English poem
Freedom In America
by Walter Crane (1863–1929)
WHERE is thy home, O Freedom? Have they set Thine image up upon a rock to greet All comers, shaking from their wandering feet The dust of old world bondage, to forget The tyrannies of fraud and force, nor fret, Where men are equal, slavish chain unmeet, Nor bitter bread of discontent to eat, Here, where all races of the earth are met?
America, beneath thy banded flag Of old it was thy boast that men were free To think, to speak, to meet, to come and go. What meaneth then the gibbet and the gag Held up to Labour’s sons who would not see Fair Freedom but a mask—a hollow show?
Oct. 7, 1887.