finitesimally what the government, but for your
opposition, might do universally. Your true creed is the survival of
the fittest. You grind these people down into what is really an economic
slavery and dependence, and then you insult and degrade them by inviting
them to exercise and read books and sing hymns in your settlement
house, and give their children crackers and milk and kindergartens and
sunlight! I don't blame them for not becoming Christians on that basis.
Why, the very day I left New York a man over eighty, who had been
swindled out of all he had, rather than go to one of those Christian
institutions deliberately forged a check and demanded to be sent to
the penitentiary. He said he could live and die there with some
self-respect."

"I might have anticipated that you would ultimately become a Socialist,
Alison," Mr. Parr remarked--but his voice trembled.

"I don't know whether I'm a Socialist or an Anarchist," she answered.
Hodder thought he detected a note of hopelessness in her voice, and the
spirit in it ebbed a little. Not only did she seem indifferent to her
father's feeling--which incidentally added fuel to it--but her splendid
disregard of him, as a clergyman, had made an oddly powerful appeal.
And her argument! His feelings, as he listened to this tremendous
arraignment of Eldon Parr by his daughter, are not easily to be
described. To say that she had compelled him, the rector of St. John's,
at last to look in the face many conditions which he had refused to
recognize would be too definite a statement. Nevertheless, some such
thing had occurred. Refutations sprang to his lips, and died there,
though he had no notion of uttering them. He saw that to admit her
contentions would be to behold crumble into ruins the structure that he
had spent a life in rearing; and yet something within him responded to
her words--they had the passionate, convincing ring of truth.

By no means the least of their disturbing effects was due to the fact
that they came as a climax to, as a fulfilment of the revelation he had
had at the Fergusons', when something of the true nature of Mr. Plimpton
and others of his congregation had suddenly been laid bare. And now
Hodder looked at Eldon Parr to behold another man from the one he had
known, and in that moment realized that their relationship could never
again be the same... Were his sympathies with the daughter?

"I don't know what I believe," said Alison, after a pause. "I'