Now as far as proving to us the truth of my theory that an intelligent able-bodied American ought to succeed where millions of ignorant, half-starved emigrants do right along, this first year had already done it. It had also proved, to our own satisfaction at least, that such success does not mean a return to a lower standard of living but only a return to a simpler standard of living. With soap at five cents a cake it isn't poverty that breeds filth, but ignorance and laziness. When an able-bodied man can earn at the very bottom of the ladder a dollar and a half a day and a boy can earn from three to five dollars a week and still go to school, it isn't a lack of money that makes the bread line; it's a lack of horse sense. We found that we could maintain a higher standard of living down here than we were able to maintain in our old life; we could live more sanely, breathe in higher ideals, and find time to accept more opportunities. The sheer, naked conditions were better for a higher life here than they were in the suburbs. I'm speaking always of the able-bodied man. A sick man is a sick man whether he's worth a million or hasn't a cent. He's to be pitied. With the public hospitals what they are to-day, you can't say that the sick millionaire has any great advantage over the sick pauper. Money makes a bigger difference of course to the sick man's family but at that you'll find for every widow O'Toole, a widow Bonnington and for every widow Bonnington you'll find the heart-broken widow of some millionaire who doesn't consider her dollars any great consolation in such a crisis. Then, too, a man in hard luck is a man in hard luck whether he has a bank account or whether he hasn't. I pity them both. If a rich man's money prevents the necessity of his airing his grief in public, it doesn't help him much when he's alone in his castle. It seems to me that each class has its own peculiar misfortunes and that money breeds about as much trouble as it kills. To my mind once a man earns enough to buy himself a little food, put any sort of a roof over his head, and keep himself warm, he has everything for which money is absolutely essential. This much he can always get at the bottom. And this much is all the ammunition a man needs for as good a fight as it's in him to put up. It gives him a chance for an extra million over his nine dollars a week if he wants it. But the point I learned down here is that the million _is_ extra--it isn't essential. Its possession doesn't make a Paradise free from sickness and worry and hard luck, and the lack of it doesn't make a Hell's Kitchen where there is nothing but sickness and trouble and where happiness cannot enter.