This sympathy he felt his life long.

He ever blamed the huge accretion of law and customs and selfishness which is called society for much of this misery of men, this hindrance to a fair distribution of the goods of this world, this guilty permission on the part of the fortunate few of the want and dirt and ugliness and coarseness which are the lot of almost the whole race of man.

Yet he was not blind to individual guilt.

Right here in his diary, after lamenting his enforced inability to succor human misery, he says that some words dropped by the workmen in conversation with him cause him to record his conviction that suffering and injustice, together with the deprivation of liberty, are due to one's own fault as well as to that of others: "Every evil that society inflicts upon me, the germ of it is my own fault; in proportion as I free myself from my vices will I free myself from the evils which society inflicts upon me.

Be true to thyself and thou canst not be false to any one.