WHILE STATE VIOLENCE against the lower classes appears in ‘Will Clewline’ as a ‘national stain’ – a ‘foul stain’, indeed – state disregard of seamen in peacetime is recognized as ‘Britain's stain’ in ‘The Neglected Tar’, and slavery is pronounced in the West Indian Eclogues as the ‘ foulest stain’. British responsibility in the management of Irish affairs, too, is the target-subject of a group of poems, all included in the 1824 posthumous collection of Poems and Other Writings. The Irish topic is again articulated by characteristically assuming the perspective of the oppressed, whether they be the young woman violated by ‘cold-hearted strangers’, British ‘ruffians’, as happens with the protagonist of the three-poem ballad sequence of ‘Mary-Le-More’ – or the exile ‘doomed to wander’. Here his ‘Lament’ over the loss of ‘Nature's rights’, significantly expressed in the first-person, conveys the equation of the right of rebellion as moral duty, in terms that define a sustained sense-making process in the corpus of Rushton's writings: ‘The wretch whose arm maintains | Oppression is the traitor; | But he who spurns his chains | Obeys the great Creator’ (‘The Exile's Lament’, VI, p. 69).