d Washington Street I had to stop and
pull myself together, such power had been in that vision of the Boston
of the future to make the real Boston strange. The squalor and
malodorousness of the town struck me, from the moment I stood upon the
street, as facts I had never before observed. But yesterday, moreover,
it had seemed quite a matter of course that some of my fellow-citizens
should wear silks, and others rags, that some should look well fed, and
others hungry. Now on the contrary the glaring disparities in the dress
and condition of the men and women who brushed each other on the
sidewalks shocked me at every step, and yet more the entire
indifference which the prosperous showed to the plight of the
unfortunate. Were these human beings, who could behold the wretchedness
of their fellows without so much as a change of countenance? And yet,
all the while, I knew well that it was I who had changed, and not my
contemporaries. I had dreamed of a city whose people fared all alike as
children of one family and were one another's keepers in all things.

Another feature of the real Boston, which assumed the extraordinary
effect of strangeness that marks familiar things seen in a new light,
was the prevalence of advertising. There had been no personal
advertising in the Boston of the twentieth century, because there was
no need of any, but here the walls of the buildings, the windows, the
broadsides of the newspapers in every hand, the very pavements,
everything in fact in sight, save the sky, were covered with the
appeals of individuals who sought, under innumerable pretexts, to
attract the contributions of others to their support. However the
wording might vary, the tenor of all these appeals was the same:

"Help John Jones. Never mind the rest. They are frauds. I, John Jones,
am the right one. Buy of me. Employ me. Visit me. Hear me, John Jones.
Look at me. Make no mistake, John Jones is the man and nobody else. Let
the rest starve, but for God's sake remember John Jones!"

Whether the pathos or the moral repulsiveness of the spectacle most
impressed me, so suddenly become a stranger in my own city, I know not.
Wretched men, I was moved to cry, who, because they will not learn to
be helpers of one another, are doomed to be beggars of one another from
the least to the greatest! This horrible babel of shameless
self-assertion and mutual depreciation, this stunning clamor of
conflicting boasts, appeals, and adjurations,