t, 
 
 cc 
 
 t^*^</
 
 WHAT ANSWER? 
 
 By ANNA E. DICKINSON, i vol. i6mo. 1.50. 
 
 THIS is one of the books which belong to the class of deeds not 
 words. It is a solemn, earnest, thrilling, enthusiastic appeal, in 
 which a noble woman, herself at ease, blessed with flattering friends, 
 with applause, with admiration, takes all in her hand, and risks all in 
 pleading the cause of the poorest, the most despised, the most maltreated 
 and scorned of God's creatures. In the form of a story, she makes a 
 most condensed, earnest, and powerful appeal to the heart and conscience 
 of the American nation on the sin of caste. If anybody can read the 
 book unmoved, we have only pity for him. What gives this story its 
 awful power is its truth. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO., Publishers, Boston,
 
 PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 BT 
 
 ANNA E. DICKINSON. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, 
 
 (LATE TlCKNOR & FIELDS, AMI) FIELDS, OSOOOD, & CO.) 
 
 1876.
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1876, 
 BY ANNA E. DICKINSON. 
 
 FRANKLIN PEESS. 
 
 8TKBZOTTPED AND PRINTED BT 
 
 BAUD, AVERT, & Co.
 
 Nothing nefo, fout neelrtng line upon line*
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT, 
 
 i. 
 
 THERE is one fact concerning this country 
 of ours, at which every travelling foreigner 
 is amazed, in which every native takes pride 
 as though it were a special personal virtue ; 
 and that is the extent of it all. 
 
 New England's hills and valleys, rich in 
 beauty, poor in soil, abounding in human 
 thrift and human ingenuity. The Middle 
 States with their crowded towns and cities, 
 their marks of tireless energy and exhaust- 
 less enterprise ; their mines and furnaces, 
 black foundations to magnificent superstruc- 
 tures. The South, generous in sun and cli- 
 mate, green with tobacco-leaves and waving 
 corn, white with endless stretches of cotton- 
 fields, and decked with flowers. The great 
 
 7
 
 8 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 West, homely of visage, flat and plain, yet 
 with all possibilities of growth and -wealth 
 before it, and with a civilization as yet rough 
 hewn, many angled, often ungainly, but with 
 the lines that mark strength and proportion, 
 that, rilled out and covered by the sure gath- 
 erings of generations, will as well mark per- 
 fect beauty. 
 
 And away beyond all this, beyond the 
 Missouri, hundreds of miles of level plain. 
 Hundreds of miles of open rolling prairie- 
 land, the swells of surface like the endless 
 billows of a peaceful sea. Hundreds of miles 
 of mountains, mountains broken, ragged, 
 like storms petrified and fixed forever; 
 mountains stretching away range beyond 
 range, stately, majestic, to seeming infinity. 
 Hundreds of miles of desert region, filled 
 with the solemnity of silence and desolation. 
 Hundreds of miles, some level, some billowy, 
 some upheaved, under whose scarred and 
 dreary face lies gathered the wealth of India 
 and Peru, a mineral wealth to supply the 
 world ; and then the majestic lift of Sierras,
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 bearing their garmenture of firs and cedars 
 and pines, trees that have withstood the 
 tempests of a thousand years, stately and 
 beautiful as the cedars of Lebanon when 
 these were worthy to adorn the temple of 
 God. And. shooting down from these, a 
 land of splendors opens, a land wherein 
 the earth rivals the waters, and the waters 
 wash down sands of gold. 
 
 Stupendous in size, a size matched by 
 the grasping spirit of this generation of its 
 inhabitants. " We must possess it all," say 
 they, and proceed to act accordingly. It 
 must all be " fenced in," to use an expressive 
 California phrase. The mines must all be 
 opened, though but the top crust be scraped. 
 The timber must all be blazed, though but 
 a tree here and there be felled. The land 
 must all be surveyed, though there be not a 
 body nor a soul to occupy it. The town- 
 lots must be laid out, and held at a most 
 unrighteous figure, though the town or the 
 city itself can only be seen in perspective 
 five hundred years away.
 
 10 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 That is the native American. "This is 
 mine," he says. " It belongs to me, and my 
 generation, and my people. We of the 
 present will drink of the cream of this pan ; 
 and those who come after us may content 
 themselves with the skim-milk : " whereas, 
 in reality, the cream has scarcely begun to 
 rise. 
 
 Nowhere else, at no time else, has there 
 been such universal grasping at wealth, such 
 deification of the dollar, such a thirst for 
 material prosperity, such hunger to possess 
 the earth and its fulness, as in this age and 
 land. 
 
 Each man desires it ; and being what he 
 is, of such growth as the soil produces, he 
 prefers being " boss " to man. He would 
 infinitely rather be employer than employed. 
 He will be the head. What, then, are the 
 hands ? 
 
 The port of New York can tell. Every 
 loaded emigrant ship can answer. They are 
 hands hardened to toil, accustomed to serve, 
 German hands and Irish hands in multi- 
 tudes.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 11 
 
 The Golden Gate of the Pacific can 
 reveal. California can make manifest, with 
 its English, Scotch, Irish, French, Spanish, 
 Portuguese, German, Italian, Greek, Scandi- 
 navian acquisitions, drawn by the same load- 
 stone of gold. 
 
 And now, in addition to these, hands made 
 of the dust of empires, Hindoos, Lascars, 
 Chinamen; one hundred thousand on the 
 Pacific coast, soon to be a million scattered 
 along the Pacific Road t radiating thence 
 across the country. 
 
 On the one side, exhaustless fields of 
 undeveloped wealth, a limitless desire for 
 riches and command: on the other, huge, 
 hungry multitudes, trained to toil, servitude 
 their condition, eager for employment and 
 bread ; crowded and impoverished at home, 
 tempting facilities offered them to abandon 
 it. A vacuum here; a vast compressed 
 force there : the result manifest. They will 
 be driven by the conditions behind them, 
 and be drawn by the promises before. 
 
 Did we so desire, we could not stop nor
 
 12 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 stay them. As well set metes and bounds 
 to the ocean, as well say to the ungovernable 
 waves, " Thus far," as hope or strive to check 
 this human tide setting from continent to 
 continent, from Europe on the east, from 
 Asia and Africa and the isles of the sea on 
 the west, " like two vast torrents rising una- 
 batedly, and daily driven onward by the 
 hand of God." 
 
 Not satisfied with these, we have grasped 
 at Alaska. We will give reasons unim- 
 peachable and absolute why we should add 
 Canada, off at the north, to the ornaments 
 about our head, and tack on Mexico at the 
 south-west, and Cuba and San Domingo at 
 the south-east, as adornings to the ample 
 flow of our garments. Because, say we, we 
 thereby add to the strength and glory of the 
 country: we thereby secure great gain to 
 the Republic. 
 
 Do we, then ? 
 
 Yes ; if extent of territory, if numbers 
 of population, if enormous development of 
 material wealth and resources, constitute
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 13 
 
 the basis or best part of a basis for the 
 Republic. 
 
 Do they so ? 
 
 All history teaches us, that as territory 
 has spread, as numbers have increased, as 
 wealth has accumulated, nations and men 
 have decayed. 
 
 If a man's vital organs grow with the 
 growth of his external body, if his heart is 
 sound, and his digestion excellent, and his 
 circulation active, and his exercise abundant, 
 growth in size must indicate growth of 
 strength as well. 
 
 But if a man retains in the body of a 
 giant the vital organs of a child, or if it 
 be layer on layer of fat that is added to his 
 internal and external economy, or if his size 
 grow by the grafting-on of alien and even 
 diseased members, then it is in order to ques- 
 tion whether size indicates strength, or the 
 reverse.
 
 14 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 n. 
 
 WE set wide our doors, and invite the 
 world to come in. What sort of provision 
 do we make for these our guests when they 
 appear ? 
 
 "Pis a costly house they enter. Many of 
 them are rude and wild. Left to their own 
 devices, unchecked and uninstructed, they 
 may damage and destroy ; and, in the mis- 
 chief wrought, be damaged and destroyed in 
 turn. What eye, or hand, or attention do we 
 give to them ? 
 
 " Oh, America is a great country ! We 
 are large enough and strong enough to swal- 
 low and digest all that are sent to us." 
 
 We swallow them certainly. Do we digest 
 and assimilate them ? Or are all the nerve 
 forces used in other channels, and exhausted 
 in other enterprises ?
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 15 
 
 The American of the present day wishes 
 to do somewhat for his country, but to do it 
 without self-sacrifice or laborious effort. 
 
 His own chief desire is to make money, 
 to have and to hold it ; not for what it will 
 bring to himself and to others, not to use it 
 as a talent and a trust, but for itself, and that 
 others shall know he is " worth " it. 
 
 He will be rich. And to this end he will 
 make himself poor in all that makes life 
 worth the possessing. 
 
 He has not time to read the books he gath- 
 ers on his library shelves, nor to admire 
 the pictures he hangs on his walls, nor to 
 take his ease in the place he calls his home, 
 nor to sit down in his neighbor's house, and 
 cultivate the pleasures of kindly human com- 
 panionship, nor to tell his wife that he loves 
 her, nor to make the acquaintance of his 
 children. 
 
 He converts himself from manhood into a 
 sort of double-action machinery ; he swathes 
 himself in interminable folds of business till 
 he is a species of mummy. He drains his
 
 16 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 body of all its resources to run his money- 
 grinding engine ; and sapped and undermined, 
 or in actual ruins, with " brain trouble " or 
 " spine trouble " or " heart trouble " or " half 
 dead with dyspepsia," has the supreme satis- 
 faction of hearing people say as he goes by 
 them on the streets, "A wonderful man 
 that ! wonderful ! began life without a dollar, 
 and is worth half a million." 
 
 Presently the same people say, as he passes 
 them, carried, not walking, " Dead ? of 
 course he is dead. No man could hold out at 
 his pace long I hear his will is to be con- 
 tested." 
 
 Or, he makes his struggle ineffectually for 
 all this, and dies in the midst of the struggle. 
 
 The great good to be secured in the indi- 
 vidual life is this. The great good, then, 
 thinks such an individual life, to be gained 
 for the whole, is, to spread in the eyes of the 
 world the size and material prosperity of the 
 Republic. 
 
 " Well, what else remains to be done ? " 
 asks such a one. " The men of a past gen-
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 17 
 
 eration fought for and established a republic. 
 The men of a decade ago fought for and se- 
 cured a republic. We are at peace. The work 
 of war and the work of peace are alike done. 
 The machinery is constructed, is in order, 
 has been altered and improved and perfected. 
 Nothing more is needed than for us to put 
 some officers in command, delegate authority 
 to them, leave them to attend to their affairs, 
 while we settle to the real duty and profit 
 and business of life, the making of money." 
 
 Selfishness, sooner or later, defeats its own 
 ends. 
 
 " We are free," is our boast. The people 
 that asks to be let alone, to hold only the 
 rights, and to be released from the cares and 
 duties and responsibilities, of citizens, are 
 slaves, slaves to their own well-being; 
 and " the chain awaits them, for which 
 they await." 
 
 Are we in any wise tending towards this 
 splendid servitude ? 
 
 Let us see.
 
 18 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 III. 
 
 " ETEBNAL vigilance is the price of liber- 
 ty : " repeated here a million times, a million 
 times forgotten. 
 
 We are fond of talking of ourselves as a 
 peculiar people, favored of God. Yet be 
 sure there is no reason why we should 
 receive aught at the hands of the great Cap- 
 tain beyond any other division of his vast 
 army. 
 
 There is no such thing as a free gift in 
 nature. That that we have we must toil for. 
 Even this body of ours, the first of our pos- 
 sessions, the last of our renunciations, cannot 
 survive for a day without our own will or 
 effort, even though there be others a plenty 
 to serve it. 
 
 Fortunate in beginning our career where 
 nature was fresh and liberal, fortunate in
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 19 
 
 establishing a government away from old- 
 time laws and traditions, untrammelled by 
 dead weights and precedents, fortunate in 
 the fatherhood of men who knew the right, 
 and, knowing, dared maintain through pov- 
 erty and blood and death, fortunate in all 
 these, yet these alone will not suffice to 
 make us strong in the present, nor secure in 
 the future. 
 
 We cannot, if we would, be pensioners 
 upon the dead. The same arts, or greater, 
 that did gain a power, must it maintain. 
 With nations, as with individuals, there is 
 no such thing as standing still. Advance or 
 retreat is the law of nature : as one climb- 
 ing the heights of Shasta finds ice, a sure 
 foothold for the time he needs to reach up 
 higher, and no more ; firm vantage-ground 
 if he does but use it for climbing, for re- 
 newed efforts ; melting snows, and shifting, 
 treacherous foundations, if he attempts to 
 remain. 
 
