ness must end.
Make one more to fight it now.'

"Men looked at me pitifully. 'I was throwing away chances,' they said.
'Why wouldn't I hear reason? We were in the world, not in Utopia.'

"'We are in the hell we have made for all mankind,' I said. 'The only
real world is the world which is founded on truth and justice.
Everything else falls away.'

"Everything else has fallen away. I was never strong, and a year ago I
was knocked down in a scrimmage. Some bullies from one of the factories
set on my men--mine no longer, but still preaching my doctrine. Somehow
I was kicked in the chest and a rib broken, and this saved me probably
from being sent up as a disturber of the peace. The right lung was
wounded, and consumption came naturally. They nursed me--Tom's wife and
sister, good souls--till I refused to burden them any longer and came
here in spite of them. It has been a sharp fight. I seem to have failed;
yet the way is easier for the next. Co-operation will come. It must
come. It is the law of life. It is the only path out of this jungle in
which we wander and struggle and die. But there must be training. There
must be better understanding. I would give a thousand lives joyfully if
only I could make men and women who sit at ease know the sorrow of the
poor. It is their ignorance that is their curse. Teach them; study them.
Care as much for the outcast at home as for the heathen abroad. And, oh,
if you can make anybody listen, beg them for Christ's sake, for their
own sake, to hearken and to help! Beg them to study; not to say with no
knowledge that help is impossible, but to study, to think, and then to
work with their might. It is my last word,--a poor word that can reach
none, it may be, any more, and yet, who knows what wind of the Lord may
bear it on, what ground may be waiting for the seed? I shall see it, but
not now. I shall behold it, and it will be nigh, in that place to which
I go. Work for it; die for it if need be; for man's hope, man's life, if
ever he knows true life, has no other foundation."

CHAPTER SEVENTEENTH.

CHILD-WORKERS IN NEW YORK.

Political economists in general, with the additional number of those who
for one purpose and another turn over statistics of labor, nodded
approvingly as they gazed upon the figures of the last general census
for the State of New York, which showed that among the myriad of workers
in factory and other occupations, but twenty-four thousand children were