To think that in the world's great capitals there is squalor which
could never compare with what my eyes then beheld! Think of Murray
Hill and the Alaska District, Fell's Point, or the Basin, and what a
sea of human wrecks we contemplate in a fraction of America's
continent alone. And again, think of the waste of wealth the wide
world over. Think how vice is wined and dined, and clad in the finest
of fabrics, while honest humanity, in helpless hunger, cries out to
ears that are deaf and hearts that have turned to stone. Oh, well may
it be said that the rich man's chances of heaven are as those of the
camel going through the eye of a needle, if the recording angel
pencils down the use and abuse of every dangerous penny that might
have been well spent, and was not.
With such reflections as these I turned my steps slowly back through
the dingy by-ways.
The afternoon was waning, and the hour was near when daily toil would
be suspended, and the workers would repair to these their miserable
homes. I had met a few already with their picks and shovels on their
ragged shoulders, and had stood to see them vanish under these crooked
doorways where little children lingered waiting and watching for their
cheerless coming. I saw some others lay down the instruments of their
honest labor outside the corner entrance of a large but smoky row of
wooden tenements that skirted one gloomy street. A doorway cut through
the sharp angles of the corner of the building, allowed a small canopy
to project in a triangular peak over two dirty battered steps that led
into a dimly-lit room on the ground floor.
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