Susan paused to listen. She had heard only a few words when
she was incensed to the depths of her heart against him. He
ought to be stopped by the police, this scoundrel trying to
make these people unhappy by awakening them to the misery and
degradation of their lot! He looked like an honest, earnest
man. No doubt he fancied that he was in some way doing good.
These people who were always trying to do the poor good--they
ought all to be suppressed! If someone could tell them how to
cease to be poor, that would indeed be good. But such a thing
would be impossible. In Sutherland, where the best off hadn't
so painfully much more than the worst off, and where everybody
but the idle and the drunken, and even they most of the time,
had enough to eat, and a decent place to sleep, and some kind
of Sunday clothes--in Sutherland the poverty was less than in
Cincinnati, infinitely less than in this vast and incredibly
rich New York where in certain districts wealth, enormous
wealth, was piled up and up. So evidently the presence of
riches did not help poverty but seemed to increase it. No, the
disease was miserable, thought Susan. For most of the human
race, disease and bad food and vile beds in dingy holes and
days of fierce, poorly paid toil--that was the law of this hell
of a world. And to escape from that hideous tyranny, you must
be hard, you must trample, you must rob, you must cease to be human.
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