The problem of poverty, as mentioned above, engrossed me early. I acted as chairman of the meeting at which Henry George was first introduced to the public in New York City. But Henry George’s remedy,—a single draught of Socialism with unstinted individualism thereafter—never attracted me, while his descriptions of the misery of the poor, eloquent as they were, and fitted to awaken persons unacquainted with actual conditions, conveyed to me no novel message. I had before then been profoundly stirred by the chapters in Karl Marx’s _Kapital_ in which he collects from the English Blue Books frightful evidence of the mistreatment of laborers and especially of children in the early part of the nineteenth century. My errands in the tenement slums of New York had also made me fairly familiar with the bitter facts, and throughout my life I have been in touch in a practical way with the appalling complexus of misery and wrong which we abstractly designate as the Labor Question. I shall not here take time to discuss Socialism or other social reform movements in detail. My intention is to sketch a certain philosophy of life, and to trace the steps by which I reached it. My reaction against Socialism and related movements, however, was a prime factor in this inner development; and it is of this reaction and the causes of it that I must speak. The evils inherent in poverty are, in the first place, obviously, the privations entailed by it; secondly, the fact that the greater part of the life of the poor is consumed in efforts to provide the bare necessaries, the mind being thus kept in bondage to bodily needs and prevented from rising to other interests more appropriate to rational beings; thirdly, the fact that the first two wrongs are caused, not wholly it is true, but yet in a large measure, by fellow human beings.[13] The sting in poverty is not so much the hardships suffered, as the contempt for the manhood of the poor, exhibited by their exploiters,—the inequity being thus turned into iniquity.