“O, I don’t know. They will at least have revenge. It may be we’ll have anarchy, and the fulfillment of the bloody scenes painted in that wonderful book, ‘Caesar’s Column.’ Have you read it? It is fearful. Enough to curdle a man’s blood.”
At this point Glen, who was still looking over his uncle’s scrap-book, said: “I believe Uncle John is getting to be quite a Socialist, judging from these clippings. Let me read some of them. They are mostly from the metropolitan dailies”:
“WANT IN THE CITIES.
“A few days ago we quoted from an editorial in the New York Tribune to show that there never before was such great distress in the chief city in the country as at present, and that the victims were not merely laboring men, unable to find employment, but professional people and small merchants as well. The Times-Herald editorially testifies that want is as general and intense in Chicago as in New York. It says:
“‘Perhaps since the great fire there has not been a keener occasion for generous giving. The country is now in the fourth year of a period of hard times. Very rich men have had their fortunes trimmed, so to speak; moderately rich men have been reduced to a sharp counting of the cost of casual luxuries. All classes have suffered in degree, but thousands and thousands of those brave folks whose only hope in life is to fight for the ship till they fall face forward fighting on the deck have been precipitated from a hard-earned and perilous independence into a black and hopeless poverty. * * * We do not share the opinion of the versifier who wrote “Organized charity, cold as ice, in the name of a hard, statistical Christ,” but we submit that the present crisis, when ill-clad, half-famished shapes confront us on the streets; when the cold pinches the denizens of hovels and tenements; when the children in a thousand squalid homes cry for sustenance, when women fight for bread at the county agent’s door, and able-bodied men swarm on the railroad tracks, eagerly begging fragments of coal—this crisis is not to be met with perfunctory measures.’
“In another article published in its news columns the Times-Herald declares that:
“‘Chicago has 8,000 families actually starving to death.
“‘It has 40,000 wives, husbands and children begging for a pittance of food to keep body and soul together—huddled into single rooms and freezing in the blizzard that visited the city yesterday.’”
The next item reads:
“DISTRESS IN GREAT CITIES.