2 An Appeal to the Young. 



are you not ? Very well, let us see what you must 

 do to make your dream a reality. 



I do not know in what rank 3^ou were born. Per- 

 haps, favored by fortune, you have turned your atten- 

 tion to the study of science ; you are to be a doctor, a 

 lawyer, a man of letters, or a scientific man ; a wide 

 field opens before you ; you enter upon life with ex- 

 tensive knowledge, a trained intelligence. Or, on the 

 other hand, you are, perhaps, only an honest artisan, 

 whose knowledge of science is limited by the little 

 you have learned at school ; but you have had the 

 advantage of learning at first hand what a life of ex- 

 hausting toil is the lot of the worker of our time. 



I stop at the first supposition, to return afterward 

 to the second ; I assume, then, that you have received 

 a scientific education. Let us suppose you intend to 

 be a doctor. 



To-morrow a man in corduroys will come to take 

 you to see a sick woman. He will lead 3'ou into one 

 of those alle3^s where the opposite neighbors can 

 almost shake hands over the heads of the passers-by; 

 you ascend into a foul atmosphere by the flickering 

 light of a little ill-trimmed lamp; you climb two, 

 three, four, five flights of filthy stairs, and in a dark, 

 cold room you find the sick woman, lying on a pallet 

 covered with dirty rags. Pale, livid children, shiver- 

 ing under their scanty garments, gaze at you with 

 their big eyes wide open. The husband has worked 

 all his life twelve or thirteen hours a day at no 

 matter what; now he has been out of work for three 

 months. To be out of employ is not rare in his trade ; 

 it happens every year, periodically. But, formerly, 

 when he was out of work his wife went out as a 

 charwoman — perhaps to wash your shirts — at the 

 rate of fifteen-pence a day ; now she has been bed- 

 ridden for two months, and misery glares upon the 

 family in all its squalid hideousness. 



What will you prescribe for the sick woman, doc- 

 tor ? you who have seen at a glance that the cause 



