t you bring me something? asks
the sensitive and poor seamstress. Do you always give some charity to
your friends? I want companionship, and not cold pieces; I want to be
treated like a human being who has nerves and feelings, and tears too,
and as much interest in the sunset, and in the birth of Christ, perhaps
as you. And the mass of uncared-for ignorance and brutality, finding a
voice at length, bitterly repels the condescensions of charity; you have
your culture, your libraries, your fine houses, your church, your
religion, and your God, too; let us alone, we want none of them. In the
bear-pit at Berne, the occupants, who are the wards of the city, have had
meat thrown to them daily for I know not how long, but they are not tamed
by this charity, and would probably eat up any careless person who fell
into their clutches, without apology.

Do not impute to me quixotic notions with regard to the duties of men and
women of culture, or think that I undervalue the difficulties in the way,
the fastidiousness on the one side, or the jealousies on the other. It is
by no means easy to an active participant to define the drift of his own
age; but I seem to see plainly that unless the culture of the age finds
means to diffuse itself, working downward and reconciling antagonisms by
a commonness of thought and feeling and aim in life, society must more
and more separate itself into jarring classes, with mutual
misunderstandings and hatred and war. To suggest remedies is much more
difficult than to see evils; but the comprehension of dangers is the
first step towards mastering them. The problem of our own time--the
reconciliation of the interests of classes--is as yet very ill defined.
This great movement of labor, for instance, does not know definitely what
it wants, and those who are spectators do not know what their relations
are to it. The first thing to be done is for them to try to understand
each other. One class sees that the other has lighter or at least
different labor, opportunities of travel, a more liberal supply of the
luxuries of life, a higher enjoyment and a keener relish of the
beautiful, the immaterial. Looking only at external conditions, it
concludes that all it needs to come into this better place is wealth, and
so it organizes war upon the rich, and it makes demands of freedom from
toil and of compensation which it is in no man's power to give it, and
which would not, if granted over and over again, lift it