is a nightmare, a delirium of misfortune. It lowers the human being at
once to the condition of a brute somewhat of the order of the cats. Men
on board a ship, driven to despair by hunger, enter the most wretched
state conceivable. The qualities of faith and mercy disappear at once.
No man trusts anybody else. Each expects the others to pounce upon him
to eat him, and none of them would dare to sleep if he could, owing to
the certainty of his peril should his vigilance be relaxed. From this
baleful picture of the lowest depths of poverty we may rise to
comparatively stupendous heights, and yet be relatively poor as to the
consideration of other conditions of life still above us. Let us, then,
view poverty as