In St

OQ THE WILD skirl of the
pipes and addresses to the
“Tmmortal Memory” Scottish
people and their friends will
gather round their haggis
next Monday to pay homage
to the anniversary of the
pirth of Scotland’s national
bard—Robert Burns.

Robert Burns was born on
January 25, 1759, in a small house
about two miles from the town of
Ayr, Scotland, and within a few
hundred yards of Alloway Church,
which his poem “Tam O'Shanter”
has rendered immortal.

On July 21, 1796, at the age of
37, Burns died of rheumatic fever
and consumption. The sense of
poverty and of the approaching
distress of his infant family
pressed heavily on Burns as he
lay dying. “What business has &
physician to waste his time on
me?” said Burns to the doctor at-
tending, “I am a poor pigeon not
worth plucking. Alas, I have not
feathers enough upon me to carry
me to my grave.”

YInder such tragic conditions,
his mental powers lost in delirium,
his young family engulfed in debt,
the horrors of a debters’ jail ever
present to his troubled imagina-
tion, _Scotland’s greatest genius
preathed his last.

O WORTHWHILE estimation
from a working class view-
point has ever been written of
Burns’ works and his place in the
struggle of his times for political
rights, and 2 brief anniversary
article could hardly give a full
and proper appreciation of such.
Most of his biographies and anni-
versary addresses; are usually
written by those who are not en-
thusiastic about the political con-
tent of his works.

The year of Burns’ birth was 2
period of colonial conquest. Wolfe's
highlanders stormed the heights
of Quebec, deciding Ganada for
the fur trader, with the cheaper
rum and fabrics of the British
mercantile class, while to the
south the first rumblings of
colonial insurrection were be-
ginning to be heard. India, the
“brightest jewel in the crown,”
was being overrun by Clive and
the East India Company. Mastery
of the seas had not yet been won.
England had many competitors
and the natives of far-off coun-
tries were suffering the lash of
the slave drivers’ whip. Capital-
ism was beginning to sweep the
last remnants of the old economic
order into the past.

The letters Burns wrote to his
friends are full of indignant, pro-
test at the conditions of the work=
ing people. “Nerves,” he said,
“sinews, health, strength, wisdom,
experience, genius — nay, 2 good
part of their thought, sold for
months and years, not only to the
necessities, the conveniences, but
the caprices of the important few.”

Everywhere around him Burns
saw terrible oppression, feudal
dues in some parts still existing
and the lairds seizing the crofts
of the highlanders and carrying
all with a heavy hand Every-
awhere the poor, like Burns’ own
father, forced to “thole the fac-
tor’s snash,” while the ‘Jaird gets
in his racket rents, his coal, his
ikain and a’ his stents.”

ruggle To Defea
ind Inspiration

a

‘For Freedom, standing by the tree,
Her sons did loudly ca’, man;
She sang a sang 0’ liberty,
Which pleased them ane and 2’, man! ..

One hundred and eighty-four years
ago, Rabbie Burns, the great Scot-
tish poet who wrote these lines, was
born. Today the people of whose
love for freedom he sang are in the
forefront of the struggle for a world
free from the shadow of fascism.

by ALFRED C. CAMPBELL

As Burns wrote, in one of his
many satires on the subject:

“They and be damned what
rights hae they,

To meat or sleep or light of
day?

Far less to riches,
freedom,

But what your Lordship likes
to give them.”

power or

Our great democratic writer
had no poetical illusions about
the grandeurs of landlordism. He
and his “toiled with the ceaseless
toil of galley slaves” and lived
amid “nakedness and hunger and
poverty and want.”

BUEN. had the great mis
fortune to work farms of the
meanest soil, and the hard work,
combined with poverty, did much
to undermine his health. Burns
said, “When my father died his
all went among the hell hounds
that growl in the kennel of jus-
tices ey.

But though he gave the powers
of his body to the labors of his
farm, he refused to bestow upon
them his thoughts or his cares.
While the plough share, under his
guidance, passed through the
sward, or the grass fell under the
sweep of his scythe, he was
humming the songs of his country
or musing on deeds of ancient
yalor, On Sunday it was his de-
light to wander along the banks
of Ayr, whose stream is now im-
mortal, and to listen to the song
of the blackbird at the close of a
summer’s day.

“The great misfortune of my
life,” he wrote, “was to want and

aim. I had felt early some
stirrings of ambition but they
were the blind gropings of

Homer’s Cyclops round the walls
of his cave.”

The masses, too, were without
any definite aim. In Burns’ time
there was no organized working
class or peasantry, as we know it
today. In fact, there was as yet
no forecast of such. The revolts
of the peasantry and early indus-
trial workers were sporadic and
of a momentary character. They,
too, were groping. In fact, many

of them attempted to turn the
“wheel of history” back. It was
a period of mass revolts against
feudalism and spiritual obscurant-
ism. The masses had no political
rights. They had neither chance
nor choice. Deportation, shooting,
were the answers given to any de-
mands by the people for progres-
sive change,

pe THE poetical works of Burns
are to be seen classics of satire
expressing the feelings of the
downtrodden peasantry against
the landlords, merchants, and
“Holy Willies” who were united
in ruling with an iron hand the
life of the Seottish people.

