Power to the People

The people are the power to come.
Oppressed, unprotected, abandoned;
left to the ebb and flow of the tides of the market,
now taken on to work, now cast off to starve,
committed to the shifting laws of supply and demand,
slaves of Capital
- the whited name of old accursed Mammon.
They are, I say, the power ... likely to come
and set up another Power,
not existing in England now ...
(George Meredith, 1875-5)