But I remember having in my mind in childhood a simple and logical question, which could not be answered then and cannot be answered now. It arose from my reading stories about shipwrecks and desert islands which contained accounts of starving men found floating on rafts or pining on rocks in mid-ocean. The horrors of their pain and loneliness were very vivid to me; but the moment that they saw a sail or came across a human foot-print I knew that all was well. Their fellow-men would receive them with prompt and reassuring assistance, boats would be lowered for them, brandy would be poured down their throats, food and fire and a voyage home were what they had to look forward to for the time with an equal mind. All this was right and simple to me, since men were a band of brothers sworn to fight the half-witted giants of seas and land. But the thing I could not understand then and cannot understand now was that this chivalrous fraternity that plucked its members out of the jaws of the sea and from the crevasses of the cruel mountains allowed people to stand about the London streets quite obviously in the condition of people requiring medical assistance and close to inanition and death. Why was there something so sacred about a raft and so unimportant about a street? Why did these rescuers who could find lost explorers at the Pole and half-drowned men in the wreck of 'The Princess Alice' not bring themselves to march to and discover and explore that wild and dark and far-off city in which I happen to be born? 

-December 12, 1902, Daily News