more elegant dinner
parties, go to Palm Beach in February, and keep saddle-horses; but we
should be perfectly secure without working at all.

Hence we have a sense of independence about it. We feel as if it were
rather a favor on our part to be willing to go into an office; and we
expect to be paid vastly more proportionately than the fellow who needs
the place in order to live: so we cut him out of it at a salary three
times what he would have been paid had he got the job, while he keeps on
grinding at the books as a subordinate. We come down late and go home
early, drop in at the club and go out to dinner, take in the opera, wear
furs, ride in automobiles, and generally boss the show--for the sole
reason that we belong to the crowd who have the money. Very likely if we
had not been born with it we should die from malnutrition, or go to
Ward's Island suffering from some variety of melancholia brought on by
worry over our inability to make a living.

I read the other day the true story of a little East Side tailor who
could not earn enough to support himself and his wife. He became
half-crazed from lack of food and together they resolved to commit
suicide. Somehow he secured a small 22-caliber rook rifle and a couple
of cartridges. The wife knelt down on the bed in her nightgown, with her
face to the wall, and repeated a prayer while he shot her in the back.
When he saw her sink to the floor dead he became so unnerved that,
instead of turning the rifle on himself, he ran out into the street,
with chattering teeth, calling for help.

This tragedy was absolutely the result of economic conditions, for the
man was a hardworking and intelligent fellow, who could not find
employment and who went off his head from lack of nourishment.

Now "I put it to you," as they say in the English law courts, how much
of a personal sacrifice would you have made to prevent this tragedy?
What would that little East Side Jewess' life have been worth to you?
She is dead. Her soul may or may not be with God. As a suicide the
Church would say it must be in hell. Well, how much would you have done
to preserve her life or keep her soul out of hell?

Frankly, would you have parted with five hundred dollars to save that
woman's life? Five hundred dollars? Let me tell you that you would not
voluntarily have given up smoking cigars for one year to avoid that
tragedy! Of course you would have if challenged to do so. If the fact
that the killing co