So said Richard Stoughton to John Fenton as they sat at dinner in the restaurant of the Astor House, while the wind and the snow played tag up and down Broadway, and men compared the blizzard of ’88 with the storm that was then raging, and incidentally wondered how the star-eyed goddess of Reform enjoyed cleaning the streets. It was Friday evening, and Richard was hurrying his dinner that he might reach his rooms in time to dress for the opera. He and Fenton had just come from a visit to a tenement house not far from the famous hotel in which they were seated, and their conversation had naturally turned upon the great problem suggested by the sights they had witnessed. “Come with me,” Fenton had said to the younger man an hour before. “I want to show you a picture that will make a striking contrast to the scene you will witness at the Metropolitan to-night.” Somewhat against his will, Richard had consented to accompany Fenton, and they had found a family in a garret, starving and freezing, almost within a stone’s throw of the City Hall. It had been a painful experience, no less to Fenton, whose long years in active newspaper life had accustomed him to the phenomena that vice and poverty exhibit in a great city, than to the younger man, whose life had been spent in the sunny haunts of prosperity, and who knew little of the outward aspects of human misery beyond what his imagination could picture. “Explain yourself,” said Fenton rather sternly, refilling his sherry glass. “What I mean is simple enough,” answered Richard. “I have read the books you gave me, and I acknowledge they have presented a startling picture of the horrors that result, seemingly, from the unequal distribution of wealth. I think I am even willing to admit that, theoretically, nobody can show any very satisfactory claim to even a square foot of the earth’s surface. But it is one thing arguing in the abstract, and another looking at life in the concrete. Granting, for instance, that my ancestors stole land from the Indians, who may have taken it by force from some prehistoric race, is that any reason why those who believe in a new method of taxation should wrest my property from me?” A smile, both sad and sarcastic, lingered about Fenton’s firm, unsymmetrical mouth.