n; the right to hold such opinions
some substantiation.

Educated people usually deal with the poor man's life deductively; they
reason from the general to the particular; and, starting with a theory,
religious, philanthropic, political, or what not, they seek, and too
easily find, among the millions of poor, specimens--very frequently
abnormal--to illustrate their theories. With anything but human
beings, that is an excellent method. Human beings, unfortunately, have
individualities. They do what, theoretically, they ought not to do,
and leave undone those things they ought to do. They are even said to
possess souls--untrustworthy things beyond the reach of sociologists.
The inductive method--reasoning from the particular to the
general--though it lead to a fine crop of errors, should at least help
to counterbalance the psychological superficiality of the deductive
method; to counterbalance, for example, the nonsense of those
well-meaning persons who go routing about among the poor in search of
evil, and suppose that they can chain it up with little laws. Chained
dogs bite worst.

For myself, I can only claim--I only want to claim--that I have lived
among poor people without preconceived notions or _parti pris_; neither
as parson, philanthropist, politician, inspector, sociologist nor
statistician; but simply because I found there a home and more beauty
of life and more happiness than I had met with elsewhere. So far as is
possible to a man of middle-class breeding, I have lived their life,
have shared their interests, and have found among them some of my
closest and wisest friends. Perhaps I may reasonably anticipate one
type of criticism by adding that I have felt something of the pinch and
hardship of the life, as well as enjoyed its picturesqueness. Since the
book was first written, it has fallen to me, on an occasion of illness,
to take over for some days all the housekeeping and cooking; and I have
worked on the boats sometimes fifteen hours a day, not as an amateur,
but for hard and--what is more to the point--badly-needed coin. It took
the gilt off the gingerbread, but it didn't spoil the gingerbread!

Would it were possible to check by ever so little the class-conceit of
those people who think that they can manage the poor man's life better
than he can himself; who would take advantage of their education to
play ducks and drakes with his personal affairs. For it is my firm
belief that in the present phase o