Charity.
The St. Louis Republic has discovered that the Charity Grafters make a profit of about 90 per cent, and sometimes when the poor are running in good luck the poor devils can get the other 1- per cent. You see, even the Capitalist Press wakes up, like Rip Van Winkle, every once in a while. Of course, they have got hold of the wrong end of the thing, and they are sending to the workhouse, with the powerful help of the City Fathers, all the poor grafters who cannot find any other way to make a living.
We advise our esteemed contemporary to investigate the Helping Hands, the Providents, Workingmen’s Hotels and other fashionable institutions. We mean these nice, pretty places, where the officials draw salaries and keep fat and healthy; where a man getting thousands of dollars a year salary has the sole say as to whether a starving woman should get some milk for her baby.
It’s a great world, boys. If you get into trouble, don’t come worrying the editor. If he were to go out and beg a dollar to feed a bunch of hoboes, he would be sent to the rock pile. Of course, if he stole a railroad, they would send him to Congress.
So, take your medicine. This is what you vote for and you are going to get it. “Christian Charity, scrimped and iced, in the name of a cautious statistical Christ.”
Somebody must have water on the brain. We are being hounded to death by the City Fathers for a WATER BILL of FORTY-EIGHT DOLLARS. How in the name of all that is blue can they figure out how that we Hoboes drank or in any way disposed of forty-eight dollars’ worth of water?