--a terrible American, William Jennings Bryan. He is for ‘peace at any price.’ There were some, long and long ago, who suffered and endured one starveling winter in camp at Valley Forge that William Jennings Bryan might wax Nebraskanly fat: and _he_ is valiantly for peace: at any price--
For that my Laughter is tinged with fulfilling hatred.
Rich hot-livered Laughter must have in it essential love or hatred.
To William Jennings Bryan everything he has done in his political career must seem all right.
It _is_ all right, undoubtedly. Just that.
They come breaking into my melancholy night-hours with an odd high-seasoned abruptness.
But I--in my black dress and my still room--I say inwardly and willy-nilly, and with all my Heart and relishingly:
Often in windy autumn nights I lie awake in my shadowy bed and think of the children, the Drab-eyed thousands of children in this America who work in coal mines and factories.
Whenever I’m wakeful and the night is windy and my room is dark and I lie in aloneness--a long aloneness: centuries--then shadows come from far-off world-wildnesses and float and flutter dimly unhappy around my bed. They tell me tales of shame and tame petty hopelessness and trifling despair.
And the one that comes oftenest is the one that tells of those Drab-Eyed children distances from here, but very immediate, who work in coal mines and factories. I read about them in magazines and newspapers, but they aren’t then one one-hundredth so real as when their shadow floats as close to me in the windy autumn night.
Once in Pennsylvania I saw a group of children, very Drab in the Eyes and very thin in the necks and legs, who worked in a mill. Their look made its imprint in my memory and more in my flesh. And it comes back as if it were the only thing that mattered as I lie wakeful in the windy night.
The children--unconscious and smiling their small decayed smiles--they are living and being crushed between greed and need as between two murderous millstones. Their frail flesh and their little brittle bones, their voices and their pinched insides, the sweet vague childish looks which belong in their faces are squeezed and crunched by two millstones--squeezed, squeezed till their scrawny fledgeling bodies are dry, breathless, and are gasping, strangling, striving frightfully for life: and still are slowly, all too slowly, dying between two millstones.
