The poverty of our city slums where hearts break in discontent, and souls are starved for lack of spiritual intelligence--such was not the poverty of Francis’ dream. To use again his own manner of speech, this is poverty in slavery, degraded and dishonoured by the vice and selfishness of man. With a full heart would he have set himself to rescue his Ideal from her modern degradation and restore her to her place of honour upon the earth. Knight-errant as he was, he would not have rested until poverty was made honourable amongst men. To rescue the poor from the conditions which have so effectually demoralised them during the past two or three centuries of unheeding individualism, would undoubtedly have been to Francis a first and urgent duty were he with us to-day. Even in his own time he regarded with anxiety the conditions which debased the poor; even then he considered himself the knight-errant sent to rescue the comely maiden Poverty from the neglect and heartless scorn of the world.[32] But was ever Italian peasant so utterly degraded as are many of the victims of modern industrialism? Poverty with Francis was the mother of spiritual freedom; poverty in the London slum is synonymous with hard materialism and irreligion. Was ever contrast greater? And yet Francis has made evident to us that beneath the squalor and degradation of the modern city, there is a spiritual possibility, if only it can be recovered. But will it ever be that poverty shall again regain amongst the hungry multitude the honourable estate with which the Saint of Assisi had endowed it? Will it ever be rescued from its present inhuman conditions? The future only can tell; and they who strive that it shall be so can only work in the strength of their faith; but faith verily can accomplish the apparently impossible, if faith itself be strong. Meanwhile the ideal of Francis has assuredly a prophetic message for the multitude which is not hungry.