ABSTRACT
This chapter speaks to how the middle and upper classes were not capable of seeing the poor in their midst. The overwrought, and, ultimately, religious, rhetoric seems aimed at waking the complacent upper classes to the destitution in their midst. They are too proud to beg, while a crust and a glass of cold water will keep their miserable life within them. Toiling bundles of slop-work seldom exhibit themselves on streets consecrated to wealth and display. Their ragged shawls and old-fashioned bonnets, their meagre forms and hollow eyes, would look strangely out of place on such a thoroughfare. There is a just God to whom the cries of such victims ascend continually, and He will not hold guiltless whoever grinds the face of the poor. Shrouded in mysteries though his purposes may seem to be—though the great books of his dealings with mankind appear untranslatable to mortal eyes, still He liveth and sitteth unmoved upon the throne of Justice.
