"

"Oh, go along with your Progressionist phrases! Nobody need starve or
freeze in Berlin. The really poor are thoroughly well looked after by
the proper authorities. The supposed distress of these women and
children is a mere trumped-up story on the part of the
Revolutionists--a means of agitation, a weapon against the government.
The beggars simply speculate on the tears of sentimental idiots. They
get up a sort of penny-dreadful, whereon the one side you have a
picture of injured innocence in the shape of pale despairing mothers
and clamoring children, and on the other, villainy triumphant in the
form of a police constable or a government official. And to think that
you should have been taken in by such a swindle!"

"I suppose you do not see how heartless it appears to speak so lightly
of other people's hunger, sitting oneself at such a table as this?"

"Bravo, Wilhelm! Now you are throwing my prosperity in my teeth like
any advocate of division of property. I trust you have not turned
Socialist yourself? you who used not to have a good word to say for the
lot."

"Never fear--I am not a Socialist. Their doctrines have not been able
to convince me yet. But for years I have seen the distress of the
working people with my own eyes, and I know that every human being with
a heart in his body is in duty bound to help them."

"And who says anything against that? Don't we all do our duty? Poverty
has always existed and always will to the end of time. But, on the
other hand, that is what charity is there for. We have hospitals for
the sick, workhouses and parish relief for the aged and incapable, for
lazy vagabonds who won't work, it is true, only the treadmill."

"That is all very fine, but what are you going to do with the honest
men who want to work but can find none?"

"Wilhelm, I have always had the highest respect for you, your wisdom,
your intellect, but forgive me if I say that, in this case, you are
talking of things you do not understand. Everybody who wants work finds
it. I hope you will be at my place next summer. Then you'll see how I
positively sweat blood in harvest-time trying to get the necessary
number of laborers together, and what I have to put up with from the
rascals only to keep them in good humor. Don't try on any of these
windy arguments with a landowner--people that want work and can't find
it indeed! Let me tell you, my son, neither I nor any one of my country
neighbors can scrape together a