edge and yearning will be only so much of an added
curse to them. They will have so much more to
forget than if they had never known and yearned.
Did Destiny to-day bind me down to the life of
an East End slave for the rest of my years, and
did Destiny grant me but one wish, I should ask
that I might forget all about the Beautiful and
True and Good; that I might forget all I had
learned from the open books, and forget the people
i had known, the things I had heard, and the lands
I had seen. And if Destiny didn t grant it, I am
pretty confident that I should get drunk and forget
it as often as possible.

These people who try to help ! Their college
settlements, missions, charities, and what not, are
failures. In the nature of things they cannot but
be failures. They are wrongly, though sincerely,
conceived. They approach life through a misunder
standing of life, these good folk. They do not
understand the West End, yet they come down to
the East End as teachers and savants. They do
not understand the simple sociology of Christ, yet
they come to the miserable and the despised with
the pomp of social redeemers. They have worked
faithfully, but beyond relieving an infinitesimal frac
tion of misery and collecting a certain amount of
data which might otherwise have been more scien
tifically and less expensively collected, they have
achieved nothing.

[[306]]

p305 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p306w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p307

v?