Lucia True Ames Mead

“ Charity! how I loathe the word! It is the iron which sears the conscience of your rich Christian as does nothing else. He thinks to buy heaven with that word.
“I tell you, Miss Brewster, these people want what you and I want. They want to preserve their self-respect, to have a chance once a week to remember that they are human beings and not machines. They want to be able in this Christian land to earn an honest living, to keep their daughters from the streets, and to keep soul and body together without sacrificing all decency and honor. ”

“ I think that Mildred had a passion for noble architecture. Her keen eyes would detect beauties or incongruities where my untrained sight perceived nothing.
“If a man writes a bad poem, I am not compelled to read it; if he paints a bad picture, I need not see it more than once,” she was wont to say; “but if he erects an ugly building in my city he hurts me every time I walk the street, and I am helpless.”
“When constructive beauty costs no more than this fantastic ugliness, why must such an absurdity be inflicted upon a long-suffering public?” ”

“ No one, not bred in a New England home with all the Puritan traditions imbibed with every breath, can realize the fever and despair that I have felt more than once after I dared to think and face the result of my thought. But that torture can never come again. Not that I have relapsed into indifference or have heeded the pleadings of my devout friends to “only believe,” that so I might dread my doubts as impious and accept without question the creed of my fathers. ”

“ I have all my life been preaching coöperation, not only for the poor, but for ourselves as well, but with small success.”
“The chief objection, I suppose,” said Mildred, “is, that when food is cooked in large quantities it never tastes so good. In time everything seems to get a sort of boarding-house flavor, and individual tastes cannot be consulted as in one’s own home. This may be made an objection by the rich, but that a fastidiousness about a flavor should prevent people from trying coöperation, who have all they can do to keep soul and body together, seems to me more than ridiculous.” ”

“ I could not be idle, you know, even with you, darling,” he answered, smiling at the bright face beside him.
“Ah, the world is large; there are many who need us; rich or poor, we will find our work somewhere,” said Mildred softly, as if to herself. Then as Jim’s steps were heard at the door she started.
“Come, Ralph, one last look at your books and room, it may be long before we return. Kiss Ruby, too; you must be her brother now, you know.” ”

“ I don’t mean for a moment that I believe hotel life or boarding-house life to be the life of the family of the future. Heaven forbid! That the privacy and seclusion of the individual and family should be preserved is imperative. The home is the first consideration. But that one’s food should be cooked, or one’s clothes made or washed, inside the rooms occupied by the family, seems to me no essential feature of the home, and I am convinced that where prejudice can be removed, a great gain would be made by eliminating the first and last, at least from the home of the city poor. ”

“ It is the duty of the male citizen to vote, and not only to vote, but to attend the caucuses which alone insure the possibility of having a worthy candidate. It is also his duty to pay his taxes and keep his sidewalk clean, but his duty does not end here. It is his imperative duty as an honorable citizen to see that this subtle poison, which, bred from germs of selfishness and ignorance, is creeping through the veins of our people, shall be arrested ere a complete social upheaval teach us the painful lesson that vigilance alone is the price of liberty. ”

“ I was too weak to talk, but I loved to lie and look at them when the terrible pain gave me a moment’s respite to think of anything beside my own woes.
The little town was crowded; not a spare room but had been gladly given up to the sufferers.
Little by little I learned all that had happened. A tree had been uprooted in the wild storm and had fallen across the track. The engine, the baggage car, and the first car had been derailed. The loss of life had not been great. Poor Hélène, the little German woman and her baby were the only ones who had not been rescued. ”

“ I know poor mothers in Boston who don’t get down so far as the Common twice a year, who scarcely see a green tree from one year’s end to another, who never think they can spare a moment’s time to amuse their children, and who gladly turn the poor little ones into the street to get them away from the hot cooking-stove which occupies the best part of the only family living-room. ”

“ I must have flushed and looked a little hurt, for he quickly added, ‘Pardon me, Miss Brewster, I think that you are far too much in earnest for that; but I have seen too many begin to read philosophy as a mere amusement, a sort of fad, and with no real earnest purpose, learning just enough to make them conceited or discouraged, and doing no good to themselves or any one else, and bringing the study of philosophy into disrepute. ”

“ Mildred’s voice quivered, and she drew my arm in hers while we walked back to our rooms in silence.
“But the world is growing better, Mildred. Every intelligent person admits that people are more kind and thoughtful than they used to be. No one who has read history could deny it,” I resumed, as once more within doors we sat down before the glowing grate to finish our talk. ”

“ Do you rich people suppose you are going to help this matter greatly by leaving money in your wills to build asylums for the moral and physical wrecks for which our incredible folly and selfish indifference is responsible?
“Your time will come; sooner or later you will find much the same condition of things in your own great cities. Do not believe that in some mysterious way—as your politicians and newspapers are trying to teach you—you, in America, are different from us.
“We are all in the same boat, because the structure of society is everywhere the same. Money is literally king and god. ”

“ Think of the bliss of living in a land where one is never disturbed by the encroachments of foreigners, or expected to attend caucuses and polls; where, in fact, the less he knows about the government the better for him and his! Fancy the pleasure in reading newspapers where the news of the day is under such careful surveillance, through the kindness of the censorship, that one is never disturbed by troublesome political matters, and has always the calm consciousness that everything is going well, although ninety per cent. ”

“ May I not hope that the life and youth and moral power of Chicago will join hand in hand in making this vast city great, not only in dimensions and numbers and wealth, but great in that kind of greatness which alone shall exalt a nation and give it memory. ”

