Their graveyard was the air.  Nature reclaimed her own with such velocity that she seemed to grudge them the very dust she had lent them during their wretched pilgrimage.  The busy, toiling, rushing, roaring, groaning universe, big with young, appeared to cry out:  “Away with them!  Away with them!  They have had their hour!  They have performed their task.  Here are a billion spirits waiting for the substance we loaned them.  The spirits are boundless in number; matter is scarce.  Away with them!”

I need not tell you, my dear brother, of all the shops and factories we visited.  It was the same story everywhere.  Here we saw exemplified, in its full perfection, that “iron law of wages” which the old economists spoke of; that is to say, the reduction, by competition, of the wages of the worker to the least sum that will maintain life and muscular strength enough to do the work required, with such little surplus of vitality as might be necessary to perpetuate the wretched race; so that the world’s work should not end with the death of one starved generation.  I do not know if there is a hell in the spiritual universe, but if there is not, one should certainly be created for the souls of the men who originated, or justified, or enforced that damnable creed.  It is enough, if nothing else, to make one a Christian, when he remembers how diametrically opposite to the teaching of the grand doctrine of brotherly love, enunciated by the gentle Nazarene, is this devil’s creed of cruelty and murder, with all its steadily increasing world-horrors, before which to-day the universe stands appalled.

Oh! the pitiable scenes, my brother, that I have witnessed!  Room after room; the endless succession of the stooped, silent toilers; old, young; men, women, children.  And most pitiable of all, the leering, shameless looks of invitation cast upon us by the women, as they saw two well-dressed men pass by them.  It was not love, nor license, nor even lust; it was degradation,—­willing to exchange everything for a little more bread.  And such rooms—­garrets, sheds—­dark, foul, gloomy; overcrowded; with such a stench in the thick air as made us gasp when entering it; an atmosphere full of life, hostile to the life of man.  Think, my brother, as you sit upon your mountain side; your gentle sheep feeding around you; breathing the exquisite air of those elevated regions; and looking off over the mysterious, ancient world, and the great river valleys leading down to the marvelous Nile-land afar,—­land of temples, ruins, pyramids,—­cradle of civilization, grave of buried empires,—­think, I say, of these millions condemned to live their brief, hopeless span of existence under such awful conditions!  See them as they eat their mid-day meal.  No delightful pause from pleasant labor; no brightly arrayed table; no laughing and loving faces around a plenteous board, with delicacies from all parts of the world; no agreeable interchange of wisdom and wit and courtesy and merriment.  No; none of these.  Without stopping in their work, under the eyes of sullen task-masters, they snatch bites out of their hard, dark bread, like wild animals, and devour it ravenously.{fr. 1}