Only once have I happened to find any one who questioned the situation from a standpoint outside of it, and that was a shabbily dressed man whom I overheard talking to a poor woman in one of those pleasant arbors which crown certain points of rising ground in the Park. She had a paper bundle on the seat beside her, and she looked like some working-woman out of place, with that hapless, wistful air which such people often have. Her poor little hands, which lay in her lap, were stiffened and hardened with work, but they were clean, except for the black of the nails, and she was very decently clad in garments beginning to fray into rags; she had a good, kind, faithful face, and she listened without rancor to the man as he unfolded the truth to her concerning the conditions in which they lived. It was the wisdom of the poor, hopeless, joyless, as it now and then makes itself heard in the process of the years and ages, and then sinks again into silence. He showed her how she had no permanent place in the economy, not because she had momentarily lost work, but because in the nature of things as we have them, it could only be a question of time when she must be thrown out of any place she found. He blamed no one; he only blamed the conditions. I doubt whether his wisdom made the friendless woman happier, but I could not have gainsaid it, when he saw me listening, if he had asked, “Isn’t that the truth?” I left him talking sadly on, and I never saw him again. He was threadbare, but he too was cleanly and decent in his dress, and not at all of that type of agitators of whom we have made an effigy like nothing I have seen, as if merely for the childish pleasure of reviling it. IV. The whole incident was infinitely pathetic to me; and yet we must not romance the poor, or imagine that they are morally better than the rich; we must not fancy that a poor man, when he ceases to be a poor man, would be kinder for having been poor. He would perhaps oftener, and certainly more logically, be unkinder, for there would be mixed with his vanity of possession a quality of cruel fear, an apprehension of loss, which the man who had always been rich would not feel. The self-made man when he has made himself of money, seems to have been deformed by his original destitution, and I think that if I were in need I would rather take my chance of pity from the man who had never been poor. Of course, this is generalization, and there are instances to the contrary, which at once occur to me. But what is absolutely true is that our prosperity, the selfish joy of having, at the necessary cost of those who cannot have, is blighted by the feeling of insecurity which every man has in his secret soul, and which the man who has known want must have in greater measure than the man who has never known want.