1897
Raise Your Standard Brothers
| Tune: | Original |
| Lyrics: | Gustav Spiller |
| Composer: | Emily Josephine Troup |
Raise your standard, brothers,
Higher still and higher!
Let the thought of justice
All your deeds inspire!
Let your eyes be kindling
With a love-lit fire!
Virtue for our armour,
Justice for our sword,
Human love our master,
Human love our lord;
So shall we be marching,
Fighting in accord.
Work for man’s salvation,
Work with might and main;
Lift the poor and fallen
To a higher plane;
Purge from law and custom
Each and every stain.
Virtue for our armour, &c.
Rest not till within you
Strength of virtue grow,
Till with streams of kindness
Heart and mind o’erflow,
Till a sense of kindred
Bindeth high and low.
Virtue for our armour, &c.
Fight till you have silenced
All the rebel throng,
Silenced lawless passions
Luring men to wrong—
Fight till all things human
To the right belong.
Virtue for our armour, &c.
Born in Hungary, Gustav Spiller spent his adult life in England, and was one of many central European songwriters whose works fuelled English radicalism. A secular hymn, its lyrics replace God with ‘Human love our lord’, as it exhorts activists to keep fighting in their daily lives for ‘justive’, ‘salvation’, and ‘virtue’. In common with a significant number of nineteenth-century protest songs, it was set to music by a female composer.
| Cause: | Socialist |
| Theme: | Identity |
| Addressed to: | Men |
| Target of Protest: | Sin (generic) | Mankind |
| Proposal/Solution: | Individual Responsibility | Education |