It is no longer permitted to be poor; still less to appear poor. It is not yet a legal crime but a social one. It is comparatively easy to evade punishment for legal crimes, but punishment for a social crime is as swift as it is merciless. No defense is possible because the prosecutor and judge is invisible. There is no defense and no appeal. No higher court to reverse judgment on technical or constitutional grounds. Accusation alone is equivalent to condemnation. "There was a time when the poor of the land were an institution, as respectable as they were part of the scheme which recognized them. The poor did not have to dress like the rich, did not have to live like the rich, act like the rich, and be buried like the rich. "But those times are gone. A fifteen dollar a week clerk is supposed to dress in clothes as expensive as his superior who receives four times the amount. He is not considered "ambitious" if he does not starve himself to appear spick and span every day of the week. Sinkers and coffee for lunch after a breakfast-less breakfast, to buy a neat silk necktie. No lunch at all to have a suit pressed. Dinnerless dinners to buy new shoes or a new hat. The shoemakers have forgotten how to put patches on shoes. The mothers have forgotten how to patch up a worn-out seat or a threaded elbow. It is no longer done." The above is the beginning of an essay on poverty I found among the papers of the deceased Italian poet Gagliano. Where the impetus of thought of such a beginning would have led him is difficult to follow. He never finished the essay. I am inclined to think that Gagliano did not have the heart, though he had the mind, to pursue the logical sequence of thoughts of his theory. He was a poet, a sweet singer, and he hated and avoided what was engendered by bitterness. He had been poor so many years that it was becoming to him. Poverty fitted him as well as his worn coat and greenish sombrero. Should Gagliano have suddenly exhibited signs of prosperity it would have scandalized every one.