There is a story of a rich woman--an Austrian, perhaps--who was chilled through by a long drive on a bitter winter day. “Make a huge fire in my sitting-room,” she said to a servant as she entered her country house, “and order wood distributed to the poor of the village.” She sat by the huge fire for ten minutes and then rang the bell. “Never mind about distributing that wood,” she said to the answering servant. “The weather seems to have moderated.” The theory back of this story is the popular one: that the great comfort of great wealth hardens the rich, makes them insensible to privation. The fact is the reverse--at least so far as America is concerned. Nowhere in the world is the value of wealth so grossly, so ludicrously over-estimated as among our plutocrats--not unnaturally, since their only title to distinction is their wealth, and a man cannot but reverence that which makes him distinguished. Nowhere, therefore, are the discomforts of poverty so exaggerated as in the palaces of our very rich. And so eager are the men as well as the women for opportunities to exercise their emotions over poverty and destitution that they are rapidly creating a huge pauper class. Demand is creating supply. The poor give to the poor through sympathy. The rich give to the poor through pity. The sympathetic poor are many, and so their pennies and food-donations, small in the single, pile up mountainously in the total. But they are sparsely and more or less judiciously, because intelligently, distributed. The very rich are, comparatively, though not absolutely, many; and they almost all give what seems to the ordinary run of well-to-do people very large sums. They give carelessly, freely. Though warned by often-exposed abuses, they never take warning. Each new fraud finds them credulous and eager. They want to give; they want to show that they are generous and helpful; to caution them is to irritate them. Thus pauperization is a vast and thriving industry. It is said, and there is no reason to doubt it, that there are several hundred families on Manhattan Island--enough to populate a small city--that have lived well for years wholly upon charity, no member of them ever doing any work beyond writing begging letters or patrolling begging routes. In addition there are thousands of families supported in large part by relief got from rich men and rich women. And the same state of affairs is found wherever the very rich, living exclusive and aloof lives, have built their palaces.