Burns condemned the ministers
who, preaching that the evictions
were ordained, blunted the re-
sistance of the crofters to the
“clearances.”

Had Burns wished he could
have lived in comfortable circum-
stances, providing he had prosti-
tuted his pen. In his day there
lived scribblers who enjoyed the
patronage and privileges of the
master class. But Burns spared
none. The government of the day
always came in for a goodly share
of his caustic pen. His satirical
comments on the doings of parlia-
ment drove the administrators to
fury and Burns was often threat-
ened with prison and deportation,
which was a common sentence
for those democrats who incurred
the displeasure of the secretary of
state.

Burns was born 59 years before
the birth of Karl Marx who, with
Frederick Engels, in 1847 drafted
the Communist Manifesto.
Through their theories they gave
to humanity a well-defined answer
to the future of society. Marx and
Engels- were the first to give a
scientific approach to the history
of mankind and to chart a gen-
eral course of action for the work-
ing class.

From Burns’ period until the
appearance of the Communist
Manifesto mass revolts and up-
risings took place in the main
countries.

Of this epoch Lenin wrote,
« . , At that time there were

many people—talented and medi-
ocre, honest and dishonest—who,
carried away by the struggle for
political freedom and the struggle
against the autocracy of kings,
police and priests, did not see the
antagonism of interests between
the bourgeoisie and the prole
tariat. These people did not even
admit the idea of the workers
coming forward as an indepen-
dent social force. . . . In.a few
words, the services rendered by
Marx and Engels to the working
class may be expressed thus: They
taught the working class to know
itself and to become class-consci-
ous and they substituted science
for dreaming, ...”

Had Burns been privileged to
read the Communist Manifesto
he would have found many things
explained to him, which in his
day he failed to grasp, for while
the chains of serfdom were being
smashed in France, other chains
were being forged, which he could
not understand. Growing capital
ism was conquering the last out
posts of the world. Transportation
and exchange were smashing the
main pillars of the old economic
order.

EVERTHELESS, surrounded
as he was in his own home-
land with reactionary landlords,
he was alive to the stirrings of
the people in other lands. He
stood on the side of the American
people when, in 1776, the Am-
erican Declaration of Independ-
ence was proclaimed. At the fall
of the Bastille, on July 14, 1789,
he wrote his famous “Tree of Lib-
erty,’ which says in part:

Heard ye o’ the tree o’ France,
I watna what's the name o’t;
Around it a’ the patriots dance,
Weel Europe kens the fame o’t.
It stands where ance the Bastile
stood,
A prison built by kings, man,
When Superstition’s hellish brood
Kept France in leading strings,
man.

‘this tree there grows sic
fruit,
Its virtues a’ can tell, man;

Upo

It raises man aboon the
It makes him ken hims)
Gif ance the peasant tas”

But vicious folk aye hat |

The works o’ Virtue thri

The courtly yermin’s bai
tree,

And grat to see it thriy

King Louis thought to cut

When it was unco sma’,

For this the watchman

his crown, ‘

Cut off his head anc 2’ &

A wicked crew syne, on i —

Did tak a solemn aith, F

It ne’er should flourish f

prime, ;

I wat they pledged thc
man.

Awa’ they gaed, wi’ mock

Like beagles hunting

man, :
But soon grew weary o’ t &
And wish’d they’d been }§
man. : {

For Freedom, standing j
tree, Be
Her sons did loudly ca’
She sang a sang o’ liber
Which pleased them an
man.
By her inspired, the new-i
Soon drew the avengi

man;
The hirelings ran—her |
chase,
And bang’d the des) |
2 man. ;
Without this tree, alake,
Is but a vale o’ woe, mm’
A scene o’sorrow mix’d ©
Nae real joys we knon
We labor soon, we labo |
To feed the titled knz
“And a’ the comfort we’r
is that.ayont the grav

Wi’ plenty o” sie trees, I
The warld would live
man;
The sword would help t
plough, |
The din 0’ war wad Ce |
Like a brethren in .a
cause, i
We'd on each other su
And equal rights and e |
Wad gladden every isi

Burns was told by the :
partment, where he was ¢
that the government :
him as a disaffected pei
had taken careful note o:
that he had sent cannc
the French Revolutiona
that he had publicly
toast: “Here’s the last —
the last chapter of the 1
of Kings.” They inform«
that his business was to *
think.

Burns’ activities in tk
tion resulted in his m:
censored. His letters t
of papers, favorable to t
ing reform movement, re
his being officially war
he might find himself —
rest of his disaffected fr
ported to Botany Bay.

E electoral system:
1832 was that the
lezed representatives to
represented nobody but ©
lord, the drunken laird
drunkener baillie.’ Eror