I stop at the first supposition, to return afterwards to the second; I assume then that you have received a scientific education. Let us suppose you intend to be a doctor.
To-morrow a man attired in rough clothes will come to fetch you to see a sick woman. He will lead you into one of those alleys where the opposite neighbours can almost shake hands over the heads of the passers-by; you ascend into a foul atmosphere by the flickering light of a little ill-trimmed lamp; you climb two, three, four, five flights of filthy stairs, and in a dark, cold room you find the sick woman lying on a pallet covered with dirty rags. Pale, livid children, shivering under their scanty garments, gaze with their big eyes wide open. The husband has worked all his life twelve or thirteen hours a day at no matter what; now he has been out of work for three months. To be out of employ is not rare in his trade; it happens every year, periodically. But, formerly, when he was out of work his wife went out as a char-woman—perhaps to wash your shirts—at the rate of fifteen-pence a day; now she has been bedridden for two months, and misery glares upon the family in all its squalid hideousness.
What will you prescribe for the sick woman, doctor? you who have seen at a glance that the cause of her illness is a general anaemia, want of good food, lack of fresh air. Say a good beef-steak every day? a little exercise in the country? a dry and well-ventilated bed-room? What irony! If she could have afforded it this would have been done long since without waiting for your advice!
If you have a good heart, a frank address, an honest face, the family will tell you many things. They will tell you that the woman on the other side of the partition, who coughs a cough which tears your heart, is a poor ironer; that a flight of stairs lower down all the children have the fever: that the washerwoman who occupies the ground floor will not live to see the spring; and that in the house next door things are worse.
What will you say to all these sick people? Recommend them generous diet, change of air, less exhausting toil. … You only wish you could, but you daren't and you go out heartbroken with a curse on your lips.
The next day, as you still brood over the fate of the dwellers in this dog-hutch, your partner tells you that yesterday a footman came to fetch him, this time in a carriage. It was for the owner of a fine house, for a lady worn out with sleepless nights, who devotes all her life to dressing, visits, balls and squabbles with a stupid husband. Your friend has prescribed for her a less preposterous habit of life, a less heating diet, walks in the fresh air, an even temperament, and, in order to make up in some measure for the want of useful work, a little gymnastic exercise in her bedroom.
The one is dying because she has never had enough food nor enough rest in her whole life; the other pines because she has never known what work is since she was born.
If you are one of those characterless natures who adapt themselves to anything, who at the sight of the most revolting spectacles console themselves with a gentle sigh and a glass of sherry, then you will gradually become used to these contrasts, and the nature of the beast favouring your endeavours, your sole idea will be to maintain yourself in the ranks of pleasure-seekers, so that you may never find yourself among
