I can bear almost any degradation, I have found; but not when I have to listen to music!
Besides, I can afford to give it up. I have made a fortune. I shall have over thirty dollars when I leave!
I have always been paid, I find, in proportion to the indignities I bore—in proportion to the amount I humiliated myself before the rich and the vulgar. These vile, bejeweled, befeathered women, these loathsome, swinish men—these are the people who have money to spend. They go through the world scattering their largess with royal hand; and you can get down and gather it up out of the mud beneath their feet.
I come home at night worn out and weak, sometimes almost in a stupor; but I am never too ill to brood over that hideous state of affairs. I gaze at it and I wring my hands, and I cry: Oh my Father in heaven, will it always be like this?
Think of it—this money that these people squander—do you know what it is? It is the toil of society! That is what it is,—it is my toil—it is the toil of the millions that swarm in the tenements where I live—it is the toil of the laborers, the beasts of burden of society, in the cities and in the country.
Think about it, I cry, think about it!—Can I not find any word, is there nothing I can do or say now or at any time, to make men see it? Why, you take it for granted—I have taken it for granted all my days—that money should belong to the brutal rich to squander in whatever inanity may please them! But it never dawns upon you that this money is the toil of the human race! Money is the representation of all that human toil creates—of all value; it is houses that laborers build, it is grain that farmers raise, it is books that poets write! And see what becomes of it—see! see! Or are you blind or mad, that you will not see? Have you no more faith in man, no more care about the soul?
You think that I have been made sick by my work in that one haunt of vice. But it is not only that, it is not only that fever district where all the diseases of a city gather. I have been all over the city, and it is everywhere the same. Go to the opera-house any night and you may see blasphemous vanity enough to feed the starving of this city for a year. Walk up Fifth Avenue and see them driving; or go to Newport and see them there. Why, I read in the papers once of a woman who gave a ball—and the little fact has stuck in my mind ever since that she wore a dress trimmed with lace that cost a thousand dollars a meter! I do not speak of the infinite vulgarity of the thing—it is the monstrous crime of it that cries to me. These people—why, they have society by the throat!