“We all know better. But we don’t live up to our knowledge. I crossed on one of the big Atlantic liners lately, with five hundred other saloon passengers. They were naturally people of intelligence, and presumably of easy circumstances. Yet at least half of those people were plotting to rob our government of money by contriving plans to avoid paying duties truly owed. To do this all of them had to break our laws, and in most cases had, in addition, to lie deliberately. Many of them were planning to accomplish this theft by the bribery of the custom-house inspectors, thus not merely making thieves of themselves, but bribing other men to do wrong. In this city I can show you blocks so densely inhabited that they are election districts in themselves. Blocks in which twenty people live and sleep in a single room, year after year; where the birth of a little life into the world means that all must eat less and be less warm; where man and woman, old and young, must shiver in winter, and stifle in summer; where there is not room to bury the people who live in the block within the ground on which they dwell. But I cannot find you, in the poorest and vilest parts of this city, any block where the percentage of liars and thieves and bribe-givers is as large as was that among the first-class passengers of that floating palace. Each condition of society has its own mis-doings, and I believe varies little in the percentage of wrong-doers to the whole.” “To hear Peter talk you would think the whole of us ought to be sentenced to life terms,” laughed Watts. “I believe it’s only an attempt on his part to increase the practice of lawyers.” “Do you really think people are so bad, Peter?” asked Leonore, sadly. “No. I have not, ten times in my life, met a man whom I should now call bad. I have met men whom I thought so, but when I knew them better I found the good in them more than balancing the evil. Our mistake is in supposing that some men are ‘good’ and others ‘bad,’ and that a sharp line can be drawn between them. The truth is, that every man has both qualities in him and in very few does the evil overbalance the good. I marvel at the goodness I find in humanity, when I see the temptation and opportunity there is to do wrong.” “Some men are really depraved, though,” said Mrs. D’Alloi. “Yes,” said madame. “Think of those strikers!”