"The poor," he exclaimed passionately, "need you, but how, before God you need them! For only a loving understanding of your neighbors' lives will soften your calloused hearts. Long benumbing hours of grimy work, sordid homes amid daily and hourly scenes of filth and shame!" He leaned forward and cried: "Listen to me, Ahab Wright," and he thrust forward his iron claw toward the merchant while the congregation gasped, "what if you had to strip naked and bathe in a one-roomed hut before your family every night when you came home, dirty and coal-stained from your day's work! the beggar and the harlot and the thief nearby." He moved his accusing claw and the startled eyes of the crowd followed it as it pointed to Daniel Sands and Grant exclaimed: "Listen, Uncle Dan Sands, how would you like to have your daughter see the things the children see who live in your tenements next to the Burned District, which is your property also! Poisoned food, cheap, poisoned air, cheap, poisoned thoughts--all food and air and ideas, the cast-off refuse of your daily lives who live in these sheltered homes. You have a splendid sewer system up here; but it flows into South Harvey and the Valley towns, a great open ravine, because you people sitting here who own the property down there won't tax yourselves to enclose those sewers that poison us!" A faint--rather dazed smile ran over the congregation like a wraith of smoke. He felt that the smoke proved that he had struck fire. He went on: "Love, great aspiring love of fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, love stifled by fell circumstance, by cruel events, and love that winces in agony at seeing children and father and brother go down in the muck all around them--that is the heritage of poverty. "Hear me, Kyle Perry and John Kollander. I know you think poverty is the social punishment of the unfit. But I tell you poverty is not the punishment of the weak. Poverty is a social condition to which millions are doomed and from which only hundreds escape when the doom of birth is sealed. What has Ahab Wright given to Harvey more than James McPherson, who discovered coal here? What has Daniel Sands done for Harvey more than Tom Williams, who has spent his life at hard work mining coal? Is not his coal as valuable as Uncle Daniel's interest? Friends--think of these things!"