the whole city afire! And that night too,
that terrible night, when in a room of horror I beheld a mother who had
just killed herself with her five little ones, she lying on a palliasse
suckling her last-born, and two little girls, two pretty little blondes,
sleeping the last sleep beside her, while the two boys had succumbed
farther away, one of them crouching against a wall, and the other lying
upon the floor, distorted as though by a last effort to avoid death!...
O Holy Father! I am but an ambassador, the messenger of those who suffer
and who sob, the humble delegate of the humble ones who die of want
beneath the hateful harshness, the frightful injustice of our present-day
social system! And I bring your Holiness their tears, and I lay their
tortures at your Holiness's feet, I raise their cry of woe, like a cry
from the abyss, that cry which demands justice unless indeed the very
heavens are to fall! Oh! show your loving kindness, Holy Father, show
compassion!"

The young man had stretched out his arms and implored Leo XIII with a
gesture as of supreme appeal to the divine compassion. Then he continued:
"And here, Holy Father, in this splendid and eternal Rome, is not the
want and misery as frightful! During the weeks that I have roamed hither
and thither among the dust of famous ruins, I have never ceased to come
in contact with evils which demand cure. Ah! to think of all that is
crumbling, all that is expiring, the agony of so much glory, the fearful
sadness of a world which is dying of exhaustion and hunger! Yonder, under
your Holiness's windows, have I not seen a district of horrors, a
district of unfinished palaces stricken like rickety children who cannot
attain to full growth, palaces which are already in ruins and have become
places of refuge for all the woeful misery of Rome? And here, as in
Paris, what a suffering multitude, what a shameless exhibition too of the
social sore, the devouring cancer openly tolerated and displayed in utter
heedlessness! There are whole families leading idle and hungry lives in
the splendid sunlight; fathers waiting for work to fall to them from
heaven; sons listlessly spending their days asleep on the dry grass;
mothers and daughters, withered before their time, shuffling about in
loquacious idleness. O Holy Father, already to-morrow at dawn may your
Holiness open that window yonder and with your benediction awaken that
great childish people, which still slumbers in ignoranc