Slaves

[ Roud - ; words William Villiers Sankey]

Faustus sang Slaves on their 2016 Westpark album Death and Other Animals. This track and a live recording from The Lights, Handover, Hampshire, in March 2015 were also released in 2017 as the title tracks of their Westpark EP Slaves. They noted:

Words William S. Villiers Sankey, music Benji Kirkpatrick.
Sankey’s poems, Ode and To Working Men of Every Clime are parodies of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Song to the Men of England, but as was common in Victorian literature, as tribute rather than satire. Shelley’s radical and progressive work was greatly admired by, and had a lasting influence on the Chartist movement, of which Sankey was an influential leader in Scotland. The texts were published in leading Chartist newspaper The Northern Star on 29 February and 28 November 1840, then again in 1956 [in] Y.V. Kovalev’s An Anthology of Chartist Literature in Soviet Union-era Moscow.

Lyrics

Faustus sing Slaves

Men of England, you are slaves,
Though you quell the roaring waves.
Though you boast by land and sea,
That Britons everywhere are free.

Men of England, you are slaves,
Bought by tyrants, sold by knaves.
Yours the toil, the sweat and pain,
Theirs the profit, the ease and gain.

Men of England, you are slaves,
Beaten by the policeman’s staves.
If their force you dare repel,
Yours shall be the prison cell.

Men of England, you are slaves,
Even the House of Commons craves,
From the crown on bended knee.
That it’s motions may be free.

Men of England, you are slaves,
Hark the stormy tempest raves.
Tis the nation’s voice I hear,
Shouting, “Liberty is near!”

Europe’s people one and all,
Rise up at your brethren’s call.
Shouting loud from sea to sea,
“Ours shall be the Victory!”