The hungry walked on eagerly. A few feet from the door that led into the
arena where the waiting tables were they had to pass by a wide-open
door. Within, in plain sight of the passers-by, was a long bar. Behind
the bar were white-jacketed bartenders. The beer-kegs formed an
inspiring background. On the bar itself stood dozens of big
schooners--full.
Above the bar could be read:
FREE BEER! Frei! Gratis!
A few walked on--straight to the dining-hall.
But every one who walked into the free-beer room was told to go through
a door on the left.
"That way!" a policeman told the thirsty.
The first man who went into the inner room found a policeman standing
beside a table on which were a dozen full schooners.
"If you drink now you don't eat," courteously said the cop.
"Kismet!" said the starving man, and reached for a schooner.
"It's for _after_ eating!" gently warned the policeman.
"Life is uncertain. I'll drink now and--"
"This way!" The policeman now spoke in his regular voice.
He led the thirsty out of the room by another door which led into still
another room used for storing the heavy circus impedimenta.
"Do you see?" asked H. R., sweetly, to the reporters and the students of
sociology from the magazines. "Do you?"
"Mr. Rutgers, Columbus and his egg had nothing on you," said the earnest
young theorist from the _Evening Post_.
The others were busily turning out literature.
"It won't cheat 'em out of a meal," H. R. whispered to young Mr. Lubin
from the _Onward_. "But they don't eat with the others."
That is how H. R. kept his promise to the business men of New York. He
had circumvented fraud, which is the chief aim of modern charity. Also
he had discouraged the formation of a professional pauper class--the one
danger against which all commonwealths must guard.
"I'd like to know what you are going to do with the culls," the _Sun_
man asked H. R. He had of late been trying to elevate the tone of the
magazines with real fiction; which they refused to print.
"Those who fell through thirst will be fed later," H. R. answered.
"And those that wouldn't be searched? They looked mighty hungry to me."
He was an expert in hunger. It drove him out of Literature.
"We'll sell the left-over meals to them at cost. We are intelligent
philanthropists. We shall now have a beer, gentlemen, and let us pass
on."
That beer had taken on a subtle quality of exclusiveness. All the
reporters drank with gusto.