Hadkins and Price were very different men,
Though both were dedicated
And had investigated
The Money Trick with piercing acumen.
The latter, a lifelong recalcitrant,
Was quick-witted, though old,
Alert, forward and bold
With every tourist and itinerant.
He went for long walks up around the crags,
Spoke freely to sightseers
From Bradford and Algiers,
The most Cosmopolitan of windbags.
But Wilfrid wasn’t just a talker, no,
He’d lived a fiery youth,
And though long in the tooth,
He still did what he could to overthrow
The system of imaginary debt.
He wrote letters to many newspapers,
Wrote by the quire and ream
About the Douglas dream,
Raging at injustice and usurers.
Many visitors to the Yorkshire town
Of Hebden Bridge must be
Wiser for Wilfrid P,
And seeds of revolution have been sown
In hearts which to the Four Corners have blown.
Hadkins was even older, over eighty
When I interviewed him.
He took me for a spin
In his new motor into the country.
We dined, drank, and talked freely about Douglas,
My vision of his hero
Was not one of a Nero,
But fearless Blackbeard waving sword and cutlass.
Hadkins though said he’d been a Christian man,
Not forceful, not at all,
Nor physical, nor tall,
Simply an engineer who’d had a plan,
A brilliant plan for meaningful reform,
Which, when it comes about
Will everywhere win out,
And make good living everbody’s norm.
The Final Solution to war and debt,
The Golden Age on Earth
Where every man is worth
A proper income, honour and respect.
The Social Credit Centre is still run
By people of his kind,
Serene, of peaceful mind,
Will they succeed in getting something else?
Hadkins was once a dreamer, Wilfrid still,
But dreams are not enough,
And talk, however tough,
Won’t move a mountain, never has nor will.
Myself I despair, will we ever win
The battle with the bankers?
Those suave, king-making gangsters...
An open question which my two old friends
Believe they can answer affirmative;
I wish, like them, I were so positive,
But they’re afflicted with myopia:
The problems we reformers face are great,
Already it may be too late
For C.H. Douglas’s Utopia.
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