"What good would it do if we did know? We couldn't help all of them. You remember what Baron Rothschild said to a wild-eyed anarchist who one day managed to break into his office brandishing a pistol: 'My friend, you insist that I share my fortune with the poor. I am worth five millions of dollars. There are in the world more than five hundred million paupers. Here is your share--exactly one cent.'" "That's all very well," smiled Paula. "I don't go to that extreme. We can't help all, but we can help a little. If the rich could see things as they are, it would make them reflect. I don't think they would be so wickedly extravagant in their own homes if they saw all this misery. The price of one big dinner served in a Fifth Avenue mansion would support half a dozen families here for a year." Tod looked skeptical. "I like to hear you talk," he said lightly, "because you're so earnest about it, but really you're wrong. If these people were given assistance to-day they would be as badly off to-morrow. All civilizations have had this problem to deal with. The poor are the underdogs in the struggle for life. They're only half human, anyway. Most of them have never known anything better. They are used to roughing it. They actually enjoy their dirt. They themselves are largely responsible for their own misfortunes. They drink, they're shiftless and thriftless." "The rich have more vices than the poor," answered Paula quietly. "The poor drink to drown their troubles. We can't say just why, of two men born with the same advantages, one prospers and the other remains in the gutter. We can only deal with the problem as we find it. It is dreadful to think that buried in these fearful tenements, brutalized by their frightful environments, are numbers of talented young men and women who are trying to better themselves. Left to themselves they are likely to sink deeper in the frightful morass that surrounds them, but if extended a helping hand they may be able to rise above the appalling conditions and so escape the terrible degradation and suffering that otherwise awaits them. A boy or girl, children of the tenements, may have within the genius of a Wagner or a Rosa Bonheur, but from infancy these children are so dragged down, so brutalized by their unspeakable environments that their natural aspirations and talents are hopelessly crushed. It is to such as these that the Settlement lends its aid. We are trying to help the deserving, we are seeking to sift the gold from the dross. Look, there is the Settlement House!" On the opposite side of the street was a substantial-looking building resembling a small school-house. Conspicuous by its cleanliness among the surrounding dingy tenements, erected by enlightened and humane idealists for the sole purpose of uplifting humanity, it stood as a kind of moral lighthouse set down in a deadly morass of crime and hopeless pauperism.