"Buy mine at half the price," cried Free Trade.
"Better give me double for mine," exclaimed Fair Trade, "than deal with that woman. She is bringing ruin upon us with her cheap trash. Through her our cornfields lie fallow. Through her our industries languish, and some even have passed away from us. Through her our country has been filled with idle hands, and the wolf of want has been brought to many a door."
"They don't seem to have settled their dispute yet, Jack," the Buccaneer said.
"No, sir. A few years since and nothing would do but you must lie the old bluff-bowed ship Protection up, and now some of them are always casting longing eyes at her, and their sighs of regret would fill the sails of a Seventy-Four."
"What!" cried the Buccaneer, in dismay, as he saw Poverty with her large family of ragged and half-starved children now come on to the scene. "You here again. Why I am constantly doing something for you, and my Great Hat is forever being sent round."
"And still I want," said Poverty.
"I have built you model dwellings. I have ordered all your drains to be trapped; your cesspools cleaned, and your dustbins emptied; and all your children I insist upon being sent to school, so that they may learn the efficacy of comfort and cleanliness, and learn to bear with patience their many sufferings."
"But I ask for food," persisted Poverty.
The Buccaneer now said, "I give you, my good woman, the very best of all food, namely, food for the mind."
But Poverty answered, "Why turn the lamp of knowledge into my hovel? Why teach me that while others have plenty, I am in rags, cold, and hungry. Knowledge on an empty stomach is a dangerous thing. To open my eyes is the refinement of cruelty, for ignorance, at least, dulls the edge of misery. If you cannot fill my stomach and patch up the rents in my clothes, then in pity kill me. Send me to a lethal chamber and let me revel for a brief moment in the luxury of one good meal, and let me pass into eternity without the pinching pangs of hunger."