Yours are the public acts of public men,
But yours are not their household privacies.
I grant you one of the great Powers on earth,
But be not you the blatant traitors of the hearth.

You hide the hand that writes: it must be so,
For better so you fight for public ends;
But some you strike can scarce return the blow;
You should be all the nobler, O my friends.
Be noble, you! nor work with faction's tools
To charm a lower sphere of fulminating fools.

But knowing all your power to heat or cool,
To soothe a civic wound or keep it raw,
Be loyal, if you wish for wholesome rule:
Our ancient boast is this--we reverence law.
We still were loyal in our wildest fights,
Or loyally disloyal battled for our rights.

O Grief and Shame if while I preach of laws
Whereby to guard our Freedom from offence--
And trust an ancient manhood and the cause
Of England and her health of commonsense--
There hang within the heavens a dark disgrace,
Some vast Assyrian doom to burst upon our race.

I feel the thousand cankers of our State,
I fain would shake their triple-folded ease,
The hogs who can believe in nothing great,
Sneering bedridden in the down of Peace