It was a jerry-
built house, and the result was that she brought the whole lot down about
her head, together with a quarter of a hundred-weight of plaster.
"Yes, I thought you'd do some mischief," had commented the landlady,
wearily.
It seemed typical. A jerry-built world, apparently. With the best
intentions it seemed impossible to move in it without doing more harm
than good to it, bringing things down about one that one had not
intended.
She wanted to abolish steel rabbit-traps. She had heard the little
beggars cry. It had struck her as such a harmless reform. But they told
her there were worthy people in the neighbourhood of Wolverhampton--quite
a number of them--who made their living by the manufacture of steel
rabbit-traps. If, thinking only of the rabbits, you prohibited steel
rabbit-traps, then you condemned all these worthy people to slow
starvation. The local Mayor himself wrote in answer to her article. He
drew a moving picture of the sad results that might follow such an ill-
considered agitation: hundreds of grey-haired men, too old to learn new
jobs, begging from door to door; shoals of little children, white-faced
and pinched; sobbing women.
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