“I have walked and ridden and driven over the hills and through the
valleys and looked at your beautiful homes and your spacious lawns and
your happy children; you can build your palaces and amass your fortunes;
your sideboards can groan beneath the weight of gold and silver, cut
glass and hand-painted china; and you can let your little ones play over
your Brussels carpet or your Persian or Axminster rugs; and you can have
a retinue of servants to wait upon you and do your bidding and satisfy
your slightest desire; and you can loll upon your oriental divans and
breathe the perfumed air and watch the sparkling water as it spurts from
fountains; and you can look at your rare paintings and ransack Europe in
order to find the masterpieces; and you can lie there with some one to
fan you, and take your afternoon siesta; and you can sit and gormandize
upon all the viands that the earth can produce; and your chef may be a
Frenchman whose ability would command a princely fortune even in the homes
of the crowned heads of Europe.
“But, after all, if you sit behind the tapestry and look out through
the plate-glass and wait for the staggering reeking, vomiting, spewing,
drink-soaked, drunken sot of a son, or you wait for the coming of the
steps of a girl who has lost her virtue, I tell you, all that wealth can
bring you will fly and you will think you are sitting in a sepulchre and
the rich furniture will simply become the bones of other days and other
faces, for nothing can make happy the father or the mother who has a
drunken sot of a boy, as many of them have today, and nothing can make
happy the father or the mother of a girl who has sold her womanhood for
gain. And I tell you, not only should our homes be the center of all that
is pure, but all that is cheerful and bright.”