"Ruined?" I said to Joe, easily enough. "Not at all. We're back in the
road, going smoothly ahead--only, at a bit less stiff a pace. Think, Joe,
of all those poor devils down in the mining districts. They're out--clear
out--and thousands of 'em don't know where their families will get bread.
And though they haven't found it out yet, they've got to leave the place
where they've lived all their lives, and their fathers before them--have
got to go wandering about in a world that's as strange to them as the
surface of the moon, and as bare for them as the Sahara desert."
"That's so," said Joe. "It's hard luck." But I saw he was thinking only of
himself and his narrow escape from having to give up his big house and all
the rest of it; that, soft-hearted and generous though he was, to those
poor chaps and their wives and children he wasn't giving a thought.
Wall Street never does--they're too remote, too vague. It deals with
columns of figures and slips of paper. It never thinks of those
abstractions as standing for so many hearts and so many mouths, just as the
bank clerk never thinks of the bits of metal he counts so swiftly as money
with which things and men could be bought.
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