 Since men died to establish a republic, 
 men must live to preserve it.
 
 20 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 Freedom exacts its price. Rights have 
 their equivalent responsibilities. Liberty 
 imposes obligations. 
 
 We will be our own sovereign. We must, 
 then, govern, or meet the fate of all govern- 
 ments without a head, or with a head that 
 yields its duties to favorites who may or 
 may not be inefficient or corrupt, but who 
 certainly will be careless if they are sure 
 they are unwatched and unregarded by their 
 chief. 
 
 Who governs America to-day ? The peo- 
 ple ? Nobody believes it. It is governed by 
 the politicians whose trade, whose business, 
 it is. Men of education, of intelligence, of 
 ambition, are too busy about their own per- 
 sonal gains and gettings and spendings to 
 hew the planks of platforms, or to investi- 
 gate the character of those who are to stand 
 upon them, or to see that the platform is 
 rightly supported. 
 
 It is something to make a good law : it is 
 more to see that it is executed. It is some- 
 thing to secure a good servant: it is more
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 21 
 
 to watch that the work of that servant is 
 well done, and that the commendation of 
 " Well done " and the condemnation of " 111 
 done " be alike spoken in due season. 
 
 This man will be a sovereign in a land 
 where the people rule, yet he will not go to 
 the place where government is made. For 
 government is not made at Washington, at 
 Albany, at Atlanta, at Springfield, at Sacra- 
 mento. It is made at the primary meeting. 
 
 " No," says this fastidious citizen. " It is 
 asking too much of me to go to that villan- 
 ous place, to be elbowed by the rabble, and 
 to be bullied by the pot-house politicians 
 who will be in full possession. I have not 
 the tune to spare, even had I the inclination 
 for such companionship. I have my bank, 
 or my office, or my fields, or my shop, or my 
 ledger, or my factory, or my profession, to 
 look after. When election-day comes, I will 
 do my duty, if I remember it, and vote, 
 if, by chance, there is a decent man on the 
 ticket." 
 
 Meanwhile the " villanous place " is
 
 22 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 crowded by the ignorant if not the vicious, 
 by the uninstructed foreigner, or the unen- 
 lightened American, material for " re- 
 peaters " controlled by unscrupulous holders 
 of public trusts. 
 
 Meanwhile the platform, built by these 
 hands, is full often builded of rotten planks, 
 or of wind that has a semblance of solidity. 
 
 Meanwhile plans are laid, and men se- 
 lected, that will control banking interests, 
 mechanic interests, manufacturing interests, 
 farming interests, professional interests, di- 
 rectly or indirectly all the interests of the 
 people of the land. And, when election-day 
 comes, the intelligent and tax-paying citizen 
 has no more freedom of action than the gal- 
 ley-slave chained to his oar. Chained by 
 this machinery of party, he votes a straight 
 ticket, votes for measures his conscience 
 condemns, and for men he despises or dis- 
 trusts, or he scratches his ticket, or bolts. 
 That is, he foregoes his right of citizenship, 
 is without voice or representation in the in- 
 coming government and man.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 23 
 
 He prostitutes his vote, or lie loses it. 
 
 Or, he does not so much as take it into his 
 hand, or even remember it. He has not the' 
 interest to touch it at all. "Election-day! 
 forgot all about it." 
 
 " Vote ? No. I've been too busy." 
 
 And having forgotten, or been too busy, to 
 take care of his own rights and interests, 
 when laws curtail and taxes press heavily 
 upon these same rights and interests, he cries 
 out against the iniquities of the politicians, 
 and the ignorance of the voters; and won- 
 ders whether, " after all, republican institu- 
 tions are not a failure." 
 
 So far as they are to be supported by, and 
 to live through Am, they certainly are. 
 
 The Republic stands like the image seen in 
 the king's vision, in brightness, excellent ; 
 in form, terrible ; its head of fine gold ; its 
 body and its limbs of silver, of brass, and of 
 iron ; its feet part of iron, but mixed with 
 miry clay. 
 
 And what was the fate of the image when 
 a weight fell upon these feet, poor, weak,
 
 24 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 uncertain feet, heavier than they could 
 bear ? They broke in pieces ; and with them 
 the clay, the iron, the brass, the silver, and 
 the gold broke in pieces together, and became 
 like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors. 
 If the statue of America is to stand, it 
 must be upon feet of granite planted on 
 everlasting foundations. If it is to stand 
 secure, it must be by the fine gold of thought, 
 the silver of purity, the brass of endurance, 
 the iron of solidity, taking the place of the 
 mire and the clay. It must be sound from 
 toe to head, genuine all through.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 25 
 
 rv. 
 
 IT is a horrible thing, the way that men 
 talk of this duty of citizenship as a work 
 of small worth, of slight dignity, of insignifi- 
 cant moment. 
 
 What, then, do we call this country of 
 ours? What future depends on the action 
 of this present? What causes are here at 
 stake ? 
 
 In ancient times, before a candidate 
 received the honors of knighthood, he passed 
 the preceding hours of darkness in vigils, in 
 fasting, in prayer. He who was to defend 
 beauty and truth, the cause of ladies' honor, 
 the sovereignty of the king, the glory of the 
 cross, must enter upon his task with no gay-- 
 ety nor thoughtlessness. Feasting and mirth 
 were not for him, but solitude and supplica- 
 tions.
 
 26 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 The spirit that animated the knight of old 
 should inspire the voter of to-day. In his 
 hand he holds 'the destinies of a nation, 
 and what a nation ! The cause of order, of 
 law, of good government; questions educa- 
 tional, social, political, moral; the weal or 
 the woe of millions of individuals, lie in 
 the scraps of white paper that nutter down 
 noiselessly into ballot-boxes. No army of 
 Europe decides such contests. No crowned 
 head of the Old World solves such problems 
 as those presented to the voter of to-day. 
 
 The eve of election should be to him a 
 vigil, and his action at the polls a sacra- 
 ment. 
 
 A republic, to live and -to grow, must be 
 planted in ground that is shot through and 
 through, vivified, by what in brief is the 
 essential essence of Christianity : on the one 
 side a recognition of the brotherhood of 
 humanity, on the other a full acceptance of 
 the doctrine of individual responsibility; by 
 each man saying, " If the work is to be done, 
 it is to be by my doing it," and then doing it ;
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 27 
 
 and by helping any of the lame, the deaf, 
 and the blind, he may find by the way. 
 
 To himself make the laws by his matured 
 thought crystallized into law, to himself elect 
 the men who' are to execute these laws, even 
 with all this accomplished, the labor of the 
 sovereign citizen is not done. He belongs to 
 a body politic ; and though his hand is clean 
 and whole, if there is spot of disease, taint of 
 mortality, in some other member, for his own 
 sake, if for no other reason, he must see taint 
 cleansed, disease destroyed, if the whole body 
 is not to be marred, and in time fall into 
 decay and death together. 
 
 In a peculiar sense is it true that in this 
 country no man lives, can live, to himself, for 
 himself alone. 
 
 Here are these millions invited to our 
 midst, to toil for us, to be our hewers of 
 wood, and drawers of water, to be our 
 road-makers, and bridge-builders, coming 
 whence they do, the sure foundations of 
 tyranny and injustice here, since there is 
 no such certain school of despotism as
 
 28 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 slavery. Here are the four millions of peo- 
 ple, but yesterday chattels, to-day intrusted 
 with their own destinies, and, in part, the 
 destinies of a nation. Here are the millions 
 of whites long held by the other end of the 
 chain that secured slaves, little versed in 
 the education of books ; unenlightened as to 
 the real meaning and import of republican 
 citizenship, its first meaning being an 
 understanding of one's own duties, and a 
 thorough respect for the rights of others. 
 
 All these millions, multiplying, doubling 
 in their homes, and in their weight of num- 
 bers in the government. 
 
 These are they who constitute the "re- 
 peaters " in Northern cities, the supporters 
 of " carpet-bag " stealings and oppressions 
 in Southern sections, the upholders of men 
 whose theories strike at the integrity of the 
 nation, and whose practices are to live and 
 grow rich on the toil and degradation of 
 their fellows. 
 
 Ignorance underlies their action. In 
 myriads of cases they would do the right, 
 and yet the wrong pursue.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 29 
 
 The men who come here from foreign 
 lands come hoping for the blessings of lib- 
 erty and the advantages of freedom. Does 
 any one suppose that these men discredit 
 liberty and jeopardize free institutions with 
 malice aforethought, and understanding the 
 import of what they do ? 
 
 They are tools in the hands of selfish 
 manipulators ; and those who cry or curse 
 under the injuries these tools inflict, yet 
 make no effort to work a transformation, of 
 comparatively easy accomplishment, whereby 
 a tool is changed to a man. 
 
 The Republic was so dear a thing to the 
 slaves, that they were willing to die for it, 
 when it meant for them only a possible free- 
 dom, and that afar off. Does any one sup- 
 pose these freedmen support the men and 
 measures that bring shame on the nation's 
 name and cause alike, comprehending the 
 mischief that is wrought ? 
 
 Alas for them ! In what schools have 
 they been trained ? Where enlightened ? 
 For our own cause and sake we have com-
 
 30 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 manded them to vote. In our own defence 
 we have armed them with this tremendous 
 weapon, yet have left them to their own 
 methods, uninstructed and undrilled in its 
 use ; and when, groping through a sort of 
 twilight, they confound friend with foe, 
 spare where they should destroy, and destroy 
 where they should spare, we cry aloud over 
 what is the result of our indifference and 
 selfishness, and account the misfortune of 
 their ignorance unto them for crime. 
 
 The multitudes who supported at the 
 polls, who died on the field for an oligarchy 
 that deprived them of land, of homes, of 
 schools, of skill, that robbed them of 
 knowledge, of opportunity, of a heritage 
 of honorable toil and successful endeavor, 
 when they so bowed and fell, did they realize 
 what power crushed them ? 
 
 These multitudes, in still supporting this 
 oligarchy, in hating a flag, and fighting a 
 government that will guarantee them lands, 
 homes, schools, industry, enlightenment, ad- 
 vance, triumphs as individuals, and triumphs
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 31 
 
 as citizens, in so turning the knife upon 
 themselves, do they know they are commit- 
 ting suicide ? 
 
 It is a question that needs no answer.
 
 32 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 V. 
 
 WE would do well to sit down and pon- 
 der the lesson of the Franco-Prussian war. 
 What triumphed at Sedan? Superior fight- 
 ing ? Superior numbers ? Superior gen- 
 eralship ? Superior weight ? The weight, 
 the fighting, the numbers, the generalship, 
 that triumphed at Sedan was the school- 
 master : because France, the France of half 
 a century ago, the France that overran 
 Europe, and won the crown of the world, 
 because this France numbered, in fifty-five 
 out of its eighty-nine departments, a per- 
 centage of from thirty to seventy-five who 
 could neither read nor write ; because one- 
 third of its people were absolutely illiterate ; 
 because the wealth, the intelligence, the art, 
 the science, the reason, the judgment, of the 
 land were out-voted, and down-voted, and
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 33 
 
 run over to the battle-field, by millions of 
 ignorant peasants; unwilling and unready 
 were forced to meet an enemy, down whose 
 long line stood not a man who could not 
 read in, as well as fight for his fatherland ; 
 and spell, as well as battle, for German unity. 
 
 " A good lesson for Europe ! " " We will 
 pass it on to those who need it." " A sug- 
 gestive fact to be studied by the despots, 
 and the slaves of effete civilizations and rot- 
 ten aristocracies." " We, we have no 
 part nor lot in it. We are safe, and with no 
 need of warning." 
 
 Is it so ? 
 
 How many people in this country of free 
 schools, of general education, of universal 
 enlightenment, cannot read and write ? 
 
 " Oh, a few hundreds ! " " Maybe a few 
 thousands ! " " Perhaps," says some soul 
 full of audacity, " perhaps a hundred thou- 
 sand." 
 
 Let the last census tell us. 38,558,371 
 people in the land. Of these, 28,238,945 are 
 ten years of age and upwards. Of these
 
 34 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 twenty-eight and odd millions, 5,658,144 can 
 neither read nor write ; in brief, one-fifth of 
 this part of the population. 
 
 " Ignorant foreigners, " you say, " who will 
 speedily be transformed in this new school 
 of freedom ; whose children will surpass 
 them, as they will surpass, in brief time, 
 their old selves." 
 
 Let the figures respond. 777,864 are for- 
 eign born ; 4,882,280 are of native growth. 
 
 " Children who have all time yet before 
 them, an abundance of opportunity, as 
 yet simply unused." 
 
 Again speak, O harsh and homely truth ! 
 
