“And so they had the right to expect to be,” retorted the High President, “but surely what you advance is no argument. Ought the people here to be satisfied merely because they are comparatively better off than the people of Scandinavia and the people of Scandinavia in turn be well content because they are comparatively better off than the people of the interior of China? But let us look further into the question as to how well the people under the Republic were contented. Were they really contented, or did they individually accept existing conditions because they could discover no particular way of changing them? Do you think that the average man among the great masses of the people was satisfied to work all his life for a pittance which was insufficient in most instances to fully furnish him, year in and year out, with the actual necessaries of life and see another man, of the same clay as himself, who could afford to squander aimlessly in one day upon an old bit of cracked porcelain, a piece of painted canvas, or some drab of the footlights, whose complexion was as false as her soul, as much money as that other man earned in a lifetime. And yet the one man was, perhaps, fully as well endowed physically and mentally as the other and the life work of the one was fully as useful to the community as the work of the other. Why, then, this awful disparity? Do you know, too, that statistics show that of ten adults dying under your vaunted Republic, nine went out of this world subjects for Potter’s Field? I do not mean by this that they were actually so interred, for the love and respect of friends who lent their aid usually saved them from this, but I do mean that nine out of ten died without leaving sufficient behind them, after a lifetime of honest, unremitting toil, to actually pay their burial expenses.” “I was unaware of that,” said the Professor, “and it certainly is a shocking disclosure.”