Camp, "that people should found a civilization on the idea of living for
one another instead of each for himself?"
"No indeed!" she answered. "Poor people have always had to live that way,
or they could not have lived at all."
"That was what I understood your porter to say last night," said the
Altrurian to me. He added, to the company generally: "I suppose that even
in America there are more poor people than there are rich people?"
"Well, I don't know about that," I said. "I suppose there are more people
independently rich than there are people independently poor."
"We will let that formulation of it stand. If it is true, I do not see why
the Altrurian system should be considered so very un-American. Then, as to
whether there is or ever was really a practical altruism, a civic
expression of it, I think it cannot be denied that among the first
Christians, those who immediately followed Christ, and might be supposed
to be directly influenced by His life, there was an altruism practised as
radical as that which we have organized into a national polity and a
working economy in Altruria."
"Ah, but you know," said Mrs.
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