 There are eighteen millions and a half to 
 be accurate, 18,536,000 people who have 
 numbered their twenty-one years. Of these, 
 3,715,196, one-fifth of the entire adult popu- 
 lation, are to be ranked under the head of 
 illiterate. 
 
 Seventeen per cent of men who are voters ; 
 twenty-three per cent of women who are, 
 or are to be, the mothers of voters, perhaps 
 to be voters themselves, in this black cate- 
 gory.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 35 
 
 " Blacks ! " Triumph not so soon, my 
 Saxon reader. Indians, negroes, Chinamen, 
 all combined, can throw into their side of 
 the scale, 2,778,601. Thy race and mine 
 weigh down our side with 2,879,543. 
 
 Five millions and a half of people who 
 cannot read, in a country whose sole endur- 
 ing prosperity must depend upon the en- 
 lightened content and action of its masses. 
 
 " We not need the lesson ! " We need it 
 as do no other people upon whom the sun 
 shines this day. 
 
 If these people themselves know so little, 
 they know not enough to demand and secure 
 the advantages of education for their chil- 
 dren. Even those who have had a modicum 
 of education thrust upon them appreciate 
 the enforced gift so slightly, as in many a 
 case to willingly shut the window, and bar 
 out the few beams that might straggle in to 
 the children who are at their mercy. 
 
 The poor man, living as the animal crea- 
 tion lives, filling his home with offspring, 
 without more thought than the birds or the 
 
 3
 
 36 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 beasts as to the future, throws upon them, 
 in part at least, the burthen of their own 
 support; thrusting upon the years of child- 
 hood, that should be given to growth and 
 absorption, the tasks and responsibilities of 
 maturity. 
 
 The selfish and greedy gatherer sees in his 
 child a hand that can add to his store ; and 
 BO uses it, though the hand be thereby left 
 untrained to do any successful gathering for 
 itself in the years to come, and the head 
 that should master it is left to life-long 
 bondage. 
 
 The second generation of Irish, the chil- 
 dren of emigrants who are the delvers in 
 mines, the workers of shuttles and looms, 
 are, in myriads of cases, illustrations of a 
 descending scale of humanity, and material 
 for citizenship. The parents, if they have 
 not been sent to the school in their child- 
 hood, have frisked in wind and weather, air 
 and sunshine, and have good stock of bodily 
 strength, if not of mental training. But 
 these little ones, driving mules through sub-
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 37 
 
 terranean passages, or nailed to the swift- 
 flying machinery in stifling rooms, deprived 
 alike of savage freedom and of civilized cul- 
 ture, are stunted in both mind and body, in a 
 country that has promised them freedom of 
 growth, the growth of which they can stunt 
 and distort in turn. 
 
 The negroes of the South, who have sprung 
 from childhood to maturity since liberty was 
 proclaimed throughout the land, instead of 
 being an improvement on their fathers and 
 mothers bred in slavery, are a deterioration. 
 The freed man and woman had a double 
 incentive to study, the natural rebound 
 of the mind from enforced ignorance, and 
 the desire to secure that that by pains and 
 penalties, whippings and punishments, had 
 been denied them. 
 
 Illiteracy was a badge of slavery. To read, 
 to write, were powers as unattainable to the 
 slave as the master's color, or the master's 
 position. To own a book, to read a book, 
 were the sure proofs of freedom. To do the 
 thing one has been forbidden to do, is one of 
 the inalienable rights of humanity.
 
 38 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 But these men and women, having gained 
 somewhat for themselves, have small wish to 
 thrust the unasked and undesired gift upon 
 their children. They worked for massa. 
 These can work for them, and, by picking up 
 a few pennies through desultory labor, sub- 
 tract slightly from their parents' penny, and 
 add enormously to the sum total of that of 
 their own and the nation's poverty. 
 
 The German who comes among us can 
 read and write. He has been held by the 
 throat, and so much of .wholesome knowledge 
 crammed down it, whether he would or not. 
 He has escaped from tyranny ; he is the citi- 
 zen of a land of freedom. He can do what 
 he will with his own. There is no law for 
 the public weal constraining him. He is 
 thrifty, saving, "forehanded : " he will have a 
 cottage, some fields, a home. He will get 
 on in the world. He will have many children ; 
 and these shall be sent, not to school to be 
 educated for the benefit of the state, as he 
 has been, but shall be sent into the field, 
 or the mill, or the shop, to gather for his ben- 
 efit, and accumulate for his prosperity.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 39 
 
 VI. 
 
 WELL, you say, what is to be done ? We 
 have established an admirable school system ; 
 we have built schoolhouses ; we appoint 
 teachers ; we pay our taxes ; we elect officers 
 of the law to see that these matters and these 
 people are looked after. Nothing more 
 remains. If any prefer to be ignorant, help- 
 less, vicious, criminal, let them pay the 
 penalty. 
 
 Meanwhile we too suffer, as we ought. 
 
 We have done all we could, and more than 
 any one has the right to demand of us. You 
 certainly cannot expect us to go into the 
 highways and byways, and call aloud, and 
 even compel these children to come in. 
 
 Even so. 
 
 The man who reads this, and who so 
 speaks, lives on some broad avenue, or some
 
 40 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 cleanly and wholesome street. Day by day 
 lie comes out of the front doorway of his 
 house, and meets people who live in homes, 
 and among surroundings, like unto his own. 
 
 He knows that the rear windows and door- 
 ways of his house look out on narrow winding 
 alleys, or over crowded courts, or filthy 
 streets. He knows it. He does not realize it. 
 
 He knows that human beings are packed 
 into vile dens, or rotting tenements, swarm- 
 ing from stifling garret to mouldy cellar. 
 He knows that out of this over-crowding, 
 under-feeding, filth, and wretchedness, disease 
 is born, and stalks day by day gathering its 
 multitudes from left and right. He knows it. 
 He does not realize it. 
 
 He knows that consumption is stalking 
 through the alley ; aches and pains, shivering 
 chills and burning fevers, are stalking through 
 the alley. He knows it. He does not realize 
 it. 
 
 By and by he hears that, following this 
 ghastly procession, the loathsome giant of 
 small-pox is stalking through the alley.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 41 
 
 Then what does he ? 
 
 Does he say, There are the city ordi- 
 nances. There is the Board of Health. There 
 are the laws and the officers for such emer- 
 gencies. I elected them ; if I didn't, some- 
 body else did. My taxes help support them. 
 If they choose to neglect their duty, what's 
 that to me ? It is no concern of mine. 
 
 Is that what the man says? 
 
 Or, does he say, It would be a pity for 
 the law to interfere with those children : I 
 hear it is children who are dying of that 
 horrible disease. Poor little wretches ! What 
 possible future is before them ? They will be 
 infinitely better off out of this world. It is 
 thwarting Providence to compel them to live. 
 It is a good fate that has befallen them. Let 
 them die unmolested. 
 
 Is that what he says ? 
 
 Or, more mercifully disposed, does he say, 
 There is no doubt those health officers do 
 not half attend to their duty. I will tell my 
 family physician to step into the alley, and 
 see what he can do to alleviate its misery.
 
 42 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 And his family physician coming back, 
 announcing that the ignorant wretches who 
 there abide are afraid of him and his medi- 
 cines and his interference, and will have none 
 of him and his work, does the man answer, 
 Very well : a man's, house is his castle. I 
 cannot force entrance even to save his life. 
 If he will die, my hands are clean, and my 
 skirts clear. 
 
 Is that what he says and does ? 
 
 The man knows that sweeping up from 
 the infected alley, borne on the wings of 
 the wind, impalpable, intangible, disease 
 loathsome, death awful, are being carried 
 towards the rear windows and rear doorways 
 of his own home. And if health laws are 
 insufficient, if health officers are careless, 
 are slow, are inefficient, he rushes himself to 
 the alley. Do the people bar window, and 
 lock door, door and window must give way. 
 Do they cry, " This is mine ! you shall not 
 interfere, you shall not enter ! " they are 
 swept aside while the little perishing 
 wretches are carried away to the hospital in
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 43 
 
 which they can be nursed and nourished into 
 life and health once more, while the pestifer- 
 ous place is fumigated and cleaned. 
 
 He does it ; and he has the right to do it, 
 by that first law of nature, self-preserva- 
 tion. 
 
 There is no disease more subtly pene- 
 trating, none more destructive, more surely 
 death freighted to such a government as 
 ours, than that of ignorance. And if those 
 who are infected, having the means provided 
 to wash and be made whole, refuse so to do, 
 then, in self-defence, we ought to see that 
 the means they reject are used, and used effi- 
 ciently to a healing and wholesome end. 
 
 We need a moral nuisance Board of 
 Health, backed by the active support of. 
 every decent and vigorous element in the 
 community. 
 
 And this should be done in behalf of the 
 tax-payer, in behalf of the child, in behalf 
 of the general weal. 
 
 The state has the right to do whatever it 
 believes essential to the preservation of its 
 sacurity, prosperity, and life.
 
 44 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 Upon this belief is the system of free 
 schools founded. Upon this belief is levied 
 the general tax for its support, demanded by 
 State law, collected by State authority. 
 
 The State comes into a man's house, and 
 says to him, I take your money for the 
 public good ; and, since it is for the public 
 good, you cannot refuse, and no man may 
 hinder. I take it from you, a property- 
 holder, because a republican government 
 cannot live unless there be intelligence 
 among the people. Unless the masses are 
 educated, there can be no security to life and 
 property. In many a case such a tax-payer 
 as you may receive no direct benefit from 
 the money claimed, since the heaviest tax- 
 payers are not those who usually send their 
 children to the public schools: yet advan- 
 tage comes in the maintenance of good laws, 
 and the increased security to life and prop- 
 erty which education brings. 
 
 Such as he may properly exact, and ought 
 to exact, that the money he is compelled to 
 surrender for the education of the people 
 shall accomplish that result.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 45 
 
 There can be no debatable ground here. 
 If the State asks, and, when it is not given, 
 arbitrarily takes, from its citizens money 
 enough to support its schools thirty or forty 
 weeks in the year, its citizens should stipu- 
 late that the State shall compel the attend- 
 ance of children thirty or forty weeks in 
 the year. 
 
 If the one law is just, the other must be 
 equally just. 
 
 If public opinion assents to the unquali- 
 fied right of the State to force a man to sus- 
 tain schools for the benefit of his neighbor's 
 children, that he may be indirectly bene- 
 fited in turn, the man has an equally 
 unqualified right to claim of the State that 
 it educate his neighbor's children, or be 
 branded as a spender or waster of money 
 exacted under false pretences. 
 
 Take, for illustration, two of the States 
 that have the best school laws in the coun- 
 try Massachusetts in the East, Illinois in 
 the West. 
 
 In Massachusetts, one-fifth of the whole 
 expenses of public schools are lost through
 
 46 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 absenteeism; and in some towns the per- 
 centage of attendance is as low as sixty. 
 
 In Illinois, with truant laws in force, the 
 average percentage of absenteeism for the 
 last ten years has been about 19. One 
 out of every five or six has not been so 
 much as enrolled in school. Of those who 
 are registered, not more than forty-five per 
 cent are in regular daily attendance during 
 the time provided for them by the State, 
 six and a half months. 
 
 The public-school fund raised by the 
 State from the people of the State, with the 
 direct pledge that it should be used only for 
 school purposes, and with the direct asser- 
 tion that the amount raised was the amount 
 needed has been used only for school pur- 
 poses, but has been used in such manner 
 that more than one-half of it has been ac- 
 tually thrown away. 
 
 The citizen may well say, I am taxed to 
 support schools for all the children in the 
 State, through six months and a half in the 
 year. One-fifth of these children do not
 
 A PAYING INTESTMENT. 47 
 
 attend at all ; and one-half of the remaining 
 four-fifths are in attendance less than one- 
 half the time. More than one-half of my 
 tax, then, is extortion. 
 
 Here is a suggestive summary from the 
 last census : The school population of the 
 United States is thirteen millions, eight hun- 
 dred and seventy-five thousand. Of this 
 number but eight millions and ninety thou- 
 sand are enrolled in any school. Of these 
 but four millions, five hundred and ninety- 
 one thousand are in average daily attendance. 
 
 In a word, in behalf of the tax-payer, 
 study in school should be compulsory for the 
 child, for the same term through which the 
 maintenance of the school is compulsory for 
 the tax-payer. 
 
 An equitable law for tax-payer and child 
 alike. 
 
 The school code of Brunswick, Luneberg, 
 so long ago as 1738, enacted that "parents 
 must not imagine, that, because the children 
 are theirs, they can do with them what they 
 please, but must remember that their chil-
 
 48 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 dren are also members of the commonwealth ; 
 that it is the duty of the government to 
 have them educated, in order that the coun- 
 try may not be peopled by illiterate, brutal, 
 and ill-mannered inhabitants." 
 
