Learning and Suffering in Vienna
at table on short rations, or perhaps on nothing at all, waiting for the next pay-day, talking of it, making plans; and while they starve they are already dreaming of the good fortune to come.
Thus the children from their earliest days grow familiar with this wretchedness.
But things end badly if the man goes his own way from the beginning, and the wife opposes him for the children’s sake. Then there are quarrels and bad blood, and the more the husband drifts apart from his wife, the nearer he drifts to alcohol. Every Saturday he begins to be drunk; and in self-preservation for herself and the children his wife fights for the few pence she can snatch from him, and those are mostly what she can get on his way from factory to saloon. When at last he comes home himself on Sunday or Monday night, drunk and brutal, but always relieved of his last penny, there are likely to be scenes that would wring tears from a stone.
I saw all this going on in hundreds of cases. At first I was disgusted or indignant; later I came to realize the tragedy of this suffering, to understand its deeper causes. They were the unhappy victims of evil circumstances.
Almost worse in those days were the housing conditions. The housing situation of the Viennese laborer was frightful. I shudder now when I think of those wretched living-caverns, of houses of call and mass dormitories, of those sinister pictures of refuse, disgusting filth and worse.
What was bound happen, what is yet bound to happen, if the flood of slaves set loose from these squalid caves pours down upon the rest of the world, upon its thoughtless fellow-men!
For thoughtless this other world is. Thoughtlessly it lets things drift; no instinct tells it that sooner or later fate will move toward retribution unless mankind placates destiny in time.
Thankful indeed am I to a Providence which sent me to that school. There I could not sabotage what I did not like. It gave me a quick and a thorough upbringing.
If I was not to despair of the people who then surrounded me, I had to learn the distinction between their outer character and
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