it your moderate means and his immoderate
greed. Nowhere are you welcome, except where contractors are digging new
roads and blasting rocks and filling sunken lots with ashes and tin
cans. The random goat of poverty browses on the very confines of the
scanty, small settlement of cheap gentility where you and your
neighbors--people of moderate means like yourself--huddle together in
your endless, unceasing struggle for a home and self-respect. You know
that your smug, mean little house, tricked out with machine-made
scroll-work, and insufficiently clad in two coats of ready-mixed paint,
is an eyesore to the poor old gentleman who has sold you a corner of his
father's estate to build it on. But there it is--the whole hard business
of life for the poor--for the big poor and the little poor, and the
unhappiest of all, the moderately poor. _He_ must sell strip after strip
of the grounds his father laid out with such loving and far-looking
pride. _You_ must buy your narrow strip from him, and raise thereon your
tawdry little house, calculating the cost of every inch of construction
in hungry anxiety of mind. And then you must sit down in your narrow
front-room to stare at the squalid shanty of the poor man who has
squatted right in your sight, on the land condemned for the new avenue;
to wish that the street might be cut through and the unsightly hovel
taken away--and then to groan in spirit as you think of the assessment
you must pay when the street _is_ cut through.

And yet you must live, oh, people of moderate means! You have your loves
and your cares, your tastes and your ambitions, your hopes and your
fears, your griefs and your joys, just like the people whom you envy and
the people who envy you. As much as any of them, you have the capacity
for pain and for pleasure, for loving and for being loved, that gives
human beings a right to turn the leaves of the book of life and spell
out its lesson for themselves. I know this; I know it well; I was
beginning to find it out when I first came to that outpost suburb of New
York, in the trail of your weary army.

But I was a boy then, and no moderateness of earthly means could rob me
of my inheritance in the sky and the woods and the fields, in the sun
and the snow and the rain and the wind, and in every day's weather, of
which there never was any kind made that has not some delight in it to a
healthful body and heart. And on this inheritance I drew such great,
big, liberal, w