PEACHUM: Come on, come on! You’d all be rotting in the sewers of Wapping if I hadn’t spent sleepless nights working out how to extract a few pence from your poverty. And I did work out something: that the rich of the earth indeed create misery, but they cannot bear to see it. They are weaklings and fools just like you. As long as they have enough to eat and can grease their floors with butter so that even the crumbs that fall from their tables grow fat, they can’t look with indifference on a man collapsing from hunger — although, of course, it must be in front of their house that he collapses.