TO LEADERS by AMOS RUSSEL WELLS

The times are ready! Far along the hills
The camp-fires of the morning are alight,
Up! for the day is full of armored ills.
Up! for the brave are eager for the fight.

Too long have greed and rapine, craft and fraud,
Too long have all the minions of the pit
From seats of regnant vantage overawed,
And cloaked iniquity with specious wit.

The wrong that cows the slave inspires the free.
Where hungry faint, where women sell their shame,
Where ten men's wealth is locked by one man's key,
Where justice is a mask and law a name,

Where strength has leave to starve but not to toil,
Where twisted villains bind the nation's weal,
Where Mammon desecrates her holy soil,
And Treason grinds her stars beneath his heel,

There is the brave man's challenge and his task!
There is his rapture while it is his woe;
For what can any son of freedom ask
But God and right, a comrade and a foe?

The times are ready, but the people wait;
Wait for a man, for men, for any man
Who, in the joy of duty simply great,
Follows "I ought to" with the glad "I can."

The people wait, impatient. Very long,
To old allegiances inertly true,
With meditative growing sense of wrong
The people have been tarrying -- for you.

For you, the authentic leaders designate;
For you, the wise to move in ordered ways,
Skilled to reform and not distract the state,
And prudently restore the better days.

They wait for you; but ah! if you should fail,
If sudden fear or any golden lure
Should catch your soul or paint your courage pale
And stay you from this mission high and pure, --

Then will the people wait no more for men,
Nor law nor rote nor any other thing;
Then will they sternly seize the iron pen,
And write themselves, and their just impulse, king!

Then, by whatever road, unwisely fast,
By might of dwarfs and unbewigged decree,
Will righteousness be surely done at last,
And Freedom's children venture to be free.

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