A CONTRAST

Laura Simmons

Across the gloom a shadow flits; I glimpse a sodden faceWherein the years of sin and toil and care have left their trace:A wanton laugh—I mark no more, for yonder in the glowOne waiteth me—my love, my star! with welcoming, I know:Tender and fine is she: withal so stately sweet and fairMy grateful heart thrills to Heaven, to see her standing there!If this be Woman—pure, benign, Man’s blessed beacon-light,Then—Christ! What that poor outcast soul that passed me in the night?

Across the gloom a shadow flits; I glimpse a sodden face

Wherein the years of sin and toil and care have left their trace:

A wanton laugh—I mark no more, for yonder in the glow

One waiteth me—my love, my star! with welcoming, I know:

Tender and fine is she: withal so stately sweet and fair

My grateful heart thrills to Heaven, to see her standing there!

If this be Woman—pure, benign, Man’s blessed beacon-light,

Then—Christ! What that poor outcast soul that passed me in the night?

The following striking comparison is from The Road from Jerusalem to Jericho (Good Housekeeping), a plea by Frances Duncan for votes for women on the ground that woman is the ideal samaritan; man the priest and the Levite who at the present time alone has the power, but lacks the inclination, to stoop to care for the injured by righting social wrongs, especially those affecting women. Miss Duncan tells of a haunting drawing by Frederick Remington:

The central figure is that of a man who has been taken by a band of Indians; four or five of his captors are about him, and you see the relentless faces lit with the grim joy of capture. Around the man’s neck a noose hangs loosely; about him he sees only the inexorable faces, the wide stretches of the plains, the silences in which there is no help. The man looks past the plains into the ghastly future that is just ahead. The picture is called “Missing.”

In this country hardly a day goes by but in it is enacted a tragedy worse than that of Remington’s picture; and it’s called by the same name. Take up a paper almost any day in New York and you read of the disappearance of a girl of fourteen or fifteen or sixteen, or of the suicide of a girl who has been caught in the horrible undertow from which, as far as society is concerned, there is no return. Within the last year, on the various routes between New York and Chicago, no less than nine hundred and sixty girls have disappeared.

Horatio Winslowin theComing Nation

If I had not heard the bitter cry,If I had not seen the bleeding feet—I think I should echo the salving lieThat toil is jolly and chains are sweet.If I had not walked the bedless night,If I had not lived the mealless day—I think I should censure the appetiteOf thieves that pilfer and fools that slay.If I had not heard and seen and feltAnd wept for lack of a pathway out—Most like I should pat an expansive beltAnd say nice things of the Russian knout.

If I had not heard the bitter cry,If I had not seen the bleeding feet—I think I should echo the salving lieThat toil is jolly and chains are sweet.

If I had not heard the bitter cry,

If I had not seen the bleeding feet—

I think I should echo the salving lie

That toil is jolly and chains are sweet.

If I had not walked the bedless night,If I had not lived the mealless day—I think I should censure the appetiteOf thieves that pilfer and fools that slay.

If I had not walked the bedless night,

If I had not lived the mealless day—

I think I should censure the appetite

Of thieves that pilfer and fools that slay.

If I had not heard and seen and feltAnd wept for lack of a pathway out—Most like I should pat an expansive beltAnd say nice things of the Russian knout.

If I had not heard and seen and felt

And wept for lack of a pathway out—

Most like I should pat an expansive belt

And say nice things of the Russian knout.

A woman of philanthropic tendencies was paying a visit to a lower East Side school. She was particularly interested in a group of poor pupils and asked permission to question them.

“Children, which is the greatest of all virtues?”

No one answered.

“Now, think a little. What is it I am doing when I give up time and pleasure to come and talk with you for your own good?”

A grimy hand went up in the rear of the room.

“Please, ma’am, youse are buttin’ in.”—The Delineator.

TheLadies Home Journalbelieves that, no less than factory and commercial worker, the oldest of home workers—the “domestic”—should be protected by standardization of wages, hours and living conditions. An editorial in the March issue says:

There is today practically no standard of wages for domestic help. The wages vary in different cities: in fact they vary in a city and a neighboring suburb. One “employment agency” fixes one wage: another settles on a different wage. There is no equitable fairness either to mistress or servant. No one really knows what is fair. The same haphazard system applies to hours of work. Neither employer nor servant knows what constitutes a fair day’s work for a cook or a maid. The whole question should be threshed out and adjusted to a standard just as are other branches of labor. Whether the eight-hour idea can be effectively worked out in the home is a question: more likely we shall have to begin on a ten-hour-day basis and gradually adjust ourselves to an eight-hour schedule with extra pay for extra hours. Employer and helper should know exactly where each stands on both questions of hours and wages. There is no further reason why, gradually, the system of our servants living outside of our homes should not be generally brought into vogue—the same as the working women engaged in all business lines. It is now done in “flats” and “apartments” where there is no room for servants’ quarters, and there is really no reason why the system should not be followed in houses where there is room. This would give a freedom of life to the servant that she does not now have, and which lack of freedom, and hours of her own and a life of her own, is the chief source of objection to domestic service, while the employers’ gain would lie in the fact that our homes could be smaller in proportion to the number of servants for whom we must now have rooms. In other words there seems to be no practical reason, except a blind adherence to custom, why the worker in the home should not be placed on exactly the same basis as the worker in the office, the store or the factory. That this idea is destined to come in the future, and in the near future, admits of no doubt. Of course it will take some time to consider all the phases of the matter that make home service different from office or store service. But we shall never solve the question of domestic service until we first place it on a practical business basis.

In the library of Clark University the volumes of Charles Booth’s Life and Labor of London are bound under the title A Survey of London.

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