The following poem was written by John Greenleaf Whittier in 1854, the year that the pressure for the expansion of slave territory as expressed in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, made the US Civil War more or less inevitable. It has a real kicker in the final verse.
The Haschisch
Of all that Orient lands can vaunt
Of marvels with our own competing,
The strangest is the Haschisch plant,
And what will follow on its eating.
What pictures to the taster rise,
Of Dervish or of Almeh dances!
Of Eblis or of Paradise,
Set all aglow with Houri glances!
The poppy visions of Cathay,
The heavy beer-trance of the Suabian;
The wizard lights and demon play
Of nights Walpurgis and Arabian!
The Mollah and the Christian dog
Change place in mad metempsychosis;
The Muezzin climbs the synagogue,
The Rabbi shakes his beard at Moses.
The Arab by his desert well
Sits choosing from some Caliph's daughters,
And hears his single camel's bell
Sound welcome to his regal quarters.
The Koran's reader makes complaint
Of Shitan dancing on and off it;
The robber offers alms, the saint
Drinks Tokay and blasphemes the Prophet.
Such scenes that Eastern plant awakes;
But we have one ordained to beat it;
The Haschisch of the West, which makes
Or fool or knave of all who eat it.
The preacher eats, and straight appears
His Bible in a new translation;
Its angels negro overseers,
And Heaven itself a snug plantation!
The man of peace, about whose dreams
The sweet millennial angels cluster,
Tastes the mad weed and plots and schemes
A raving Cuban filibuster!
The noisiest Democrat with ease,
It turns to slavery's parish beadle;
The shrewdest stateman eats and sees
Due southward points the polar needle.
The Judge partakes, and sits erelong
Upon his bench a railing blackguard;
Decides off-hand that right is wrong,
And reads the ten commandments backward.
O potent plant! so rare a taste
Has never Turk or Gentoo gotten;
The hempen Haschisch of the East
Is powerless to our Western Cotton!
Today, of course, the drug that drives our government mad, leads into endless wars and destruction of our constitutional liberties, and may lead to a worse catastrophe than the war that ended our addiction to the profits from slave-raised cotton, is oil.
Pass it on.
The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
--John Gilmour
