I should prefer to see my family about
me - the one only pleasure I should have - the poorer and the more unhappy,
the less I should care to part with them. This may be foolish, but I
expect it is human nature.
English folk don't 'cotton' to their poverty at all; they don't cat
humble-pie with a relish; they resent being poor and despised. Foreign
folk seem to take to it quite naturally; an Englishman, somehow or other,
always feels that he is wronged. He is injured; he has not got his
rights. To me it seems the most curious thing possible that well-to-do
people should expect the poor to be delighted with their condition. I
hope they never will be; an evil day that - if it ever came - for the
Anglo-Saxon race.
One girl prided herself very much upon belonging to a sort of club or
insurance-if she died, her mother would receive ten pounds. Ten pounds,
ten golden sovereigns was to her such a magnificent sum, that she really
appeared to wish herself dead, in order that it might be received. She
harped and talked and brooded on it constantly. If she caught cold it
didn't matter, she would say, her mother would have ten pounds. It seemed
a curious reversal of ideas, but it is a fact that poor folk in course of
time come to think less of death than money.
