A Traveler From Altruria by William Dean Howells

Author:William Dean Howells [Howells, William Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781411440579
Publisher: Barnes & Noble
Published: 2017-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

VIII

YOUNG Camp carried out the plate of victuals to the tramp, and Mrs. Makely said to his mother, "I suppose you would make the tramp do some sort of work to earn his breakfast on week-days?"

"Not always," Mrs. Camp replied. "Do the boarders at the hotel always work to earn their breakfast?"

"No, certainly not," said Mrs. Makely, with the sharpness of offence. "But they always pay for it."

"I don't think that paying for a thing is earning it. Perhaps some one else earned the money that pays for it. But I believe there is too much work in the world. If I were to live my life over again, I should not work half so hard. My husband and I took this place when we were young married people, and began working to pay for it. We wanted to feel that it was ours, that we owned it, and that our children should own it afterwards. We both worked all day long like slaves, and many a moonlight night we were up till morning, almost, gathering the stones from our fields, and burying them in deep graves that we had dug for them. But we buried our youth, and strength, and health in those graves, too, and what for? I don't own the farm that we worked so hard to pay for, and my children won't. That is what it has all come to. We were rightly punished for our greed, I suppose. Perhaps no one has a right to own any portion of the earth. Sometimes I think so, but my husband and I earned this farm, and now the savings bank owns it. That seems strange, doesn't it? I suppose you'll say that the bank paid for it. Well, perhaps so; but the bank didn't earn it. When I think of that I don't always think that a person who pays for his breakfast has the best right to a breakfast."

I could see the sophistry of all this, but I had not the heart to point it out; I felt the pathos of it, too. Mrs. Makely seemed not to see the one nor to feel the other, very distinctly. "Yes, but surely," she said, "if you give a tramp his breakfast without making him work for it, you must see that it is encouraging idleness. And idleness is very corrupting—the sight of it."

"You mean to the country people? Well, they have to stand a good deal of that. The summer folks that spend four or five months of the year here, don't seem to do anything from morning till night."

"Ah, but you must recollect that they are resting! You have no idea how hard they all work in town during the winter," Mrs. Makely urged, with an air of argument.

"Perhaps the tramps are resting, too. At any rate, I don't think the sight of idleness in rags, and begging at back doors, is very corrupting to the country people; I never heard of a single tramp who had started from the country; they all come from the cities.

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