 The child is the ward of the State. If, 
 socially, no one may come between a parent's 
 right and a child's duty ; politically, no one, 
 whatever his relation, may come between the 
 State and its subject. 
 
 A man has no right to pursue a course 
 that will certainly burthen society with crim- 
 inals and paupers. If such tendency is man- 
 ifest, society has the right to coerce him in 
 self-defence. 
 
 If the State protects the father's field from 
 the spoiler, it should equally protect the 
 child's field of the mind. 
 
 The State asserts its power and duty to 
 restrain the parent who would dwarf tha 
 body or maun the limbs of his child. To 
 dwarf the brain, and maim the intellect, 
 ought to be regarded as worse than disabling 
 the body; more harmful to the child, and 
 freighted with worse calamities to the nation.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 49 
 
 The system of compulsion protects the 
 rights of the child, while it enforces the du- 
 ties of the parent. To enforce duties is not 
 an invasion of rights. 
 
 For the State to provide education for 
 every child, but fail to provide that every 
 child shall qualify himself by such education 
 for citizenship, is to maintain that the right 
 of the parent to perpetuate ignorance and, 
 in consequence, thriftlessness, intemperance, 
 and crime is above the right of the child 
 to be educated, and the right of the State to 
 self-preservation. 
 
 Chancellor Kent once said, " The parent 
 who sends his son into the world uneducated 
 defrauds the community of a useful citizen, 
 and bequeathes a nuisance." 
 
 The State should abate and abolish nui- 
 sances. 
 
 It enforces the right to send back from its 
 shores paupers and criminals already raised. 
 It should enforce the right to prevent their 
 being raised in its midst. 
 
 Criminals and paupers are not created: 
 they grow.
 
 50 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 It holds that the majority shall rule. The 
 majority has decided, from the foundations 
 of this government, that the entire body 
 of its people shall be educated: yet it 
 supinely consents to the constant imped- 
 ing and violation of this law, and tamely 
 submits to the incessant overthrow of the 
 will of the intelligent majority, by the reck- 
 less or selfish minority. 
 
 It grants to all its male citizens, not dis- 
 qualified by crime, the authority of the 
 ballot. Suffrage is power over others ; and, 
 to power over others, no right can possibly 
 exist. Whoever wishes to exercise it is 
 bound to acquire the necessary qualifica- 
 tions, as far as their acquisition is practicable 
 to him; and the conditions should be such 
 as all can fulfil. An educational condition, 
 and that of no mean order, is one that the 
 poorest can, and that the poorest should be 
 compelled to, fulfil.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 51 
 
 vn. 
 
 NOB has the good citizen completed his 
 duty to his neighbor, and his service to soci- 
 ety, and through these gained a profit for 
 himself, when he has exacted of the State 
 that it put the rudiments of book-knowledge 
 within reach of every childish hand, and 
 compel every childish hand to take hold. 
 
 Four-fifths of the industry of the country 
 is dependent upon occupations for which 
 there is need of special training ; occupa- 
 tions that receive abundant aid from the 
 governments of Europe, for which abso- 
 lutely nothing is here done by authority of 
 the States; occupations that are largely 
 filled by discontented men, who wreak their 
 discontent upon society, causing all to suffer 
 by the blundering methods they adopt to 
 improve the conditions with which they are 
 dissatisfied.
 
 52 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 Let us hear what these men say, not at 
 second hand. One of their number, speaking 
 officially, asserts in brief that "these hand- 
 workers have done enough to make all the 
 enormous surplus wealth in the world. Of 
 their creation, it should be in their posses- 
 sion; if not by peaceable means, then by 
 some means." 
 
 If this indeed be so, by what method do 
 these men themselves propose to remedy this 
 evil? 
 
 "What plans have they formed, what efforts 
 put forth in their own behalf ? 
 
 They have banded themselves together, 
 to fight what they call the common enemy, 
 in organizations that are known as trades 
 unions. They fight this common enemy by 
 a species of warfare known as strikes. 
 
 They demand legislation hi aid of their 
 side, and against this common enemy, touch- 
 ing directly the hours of work, and indirectly 
 through these the price of labor. 
 
 What are these unions? They might be 
 associations to cure the sick, help the weak,
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 53 
 
 reward the strong; associations to foster 
 skill, spread intelligence, grasp power, by 
 broadening knowledge, which is power. 
 
 We have come to the sort of labor wherein 
 what a man is stamps itself upon what he 
 does, in even the humblest forms of industry. 
 To elevate work, through this to increase 
 its compensation, the only speedy, nay, the 
 only sure way, is to elevate the workman. 
 
 Do these organizations, then, labor to this 
 end? 
 
 The Alpha and the Omega of their busi- 
 ness-creed is to crowd up wages by narrow- 
 ing competition and restricting skill. 
 
 One apprentice to four journeymen ; one 
 to seven; nay, even, in some cases, one to 
 ten, say they. 
 
 The world is widening in numbers. Num- 
 bers widen demand. Instead of one trained 
 workman to take the place of four, there 
 should be four in training to take the place 
 of one. 
 
 So far from stimulating the weak, and 
 rewarding the ambitious, they reduce one
 
 54 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 and all to a common basis. So many hours 
 a day, work for all ; so much wage a day, 
 pay for all, a universal levelling - down 
 process. 
 
 To compel the employer to pay an ineffi- 
 cient workman more than that workman is 
 worth, will compel him, in self-defence, to 
 pay an efficient workman less than such an 
 one actually earns. 
 
 To aggregate good, better, best, bad, 
 worse, worst, and exact for these the same 
 grade of compensation, will, sooner or later, 
 reduce the aggregate quality of the work 
 done. 
 
 To put skilled craftsmen at rude work is 
 to depreciate the value of skill, and so 
 depress its wages. What if a surgeon with 
 college training, a fortune spent in gaming 
 knowledge, a lifetime spent in acquiring the 
 ease of experience, should use all this but to 
 soothe paltry bruises, and heal insignificant 
 wounds ? 
 
 Through these associations, the aggrieved 
 will fight Tyranny Capital. A Tyrant
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 55 
 
 the Employer ; will assert the rights of the 
 individual man. 
 
 How? 
 
 All despotism is bad ; but the worst is that 
 that works with the machinery of freedom. 
 
 Class aggrandizement takes the place that 
 ought to be held by reason, justice, and 
 common-sense. Ordered to quit, the men 
 leave. Told to put down their tools, and 
 their bread with these, they obey without 
 question, without expostulation. They yield 
 the right to make contracts, to settle hours, 
 to settle work, to settle pay, to settle the 
 place of their labor. 
 
 In a word, they sell their liberty to main- 
 tain their rights, and make of themselves 
 slaves, that they may be free. 
 
 Moncure Conway somewhere tells a story 
 of an innkeeper who, disturbed in his slum- 
 bers by the caterwaulings of some night 
 prowler, found the poker, but, failing to 
 strike the light, succeeded in breaking the 
 hall clock and the hall lamp, then falling 
 broke out two front teeth, broke his right
 
 56 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 arm, and sprained his ankle ; in short, hit 
 and hurt nearly every thing except the cat. 
 A story with a moral, a moral to be 
 recommended to the careful study of those 
 who recommend strikes. 
 
 What is a strike ? 
 
 A war. And who needs to be told that 
 fighting is folly, and costs more than it comes 
 to. The men cease to be productive labor- 
 ers. The raw materials lie idle. The 
 machinery is at rest and rusting. The mas- 
 ter loses profits to spend, and so put money 
 into circulation, and interest with which to 
 start fresh and larger enterprises. The 
 railways and steamers lose in transportation; 
 and their employees for want of work are 
 discharged outright, or suffer in lowered 
 wages. The men themselves lose the prod- 
 uct of past labor by exhausting their sav- 
 ings; lose what would be the product of 
 present labor ; mortgage, often a year deep, 
 the labor of the future. The small trades- 
 men lose custom, and in many a case are 
 ruined by bad debts. The country loses in 
 commerce and prospective contracts.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 57 
 
 In addition, on the one hand, is resent- 
 ment fed by continued losses ; on the other, 
 intolerable bitterness engendered through 
 accumulated miseries. 
 
 There must be a more excellent way than 
 this.
 
 58 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 vm. 
 
 LEGISLATION? So say some. But what? 
 
 There is no need to talk of certain wild 
 doctrines that are enunciated by a distinct 
 foreign element in our midst, doctrines 
 that are incompatible with the existence of 
 all law, of all order, of all property, of all 
 civilization, of all that makes us to differ 
 from Mohawks and Hottentots, the stock 
 in trade of a class of men who are incapa- 
 ble or unwilling to comprehend the spirit 
 of our institutions and our life ; malcon- 
 tents professional, to whom law means tyr- 
 anny, and order a despot to be guillotined. 
 No body of American men, employers or 
 employed, are to be found training with 
 these. 
 
 The American method is set forth by one 
 of the last great national political conven-
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 59 
 
 tions, cited here, not as a single instance, 
 but as type of a class, a class to be num- 
 bered by the number of political conven- 
 tions. How does this plan read ? 
 
 It asserts that the working-man is to 
 be benefited "by so shaping legislation as 
 to secure full protection, and an ample field, 
 for capital and labor; to create for capital 
 the largest opportunities, and a just share of 
 mutual profits for these two servants of civil- 
 ization." Side by side with this plank lies 
 another declaring that this same party is 
 "opposed to land-grants, and in favor of 
 holding the public lands for actual settlers." 
 
 To the first of these, what shall be said ? 
 That those who worded it did not them- 
 selves know what they meant, and did riot 
 propose that any one else should be able to 
 tell them. 
 
 To the second ? When John Van Buren 
 made his somersault into the Free-Soil 
 party, Mike Walsh asked him, "Do you 
 think anybody will believe that you are hon- 
 est in this profession?" To which John
 
 60 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 imperturbably answered, " There are more 
 fools in the State of New York than you 
 suppose." 
 
 The common-sense of the country should 
 rise up, and condemn this tampering with 
 serious things, this " darkening of counsel by 
 words without knowledge." At present the 
 actors go their own pace, and play their 
 antics unmolested. They make promise of 
 gifts from which not the receivers, but the 
 bestowers, are to derive benefit. They have 
 cared enough for the toiler to sacrifice to 
 him, not themselves, but other people's in- 
 terests, and even his own. 
 
 They do not touch the conditions of the 
 factory operatives, of the agricultural delv- 
 ers, of the mass of unskilled laborers. They 
 exasperate great bodies of people by assert- 
 ing vaguely that the law ought to give them 
 a something that is to be a panacea for all 
 their woes. This blessed something, not be- 
 stowed, grants to each member of this body 
 warrant to envy and hate and destroy. Soci- 
 ety should demand of these " vain babblers "
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 61 
 
 that they sharply define what this something 
 is; that it may be intelligently met, and 
 accepted or ended. 
 
 "When they do interfere by direct legisla- 
 tion, it is in behalf of those who are abun- 
 dantly able to care for themselves, the 
 skilled mechanics ; men whose incomes aver- 
 age above those of clerks, salesmen, artists, 
 small employers, and professionals ; men who 
 have the opportunity, if they have the 
 brains and the will, to clamber " up higher," 
 where there is always plenty of elbow-room, 
 and where they can find others who, in 
 almost every case, have "risen from the 
 ranks." 
 
 The curse of the age for these men, as for 
 some others, is over-legislation ; a shifting 
 of personal effort and personal responsibility 
 upon some vast shadowy shoulders known 
 as the " government." 
 
 A man will not listen to truth told him 
 by an enemy ; and he very rarely gets it from 
 the mouth of a friend. Nevertheless let 
 this truth stand: the State owes to the
 
 62 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 skilled mechanic what it owes to all its 
 children, the very best means of educa- 
 tion to serve as the basis of any after-life. 
 
 Beyond this, it ought to see, for its own 
 prosperity, that the opportunities are pro- 
 vided, through which the finest skill can be 
 reached by its producing classes; and that 
 no impediment is selfishly placed in the way 
 of the weak by the strong, to prevent acqui- 
 sition of this skill, whereby the whole State 
 suffers through the non-production or the 
 ill production of any of its members. 
 
 The politicians, by the countenance they 
 give to the narrow and prescriptive policy of 
 the journeymen mechanics ; the State, by its 
 entire indifference to the establishment of 
 schools for special and technical training, 
 are aggravating a class trouble that is rap- 
 idly becoming a national calamity. 
 
 The essential lack of American workmen 
 is stick-at-iveness. They do not wish to sub- 
 mit to the primary school of patience, the 
 grammar school of apprenticeship, the high 
 school of polytechnic study. They will
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 63 
 
 have some royal road to knowledge. They 
 will not acquire the ability that is only to 
 be gathered by line upon line, precept upon 
 precept, here a little, and there a little, to 
 the full rounding-out of perfection. 
 
