or by liveried flunkies and waiting
maids. While men and women want bread, and beg crusts or stand
shivering in the "bread lines" of our great cities, there are monkeys
being banqueted at costly banquets by the profligate degenerates of
riches. It's all wrong, Jonathan, cruelly, shamefully, hellishly
wrong! And I for one, refuse to call such a brutalized system, or the
nation tolerating it, _civilized_.

Good old Thomas Carlyle would say "Amen!" to that, Jonathan. Lots of
people wont. They will tell you that the poverty of the millions is
very sad, of course, and that the poor are to be pitied. But they will
remind you that Jesus said something about the poor always being with
us. They won't read you what he did say, but you can read it for
yourself. Here it is: "For ye have the poor always with you, and
_whensoever ye will ye can do them good_."[3] And now, I want you to
read a quotation from Carlyle:

"It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man
wretched; many men have died; all men must die,--the last exit
of us all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain. But it is to live
miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing;
to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt-in with
a cold universal Laissezfaire: it is to die slowly all our
life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite Injustice, as
in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris' Bull! This is and
remains forever intolerable to all men whom God has made."

"Miserable we know not why"--"to die slowly all our life
long"--"Imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite Injustice"--Don't these
phrases describe exactly the poverty you have known, brother Jonathan?

Did you ever stop to think, my friend, that poverty is the lot of the
_average_ worker, the reward of the producers of wealth, and that only
the producers of wealth are poor? Do you know that, because we die
slowly all our lives long, the death-rate among the working-class is
far higher than among other classes by reason of overwork, anxiety,
poor food, lack of pleasure, bad housing, and all the other ills
comprehended in the lot of the wage-worker? In Chicago, for example,
in the wards where the well-to-do reside the death-rate is not more
than 12 per thousand, while it is 37 in the tenement districts.

Scientists who have gone into the matter tell us that of ten million
persons belonging to the well-to-do classes the annual deaths do not
number