THE CIVILIZATION THAT IS. 91
and the beasts he drives, I am inclined to think that this most prosperous era is more prosperous for horses than for men.
Our Napoleon of Wall Street, our rising Charlemagne of railroads, who came to this city with nothing but a new kind of mouse-trap in a mahogany box, but who now, though yet in the vigor of his prime, counts his wealth by hundreds of millions, if it can be counted at all, is interviewed by a reporter just as he is about to step aboard his palace-car for a grand combination expedition into the Southwest. He descants upon the services he is rendering in welding into one big machine a lot of smaller machines, in uniting into one vast railroad empire the separated railroad kingdoms. He likewise descants upon the great prosperity of the whole country. Everybody is prosperous and contented, he says : there is, of course, a good deal of misery in the big cities, but, then, there always is !
Yet not alone in the great cities. I ride on the Hudson River Railroad on a bitter cold day, and from one of the pretty towns with Dutch names gets in a constable with a prisoner, whom he is to take to the Albany penitentiary. In this case justice has been swift enough, for the crime, the taking of a shovel, has been committed only a few hours before. Such coat as the man has he keeps but- toned up, even in the hot car, for, the constable says, he has no underclothes at all. He stole the shovel to get to the penitentiary, where it is warm. The constable says they have lots of such cases, and that even in these good times these pretty country towns are infested with such tramps. With all our vast organizing, our developing of productive powers and cheapening of transportation, we are yet creating a class of utter pariahs. And they are to be found not merely in the great cities, but wherever the locomotive runs.
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