 A steadily narrowing limit of apprentices, 
 a shortened time of apprenticeship, an 
 entire lack of training-schools and polytech- 
 nic colleges, that is the state of the case 
 in America. 
 
 If we belonged to ourselves alone, ourselves 
 to compete only with ourselves, this policy 
 would be harmful and foolish. As it is, it is 
 suicidal ; for America, even though we may 
 think otherwise, is not the whole, but only a 
 part, of the world. 
 
 "We are great consumers: we are critical 
 buyers. We need, then, much skill and 
 thorough skill. We will have the best the 
 market affords. These trained mechanics 
 themselves desire A 1 when they come as 
 buyers ; and American workmen who will 
 not perfect themselves, nor allow others to 
 be perfected here, and American statesmen
 
 64 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 who are ignoring technical and polytechnic 
 schools as though they were of absolutely 
 no moment, are forcing us more and more to 
 a foreign market.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 IX. 
 
 EUROPE is catering to this desire. One 
 hundred years ago, it was without training- 
 schools and elementary scientific instruction 
 for the working population : now these are 
 found in every country on the continent, 
 aided by enormous government subsidies, 
 and help of liberal and intelligent kind. 
 
 In Austria proper, there are forty-five 
 schools for scientific instruction, with seven 
 polytechnic schools. 
 
 Baden has fifty special technical schools ; 
 among these, forty-one schools of " arts and 
 trades." 
 
 Bavaria has a large number of industrial 
 schools, embracing besides music, painting, 
 sculpture, and other belongings to the fine 
 arts, four agricultural academies, with twen- 
 ty-nine sections for similar instruction in 
 
 5
 
 66 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 that number of superior trade-schools. These 
 schools have, for their chief design, " to carry 
 the sciences into industry, and to put indus- 
 trial pursuits upon a footing corresponding 
 to the progress of technical art, and the 
 competition of foreign industry." 
 
 Wurtemburg, with only 1,700,000 inhabit- 
 ants, has one technical university, ten tech- 
 nical schools of the next grade with 5,140 
 pupils, eleven building and trade schools, 
 giving a thorough theoretical and practical 
 training in these occupations. 
 
 Prussia has 361 schools of agriculture, 
 general and special. Besides schools for 
 weaving and textile manufactures, there are 
 265 industrial schools, whose studies and 
 hours are directly arranged for the use of 
 mechanics. 
 
 Not only the best artisans, but the finest 
 designers in the world, are to be found in 
 Switzerland. Switzerland spends seven times 
 as much on education as on pauperism and 
 crime. She has a complete system of tech- 
 nical and special industrial schools ; and the
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 67 
 
 concededly best polytechnic institute in exist- 
 ence, that of Zurich. There are seven courses 
 of study, architecture and construction, 
 civil engineering, mechanics and machinery, 
 chemistry inorganic and applied, industrial 
 agriculture, forestry and rural economy, 
 moral and political economy, and the fine arts. 
 
 Napoleon knew well what he was doing for 
 the future of the mechanical arts of his 
 country, when he ordered drawing taught in 
 all of the schools of France. And, climbing 
 up from these, the student can enter any one 
 of a large number of schools of agriculture, 
 of drawing, of arts and trades, of hydrog- 
 raphy, of technical sciences, of design for 
 textile arts, laces, wall-paper, furniture, &c., 
 of horticulture, silk-culture, mining, practical 
 chemistry, and dyeing. 
 
 In the London exhibition of 1851, England 
 stood supreme in nine-tenths of the one hun- 
 dred departments. England, in the Paris 
 exposition of 1867, stood defeated in nine- 
 tenths of the one hundred departments. 
 Through those sixteen years, workmen
 
 68 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 graduates of these schools had entered the 
 shops of Europe, and beaten her on her 
 chosen and long-conceded ground. 
 
 What did she? Established schools of 
 this order everywhere ; established free 
 classes, art and scientific, for the purpose of 
 lifting the handicrafts to the dignity and 
 opportunity of the professions. 
 
 Great Britain in 1860 had nine schools of 
 science and art, with three hundred pupils. 
 In 1869, she had five hundred such schools, 
 with fifteen thousand pupils. 
 
 In all that tends to convert the mere 
 workman into the artisan, we are a long 
 way behind Austria, France, and Switzerland. 
 Buncombe and self-laudation will not make 
 headway against the legitimate results of this ; 
 neither will narrow rules of work, and special 
 prescriptive legislation. What we desire we 
 will have. What we want we will secure 
 wherever it can be found. America will have 
 the results of skill, whether skill is permitted 
 to perfect itself here, or not. 
 
 Here is a single straw from a rick-full:
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 69 
 
 Said a leading jeweller to me some time ago, 
 "To-day there came into this port ninety- 
 seven workers in fine gold and gems, demand- 
 ing great prices, receiving great prices ; while 
 ninety-seven American boys, sons of Ameri- 
 can mechanics, who might be in their places, 
 are common laborers or vagabonds, the 
 effect of apprenticeship tyranny." 
 
 Mark the swarm of men who answer a 
 solitary advertisement for the place of a 
 clerk ; while our railroads, our factories, our 
 trades, are crying for educated superintend- 
 ents, foremen, engineers, designers, skilful 
 managers, and cunning workmen. 
 
 The contests of the future, when civilized 
 nations shall grapple for supremacy, even 
 existence, will be industrial contests. 
 
 " We are not afraid ! one American is 
 equal to two Europeans any day." Granted 
 the American, with his broader individual 
 development, is better stuff to train : the fact 
 still stands that he must have the training. 
 There must be fraternity in place of enmity ; 
 open hands, open doors, open schools of
 
 70 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 apprenticeship, and a liberal backing of 
 technical and training schools, if this country 
 and its producers are to hold their own in its 
 own markets, to say nought of the markets 
 of the world. 
 
 Untrammelled hands, untrammelled feet, a 
 fair field, and no favor that is what the 
 skilled mechanic needs for himself; and he 
 ought to be ashamed to ask more than this 
 of the government. Let politicians stop gam- 
 bling with his discontent. Let this discon- 
 tent, with facilities of enlightenment, moil its 
 way to plans, the plans to wholesome action ; 
 and it will be the better for this man and the 
 world. 

 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 71 
 
 X. 
 
 THE trained mechanic, like the rest of 
 capable human beings, must work out his 
 own salvation. Unless his grip is strong to 
 take, it will be weak to hold. 
 
 But how ? Says Abernethy, " If a man 
 has a clear idea of what he desires to do, he 
 will seldom fail in selecting the proper means 
 of accomplishing it." 
 
 The way, it seems to me, for the mechanic 
 to secure all he earns, is the present way of 
 the world. The whole march of civilization 
 is towards co-operation. Each step is an edu- 
 cator. The power of combination belongs 
 to enlightenment. By the natural growth 
 of civilization, power passes from individuals 
 to masses. When it is really there, it makes 
 itself felt. When the knowledge that is 
 power the knowledge of self, of skill in
 
 72 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 work, of recognition of personal limitations, 
 and of the powers of others, of the relative 
 value of different gifts is well spread 
 through the industrial classes, then will be 
 seen the triumph of co-operative effort. 
 
 I am as unwilling to speak out all that I 
 think practicable in this matter, as George 
 Stephenson was about railways, when he cal- 
 culated the average speed of a train at ten 
 miles an hour ; because, if he had estimated 
 it higher, the practical men would have 
 turned a deaf ear to him, as that most unsafe 
 man, in their estimation, an enthusiast 
 and a visionary. I do not believe that co- 
 operation will give every man a brown-stone 
 house, and ten thousand a year ; but it will 
 give him what he is actually worth, and that 
 is all he has the right to demand. It will 
 elevate his work in his own estimation, by 
 making him its master, and not its slave. 
 
 It will put an end to the absurdity that 
 the "head " of the establishment is actually 
 worth no more than the hands, and ought to 
 receive no more than they of the profits of 
 their joint labor.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 73 
 
 A man with his hands cut off, and a 
 trained head on top of his body, can plan, 
 order, execute ; but if his head be cut off? 
 There is nothing a set of intelligent workers 
 would so speedily discover, working for 
 themselves, as the need of a leader, and the 
 full value of one who is a leader indeed. 
 
 What are the two pillars that base the 
 power of a large employer in America ? 
 
 Money and brains : pre-eminently the last ; 
 a special aptitude for a special work. 
 
 In most lands, even to-day, the man of 
 means is the man of privilege. Elsewhere, 
 as a rule, capital represents centuries of past 
 labor or spoliation. Here in nine-tenths of 
 the cases, and in eight-tenths of the remain- 
 ing tenth, it means present work of body 
 and brain. Here a man is poor, his son is 
 rich, his grandson is poor. Make, spend, 
 break ! The circle is complete. The cap- 
 italist, in America, is simply the sagacious, 
 sleepless, aggressive laborer. Four-fifths of 
 the manufacturing kings of New England 
 began as day-subjects.
 
 74 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 " Consummate men of business," says Ar- 
 thur Helps, "are as rare almost as great 
 poets." Such an one has promptitude of 
 action in emergencies, capacity of simplify- 
 ing work, and organizing the labors of mul- 
 titudes ; great tact, and knowledge of 
 human nature; scientific knowledge, practi- 
 cal knowledge, presence of mind, courage, 
 zeal, and the habit of command. These are 
 they who succeed, men who, in addition, 
 are of iron will ; who recognize, in a diffi- 
 culty, only a thing to be overcome; who 
 lick honey from thorns, and pay for it; 
 men who are content to yield so great a 
 price as their own servitude for their domin- 
 tion over others. 
 
 Legislation can not make all men like unto 
 these, any more than it can make all men 
 equally brave, or strong, or wise, or learned, 
 or beautiful, or beloved, or of one height. 
 Neither can co-operation ; but co-operation 
 can put all the feet on a common level. 
 After that, the heads must stand as they 
 grow ; one four feet high, one six.
 
 A PAYING IITVESTMENT. 75 
 
 Men with thinking brains in their heads, 
 though they stand but four feet, with skilled 
 hands working for themselves, would quickly 
 see the value of such a captain as this, when 
 they could pay him, and not be paid by him. 
 
 A master-mind in business is to be hired 
 as a president, a general, a naval commander, 
 is to be hired. He is hired now. Bank 
 presidents, railway officers, the " heads " 
 of all joint-stock enterprises, are secured 
 through the money in the hands of others. 
 The executive ability that is needed to 
 carry on a shop, a factory, a foundery, a 
 building enterprise, is as available. In place 
 of five rich men, fifty poor ; in place of 
 fifty rich, five hundred poor men, can 
 command such services. 
 
 And the more skill, the more ability, the 
 more training, the more general and special 
 education, there is in this body of workmen, 
 the more success for them, and the greater 
 gain for the general weal. 
 
 The governments of Europe were opposed 
 to any education of the masses, till they dis-
 
 76 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 covered in schools an unexpected ally in the 
 promotion of national industry, and the in- 
 crease of national wealth and power. That 
 discovery once made, even the least enter- 
 prising states have been driven, in self-de- 
 fence, to establish them. Desire of success, 
 and supremacy in the arts, both of peace and 
 war, is drawing Europe to the hasty accept- 
 ance and development of the policy of uni- 
 versal education. Even the Turkish empire 
 has planted in its midst a system of free 
 schools. 
 
 As we led a century ago, let us lead now. 
 Because our fathers were in advance of their 
 time, shall that excuse us for lagging behind 
 ours? 
 
 The country that exports expensive manu- 
 factures, and imports its chief necessities, 
 must perpetually be accumulating wealth, 
 and will end by getting the command both 
 of the labor and the money market ; and 
 the supremacy of any people in the arts is 
 to be gamed and maintained, hereafter, only 
 by the thorough education of its laboring 
 classes.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 77 
 
 Let us have more schools, better attend- 
 ance, technical study as a sort of high school 
 outgrowth of the common school, that, as 
 the one fits the boy for the performance of 
 his general duties as a citizen, so the other 
 may prepare him for the special duties of his 
 trade or art. Let us have more knowledge, 
 more light, for the good of the individual 
 and the good of the whole.
 
 78 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 XI. 
 
 MEANWHILE, as those of us who are able 
 to hold our own in the world, make our way 
 with such success as may attend us, having 
 brains to comprehend, hearts to feel, con- 
 sciences to enlighten, hands to execute, let 
 us, for our own safety, see that multitudes 
 of those who are incapable of holding their 
 own multitudes of "the poor whose de- 
 struction is their poverty" have that atten- 
 tion and help, that will save them from utter 
 debasement, and ourselves from heavy penal- 
 ties. 
 
