Toil, toil, toil, from early morn until late at night; then home they swarm; tumble into their wretched beds; snatch a few hours of disturbed sleep, battling with vermin, in a polluted atmosphere; and then up again and to work; and so on, and on, in endless, mirthless, hopeless round; until, in a few years, consumed with disease, mere rotten masses of painful wretchedness, they die, and are wheeled off to the great

I asked one of the foremen what wages these men and women received.  He told me.  It seemed impossible that human life could be maintained upon such a pittance.  I then asked whether they ever ate meat.  “No,” he said, “except when they had a rat or mouse” “A rat or mouse!” I exclaimed.  “Oh yes,” he replied, “the rats and mice were important articles of diet,—­just as they had been for centuries in China.  The little children, not yet able to work, fished for them in the sewers, with hook and line, precisely as they had done a century ago in Paris, during the great German siege.  A dog,” he added, “was a great treat.  When the authorities killed the vagrant hounds there was a big scramble among the poor for the bodies.”

I was shocked at these statements; and then I remembered that some philosopher had argued that cannibalism had survived almost to our own times, in the islands of the Pacific Ocean, because they had contained no animals of large size with which the inhabitants could satisfy the dreadful craving of the system for flesh-food; and hence they devoured their captives.

“Do these people ever marry?” I inquired.

“Marry!” he exclaimed, with a laugh; “why, they could not afford to pay the fee required by law.  And why should they marry?  There is no virtue among them.  No,” he said, “they had almost gotten down to the condition of the Australian savages, who, if not prevented by the police, would consummate their animal-like nuptials in the public streets.”

Maximilian told me that this man was one of the Brotherhood.  I did not wonder at it.

From the shops and mills of honest industry, Maximilian led me—­it was still broad daylight—­into the criminal quarters.  We saw the wild beasts in their lairs; in the iron cages of circumstance which civilization has built around them, from which they too readily break out to desolate their fellow-creatures.  But here, too, were the fruits of misgovernment.  If it were possible we might trace back from yonder robber and murderer—­a human hyena—­the long ancestral line of brutality, until we see it starting from some poor peasant of the Middle Ages, trampled into crime under the feet of feudalism.  The little seed of weakness or wickedness has been carefully nursed by society, generation after generation, until it has blossomed at last in this destructive monster.  Civilization has formulated a new variety of the genus homo—­and it must inevitably perpetuate its kind.