roken-down rookery. "How can any one live in such a place? The Black
Hole of Calcutta couldn't have been much worse!"

"That's just it," answered Paula, with some warmth. "You self-satisfied,
well-fed people uptown don't take the trouble to come down here to find
out how the poor live. We Settlement workers know, for we are right in
the heart of it all. What you see from the street is nothing. You must
enter some of these tenements if you wish to become really acquainted
with the shocking conditions in which they live--the crushing poverty,
the physical and moral suffering, the gross immorality. In some places
as many as twelve persons, full-grown men and women, half-grown boys and
girls, all eat and sleep in one dark, ill-ventilated room. Can you
wonder that such a life brutalizes them and that they die like flies?"

Tod shrugged his shoulders.

"What good would it do if we did know? We couldn't help all of them. You
remember what Baron Rothschild said to a wild-eyed anarchist who one day
managed to break into his office brandishing a pistol: 'My friend, you
insist that I share my fortune with the poor. I am worth five millions
of dollars. There are in the world more than five hundred million
paupers. Here is your share--exactly one cent.'"

"That's all very well," smiled Paula. "I don't go to that extreme. We
can't help all, but we can help a little. If the rich could see things
as they are, it would make them reflect. I don't think they would be so
wickedly extravagant in their own homes if they saw all this misery. The
price of one big dinner served in a Fifth Avenue mansion would support
half a dozen families here for a year."

Tod looked skeptical.

"I like to hear you talk," he said lightly, "because you're so earnest
about it, but really you're wrong. If these people were given assistance
to-day they would be as badly off to-morrow. All civilizations have had
this problem to deal with. The poor are the underdogs in the struggle
for life. They're only half human, anyway. Most of them have never known
anything better. They are used to roughing it. They actually enjoy their
dirt. They themselves are largely responsible for their own misfortunes.
They drink, they're shiftless and thriftless."

"The rich have more vices than the poor," answered Paula quietly. "The
poor drink to drown their troubles. We can't say just why, of two men
born with the same advantages, one prospers and the other remains in the
gutte