It is perhaps natural that ignorant poor women should imagine that inequality is the fault of the rich women. What is more surprising is that many rich women, though they ought to know better than anybody that a woman can no more help being born rich than born poor, feel guilty and ashamed of their wealth, and plunge into almsgiving to relieve their sickly consciences. They often conceive Socialism as a charitable enterprise for the benefit of the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Socialism abhors poverty, and would abolish the poor. A hearty dislike and disapproval of poor people as such is the first qualification of a good Equalizer. Under Socialism people would be prosecuted for being poor as they are now for being naked. Socialism loathes almsgiving, not only sentimentally because it fills the paupers with humiliation, the patrons with evil pride, and both with hatred, but because in a country justly and providently managed there could be neither excuse for it on the pauper’s part nor occasion for it on the patron’s. Those who like playing the good Samaritan should remember that you cannot have good Samaritans without thieves. Saviors and rescuers may be splendid figures in hagiography and romance; but as they could not exist without sinners and victims they are bad symptoms. The virtues that feed on suffering are very questionable virtues. There are people who positively wallow in hospitals and charitable societies and Relief Funds and the like, yet who, if the need for their charitable exercises were removed, could spend their energy to great advantage in improving their own manners and learning to mind their own business. There will always be plenty of need in the world for kindness; but it should not be wasted on preventible starvation and disease. Keeping such horrors in existence for the sake of exercising our sympathies is like setting our houses on fire to exercise the vigor and daring of our fire brigades. It is the people who hate poverty, not those who sympathize with it, who will put an end to it. Almsgiving, though it cannot be stopped at present, as without it we should have hunger riots, and possibly revolution, is an evil. At present we give the unemployed a dole to support them, not for love of them, but because if we left them to starve they would begin by breaking our windows and end by looting our shops and burning our houses.