"And thanne come Pees into parlement · and put forth a bille, How Wronge ageines his wille · had his wyf taken. 'Both my gees and my grys[851] · his gadelynges[852] feccheth; I dar noughte for fere of hym · fyghte ne chyde. He borwed of me bayard[853] · he broughte hym home nevre, Ne no ferthynge ther-fore · for naughte I couthe plede. He meynteneth his men · to marther myne hewen,[854] Forstalleth my feyres[855] · and fighteth in my chepynge, And breketh up my bernes dore · and bereth aweye my whete, And taketh me but a taile[856] · for ten quarters of otes, And yet he bet me ther-to · and lyth bi my mayde, I nam[857] noughte hardy for hym · uneth[858] to loke.'"
They pride themselves that all is stable and God is with them. How can such a state of affairs be stable! They feel at ease, yet injustice can never mean rest. God has spoken the final sentence, but with a rare sarcasm the prophet adds his comment on the scene. These rich men had been flattered into their religious security by hireling prophets, who had opposed himself. As they leave the presence of God, having heard their sentence, Micah looks after them and muses in quiet prose.
The prophet speaks:--
_Yea, if one whose walk is wind and falsehood were to try to cozen_ thee, saying, _I will babble to thee of wine and strong drink, then he might be the prophet of such a people._
At this point in chap. ii. there have somehow slipped into the text two verses (12, 13), which all are agreed do not belong to it, and for which we must find another place.[859] They speak of a return from the Exile, and interrupt the connection between ver. 11 and the first verse of chap. iii. With the latter Micah begins a series of three oracles, which give the substance of his own prophesying in contrast to that of the false prophets whom he has just been satirising. He has told us what they say, and he now begins the first of his own oracles with the words, _But I said_. It is an attack upon the authorities of the nation, whom the false prophets flatter. Micah speaks very plainly to them. Their business is to know justice, and yet they love wrong. They flay the people with their exactions; they cut up the people like meat.
The prophet speaks:--_But I said,_ _Hear now, O chiefs Of Jacob,_ _And rulers of the house of Israel:_ _Is it not yours to know justice?--_ _Haters of good and lovers of evil,_ _Tearing their hide from upon them_ (he points to the people), _And their flesh from the bones of them;_ _And who devour the flesh of my people,_ _And their hide they have stripped from them_ _And their bones have they cleft,_ _And served it up as if from a pot,_ _Like meat from the thick of the caldron!_ _At that time shall they cry to Jehovah,_ _And He will not answer them;_ _But hide His face from them at that time,_ _Because they have aggravated their deeds._
These words of Micah are terribly strong, but there have been many other ages and civilisations than his own of which they have been no more than true. "They crop us," said a French peasant of the lords of the great Louis' time, "as the sheep crops grass." "They treat us like their food," said another on the eve of the Revolution.
Is there nothing of the same with ourselves? While Micah spoke he had wasted lives and bent backs before him. His speech is elliptic till you see his finger pointing at them. Pinched peasant-faces peer between all his words and fill the ellipses. And among the living poor to-day are there not starved and bitten faces--bodies with the blood sucked from them, with the Divine image crushed out of them? Brothers, we cannot explain all of these by vice. Drunkenness and unthrift do account for much; but how much more is explicable only by the following facts! Many men among us are able to live in fashionable streets and keep their families comfortable only by paying their employés a wage upon which it is impossible for men to be strong or women to be virtuous. Are those not using these as their food? They tell us that if they are to give higher wages they must close their business, and cease paying wages at all; and they are right if they themselves continue to live on the scale they do. As long as many families are maintained in comfort by the profits of businesses in which some or all of the employés work for less than they can nourish and repair their bodies upon, the simple fact is that the one set are feeding upon the other set. It may be inevitable, it may be the fault of the system and not of the individual, it may be that to break up the system would mean to make things worse than ever--but all the same the truth is clear that many families of the middle class, and some of the very wealthiest of the land, are nourished by the waste of the lives of the poor. Now and again the fact is acknowledged with as much shamelessness as was shown by any tyrant in the days of Micah. To a large employer of labour, who was complaining that his employés, by refusing to live at the low scale of Belgian workmen, were driving trade from this country, the present writer once said: "Would it not meet your wishes if, instead of your workmen being levelled down, the Belgians were levelled up? This would make the competition fair between you and the employers in Belgium." His answer was, "I care not so long as I get my profits." He was a religious man, a liberal giver to his Church, and he died leaving more than one hundred thousand pounds.