Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/180

 62 PROPERTY IN LAND.

find crowded together families who (some of them, lest they might offend the deer) have been driven from their native soil into the great city to compete with each other for employment at any price, to have their children debauched by daily contact with all that is vile. Let him some Saturday evening leave the districts where the richer classes live, wander for a while through the streets ten- anted by working-people, and note the stunted forms, the pinched features. Vice, drunkenness, the recklessness that comes when hope goes, he will see too. How should not such conditions produce such effects? But he will also see, if he chooses to look, hard, brave, stubborn struggling the workman, who, do his best, cannot find steady employment ; the breadwinner stricken with illness ; the widow straining to keep her children from the work- house. Let the Duke observe and reflect upon these things, and then apply the " reduction to iniquity."

Or, let him go to Edinburgh, the " modern Athens," of which Scotsmen speak with pride, and in buildings from whose roofs a bowman might strike the spires of twenty churches, he will find human beings living as he would not keep his meanest dog. Let him toil up the stairs of one of those monstrous buildings, let him enter one of those " dark houses," let him close the door, and in the blackness think what life must be in such a place. Then let him try the "reduction to iniquity." And if he go to that good charity (but, alas, how futile is Charity without Justice !) where little children are kept while their mothers are at work, and children are fed who would otherwise go hungn', he may see infants whose limbs are shrunken from want of nourishment. Perhaps they may tell him, as they told me, of that little girl, barefooted, ragged, and hungry, who, when they gave her bread, raised her eyes and clasped her hands, and thanked our Father in Heaven for his bounty to her. They who told me that never

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