Let me to-day do something that shall take A little sadness from the world’s vast store, And may I be so favoured as to make Of joy’s too scanty sum a little more Let me not hurt, by any selfish deed Or thoughtless word, the heart of foe or friend; Nor would I pass, unseeing, worthy need, Or sin by silence when I should defend. However meagre be my worldly wealth, Let me give something that shall aid my kind— A word of courage, or a thought of health, Dropped as I pass for troubled hearts to find. Let me to-night look back across the span ’Twixt dawn and dark, and to my conscience say— Because of some good act to beast or man— “The world is better that I lived to-day.”
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.
Oh! the earth is full of sinning And of trouble and of woe, But the devil makes an inning Every time we say it’s so. And the way to set him scowling, And to put him back a pace, Is to stop this stupid growling, And to look things in the face.
If you glance at history’s pages, In all lands and eras known, You will find the buried ages Far more wicked than our own. As you scan each word and letter. You will realise it more, That the world to-day is better Than it ever was before.