Of course, I do not mean that Americans may not give at all without
sensible risk, or that giving among them is always followed by a logical
regret; but, as I said, life with them is in no wise logical. They even
applaud one another for their charities, which they measure by the amount
given, rather than by the love that goes with the giving. The widow's
mite has little credit with them, but the rich man's million has an
acclaim that reverberates through their newspapers long after his gift is
made. It is only the poor in America who do charity as we do, by giving
help where it is needed; the Americans are mostly too busy, if they are
at all prosperous, to give anything but money; and the more money they
give, the more charitable they esteem themselves. From time to time some
man with twenty or thirty millions gives one of them away, usually to a
public institution of some sort, where it will have no effect with the
people who are underpaid for their work or cannot get work; and then his
deed is famed throughout the continent as a thing really beyond praise.
Yet any one who thinks about it must know that he never earned the
millions he kept, or the millions he gave, but somehow made them from the
labor of others; that, with all the wealth left him, he cannot miss the
fortune he lavishes, any more than if the check which conveyed it were a
withered leaf, and not in any wise so much as an ordinary working-man
might feel the bestowal of a postage-stamp.

But in this study of the plutocratic mind, always so fascinating to me, I
am getting altogether away from what I meant to tell you. I meant to tell
you not how Americans live in the spirit, illogically, blindly, and
blunderingly, but how they live in the body, and more especially how they
house themselves in this city of New York. A great many of them do not
house themselves at all, but that is a class which we cannot now
consider, and I will speak only of those who have some sort of a roof