and a box of jewels in the
bank, or a library, or an automobile, or even a house and lot, before
peace reigns.

Everyone likes to mingle with his kind now and then; to some it is
subjectively necessary to hire a caterer, to others peanuts suffice.
Everyone likes to wonder and ponder and express opinions--a prize
fight is sufficient material for some; others prefer metaphysics.
Everyone likes to play. Some need box seats at the Midnight Frolic,
others a set of second-hand tools, and yet others a game of craps in
the kitchen.

No one likes to be hungry, to be weary, to be sick, to be worried over
the future, to be lonely, to have his feelings hurt, to lose those
near and dear to him, to have too little independence, to get licked
in a scrap of any kind, to have no one at all who loves him, to have
nothing at all to do. The people of the so-called working class are
more apt to be hungry, weary, and sick than the "educated and
cultured" and well-to-do. Otherwise there is no one to say--because
there is no way it can be found out--that their lives by and large are
not so rich, subjectively speaking, as those with one hundred thousand
dollars a year, or with Ph. D. degrees.

Most folk in the world are not riotously happy, not because they are
poor, or "workers," but because the combination making for riotous
happiness--shall we say health, love, enough to do of what one longs
to do--is not often found in one individual. The condition of the
bedding, of the clothing; the pictures on the wall; the smells in the
kitchen--and beyond; the food on the table--have so much, and no more,
to do with it. Whether one sorts soiled clothes in a laundry, or
reclines on a chaise-longue with thirty-eight small hand-embroidered
and belaced pillows and a pink satin covering, or sits in a library
and fusses over Adam Smith, no one of the three is in a position to
pass judgment on the satisfaction or lack of satisfaction of the other
two.

All of which is something of an impatient retort to those who look at
the world through their own eyes and by no means a justification of
the _status quo_. And to introduce the statement--which a month ago
would have seemed to me incredible--that I have seen and heard as much
contentment in a laundry as I have in the drawing-room of a Fifth
Avenue mansion or a college sorority house--as much and no more. Which
is not arguing that no improvements need ever be made in laundries.

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