into the former camp: "I know not.. / whether those who did our Rights betray, / And for a mess of Pottage, sold away / Our dear bought / Freedoms, shall now trusted be, / As Conservators of our Libertie." As does Henry Ellison (1875) "O Faith .. The disbelieving world would sell thee so; / Head turned with sophistries, and heart grown cold, / For a vile mess of pottage it would throw / Away thy heritage, and count the gold!". Karl Marx' lament in Das Kapital has been translated using this phrase: The worker "is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for labour, in return for the price of his customary means of subsistence, to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage." Swift and Byron use the phrase satirically: "Thou sold'st thy birthright, Esau! for a mess / Thou shouldst have gotten more, or eaten less." The Hindu nationalist V. D. Savarkar borrowed the phrase, along with quotations from Shakespeare, for his pamphlet Hindutva (1923), which celebrated Hindu culture and identity, asking whether Indians were willing to 'disown their seed, forswear their fathers and sell their birthright for a mess of pottage'. Perhaps the most famous use in American literature is that by Henry David Thoreau: "If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living." Another prominent instance of using the phrase in American fiction is James Weldon Johnson's famous protagonist Ex-Coloured Man who, retrospectively reflecting upon his life as a black man passing for white, concludes that he has sold his "birthright for a mess of pottage". By a conventional spoonerism, an overly propagandistic writer is said to have "sold his birthright for a pot of message," a bit of enduring wordplay documented as early as 1850. Terry Pratchett has his character Sergeant Colon say this in Feet of Clay, after Nobby of the Watch has guessed that the phrase is "a spot of