 Horrible matters to investigate, these, 
 of ignorance, vice, and crime; so horrible 
 that society tries to ignore them, as though 
 ignoring destroyed ; so horrible that refined 
 human nature would fain deny the bond of 
 a common humanity with the ignorant, the 
 vicious, and the criminal.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 79 
 
 Still it is common. 
 
 There is a story somewhere told of a cer- 
 tain Welsh minister, who, coming over the 
 hills to his church one misty morning, saw, 
 off through the fog, a something he thought 
 a monster. Approaching it, " I discovered," 
 said he, " that it was a man. Reaching his 
 side, I found him to be my brother." 
 
 So we of the more favored of fortune, 
 looking out through the mists of indifference 
 or the mists of selfishness, see shapes that 
 are no more clearly defined than shadowy 
 monsters, the outcast and perishing 
 classes; creatures that wear the outward 
 garb of men and women, but are, in our 
 estimation, beings as apart from us as though 
 they were of another creation. 
 
 And yet, however we regard them, we are 
 willing or reluctant, with our consent or 
 against our consent one and all members 
 of a family that embraces the whole human 
 kind. 
 
 Am I my brother's keeper ? 
 
 " No," and " Yes," says society.
 
 80 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 No, when he is to be instructed, helped, 
 saved. 
 
 Yes, when he is to be judged, sentenced, 
 punished. 
 
 Before society condemns, it should pass 
 through a self - examination. The judge 
 should be judged. 
 
 The criminal is an enemy to human so- 
 ciety, says society; a moral wild beast, to 
 be hunted, since he is dangerous at liberty ; 
 to be caged, when .captured, with other wild 
 beasts of his own species. 
 
 A moral wild beast. Very well. Was he 
 born so? and, in that case, are we in any 
 wise responsible for such monstrous birth? 
 Or has he gone through some process of a 
 hideous transformation to which we have 
 actively or passively consented ? 
 
 We have permitted the construction of 
 courts and alleys, the building of houses for 
 human habitation, wherein no plant could 
 grow, nor flower could blossom, and in 
 which life of all sorts shoots sickly and 
 stunted, and wilts ere it can bloom.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 81 
 
 Places so close and so foul, that in them 
 no man of sensibility would stable his horse, 
 or kennel his favorite dog. 
 
 Abodes in which the ordinary decencies 
 of life are of necessity violated; since men 
 and women, young and old, the married and 
 the single, huddle together, by day and by 
 night, in a contact and an exposure that 
 must finally annihilate even the rudest sense 
 of propriety and of shame. 
 
 Dens reeking with fever and disease. 
 Where disease is, disease of blood, and 
 bone, and tissue, there is an open door 
 to vice and crime. Starved brain, famished 
 nerves, palsied will, an entire lowered physi- 
 cal tone, must depress, if not destroy, all 
 moral tone. 
 
 People here withering in ignorance; no 
 law compelling the parents to allow the 
 child instruction ; no law seeking the home- 
 less and truant child, and leading it to the 
 schoolroom door. 
 
 Given over to the tutelage of idleness and 
 vagabondage, till they graduate in outlawry.
 
 82 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 More than two-thirds of the denizens of 
 almshouses and refuges a crop gathered 
 from this soil are but one remove, if even 
 that, from absolute illiteracy. 
 
 Out of the seventeen thousand inhabitants 
 of State-prisons, eighty per cent have never 
 learned a trade, nor any means of honorable 
 support. 
 
 About these people, diseased in body and 
 mind, weak in will, craving in appetite, 
 society consents to the sale of that that 
 grants them temporary exaltation, or tempo- 
 rary forgetfulness, at the expense of what 
 means, or health, or virtue, circumstances 
 have spared. 
 
 To put a stimulant in the way of a morbid 
 appetite, a diseased stomach, an under-fed 
 body, and expect no use to be made of it, is 
 as unreasonable as to put water before the 
 perishing, food before the starving, and ex- 
 pect them not to drink thirstily, nor to feed 
 ravenously. 
 
 Here, then, are conditions of misery, 
 disease, and degradation, synonymous with
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 83 
 
 conditions of crime, for which society is 
 responsible, and the penalty of which society 
 has to pay. 
 
 There are other multitudes one, two, 
 half a dozen steps, removed from these, 
 those who do but live to toil, and toil 
 unceasingly to live; unhappy, overtasked, 
 exasperated ; who, seeking to escape for a 
 little while from the hard needs or heavy 
 pressure of their lives, stumble through the 
 saloon-doors that society opens wide to them, 
 into the jail -doors that society with haste 
 and fear shuts fast. 
 
 There are yet others who are exposed 
 naked on a highway where he who walks 
 safely needs armor of proof ; brothels, rum- 
 shops, gambling - hells, standing on either 
 side, shooting their poisoned arrows as he 
 passes by. Boys who ought to be at school, 
 or employed ; young men, young in years, 
 in knowledge, in wisdom ; idlers though 
 not vagabonds, loiterers but not vagrants ; 
 youths out for a " good time," for a " little 
 holiday," for "a bit of a spree," these
 
 84 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 " shake a loose foot" once too often, or once 
 too far, and find it caught in chains. Per- 
 haps they are only on-lookers, the compan- 
 ions of those who are in mischief: they 
 become companions in misery. 
 
 The enormous majority of those who are 
 " taken up," and " sent down " for a first 
 offence, still possess an element of self- 
 respect, in greater or less degree, and at 
 least a rude or crude sense of honor. 
 
 What does society for these? Having 
 neglected, or noticed only to tempt them, 
 society at once takes them actively in hand, 
 and begins to educate them in crime and 
 abomination; in the end punishing them, 
 while itself is punished, for what it has 
 compelled them to acquire.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 85 
 
 xn. 
 
 THERE are over two thousand county-jails 
 in the country. What are they ? 
 
 From the leading one in the leading city 
 of the land, to the smallest one in the small- 
 est district, with a few honorable exceptions, 
 they are alike, epitomes of nastiness, dis- 
 comfort, and demoralization. 
 
 The cells furnished with a straw-bed 
 and a straw-bolster; rarely more than one 
 blanket, this washed sometimes once a 
 week, in the majority of cases not once a 
 year ; without towels, without soap, without 
 water ; swarming with vermin, and poisoned 
 by the horrible exhalations of the night-tubs; 
 insufficient food furnished, badly cooked, and 
 vulgarly served; without ventilation, per- 
 haps a hole six inches square, cut into the 
 wall, and leading nowhere; no sunshine,
 
 86 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 no fresh air, close, damp, foul, offensive ; 
 no books, no light in the evening by which 
 to read them ; no services, no chaplain ; 
 often with not a single kindly-disposed vis- 
 itor ; often so insecure as to render neces- 
 sary happles or chains. 
 
 One long hall outside the horrible cells, 
 used for all purposes ; no work, no super- 
 vision, no employment for hands or heads, 
 save the drinking of whiskey, the playing 
 of cards, the acquiring of added skill in vice 
 or crime. 
 
 Frightful places for the condemned, if the 
 condemned alone were consigned to them. 
 
 But into these places are promiscuously 
 thrust, and promiscuously detained, 
 
 The innocent accused. 
 
 The guilty accused. 
 
 Those awaiting trial. 
 
 Those undergoing trial. 
 
 Those serving sentences of punishment. 
 
 Those who cannot furnish bail ; the ac- 
 cused of crime, and the innocent witness of 
 crime, alike.
 
 A PAYING ESTVESTMENT. 87 
 
 Those held for debt. 
 
 For non-payment of fines. 
 
 For vagrancy; "having no visible means 
 of support." 
 
 For insanity. 
 
 For helplessness, those whose sole of- 
 fence is blindness or infancy ; babies up to 
 four and five years of age, " committed 
 by the magistrate, because they need their 
 mother's care." 
 
 Men and women; the accused and the 
 convicted ; the innocent child and the hard- 
 ened offender ; the boy or girl charged only 
 with a misdemeanor, and the man or woman 
 capable of any enormity and every crime ; 
 the helpless and the infamous, the weak and 
 the vicious, all flung together. 
 
 The blind and the insane should be in 
 asylums. The vagrants should be put to 
 work, where they can feed themselves ; and 
 not, as now, prey upon society. The impo- 
 sition of fines should be abolished. If the 
 man can pay his fine easily, it is no punish- 
 ment : if he is without means, it resolves 
 itself into imprisonment illegally enforced.
 
 88 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 The witness should have his deposition 
 taken, duly attested by oath or affirmation, 
 and be allowed to go. Or if he is detained, 
 being without friends or money, and so 
 unable to furnish bonds to appear at trial, 
 society, that detains him for its security, has 
 no right to immolate him. It should see 
 him lodged in comfort and honor, and should 
 pay a full equivalent for his time and trouble. 
 The witness is held on the same principle 
 that justifies the taking of private property 
 for public benefit; and this principle in- 
 volves, in either case, the same right of 
 indemnity. 
 
 Now the accused, even he who is in the 
 end proven guilty, if able to furnish security, 
 can go his way in comfort and prosperity 
 through the world; while the unfortunate 
 witness of his crime perhaps the hapless 
 victim as well languishes and deteriorates 
 in the pestiferous air of the prison. 
 
 The mate of a vessel coming into the port 
 of New York, who was accused of having 
 murdered one of his sailors, and of brutally
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 89 
 
 using and maiming others, was admitted to 
 bail, and sailed away to fresh enterprises. 
 The English sailors who were his victims, 
 and the witnesses against him, strangers in a 
 strange land, unable to give security, were 
 for two whole years confined in the noisome 
 cells of Ludlow-street Jail, to bear testimony 
 in a case that never came to trial. 
 
 A dissertation from their lips upon the 
 rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of hap- 
 piness, granted in this land to the innocent 
 and the unfortunate, might be listened to, 
 and acted upon, with profit. 
 
 To charge, and to prove, are two matters. 
 The accused and the convicted should be 
 recognized as two persons. The accused, 
 even if guilty, has the right to be accounted 
 innocent till condemned. 
 
 There should be a hall of justice, into 
 which every arrested person should be 
 brought at once, and, if attainable, saved 
 imprisonment. The air of the jail is a 
 blight from which it would be well to pre- 
 serve as many as possible.
 
 90 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 The State should provide a defender, as 
 well as a prosecutor, in all cases of minors, 
 of the friendless, of the hopelessly poor. 
 The innocent, able without difficulty to 
 prove innocence, should be discharged at 
 once. Thousands of cases are now dismissed 
 after months of imprisonment, on charges 
 never substantiated, or never even called for 
 trial, mere malice, or insignificant injury, 
 lying at the bottom of them. 
 
 The accused, being committed, should be 
 shut away entirely from the condemned, and 
 from one another. They should not be 
 marked as jail-birds. If innocent, they 
 should not be exposed to contamination. If 
 guilty, they should not have the opportunity 
 of depraving others, or of sinking one step 
 lower themselves. 
 
 Above all, they should be brought to a 
 speedy trial. The State has no right to pun- 
 ish the merely suspected. Now they are often 
 kept waiting from one to twelve months for a 
 prosecution that will discharge them inno- 
 cent, or punish them with a briefer term than
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 91 
 
 that they have already served. Among the 
 condemned, misdemeanors should not be con- 
 founded with crimes, nor the mischievous 
 with the criminal, if they are not to become 
 so. Now the State full often seizes a mis- 
 chief-maker, and, by the association it com- 
 pels, graduates a malefactor. Is it too much 
 to say to those who jeer at " prison reform," 
 that, at least, the State has no right, if it 
 does not regenerate, to demoralize, and then 
 punish the demoralization itself has pro- 
 duced? 
 
 The habitual drunkards, if they are to be 
 confined at all for drunkenness, should be 
 treated as the insane, consigned to some 
 place where they can serve a curative sen- 
 tence. Now, to send down a man or woman 
 from ten to one hundred times, at great cost 
 of arrest, of trial, of commitment, only to 
 harden and degrade yet further, is neither 
 good sense nor good law, but a mockery of 
 justice. 
 
 To thrust a child into such a place as this, 
 is to accomplish the Devil's own service, and
 
 92 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 most artistically. With, my own eyes I have 
 seen a child of six, in for no crime, nor even 
 fault, listening eagerly to the fluent talk of 
 one whose association was destruction ; have 
 seen boys down for a first and small offence, 
 clustered about the knees, taking lessons 
 never to be forgotten, of robbers, burglars, 
 and adulterers. 
 
 There should be houses for such as these, 
 that should be neither jails nor prisons. 
 
 Am I my brother's keeper ? Ask it again ! 
 
