Image from Josiah Flynt, Tramping With Tramps (New York: Century Co, 1899)

     Now, really," said Mrs. Makely, "I must insist upon dropping this everlasting talk about money. I think it is perfectly disgusting, and I believe it was Mr. Makely's account of his speculations that kept me awake last night. My brain got running on figures till the dark seemed to be all sown with dollar-marks, like the stars in the milky way. I - ugh! What in the world is it? Oh, you dreadful little things!"

     Mrs. Makely passed swiftly from terror to hysterical laughter as the driver pulled up short, and a group of barefooted children broke in front of his horses, and scuttled out of the dust into the roadside bushes like a covey of quails. There seemed to be a dozen of them, nearly all the same in size, but there turned out to be only five or six; or at least no more showed their gleaming eyes and teeth through the underbrush in quiet enjoyment of the lady's alarm.

    "Don't you know that you might have got killed?" she demanded, with that severity good women feel for people who have just escaped with their lives. "How lovely the dirty little dears are!" she added, in the next wave of emotion. One bold fellow of six showed a half length above the bushes, and she asked, "Don't you know that you oughtn't to play in the road when there are so many teams passing? Are all those your brothers and sisters?"

    He ignored the first question. "One's my cousin." I pulled out a half-dozen coppers and held my hand toward him. "See if there is one for each." They had no difficulty in solving the simple mathematical problem except the smallest girl, who cried for fear and baffled longing. I tossed the coin to her, and a little fat dog darted out at her feet and caught it up in his mouth. "Oh, good gracious!" I called out in my light, humorous way. "Do you suppose he's going to spend it for candy?" The little people thought that a famous joke, and they laughed with the gratitude that even small favors inspire. "Bring your sister here," I said to the boldest boy, and when he came up with the little woman, I put another copper into her hand. "Look out that the greedy dog doesn't get it," I said, and my gayety met with fresh applause. "Where do you live?" I asked, with some vague purpose of showing the Altrurian the kindliness that exists between our upper and lower classes.

    "Over there," said the boy. I followed the twist of his head, and glimpsed a wooden cottage on the border of the forest, so very new that the sheathing had not yet been covered with clapboards. I stood up in the buckboard and saw that it was a story and a half high, and could have had four or five rooms in it. The bare, curtainless windows were set in the unpainted frames, but the front door seemed not to be hung yet. The people meant to winter there, however, for the sod was banked up against the wooden underpinning; a stove-pipe struck out of the roof of a little wing behind. While I gazed a young-looking woman came to the door, as if she had been drawn by our talk with the children, and then she jumped down from the threshold, which still wanted a doorstep, and came slowly out to us.

    The children ran to her with their coppers, and then followed her back to us.

    Mrs. Makely called to her before she reached us, "I hope you weren't frightened. We didn't drive over any of them." "Oh, I wasn't frightened," said the young woman. "It's a very safe place to bring up children, in the country, and I never feel uneasy about them."

    "Yes, if they are not under the horses' feet," said Mrs. Makely, mingling instruction and amusement very judiciously in her reply.

    "Are they all yours?" "Only five," said the mother, and she pointed to the alien in her flock. "He's my sister's. She lives just below here." Her children had grouped themselves about her, and she kept passing her hands caressingly over their little heads as she talked. "My sister has nine children, but she has the rest at church with her to-day."

    "You don't speak like an American," Mrs. Makely suggested.

    "No, we're English. Our husbands work in the quarry. That's my little palace." The woman nodded her head toward the cottage.

    "It's going to be very nice," said Mrs. Makely, with an evident perception of her pride in it.

    "Yes, if we ever get money to finish it. Thank you for the children!"

    "Oh, it was this gentleman." Mrs. Makely indicated me, and I bore the merit of my good action as modestly as I could. "Then thank you, sir," said the young woman, and she asked Mrs. Makely, "You're not living about here, ma'am?"

    "Oh, no, we're staying at the hotel."

    "At the hotel! It must be very dear, there." "Yes, it is expensive," said Mrs. Makely, with a note of that satisfaction in her voice which we all feel in spending a great deal of money.

    "But I suppose you can afford it," said the woman, whose eye was running hungrily over Mrs. Makely's pretty costume. "Some are poor, and some are rich. That's the way the world has to be made up, isn't it?"

    "Yes," said Mrs. Makely, very dryly, and the talk languished from this point, so that the driver felt warranted in starting up his horses. When we had driven beyond earshot she said, "I knew she was not an American, as soon as she spoke, by her accent, and then those foreigners have no self-respect. That was a pretty bold bid for a contribution to finish up her 'little palace!' I'm glad you didn't give her anything, Mr. Twelvemough. I was afraid your sympathies had been wrought upon."

    "Oh, not at all!" I answered. "I saw the mischief I had done with the children."

    The Altrurian, who had not asked anything for a long time, but had listened with eager interest to all that passed, now came up smiling with his question: "Will you kindly tell me what harm would have been done by offering the woman a little money to help finish up her cottage?"

    I did not allow Mrs. Makely to answer, I was so eager to air my political economy. "The very greatest harm. It would have pauperized her. You have no idea how quickly they give way to the poison of that sort of thing. As soon as they get any sort of help they expect more; they count upon it, and they begin to live upon it. The sight of those coppers which I gave her children--more out of joke than charity--demoralized the woman. She took us for rich people, and wanted us to build her a house. You have to guard against every approach to a thing of that sort."

    "I don't believe," said Mrs. Makely, "that an American would have hinted, as she did."

    "No, an American would not have done that, I'm thankful to say. They take fees, but they don't ask charity, yet." We went onto exult in the noble independence of the American character in all classes, at some length. We talked at the Altrurian, but he did not seem to hear us. At last he asked, with a faint sigh, "Then, in your condition, a kindly impulse to aid one who needs your help is something to be guarded against as possibly pernicious?"

    "Exactly," I said. "And now you see what difficulties beset us in dealing with the problem of poverty. We cannot let people suffer, for that would be cruel; and we cannot relieve their need without pauperizing them."

    "I see," he answered. "It is a terrible quandary."

    "I wish," said Mrs. Makely, "that you would tell us just how you manage with the poor in Altruria."

    "We have none," he replied.

    "But the comparatively poor - you have some people who are richer than others?"

    "No. We should regard that as the worst incivism."

    "What is incivism?"

    I interpreted, "Bad citizenship."

    "Well then, if you will excuse me, Mr. Homos," she said, "I think that is simply impossible. There must be rich and there must be poor. There always have been, and there always will be. That woman said it as well as anybody. Didn't Christ himself say, 'The poor ye have always with you'?"

Chapter VII

    The Altrurian looked at Mrs. Makely with an amazement visibly heightened by the air of complacency she put on after delivering this poser: "Do you really think Christ meant that you ought always to have the poor with you?" he asked.

    "Why, of course!" she answered triumphantly. "How else are the sympathies of the rich to be cultivated? The poverty of some and the wealth of others, isn't that what forms the great tie of human brotherhood? If we were all comfortable, or all shared alike, there could not be anything like charity, and Paul said 'the greatest of these is charity.' I believe it's 'love' in the new version, but it comes to the same thing."

    The Altrurian gave a kind of gasp, and then lapse into a silence that lasted until we came insight of the Camp farmhouse.

Source: William Dean Howells, A Traveler from Altruria (Boston, 1894).

"If we go to Europe, Cynthia, I don't want you to marry any of them counts or dukes.
You just wait until we run across some king in reduced circumstances."
Charles Dana Gibson.  From The Gibson Book (1907).

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