The bony hands and sunken eyes and sincere gratitude expressed for every penny proved their suffering real.
As my means were limited and I could not pass one by, I got a pound changed into pennies, and put them in a green bag, which I took in the carriage wherever I went.

It was but a drop in the ocean, but it was all I could do to relieve that unfathomed misery.

The poverty I saw everywhere in the Old World, and especially in Ireland, was a puzzling problem to my mind, but I rejected the idea that it was a necessary link in human experience--that it always had been and always must be.
As we drove, day by day, in that magnificent Phoenix Park, of fifteen hundred acres, one of the largest parks, I believe, in the world, I would often put the question to myself, what right have the few to make a pleasure ground of these acres, while the many have nowhere to lay their heads, crouching under stiles and bridges, clothed in rags, and feeding on sea-weed with no hope, in the slowly passing years, of any change for the better?
The despair stamped on every brow told the sad story of their wrongs.

Those accustomed to such everyday experiences brush beggars aside as they would so many flies, but those to whom such sights are new cannot so easily quiet their own consciences.

Everyone in the full enjoyment of all the blessings of life, in his normal condition, feels some individual responsibility for the poverty of others.