THE GENIUS LOCI OF WALL STREET

DOWN in a wonderful city, near to the foulest slums,
Where squalor and crime are rife, and the tide flows turgid and green,
Where all are greedy and blatant, where peacefulness never comes,
There squats a ravening reptile, Arachne, the Spider Queen.

After the ways of the spider, her progeny crowd her back,
Rest on her bristly thorax, or cling to her mottled sides.
Only the wealth of a nation contents the ravenous pack,
The fat of the land, with the commerce of all the tides.

Her throne is a street in the city, by the senseless name of Wall,
Her prey is human muscle, with the products of honest toil.
She works in her dark recesses, weaving an iron thrall,
To steal the fruits of labor, and rob the gifts of the soil.

Her web is a net of iron that covers the plundered land,
Entangling the plow and harrow, enthralling the ax and loom.
And the well-earned profits of labor, that slip through the workman’s hand
Are stored at last in the spider’s den of gloom.

She sends her numerous offspring, with plausible lies to tell,
Far out on the Nation’s vineyards, while fields are of vivid green.
Never were men of Jewry more cunning to buy or sell,—
And the corn and oil come back to the Spider Queen.

O men of the ocean prairie, with your sea-like fields of corn,
How much are you the richer, for the weary years you have seen?
Some part has gone to the huckster, who looks on your work with scorn,
But the better part to the cells of the Spider Queen.

Have you sometime thought, O toiler, when the sun was high and hot,
That a nation had gone too fast, that a people might die of greed?
That making the land a refuge had wrought a national blot?
That honor and strength were more than numbers or speed?

The iron web is spreading—it comes to your very door,
It saps the sinews of labor and draws your grain from the sheaves.
It enters never a county but it sends a mortgage before,
With an unseen tax that reaches from sill to eaves.