Hilda drew close to her mother, kissing her face, twining her arms around her neck. For a long time she lay that way, alternately sobbing and sleeping. Then, after a long time, there was a stir. She woke from a doze to find a police officer and two or three other men bending over her. Some one carried a lantern. Terrified, smitten dumb, she was unable to answer the questions put to her. Then a woman, evidently the mistress of the house on the top of the hill, arrived and took Hilda in her arms and cried over her. "I'll take the little girl," she said to the police officer. "But the mother, can you save her? Is she too far gone?" "I've sent for a doctor," replied the other. * * * * * Just before the ladies left the table, young Lambert raised his glass of Madeira. Turning towards the wife of the Railroad King, he said: "My best compliments for a delightful dinner." The doctor, who had been bending over Mrs. Hooven, rose. "It's no use," he said; "she has been dead some time--exhaustion from starvation." BY ANATOLE FRANCE The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread. Progress and Poverty BY HENRY GEORGE (One of the most widely-read treatises upon economics ever published, this book was the fountain head of the single-tax movement. The writer was a California journalist, 1839-1897, who devoted all his life to the propaganda of economic justice) Unpleasant as it may be to admit it, it is at last becoming evident that the enormous increase in productive power which has marked the present century and is still going on with accelerating ratio, has no tendency to extirpate poverty or to lighten the burdens of those compelled to toil. It simply widens the gulf between Dives and Lazarus, and makes the struggle for existence more intense. The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamed. But in factories where labor-saving machinery has reached its most wonderful development, little children are at work; wherever the new forces are anything like fully utilized, large classes are maintained by charity or live on the verge of recourse to it; amid the greatest accumulations of wealth, men die of starvation, and puny infants suckle dry breasts; while everywhere the greed of gain, the worship of wealth, shows the force of the fear of want. The promised land flies before us like the mirage. The fruits of the tree of knowledge turn, as we grasp them, to apples of Sodom that crumble at the touch....