; 
You have eaten our lives and our babes and wives, 
And we’re told it’s your legal share; 
But if blood be the price of England’s wealth, 
Good God, we ha’ bought it fair. 

N. 

From: Freedom : A Journal of Anarchist Communism, September 1893. https://archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/nonfrenchpublications/english/freedom/freedom-volume07-n080.pdf