"For me those days of slavery and infamy are gone. For millions of my fellow-men and fellow-women those days of slavery and infamy remain; but a man who has once been through what I have, who has lived and starved and eaten his heart out among the poor in their squalid, sordid surroundings, can never forget it so long as he lives. Their cry is ever in my ears; the cry of men whom these monsters have made less than men, breaking the man's heart in them, turning them into curs and cravens, robbing them of the very birthright of their manhood, that, like bullocks and steers, they may be broken to bow themselves to the yoke and lash, and meekly to obey their tyrant's bidding. The cry of wan-faced, hollow-eyed women, working a week of winter days and nights in a fireless garret till their chilled fingers can scarce hold the needle, and for a wage, that on the streets to which--small wonder!--such women are, by starvation and despair, too often driven, can be earned at so light a cost. But most of all, the cry of little children--little hollow-eyed children, crying silently because they are hungry and cold, stretching wan hands for the bread----My God! I cannot bear to think of it; I shall go mad. I sometimes think I _am_ mad when I brood over their sufferings and their wrongs. A great writer has put it on record that when he looks upon his fellow-men and fellow-women, and remembers that pain and sorrow and disease, for themselves and their dear ones, are the inevitable lot of all, and death the only certainty--when he sees them smiling, flirting, posturing, grimacing on the very edge of Eternity, he is filled with amazement and contempt. "Contempt! To me the sight of haggard, careworn men, of weary-faced and unlovely women, leading starved and joyless lives, out of which all hope and beauty and poetry are irretrievably crushed and gone, yet forcing themselves, in face of such terrible odds, to smile and laugh and take life lightly--is a sight for gods to wonder at, is magnificent, is heroic, is sublime. "And me, God has upraised to right the wrongs of the poor. The love that I bear to these my people, of whom I am one, burns more steadily than ever within me; but side by side with it there has sprung up a fiercer flame--the fires of fierce and relentless hate of their oppressors. Me, God has marked out to be the avenger of the poor. "As God sent the rainbow as a sign to his servant Noah, so to me by a sign has He signified His will. To me, as I walked the streets of this great city, a message came, bidding me turn my steps to the nation's museum, there to seek the sign. And in the Egyptian court of the museum I found it. There, stretching half the length of that great hall, where stand the sarcophagi of Israel's taskmasters, the Pharaohs, is a clenched arm and fist, of solid granite, and of such giant proportions, that one single blow from it would make to fall the side of a house, and bring to death and destruction all who dwell therein.