“More comfortable,” corrected Patsy. “Mind you, I’m not meaning starved, ground-under-the-heel poverty, the kind that breeds anarchists and criminals. God pity them, too! I mean the man who is still too poor to reckon his worth to a community in mere money, who, instead, doles kindness and service to his neighbors. Did you ever see a man richer than the one who comes home at day’s end, after eight hours of good, clean work, and finds the wife and children watching for him, happy-eyed and laughing?”
The sick man stirred uneasily. “Well—can’t a rich man find the same happiness?”
“Aye, he can; but does he? Does he even want it? Count up the rich men you know, and how many are there—like that?” No answer being given, Patsy continued: “Take the richest man—the very richest man in all this country—do you suppose in all his life he ever saw his own lad watching for him to come home?”
“What do you know about the richest man—and his son?” The sick man had for a moment become again a fiercely bitter, fighting force, a power given to sweeping what it willed before it. He sat with hands clenched, his eyes burning into the girl’s on the ground beside him. “I know what the world says.”
“The world lies; it has always lied.”
“You are wrong. It is a tongue here and a tongue there that bears false witness; but the world passes on the truth; it has to.”
“You forget”—Burgeman senior spoke with difficulty—“it is the rich who bear the burdens of the world’s cares and troubles, and what do they get for it? The hatred of every one else, even their sons! Every one hates and envies the man richer and more powerful than himself; the more he has the more he is feared. He lives friendless; he dies—lonely.”
Patsy rose to her knees and knelt there, shaking her fist—a composite picture of supplicating Justice and accusing Truth. She had forgotten that the man before her was sick—dying; that he must have suffered terribly in spirit as well as body; and that her words were so many barbed shafts striking at his soul. She remembered nothing save the thing against which she was fighting: the hard, merciless possession of money and the arrogant boast of it.
“And you forget that the burden of trouble which the brave rich bear so nobly are troubles they’ve put into the world themselves. They hoard their money to buy power; and then they use that power to get more money. And so the chain grows—money and power, money and power! I heard of a rich man once who turned a terrible fever loose all over the land because he bribed the health inspectors not to close down his factories. And after death had swept his books clean he gave large sums of money to stamp out the epidemic in the near-by towns. Faith! that was grand—the bearing of that trouble! And why are the rich hated? Why do they live friendless and die lonely? Not because they hold money, not because they give it away or help others with it. No! But because they use it to crush others, to rob those who have less than they have, to turn their power into a curse. That’s the why!”
Patsy, the fanatic, turned suddenly into Patsy, the human, again. The fist that had been beating the air under his nose dropped and spread itself tenderly on the sick man’s knee. “But I’m sorry you’re lonely. If there was anything you wanted—that you couldn’t buy and I could earn for you—I would get it gladly.”