h rather than the forests of
the Amazon. Yet, taken all in all, he evidently is a thorough modern
in his urban instinct. The world was big, and he had gold for passage
across seas; and there he had, in reason, found entire safety; but such
a thought never entered his mind. Paris was the only sea he knew; here
his plans for escape and plans for life clung tenaciously as a dead
man's hand.

The second element of background for Jean Valjean is poverty. The
people of this drama are named "the miserable ones." And poverty is
modern and a modern question. All socialists, anarchists, and
communists talk of poverty; this is their one theme. Superficial
social reformers make poverty responsible for the total turpitude of
men. Men are poor, hence criminal. Jean Valjean is poor--miserably
poor; sees his sister's children hungry, and commits crime, is a thief;
becomes a galley slave as punitive result. Ergo, poverty was the cause
of crime, and poverty, and not Valjean, must be indicted; so runs the
argument. This conclusion we deny. Let us consider. Poverty is not
unwholesome. The bulk of men are poor, and always have been. Poverty
is no new condition. Man's history is not one of affluence, but one of
indigence. This is a patent fact. But a state of lack is not
unwholesome, but on the contrary does great good. Poverty has supplied
the world with most of the kings it boasts of. Palaces have not
cradled the kings of thought, service, and achievement. What greatest
poet had luxury for a father? Name one. Poverty is the mother of
kings. Who censures poverty censures the home from whose doors have
passed the most illustrious of the sons of men. Christ's was a poverty
so keen and so parsimonious that Occidentals can not picture it. More,
current social reformers assume that the poor are unhappy; though if
such reformers would cease dreaming, and learn seeing, they would
reverse their creed. Riches do not command joy; for joy is not a
spring rising from the depths where gold is found and gems gathered.
Most men are poor, and most men are happy, or, if they are not, they
may trace their sadness to sources other than lack of wealth. The best
riches are the gifts of God, and can not be shut off by any sluicing;
the choicest riches of the soul, such as knowledge and usefulness and
love and God, are not subject to the tariff of gold. Poverty, we
conclude, is not in itself grievous. Indeed, there are in poverty
bl