 In the days of Lord Bacon, the prisons 
 were in so vile a state as to send, by the 
 prisoners, their miasma even into the court- 
 room ; and many a judge, who condemned a 
 wretch to the gallows, was in turn con- 
 demned by him to fever and the grave. 
 " Therefore" says Lord Bacon, "it were good 
 wisdom, that, in such cases, the jails were 
 well aired before they, the accused, were 
 brought forth." 
 
 Degraded, or ignorant, or helpless, tempted 
 by the law, by the license the law counte- 
 nances, demoralized by the law schools, thrust
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 93 
 
 into a grave, forgotten, coming out only to 
 prey upon us, bringing with them the pesti- 
 lence of the tomb. 
 
 Let us consider it for our own sake. 
 
 I read in the papers, the other day, of a 
 man who lived not long since, in the city of 
 London ; a man proud of his wealth, proud 
 of his position, proud of his name, the 
 inheritance of centuries, so proud that he 
 regarded the masses of his kind no more 
 than he regarded the mud of the streets 
 flung upon them by his horses' feet as he 
 rode by. 
 
 Well, this man had, in his magnificent 
 home, one only daughter, a girl rare in grace 
 and perfect in beauty ; the pride of his eyes, 
 and the gladness of his heart. And, she 
 coming of age, her father made a great feast, 
 and invited his friends and neighbors, 
 the people he recognized as belonging to his 
 world, to rejoice with him. In the midst 
 of all that light and splendor and loveliness, 
 there was nothing fairer and finer than she. 
 In the midst of the elegant adornings there
 
 94 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 worn, shimmer of silk, blaze of jewels, fall 
 of lace, royal sweep of velvet, there was 
 nothing so exquisite as the robe she wore ; 
 so dainty and marvellous that even the 
 trained and accustomed eyes there gathered 
 looked at it with wonder and with admira- 
 tion. 
 
 The delicate garment that had a wearer 
 had had a maker ; a girl as young as she, who 
 might have been as fair and as strong as she, 
 had she too had a little bit of sunshine, a 
 little bit of fresh air, a little bit of happiness ; 
 a. girl who was one of " the masses ; " who, 
 morning by morning, journeyed from the 
 stifling garret in which she lived, to the 
 grand establishment in which these artistic 
 wonders were made, and there toiled, with 
 the fever that was to destroy her already 
 burning in her veins. So with each punc- 
 ture of the needle, with each drawing in 
 and out of the silken thread, she wrought 
 fairness and beauty: she wrought and in- 
 wrought disease and death. 
 
 Thus it fell, that in less than a week from
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 95 
 
 the time the guarded daughter stood, in all 
 her pride and pomp of loveliness, brilliant, 
 admired, secure, she was twisted in the sheet 
 on which she had died, and was carried out 
 to her final rest, with no mourners having 
 the courage and the grief combined to follow 
 her, save her stricken and heart-broken 
 father. 
 
 Sooner or later, sooner or later, the bond 
 of humanity makes itself felt. If by the 
 hand grasp and fellowship of brotherhood, 
 well for us. 
 
 If not
 
 96 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 IT costs more to neglect our duties than 
 to accomplish them. 
 
 It costs more to take care of the idle poor, 
 the able paupers, than to see that they are 
 trained, in some wise, to work, and the 
 means of self-support put before them. 
 
 It costs more to cure than to prevent, ten 
 times over; and cure is rarely brought to 
 perfection even then. 
 
 Crime and its results, the original injury 
 it works, its police, its magistrates, its com- 
 mitments, its trials, its courts, its sheriffs, its 
 clerks, its judges, its juries, its prisons, its 
 penitentiaries, its gallows, cost more than 
 all the other expenses of government com- 
 bined. And what does it cost besides 
 money ? 
 
 Does the State having provided schools
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 97 
 
 for these little venders of papers, of matches, 
 these hangers-on about wharves, and build- 
 ings in construction, these small thieves and 
 vagrants, these street Arabs take them in 
 hand, and save them for its own sake, as well 
 as theirs ? Why, then, are they where and 
 what they are ? 
 
 The expenditure for maintaining a pauper 
 child and there are tens of thousands in the 
 different State and county houses till he 
 can be of some service is not less than five 
 hundred dollars ; of which not one cent is now 
 spent in making him a self-supporting and self- 
 respecting citizen. The school and the indus- 
 trial information he ought to have bestowed 
 upon him left unbestowed, he remains a 
 pauper, or becomes worse, for the sixty 
 or seventy years through which he may curse 
 the world with his presence. 
 
 Of 11,510 convicted criminals in New 
 York, 7,232 that is to say, 62 per cent 
 were orphans or half orphans. What a 
 parent has the State been to these ! 
 
 The ratio of well educated in the prisons
 
 98 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 is about one in seventy-five. The prison 
 tables that give a respectable percentage are 
 fallacious. Every man, not put to the test, 
 will overstate the amount of his education. 
 He " can read and write " reading and writ- 
 ing that require ingenuity to comprehend 
 and to decipher ! 
 
 The night-schools whereby myriads of 
 boys and girls have been saved to an honora- 
 ble, self-supporting, and helpful manhood 
 and womanhood, consume on an average two 
 dollars a year for each scholar. The average 
 expenditure for every State -prison convict, 
 aside from any previous burthen to society, is 
 two hundred dollars a year. It takes two 
 dollars a year, and a little attention, to save a 
 waif to manhood. It takes two hundred dol- 
 lars a year to support this waif when he has 
 run the streets in ignorance till he graduates 
 in crime, has lost manhood and identity 
 together, and has become a thing behind a 
 cell-door, and a number on the outside of it. 
 
 If the evil effects of the neglect of a life 
 ended with that life, they would be sore and
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 99 
 
 heavy weights for society to entail upon 
 itself; but they spread in ever - widening 
 circles as the generations move on and down. 
 
 It is a difficult matter to trace the record 
 of a criminal and pauper descent ; since, like 
 all dark things, it burrows in the dark, where 
 investigation follows with uncertain feet. 
 
 Here and there, however, by unusual prom- 
 inence of vigor and crime, by unusual per- 
 sistence of interest and study, the dismal 
 road can be traced not to its end, but 
 from a dreary past to a hideous present. 
 
 At a recent meeting of the State Charities 
 Aid Association of New York, Dr. Harris 
 presented some verified statistics of the out- 
 growth of a single life of neglect and misery. 
 
 Two hundred years ago, in a small village 
 on the Upper Hudson, " Margaret " was left 
 adrift ; a solitary child, without family, or 
 friends, or home. Ah ! if there had been a 
 school for her, a shelter for her, a law that 
 had been, in sort at least, a foster father and 
 mother to her ; and some one to see that she 
 received all that the law allowed, perhaps
 
 100 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 going a step out of the -way to make sure 
 that this life had its feet planted on the right 
 road! 
 
 But, no ; neither the law, nor any man nor 
 woman within or without the law, cared for 
 her body or her soul. 
 
 The little unregarded animal lived its ani- 
 mal life ; grew, found others of its kind, per- 
 petuated its animal life ; died ; and, dying, 
 left a long line of criminals and paupers to 
 curse those who had made no effort to turn 
 the curse of its life into a blessing. 
 
 Shooting down through six generations, 
 the county records show nine hundred descend- 
 ats of this one abandoned life to have been 
 and to be drunkards, lunatics, imbeciles, 
 idiots, paupers, and prostitutes ; two hundred 
 of these convicted of and punished for crime. 
 
 In one generation alone, there were twenty 
 children, of whom seventeen grew, like poi- 
 sonous weeds, to maturity. Of these seven- 
 teen, nine served in State prisons, for high 
 crimes, an aggregate term of fifty years; 
 while the remaining eight divided their exist-
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 101 
 
 ence among jails, penitentiaries, and alms- 
 houses. 
 
 " Behold, how great a matter a little fire 
 kindleth!" 
 
 This one spark of life, that, watched and 
 tended, might have made a cheerful blaze on 
 a domestic hearth, warming and vivifying a 
 home, an excellent thing in itself, a com- 
 fort and help to others, left to run wild, 
 has grown and grown till it sweeps a tempest 
 of flame, consuming property, persons, morals, 
 and that thing for which we care so much, 
 money, by hundreds of thousands. 
 
 " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he 
 also reap."
 
 102 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 THESE are dismal pictures, cry you, to 
 hold up as transcripts of any part of the life 
 of the Republic ! Can you not find some- 
 thing better and finer and pleasanter to put 
 before our eyes? You could enchant our 
 vision, and yet hold to the truth. 
 
 It is even so ; but there are a plenty to 
 do such grateful service, few to perform 
 its ungracious reverse. While others have 
 painted sunshine, and beauty, and prosperity, 
 till your eyes are dazzled, it is mine to stand 
 within the gloom and the shadow, and, taking 
 their voice, cry aloud, " You ignore me, but I 
 am here. Ah ! for your own sake ignore me 
 no longer ! " 
 
 "My son," said a certain great French 
 king, in giving his boy wise maxims of gov- 
 ernment, "if you would govern well, you 
 must seem to love your people."
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 103 
 
 " How shall I seem to love them, father ? " 
 inquired the boy. 
 
 "My son, by loving them." 
 
 If we would see our country great, we 
 must love it, and serve it, and love the 
 service. 
 
 It has endless possibilities of growth ; but 
 rich as it is in its native soil, even where no 
 weeds spring, it will be the better for culti- 
 vation, and we be the better for the work of 
 cultivating it. 
 
 " All in due time," you say ? " What 
 need of haste, or care, or toil ? In the ap- 
 pointed times and seasons, as the earth 
 brings forth bud, and leaf, and fruit, so will 
 thought, and creation, and progress, in fair 
 and stately order, take possession of the 
 world. Why should we be asked to help or 
 to hurry fate or Providence ? " 
 
 Do ample harvests spring from virgin soil ? 
 How much does God do for man in Nature, 
 while he sits and waits ? Out on the Cali- 
 fornia parks is a vast carpet of wild oats, 
 and, over the foot-hills, manzanita and chap-
 
 104 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 arral and scrub-oak, there from time out 
 of knowledge, and to be there till time 
 beyond thought, if Nature were left merely 
 to her own devices ; and yet in this same 
 Nature are possibilities of grain and growth 
 so luxuriant, so rich, so abounding, as to 
 be the wonder of the world. And there are 
 places all over its surface, that were thought 
 to be desert land, useless and barren, 
 Nature making no sign, that, under busy 
 hands and care, are to-day what Charles 
 the Emperor thought Florence to be, 
 " Too pleasant to be looked upon, but only 
 on holy days." 
 
 In brief, God is a good worker, but he 
 loves to be helped, and we need to help him. 
 How much more, to help one another ! 
 
 To love our country, to serve it, and to 
 love the service ! 
 
 Many a man, apparently, thinks he is 
 saying something of some credit to himself, 
 when he announces that he does not vote ; 
 that no gentleman concerns himself with 
 politics in these days.
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 105 
 
 Such an one ought to know that the citi- 
 zen who says, " I have lived through so 
 many elections, and have never cast a bal- 
 lot," confesses himself guilty of as real base- 
 ness, as the soldier who proclaims that he 
 has been through so many battles, and has 
 never fired a shot. 
 
 Such an one ought to understand that a 
 man who receives the benefit of such a gov- 
 ernment as ours, and repays it by no thought 
 nor action of his own, is no more worthy of 
 the name of gentleman, than any other re- 
 ceiver of a benefit, who accepts it while 
 openly professing contempt for the donor. 
 
 Such an one ought to realize that he who 
 has brains, culture, opportunity, and uses 
 none of these for the help of the poor, the 
 degraded, and the needy, is as unmanly as 
 a giant who sees a cripple sinking beneath 
 his load, or a child fainting under his bur- 
 then, and stretches no hand to assist or to 
 save. A sense of individual responsibility, 
 a recognition of the brotherhood of human- 
 ity, that is what we need.
 
 106 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 A sense of individual responsibility, 
 not alone to vote, but to act ; not alone to 
 make laws, but to see that they are exe- 
 cuted. There is a homely old proverb which 
 says, " If you want a thing attended to, go : 
 if not, send." 
 
 A recognition of the brotherhood of hu- 
 manity, a traveller tells, in his story of 
 foreign wanderings, of how he went into a 
 cemetery near Dublin, to stand by the grave 
 of O'Connell ; and having stood and . mused 
 for a space, moving on, came to a stone that 
 bore the name of Tom Moore. "How is 
 this ? " said he, turning to the sexton ; " a 
 Protestant laid among Catholics, a heretic 
 resting in consecrated soil ? How is this ? " 
 
 " Sure," answered the sexton, " O'Connell 
 was for liberty, and Tom Moore was for lib- 
 erty ; and liberty, you know, does make 
 brothers of us all." 
 
