nheritance that keeps them struggling for food, over outworn paths,
mere creatures of primal instinct, whose Godhood is taken from them at
birth; by you--by you who get what you do not earn from those who earn
what they do not get."

He turned to the group near the rear of the room, looked at them and
continued:

"The poor need your neighborly sacrifice, and in that neighborly love
and sacrifice you will grow in stature more than they. What you give you
will keep; what you lose you will gain. The brotherhood you build up
will bless and comfort you.

"The poor," he exclaimed passionately, "need you, but how, before God
you need them! For only a loving understanding of your neighbors' lives
will soften your calloused hearts. Long benumbing hours of grimy work,
sordid homes amid daily and hourly scenes of filth and shame!" He leaned
forward and cried: "Listen to me, Ahab Wright," and he thrust forward
his iron claw toward the merchant while the congregation gasped, "what
if you had to strip naked and bathe in a one-roomed hut before your
family every night when you came home, dirty and coal-stained from your
day's work! the beggar and the harlot and the thief nearby." He moved
his accusing claw and the startled eyes of the crowd followed it as it
pointed to Daniel Sands and Grant exclaimed: "Listen, Uncle Dan Sands,
how would you like to have your daughter see the things the children see
who live in your tenements next to the Burned District, which is your
property also! Poisoned food, cheap, poisoned air, cheap, poisoned
thoughts--all food and air and ideas, the cast-off refuse of your daily
lives who live in these sheltered homes. You have a splendid sewer
system up here; but it flows into South Harvey and the Valley towns, a
great open ravine, because you people sitting here who own the property
down there won't tax yourselves to enclose those sewers that poison us!"
A faint--rather dazed smile ran over the congregation like a wraith of
smoke. He felt that the smoke proved that he had struck fire. He went
on: "Love, great aspiring love of fathers and mothers and sisters and
brothers, love stifled by fell circumstance, by cruel events, and love
that winces in agony at seeing children and father and brother go down
in the muck all around them--that is the heritage of poverty.

"Hear me, Kyle Perry and John Kollander. I know you think poverty is the
social punishment of the unfit. But I tell you poverty is not the
puni