The Hypocrites of Commercial Street
A biting piece of social commentary from 1878 Seattle poetry attacks the town's pious moneylenders who exploit their neighbors while maintaining a veneer of religious devotion.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
I do not like to hear him pray / Who loans at twenty-five per cent, / For then I think the borrower may / Be pressed to pay for food and rent; / And in the book we all should read / Which says the lender should be blessed, / As sure as I have eyes to read, / It does not say take interest.
I do not like to hear him pray, / On bended knee, about an hour, / For grace to speed aright the day; / Who knows his neighbor has no flour. / I'd rather see him go to mill / And buy the luckless brother bread, / And see the children eat their fill, / And laugh beneath their shed.
I do not like to hear him pray, / 'Let blessings on the widow be,' / Who never seeks her home to say, / 'If want o'ertakes you, come to me.' / I hate the prayer, so loud and long, / That's offered for the orphan's weal / By one who sees him crushed by wrong, / And does not for his sufferings feel.
I do not like to hear her pray, / With jeweled ear and silken dress, / Whose washerwoman toils all day, / And then is asked to work for less. / Such pious shearers I despise, / With folded hands and face demure, / They lift to heaven their angel eyes, / And steal the earnings of the poor.
“Such pious shearers I despise, / With folded hands and face demure, / They lift to heaven their angel eyes, / And steal the earnings of the poor.”
This 1878 critique captures the enduring tension between Seattle's Gilded Age business interests and the working class struggling to meet rent. The poem’s frustration with 'pious' lenders profiting from neighbors' hunger mirrors modern concerns about predatory lending and the housing crisis in a rapidly gentrifying city.
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