THE COLLECTION
I passed the plate in church.
There was a little silver, but the crisp bank-notes heaped themselves up high before me;
And ever as the pile grew, the plate became warmer and warmer, until it fairly burned my fingers, and a smell of scorching flesh rose from it, and I perceived that some of the notes were beginning to smolder and curl, half-browned, at the edges.
And then I saw through the smoke into the very substance of the money, and I beheld what it really was: I saw the stolen earnings of the poor, the wide margin of wages pared down to starvation;
I saw the underpaid factory girl eking out her living on the street, and the over-worked child, and the suicide of the discharged miner; I saw the poisonous gases from great manufactories, spreading disease and death;
I saw despair and drudgery filling the dram-shop; I saw rents screwed out of brother men for permission to live on God's land;
I saw men shut out from the bosom of the earth and begging for the poor privilege to work, in vain, and becoming tramps and paupers and drunkards and lunatics, and crowding into almshouses, insane asylums and prisons;
I saw ignorance and vice and crime growing rank in stifling, filthy slums;
I saw shoddy cloth and adulterated food and lying goods of all kinds, cheapening men and women, and vulgarizing the world; I saw hideousness extending itself from coal-mine and foundry over forest and river and field;