ecognized brother is being buried? to
feast upon costly wines and far-fetched elaborate viands at tables
overloaded with fresh flowers and artistic gold, while the pallid faces
of a hundred hungry ones are looking on, and who are not even recognized
so much as the dog that receives a bone? To know that the city is
attacked by a powerful army and refuse either to enlist for its defence,
or to contribute means to help the defenders, would not be tolerated;
but to do such things is precisely what selfish and unfeeling wealth
demands, and what the aroused conscience of humanity will, ere long,
forbid. It refuses to establish the industrial and moral education for
all which would protect society from the invading forces of pauperism,
crime, and pestilence. It refuses to suspend its costly royal revels
until the voices of hunger and despair are silenced. It refuses to
moderate its giddy round of fashionable frivolity and ostentation in the
very presence of death, in the tenements where human life is reduced to
less than half its normal length, so that death and revelry confront
each other in the city.

[14] The writer once started a society upon this principle, to
be called the BROTHERHOOD OF JUSTICE. Its principle was the
abnegation of selfishness by strictly limiting the
expenditure of every member to the amount really necessary
to his comfort, dedicating the rest to humanity. It did not
appear difficult to gather members, and an able apostle of
this principle would be a world's benefactor.

I can imagine the voice of the million which says to the millionaire, we
do not ask you to be a hero and leap in to save the drowning; we do not
even require you to be a manly man and bestir yourself before a life is
lost; but we do say that the drowning man shall not be doomed to drown
by your indifference? but if there is a rope which may be thrown to him,
or a plank to uphold him, that rope or that plank shall be used, even if
you forbid and claim them as your vested rights. You have no vested
rights paramount to the rights of the commonwealth. It can order you in
times of danger to all to place your body for the protection of the city
in the path of the cannon ball, and if the commonwealth can demand your
life for the benefit of all, do you think it will allow its members to
be slaughtered in order to sustain your revelry, and leave your piles of
hoarded gold and silver to a