. Some are born into an easy and
sheltered affluence. Others are the children of mean and sordid want.
For some the long toil of life begins in the very bloom time of
childhood and ends only when the broken and exhausted body sinks into a
penurious old age. For others life is but a foolish leisure with mock
activities and mimic avocations to mask its uselessness. And as the
circumstances vary so too does the native endowment of the body and the
mind. Some born in poverty rise to wealth. An inborn energy and capacity
bid defiance to the ill-will of fate. Others sink. The careless hand
lets fall the cradle gift of wealth.

Thus all about us is the moving and shifting spectacle of riches and
poverty, side by side, inextricable.

The human mind, lost in a maze of inequalities that it cannot explain
and evils that it cannot, singly, remedy, must adapt itself as best it
can. An acquired indifference to the ills of others is the price at
which we live. A certain dole of sympathy, a casual mite of personal
relief is the mere drop that any one of us alone can cast into the vast
ocean of human misery. Beyond that we must harden ourselves lest we too
perish. We feed well while others starve. We make fast the doors of our
lighted houses against the indigent and the hungry. What else can we do?
If we shelter _one_ what is that? And if we try to shelter all, we are
ourselves shelterless.

But the contrast thus presented is one that has acquired a new meaning
in the age in which we live. The poverty of earlier days was the outcome
of the insufficiency of human labor to meet the primal needs of human
kind. It is not so now. We live in an age that is at best about a
century and a half old--the age of machinery and power. Our common
reading of history has obscured this fact. Its pages are filled with the
purple gowns of kings and the scarlet trappings of the warrior. Its
record is largely that of battles and sieges, of the brave adventure of
discovery and the vexed slaughter of the nations. It has long since
dismissed as too short and simple for its pages, the short and simple
annals of the poor. And the record is right enough. Of the poor what is
there to say? They were born; they lived; they died. They followed their
leaders, and their names are forgotten.

But written thus our history has obscured the greatest fact that ever
came into it--the colossal change that separates our little era of a
century and a half from all the preced