All this is true enough. But how, I would ask, is it possible for our people to maintain this precious sense of self-respect when they are forced daily and hourly into contact with those who appear to have no more idea of decency, cleanliness, and comfort than the beasts which perish? The whole physical circumstances of their lives fight against them. To the great bulk of these immigrant aliens, the word "home," that word so sacred to English ears, around which so many associations cling, has no meaning at all. They appear to have only one dominant passion, the love of gain;--not that they gain much, poor creatures, still it is there;--and in their pursuit of it they are willing to accommodate themselves to the meagre wage, the lengthy hours, and the filthy surroundings already described. With this exception they appear to be indifferent to everything which makes life worth the living, to have no happiness in the past, no pleasures in the present, no hope in the future. With our own people it is different. However degraded they may be, there exists among them the longing for enjoyment. "Not to enjoy is not to live." Moral and intellectual enjoyments many have none; and in default of these, they betake themselves to the lowest forms of animal enjoyment; snatching at their pleasures greedily, foully, all the more fiercely because their opportunities of enjoyment are so limited. Can we wonder that these things are so? Can we judge them harshly? God forbid! A well-known social reformer, for whose work and opinions I have the greatest respect, has written:--"It is a fact apparent to every thoughtful man, that the larger portion of the misery that constitutes our social question arises from indulgence, gluttony, drink, waste, profligacy, betting, and dissipation."[25] This on the surface is true enough; but when we come to examine more closely into the problems of poverty, we shall find that though intemperance, unthrift, self-indulgence, and inefficiency are unhappily the common vices of the poor, yet these vices are not so much the _causes_ of poverty, as the _effects_ of it.