“You are right: we may make the selfish fear, and that is often a very salutary thing to do if nothing better can be done. A business man was telling me only the other day of the different relations between employers and employees in Fall River and other manufacturing places since the strikes of the last few years. “But, after all, though fear and legislation can do something to convert a brutal man into a decent man for a time, there must needs be something else,—the gospel of love and humanity, which of his own free will he must choose to accept and apply understandingly. “I shall not attempt to palliate any of the existing evils, nor, on the other hand, shall I attempt to undermine our present social and political system even if I could. Certainly I shall not try to do this until I am very certain that I see the right method of substituting something better in its place. “By the way, have you read Bellamy’s ‘Looking Backward’? It is very suggestive, and Nationalization of Industries is getting to be more of a fad in Boston than Esoteric Buddhism or Christian Science. Bellamy tells us what we must try to attain; but, alas! he gives little hint of what must be our first step toward the attainment. This is the problem which you and I must help our generation to solve. “Go on with your socialistic schemes. I believe they contain a half truth; at all events, to talk about them as you do will make people think, for you speak from the deepest conviction. Out of all this _sturm und drang_ period must surely come clear insight and right action: at least I am optimist enough to hope so; and my work shall be to think out the solution, as far as I may, but at all events to do what in me lies to set people to thinking; to make life a little sweeter and better; to infuse into it more hope for a few of my generation, and thus help to make their children ready for the new order of things if it comes. “In this great city money flows like water. There are streets where, for a mile, every house must be the home of a millionaire, for no one else could afford to live in such a one. Yet, within two miles of these palaces there is the direst want, the most frightful squalor, and the problem of New York is fast getting to be like the problem of London. “Most of our women dabble a little in charity now and then. They get up charity balls and fairs to satisfy their consciences in that way, and flatter themselves when they spend their money lavishly in luxuries for their own pleasure that they are giving employment to the poor and doing God service. They will sometimes give their money; they will sometimes give a little time to cut out garments at a sewing circle; but not one in five hundred will give her personal service even for a half day a week in coming face to face with those who need the help of her intelligence and her human sympathy.