Years ago she stood in one of the corners of the great city — it was the first time she had come down to it — and she brought her mother to a halt beside her, then pointed her finger at the body sprawled across the width of the sidewalk: Mother, why is this man sleeping here?..
To this day she still remembers the cracked feet, the threadbare trousers, and the broad strap across his shoulders... And the answer came... He is a porter... resting, my daughter... And she wondered the next day, as she glimpsed a fellow of his with a load like a mountain perched upon his shoulders: Lord, does he not tire? Poor man! How can he carry all this?...
And yesterday she was passing along the street — she has grown used to these scenes, which meet her gaze on every side — and the insistent question returned to her when she glimpsed, a few steps away, a man like a piece of a mountain, with his towering stature and his rosy face. She had not looked long before she glimpsed the strap dangling from his shoulder and saw the two bare feet, and she remembered Plato's saying in his Republic, and asked herself once more: Is it true that there is a class of people created for bodily labor, and to live the life of grazing beasts?
And she felt pricks that made her heart bleed; this heart will go on writhing so long as these scenes lie scattered wherever the eye may roam... And the little girl of yesterday asks:
Why do we make people carry our loads? Why do we cast
our burdens upon their shoulders? Why do we press the poor, for a few piasters, into becoming slaves to us? Has the age of slavery not passed?.. Does the man of this age
not have enough in the mechanical miracles his own hands have wrought, all of which he has harnessed to his service, that he must also harness... his brother man?...