“ My classes take me to Dorchester and Cambridge and Longwood. Once a week I meet a score or so of our Boston society women in a Commonwealth Avenue drawing-room, who manage, among their thousand and one lectures, lessons, and engagements of every sort, to squeeze in an hour to hear me discourse on the topics of the day, when I try to teach them about some phases of our nineteenth century life of which they, like most women, know but little. ”

“ I am tired of this prating and ignorant talk by would-be cultured people who know nothing of the real results of missionary work. They find no fault with actresses or sea-captains or Bohemians who choose exile for gain or pleasure, but they are always ready to cry out against the folly of one who goes to teach men the alphabet, and tell women that they are something more than beasts of burden or mere child-bearing animals. ”

“ Miss Brewster gained courage as she proceeded, and in a clear, unshaken voice continued:
“In all lands on which the sun ever shone, probably there was never a time when money wisely expended could set in play so many and such powerful forces for good as it can do now and here. For here, in this western land of unlimited possibilities, is the young giant born whose savage strength may prove our nation’s weakness if we leave his infant years to the guidance of his own wayward will. ”

“ You ask me to give you suggestions for the expenditure of your wealth in benefiting humanity. This I must decline to do, my dear friend. If I had your wealth I know what I should do, or, at least, what I ought to do, but I am a socialist, and you are not. I do not believe in laissez-faire as you do, and as a socialist I should use my wealth and influence for a reorganization of society, not for a patching up of what is at bottom false and rotten. Things are getting worse and worse, and must continue to do so under the present social system. ”

“ I would teach them that all their limitless material resources cannot make them the real power in the land that little, sterile Massachusetts, with her east winds and rocky soils, has been, unless they first plant the seed that shall bring forth such men of character and thought as New England has borne.
“Why was it that so many of the men of this century, whom the nation most delights to honor, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Bryant, Whittier, Holmes, Beecher, Curtis, Garrison, Phillips, Webster, were sons of this New England soil? ”

“ But I speak to you as scholars, as men and women of insight who need not to be reminded that the state, as one of the three great human institutions by which civilized man has differentiated himself from the savage, has higher functions than those which appeal most forcibly to the ordinary man and woman of to-day.
“We live in a
MATERIALISTIC ATMOSPHERE, where the things of the senses allure far more than the things of thought, where a man of ideals is laughed at by the majority as an unpractical theorist, and shrewdness is esteemed the highest virtue. ”

“ You are all aware that I have asked the favor of your company to-day in order to discuss a serious matter involving the expenditure of a large sum of money. I wish to avail myself of the united wisdom of those present to enable me to use for good and not for evil the enormous wealth which has so suddenly dropped from the skies, as it were, into my hands. ”

“ I do not want a palace with dreary suites of high-studded rooms and frescoed ceilings, and I do not want a house that is nothing but a crowded museum of bric-à-brac, like so many I see. No; my house shall be a stately mansion with far-seeing towers and turrets, with cosy, low-studded rooms and wainscoted 304walls, with pillared arcades and richly carved stone balconies. All Spain and Venice and Nuremberg shall be studied for hints of beauty, and it shall be a home, a perfectly ideal American home; beautiful without and within ”

“ I am amazed every day to see how densely stupid some sensible people are. I know a Frenchwoman who has always slept at home on a bed four feet high, canopied and enshrouded with curtains. It is half a day’s work to make it, and she feels out in the cold and all forlorn when put into one of our little, open, low, brass bedsteads. I suppose she would think it quite as unhomelike and as demoralizing in its tendency as my agent thought my berth beds would be. ”

“ We passed Walden Pond, gleaming like silver in the sunshine, and he talked of Thoreau, whom he seemed to know well, though I had at that time read nothing of him. Presently we rolled up to the Concord station, and while a crowd of people alighted and took the ‘barge,’ we went down one of the long, shady streets, bordered by tall hedges and close-clipped lawns, with comfortable, roomy mansions set back from the street; past the little gem of a town library, on its carpet of emerald green ”

“ You have no conception, Miss Brewster, you can have no conception, of the state of things here at present. Six millions of our people are living on the brink of pauperism. I tell you, when I sit down to my omelette and toast in the morning and reflect that there are two hundred thousand human 85beings within two miles of me who don’t know where they are going to get their next meal, when I read of the hundreds of children who habitually go to school without any breakfast, and who not unfrequently faint dead away over their books, I tell you it doesn’t make my own breakfast relish any better. ”

“ To have for one’s inheritance the birthright of American citizenship seems to me something so rich and precious that to despise it and ignobly sell 10it,—not like Esau for the mess of pottage which could relieve his hunger,—but to sell it to the stranger for the sake of gaining immunity from responsibility, yes, more than that, throwing it away out of sheer contempt for it and ingratitude for what it has done for one, this seems to me the acme of cowardice and selfishness. ”

“ Those brave men of old were not afraid of preaching politics; and how can one, the follower of him who taught us to pray, ‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,’ dare to make this but mere lip-service? Surely they will be the first to give the influence of their Christian manhood to bring that kingdom here and now in this city of Chicago. The clergyman who fails to teach his people that God as truly leads this nation now as in the days of old is recreant to his trust, is unworthy of his calling, as it seems to me. ”

“ However, eight months previously, when reverses of fortune had cast my fate in Salem, Massachusetts, among a family of Unitarians who had been old-time abolitionists, and were now woman suffragists and zealous reformers in every direction, my conception of life had enlarged a little, and I was prepared not to be amazed at this radical, bookish Boston girl who upset all my previous theories of what a charming woman should be. ”