 Let humanity, then, make brothers of us 
 all. Since we have to confess a common 
 bond in sickness, in sorrow, hi death, at the 
 grave's mouth, let us learn it in help, in
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 107 
 
 comfort, by the strong assisting the weak, 
 and even the weak the weaker ; in a hearty 
 and wholesome recognition of the faith that 
 " one is our Father, even God ; and all 
 we are brethren."
 
 108 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 XV. 
 
 WHATSOEVER lias been said in this little 
 book to men, who have the conceded right to 
 vote, is said to women, who ought to accom- 
 plish the duty of voting. 
 
 The work of this world will be done only 
 when every man and every woman shall do 
 his and her share to the full. 
 
 Say some men and some women, " Women 
 cannot fight : therefore they should not vote. 
 Women cannot enforce disputed authority: 
 therefore they should not assume it. Men 
 will never consent to the equal rule of 
 women, since women have not the strength 
 to compel obedience." 
 
 That is to say, the world of men will 
 never advance beyond a recognition of brute 
 power. 
 
 The entire movement of civilization is
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 109 
 
 marked by the ability of men to do without, 
 force, or the forms or threatenings of force in 
 government, to accomplish self-government, 
 to submit to the dictates of -reason and con- 
 science. In just such degree as the world 
 shows itself ready for the recognition of 
 women in political power, it shows itself fit 
 for self-government. He who uses the whip 
 needs the whip. He who needs the whip, if 
 he have the opportunity, uses it. 
 
 So long as politics meant wars and rumors 
 of wars, so long as every twisted knot or 
 tangled skein was to be cut by sword or 
 battle-axe, there was no place for women's 
 hands in this field. They could hold and 
 wield no such weapons. But that day is 
 done. Even kings no longer play at chess, 
 with nations for pawns. This war of ours 
 had to defend itself, to make its cause good, 
 to prove that it signified more than national 
 territory, or power, or unity ; that it meant, 
 in very truth, liberty, humanity, the rights 
 of man, not alone for those who fought it, 
 but for those who had not the strength, in
 
 110 A PAYINQ INVESTMENT. 
 
 some cases scarcely the will, to contend for 
 themselves, ere it could go on its way to a 
 victorious close. 
 
 When a war is fought on such grounds, 
 wars, for us, are nearly ended. 
 
 " Jove means to settle 
 Astrsea in her seat again, 
 And let down, from her golden chain, 
 An age of better metal." 
 
 The questions of government to-day, and 
 yet more to-morrow, are questions sanitary, 
 educational, social, humanitarian. 
 
 The drainage of great cities ; the duties 
 of boards of health ; the education of chil- 
 dren and youth ; the fostering of science 
 and art ; the suppression of vice and in- 
 temperance ; the reforming of forms of 
 justice; the re-organization of systems of 
 public charity and public correction; the 
 supervision of homes for the homeless and 
 the disabled, for the orphans and the aged, 
 for the deaf, the blind, the sick, the incapa- 
 ble, the insane ; the establishment of jus-
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. Ill 
 
 tice in domestic relations ; a re-enactment of 
 laws touching marriage, divorce, the guard- 
 ianship of children, 
 
 These are matters, one and all, that should 
 interest woman if they do not ; that would 
 be the better done for her help ; that need 
 her care, the care of which she needs, for 
 mutual growth and benefit. 
 
 Women who, as a rule, are so cleanly and 
 careful in their own houses, and such admira- 
 ble nurses in their own homes, and such cap- 
 ital organizers in their own small domains, 
 would see that all questions concerning the 
 general health of towns and cities, the gen- 
 eral care of hospitals and asylums of all 
 sorts, were better met and answered than 
 they are by the men who now face and 
 settle them. 
 
 No set of women would keep house in 
 such a filthy way as men keep it in the 
 streets of great cities. 
 
 No set of women would keep house to 
 such waste, and to so little comfort, as men 
 keep it in the body of public institutions 
 under their control.
 
 112 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 No set of women, with the home-making 
 instinct strong in them, would organize such 
 cheerless barracks, such schools of idleness, 
 as are the huge agglomerations of public 
 charities. 
 
 No set of women, being enlightened, 
 would set wide on all sides doors that are 
 the gates to hell, dig pitfalls into which the 
 unwary must stumble, do it in the name of 
 the law, and then thrust out their well be- 
 loved to meet the fate that has been pre- 
 pared for them only standing ready to 
 punish them if they go down. 
 
 Now men say to women, and women con- 
 sent to the saying, " Thy place is at home. 
 Thy duty is to thy children. Why strive in 
 unwomanly fashion for place, and name, and 
 authority, and rights in the world ? " 
 
 A woman can only do her duty to her 
 home, to other people's homes, if her 
 own is safe : her duty to her children, 
 her duty to her own soul, by going into the 
 world, not to strive in unwomanly fashion 
 for place, and name, and authority, and
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 113 
 
 rights ; but, in womanly fashion, to do the 
 work that no man is doing, the work that 
 men are doing ill, the work that men are 
 actually forbidding to be done. 
 
 It is an easy thing to teach, an easy thing 
 to learn, selfishness, and call it womanliness. 
 
 There are a plenty to say and to hear the 
 saying, " The world is God's, not thine : 
 let him work out a change if change must 
 be." Take thine ease under thy own vine 
 and fig-tree. Let the world rush on its way to 
 sorrow, to sin, to shame. "What should such a 
 fragile form as thine do to stop or to stay it ? 
 
 Let truth fall in the streets, let virtue 
 wander homeless till its feet take hold of the 
 steps that lead down to destruction. What 
 should such a delicate hand as thine do to 
 arrest or to save ? soil it by no such contact. 
 
 Let gilded hells be opened on all sides to 
 lure thy sons and thy neighbor's sons to 
 gamble away their earnings, the support of a 
 home ; to draw them to arms that will em- 
 brace only to poison, sending them back to 
 innocent and unconscious arms, that will be 
 
 8
 
 114 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 poisoned in turn ; to put to the mouths of 
 the weak in will, the strong in appetite, that 
 that will destroy body and brain, reason and 
 conscience, home and happiness, heart and 
 soul, together. What shouldst thou know 
 of such matters? To know is to be contami- 
 nated : keep thy ignorance, or thy ostensible 
 ignorance, and thy womanly charm together. 
 
 Let government go to wrack, let commerce 
 and society conspire to accomplish evil, let 
 lives be blasted, and hearts be broken, and 
 souls be damned. What are these to thee ? 
 Thy sole duty is as a violet to smell sweet, 
 as a flute to sound fine harmonies. 
 
 And yet, sir, and yet, madam, God created 
 this woman, not a flower, not a flute, but a 
 living soul ; as such to receive help, and to 
 yield help to all other living souls ; to it 
 intrusted seed to sow, talents to- multiply, 
 work to be done. By and by the Lord of 
 the harvest will say to it, 
 
 " I gave thee of my seed to sow : 
 
 Bringest thou me an hundred fold ? 
 Can she look up with face aglow, 
 And answer, ' Father, here is gold ' ? "
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 115 
 
 Nay. Rather, she will respond, This talent 
 I multiplied not. I was afraid, afraid that 
 multiplication would bring weights to be 
 carried, and provoke envies and jealousies, 
 fears within and cares without. This garden 
 and this field I ploughed and planted and 
 weeded not. The way was rough, and hurt 
 my feet ; the sun was hot, and spoiled my 
 beauty. To be pleasing in men's eyes, to 
 men's tastes, or men's prejudices, to take my 
 ease, was more to me than to do the work of 
 God. 
 
 O my sisters ! the world is groaning and 
 travailing in pain until this day, crying out 
 of the darkness wherein it gropes, out of 
 the anguish in which it writhes, for your 
 hands and help and care. Where, then, are 
 your woman's hearts and your woman's con- 
 sciences, that you are silent and still ? 
 
 Go you to the asylums and the hospitals, 
 and make of them homes. 
 
 Go to the jails, the prisons, the peniten- 
 tiaries, and make them reformatories and 
 regenerators.
 
 116 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 Go to the ignorant, the rude, the stupid, 
 and see that the light of intelligence is let 
 into their night of mental bondage. 
 
 Go to the doors through which men go in 
 men, and come out wild beasts; the doors 
 that return, for the money there left, poverty, 
 fightings, dismantled homes, brawls, murders ; 
 that absorb men and money, and in exchange 
 crowd almshouses and jails, and ripen fruit 
 for that ghastly tree of civilization, the 
 gallows. Standing there, in behalf of men, 
 of women, of children, of society, alike out- 
 raged, defied, dishonored, destroyed, say, " In 
 the name of the law, and with the power of 
 the law, I stop this wholesale poison and 
 butchery." 
 
 O men, my brothers! of what are you 
 afraid ? In just such measure as a man does 
 his duty to the world, does he grow in real 
 manliness. In just such measure as a woman 
 does her duty to the world, does she grow in 
 real womanliness. 
 
 Selfishness is not loveliness; weakness is 
 not tenderness. As woman's life broadens
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 117 
 
 and deepens, as her thought and her cares 
 and her responsibilities widen, so does her 
 capacity for love, her strength of love, 
 broaden and deepen, grow in richness and 
 beauty, grace and power. 
 
 As women love humanity more, they will 
 give better love to the men by their sides. 
 Out of such work and such life, men, then, 
 will be the gainers in that for which they 
 reveal the most desire, and express the most 
 care. 
 
 I see grow out of such life and such work 
 a woman who possesses both head and heart ; 
 a soul to feel, a brain to think ; broad, ear- 
 nest, just, as well as sweet, tender, and pure ; 
 able to give, as well as to receive ; to help, 
 as well as to welcome help ; a woman to rest 
 a tired man, to inspire a discouraged man, to 
 stimulate a flagging man, as well as to be 
 rested, inspired, stimulated, in blessed time 
 and turn ; a woman to see in society, in 
 the church, in the State, a family that needs 
 her loving wisdom, her thoughtful care, as 
 does that of her own home; a woman^ as
 
 118 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 her Maker intended her to be. The nations 
 of the earth shall rise up and call such an 
 one blessed ; and God himself shall say to 
 her work, " Well done ! " 
 
 I ask such work for woman, not alone for 
 herself, but quite as earnestly for the sake 
 of the man who works and walks by her 
 side; since broader thinking, nobler living, 
 a more exalted type of womanhood, among 
 women, would compel and there is need 
 of it broader thinking, nobler living, a 
 more exalted type of manhood, among men. 
 
 "What does it matter to the world," as 
 Paul Flemming asks, "whether you or I 
 or another did such a deed, or wrote such a 
 book, so be it deed and book were well 
 done?" 
 
 To the world, nothing, so that the work 
 be done ; if, indeed, it can be done by 
 another. Thy work is thine alone. 
 
 Small loss to the world, perhaps, if one 
 man or one woman left his or her task un- 
 wrought ; but how if the one be multiplied 
 to millions? If each one so said, and was
 
 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 119 
 
 idle, the "matter" would be to the world 
 that all of its labor would be unaccom- 
 plished. 
 
 And, aside from the gaps and flaws so 
 made in the work and destiny of the world, 
 what does it matter to you whether your 
 eyes having seen the work to be done, your 
 ears having heard the cry of distress, and 
 the call to duty, your feet having come to 
 the burthen where it lies in the way, you 
 close your eyes, stop your ears, go wide of 
 the path and the burthen, and leave it to 
 the chance and the risk of another seeing, 
 hearing, answering, carrying faithfully to the 
 end? 
 
 To the world, it may or may not be of 
 some moment: to your soul, or mine, it is, 
 I think, the difference between an essential 
 heaven or hell. 
 
 So not alone for the world's sake, not 
 alone for the sake of men and women in 
 connection with time and the things of time, 
 but for the sake of character-growth, the 
 growth of the soul, do I ask that each
 
 120 A PAYING INVESTMENT. 
 
 man and each woman shall do his and her 
 work, where it may be found, and do it till 
 work for them is done. 
 
 Since God put no soul into the world, in 
 frail or stalwart body, to smell a rose, to 
 wander through a flower-garden, to dream 
 away the long, long hours of a sunny sum- 
 mer-time of idleness, to seek selfishly its 
 own pleasures, feed selfishly its own wants, 
 gratify selfishly its own desires; but, while 
 it is called to-day, to do whatsoever its 
 hand findeth to*do for friend or foe, or the 
 stranger within or without the gates, and to 
 do it with its might ; to clamber mountain 
 peaks peaks of earnest endeavor, of heroic 
 duty through life, that, at death, it may be 
 near to heaven ; to toil in a harvest-field, to 
 labor in a vineyard, the bread and the wine 
 of which shall be tasted here, but shall be 
 eaten and drunken to the full in the eternities 
 of God.
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Santa Barbara 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW.