“Do you know of the blacksmith women in the ‘black country’? I have recently been there, giving some addresses. Oh, the hideousness of it all, with its starving people, its wretched, stunted lives, its ghastly ugliness, its brutalized men and women! One sees women, who should be at home nursing their babies, standing on their feet from morning till night doing the work of men, swinging the hammer amidst grime and soot and incessant noise. And if one of them drops at her post from sheer exhaustion, there is a fiendish clanging thing that bangs on the floor and shakes every bone in the poor wretch’s body. “Mr. —— took Henry George to see the sight when he was here, and he told me that George swore until he was black in the face. “Oh, I know you think I am a hot-head; you will say these are exceptional cases. You will doubtless try to do what all the good rich people do (I admit, you see, that there are _some_ good ones); you will doubtless try to help palliate all these horrors. If you were here you might build an old men’s home for the poor men to whom society has never given a chance, who, through no fault of their own, have been forced from their cradle to live in stifling attics or damp, unwholesome hovels, breathing poison, working their fingers off to give their hungry children bread. You might build a comfortable home where these decrepit, useless old fellows might enjoy the food which you give in charity, wear your charity uniform, and look forward to filling a pauper’s grave, as does one in nine of all the people who die in London. Or you might build a splendid marble palace of a hospital or asylum, and herd together vast numbers of little boys or fallen women or cripples, and try in some big, mechanical, institutional way to do with your pound of cure what an ounce of prevention would have accomplished a thousand times better, if it could have come in the way of justice, not charity. Charity! how I loathe the word! It is the iron which sears the conscience of your rich Christian as does nothing else. He thinks to buy heaven with that word. “I tell you, Miss Brewster, these people want what you and I want. They want to preserve their self-respect, to have a chance once a week to remember that they are human beings and not machines. They want to be able in this Christian land to earn an honest living, to keep their daughters from the streets, and to keep soul and body together without sacrificing all decency and honor. “How much delicacy and fine moral sentiment, to say nothing of physical comfort, do you suppose is to be had in the sixty thousand families of London, each of which lives in one room? “Do you rich people suppose you are going to help this matter greatly by leaving money in your wills to build asylums for the moral and physical wrecks for which our incredible folly and selfish indifference is responsible?