“Then I have no doubt that you will consider that I did commit a crime.”

“Ah! so there was something after all?”

“Yes, I contributed fifteen hundred marks to a collection for the distressed families of the Social Democrats who had been dismissed from Berlin.”

“You did?” cried Paul, dropping his knife and fork, and staring at Wilhelm in amazement.

“And that seems so criminal to you?”

“Look here, Wilhelm, you know I’m awfully fond of you, but I must say you have only got what you deserve.  How could you take part in a revolutionary demonstration of the kind?”

“I did not, nor do I now see anything political in it.  It was a question of women and children deprived of their bread-winners, and whom one cannot allow to starve or freeze to death.”

“Oh, go along with your Progressionist phrases!  Nobody need starve or freeze in Berlin.  The really poor are thoroughly well looked after by the proper authorities.  The supposed distress of these women and children is a mere trumped-up story on the part of the Revolutionists—­a means of agitation, a weapon against the government.  The beggars simply speculate on the tears of sentimental idiots.  They get up a sort of penny-dreadful, whereon the one side you have a picture of injured innocence in the shape of pale despairing mothers and clamoring children, and on the other, villainy triumphant in the form of a police constable or a government official.  And to think that you should have been taken in by such a swindle!”

“I suppose you do not see how heartless it appears to speak so lightly of other people’s hunger, sitting oneself at such a table as this?”

“Bravo, Wilhelm!  Now you are throwing my prosperity in my teeth like any advocate of division of property.  I trust you have not turned Socialist yourself? you who used not to have a good word to say for the lot.”

“Never fear—­I am not a Socialist.  Their doctrines have not been able to convince me yet.  But for years I have seen the distress of the working people with my own eyes, and I know that every human being with a heart in his body is in duty bound to help them.”

“And who says anything against that?  Don’t we all do our duty?  Poverty has always existed and always will to the end of time.  But, on the other hand, that is what charity is there for.  We have hospitals for the sick, workhouses and parish relief for the aged and incapable, for lazy vagabonds who won’t work, it is true, only the treadmill.”

“That is all very fine, but what are you going to do with the honest men who want to work but can find none?”