+−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−+ | BLACK EYES | | PAINTED HERE | +−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−+
With some of his friends—for he made many friends both in the office and out of it, and Mrs. Ruysdael and her husband, whom he finally met, were exceedingly kind to him—he went on a tour of those cafés that called themselves Bohemian. That night he descended from restaurants where one drank champagne and heard songs by vaudeville performers who thus earned more money than at the theaters which they had deserted, to seats in shoddy beer-halls where there was dancing by women too old or too unskilled to continue upon the stage; and on the way home from "Little Hungary," a place in which a dull company drank strange wines to the music of a good band, the motor that conveyed his party crept under smoking naphtha lamps through a jumble of push-carts converted into bargain counters, and past the overcrowded squalor of the quarter of the Russian Jews.
Poverty hurt him, or the sight of poverty. Somewhere he read that one per cent. of the families in the United States owned more than the other ninety-nine per cent., but he explained this by the theory that the one per cent. had created the wealth that they owned. He was told that there were four million paupers in the country; but he ascribed their condition to their failure to take advantage of a republic’s free opportunities. Somebody said that, during the past winter, seventy thousand New York children had gone hungry to the public schools; Luke was sure that the schools would soon supply their pupils with free meals. From a report of the New Jersey Department of Charities that came into his hands, he learned that, in New Jersey, one person in every two hundred and six of the population was a ward of the State; but his reflection was only that New Jersey must be badly governed. His heart ached over what he saw; but his intellect satisfactorily explained all hearsay evidence. He could go out to Ellis Island and, listening to its thousands of immigrants prattle their hopes in forty-three languages and dialects, could share their hopes. Evil administrators had hurt the country by overturning the purpose of its founders; the remedy lay in a return to first principles.