ured in obedience to some inner _ideal_, while
their comrades were not actuated by anything worthy of that name. These
ideals of other lives are among those secrets that we can almost never
penetrate, although something about the man may often tell us when they
are there. In Mr. Wyckoff's own case we know exactly what the
self-imposed ideal was. Partly he had stumped himself, as the boys say,
to carry through a strenuous achievement; but mainly he wished to
enlarge his sympathetic insight into fellow-lives. For this his sweat
and toil acquire a certain heroic significance, and make us accord to
him exceptional esteem. But it is easy to imagine his fellows with
various other ideals. To say nothing of wives and babies, one may have
been a convert of the Salvation Army, and had a nightingale singing of
expiation and forgiveness in his heart all the while he labored. Or
there might have been an apostle like Tolstoi himself, or his compatriot
Bondareff, in the gang, voluntarily embracing labor as their religious
mission. Class-loyalty was undoubtedly an ideal with many. And who knows
how much of that higher manliness of poverty, of which Phillips Brooks
has spoken so penetratingly, was or was not present in that gang?

"A rugged, barren land," says Phillips Brooks, "is poverty to live
in,--a land where I am thankful very often if I can get a berry or a
root to eat. But living in it really, letting it bear witness to me of
itself, not dishonoring it all the time by judging it after the standard
of the other lands, gradually there come out its qualities. Behold! no
land like this barren and naked land of poverty could show the moral
geology of the world. See how the hard ribs ... stand out strong and
solid. No life like poverty could so get one to the heart of things and
make men know their meaning, could so let us feel life and the world
with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown away.... Poverty
makes men come very near each other, and recognize each other's human
hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, demands and cries out for
faith in God.... I know how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere
mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem.... But I am sure that the
poor man's dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon
his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of
life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness
and revelations of God. Let him resist