earning 'his bread.' Apparently—and this is the gist of the matter—they have no need to earn bread for themselves. The accompanying illustrations show us on one page a prettily dressed little girl sitting daisy-crowned in the fields, and, on the other page, a ragged and tattered little girl with a shawl over her head going to the work which has but too plainly impoverished her. Hansel and Gretel are not more distinctly within the boundaries of fairyland than are these entrapped children. The witch is not more distinctly a child-eating hobgoblin than is the capitalist of such fervid song.

The sickly and unreasoning tone which pervades the literature of poverty is demoralizing. There is nothing helpful in the assumption that effort is vain, resistance hopeless, and the world monstrously cruel. The dominating element of such prose and verse is a bleak despair, unmanly, unwomanly, inhuman. Out of the abundance of material before me, I quote a single poem, published in the New York Call, reprinted in the Survey, and christened mockingly,—

THE STRAIGHT ROAD
They got y', kid, they got y', just like I said they would;
You tried to walk the narrow path,
You tried, and got an awful laugh;
And laughs are all y' did get, kid, they got y' good!
They never saw the little kid,—the kid I used to know,
The little bare-legged girl back home,
The little girl that played alone,
They don't know half the things I know, kid; ain't it so?
They got y', kid, they got y',—you know they got y' right;
They waited till they saw y' limp,
Then introduced y' to the pimp,
Ah, you were down then, kid, and couldn't fight.
I guess you know what some don't know, and others know damn well,
That sweatshops don't grow angel's wings,
That working girls is easy things,
And poverty's the straightest road to hell.

And this is what our Lady Poverty, bride of Saint Francis, friend of all holiness, counsel of all perfection, has come to mean in these years of grace! She who was once the surest guide to Heaven now leads her chosen ones to Hell. She who was once beloved by the devout and honored by the just, is now a scandal and a shame, the friend of harlotry, the instigator of crime. Even a true poet like Francis Thompson laments that the poverty exalted by Christ should have been cast down from her high caste.

All men did admire
Her modest looks, her ragged, sweet attire
In which the ribboned shoe could not compete
With her clear simple feet.
But Satan, envying Thee thy one ewe-lamb,
With Wealth, World's Beauty and Felicity
Was not content, till last unthought-of she
Was his to damn.
Thine ingrate, ignorant lamb
He won from Thee; kissed, spurned, and made of her
This thing which qualms the air,
Vile, terrible, old,
Whereat the red blood of the Day runs cold.

These are the words of one to whom the London gutters were for years a home, and whose strengthless manhood lay inert under a burden of pain he had no courage to lift. Yet never was sufferer more shone upon by kindness than was Francis Thompson; never was man better fitted to testify to the goodness of a bad world. And he did bear such brave testimony again and yet again, so that the bulk of his verse is alien to pessimism,—'every stanza an act of faith, and a declaration of good will.'

The demoralizing quality of such stuff as 'The Straight Road,' which is forced upon us with increasing pertinacity, is its denial of kindness, its evading of obligation. Temptation is not only the occasion, but the justifier of sin,—a point of view which plays havoc with our common standard of morality. When a vicious young millionaire like Harry Thaw runs amuck through his crude and evil environment, we sigh and say, 'His money ruined him.' When a poor young woman abandons her weary frugalities for the questionable pleasures of prostitution, we sigh and say, 'Her poverty drove her to it.' Where then does goodness dwell? What part does honor play? The Sieur de Joinville, in his memoirs of Saint Louis, tells us that a certain man, sore beset by the pressure of temptation, sought counsel from the Bishop of Paris, 'whose Christian name was William.' And this wise William of Paris said to him: 'The castle of Montl'héry stands in the safe heart of France, and no invading hosts assail it. But the castle of La Rochelle in Poitou stands on the line of battle. Day and night it must be guarded from assault, and it has suffered grievously. Which gentleman, think you, the King holds high in favor, the governor of Montl'héry, or the governor of La Rochelle? The post of danger is the post of glory, and he who is sorely wounded in the combat is honored by God and man.'

III

There are those whose ardor for humanity finds a congenial vent in the denouncement of all they see about them,—all the institutions of their country, all the laborious processes of civilization. Sociologists of this type speak and write of an ordinary American city in terms which Dante might have envied. Nobody, it would seem, is ever cured in its hospitals; they only lie on 'cots of pain.' Nobody is ever reformed in its reformatories. Nobody is reared to decency in its asylums. Nobody is—apparently—educated in its schools. Its industries are ravenous beasts, sucking the blood of workers; its poor are 'shackled slaves'; its humble homes are 'dens.' I have heard a philanthropic lecturer talk to the poor upon the housing of the poor. She threw on a screen enlarged photographs of narrow streets and tenement rooms which looked to me unspeakably dreary, but which the working-women around me gazed at in mild perplexity, seeing nothing amiss, and wondering that their residences should be held up to this unseemly scorn. They did not do as did the angry Italians of a New Jersey town,—smash the invidious pictures which shamed their homes; they sat in stolid silence and discomfiture, dimly conscious of an unresented insult.

It is hard to grasp a point of view immeasurably remote from our own; but what can we understand of other lives unless we do this difficult thing? Old women in the out-wards of an almshouse (of all earthly abodes the saddest) have boasted to me that their floors were scrubbed every other day, and their sheets changed once a week; and this braggart humor stunned my senses until I called to mind the floor and the bed of one of them (an extraordinarily dirty old woman) whom I had known in other years. Last winter the workers in a settlement house were called upon at midnight to succor a woman who had been kicked and beaten into unconsciousness by a drunken husband. The poor creature was all one bleeding bruise. When she was revived, her dim eyes traveled over the horrified faces about her. 'It's pretty bad,' she gasped, 'it's mighty bad'; and then, with another look at the group of protecting, pitying spinsters, 'but it must be something fierce to be an old maid.'