NOT GOLD, BUT BLOOD by Frances Eugenia Bolton

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Oct 11, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 41.

NOT GOLD, BUT BLOOD.

By Frances Eugenia Bolton

BY FRANCES EUGENIA BOLTON.

This we call gold, this tide of circulation That fills the veins and arteries of trade, This life-flood flowing, ebbing 'mid the nations, What is it? Of what substance is it made? Is it mere metal, hard, unfeeling, witless, Unthrobbing? Nay, 'tis made of pulse and mood, And has unnumbered voices that bear witness, This is not gold, but blood.

Men poured this river into marts by dying Beside their picks down in the bowels of earth; And women gave it up in tears and sighing And throes of hard child-birth. 'Twas oozed out in the sweat of luckless toilers Whose wage was held by fraud to swell the flood; And wanton Pleasure dipped in gory boilers, And dyed her robes in blood.

Behold in all the earth the way it goeth Through calloused hands that harden for its mold; And men are broken for the tide that floweth To feed the "frenzied finance" scheme with gold. Heart-break and brains awreck must give it motion; Its substance must be stamped with human dole. It draws the nation's armies for its ocean, And blots out hope and soul.

It swells in heartless centers all congested, With blood of millions starved of food and breath. Its odor rises like a thing infested— A dreaded plague foreboding blight and death. Playing about these vats of corporation, Think to escape, O Trusts, that stay this flood? Nay, in it is your own soul's sure damnation, Ye feed it, too, with blood.

Lo, Calvary's cross! Behold the spotless Victim! 'Twas thirty pieces Judas set for cost. This was the price men gave for Love's eviction; Yet Christ poured blood for every soul that's lost. This tide of gold, so fed by man and woman, Is Christ's own life that ye have so abhorred; And in the wreckage of the soul of human Ye crucify the Lord.

Stop! Hold a moment from this frenzied action; He comes whose right it is to keep and hold. Turn now these tides to earthly benefaction; Restore the wage; be just to young and old. Think not to buy earth's honor, God's salvation; Come to the cross and feel its crimson flood; Or answer to the Judge for souls of nations Drowned in the golden blood.