"_Dear Miss Marsh_:
"Just as I have told my other friends, let me tell you: By all
means we want you to come. Do not disappoint us. But I believe that
your club is not entitled to a delegate. So I am sending you this
card. Will you attend the meeting, and the reception as my guest?"
And then her name. Sometimes, when I get discouraged about us, I take
out that letter, and read it through.
I remember when the train left that morning, how I looked back on the
village, sitting there in its big arm chair of hills, with green
cushions of woods dropped around, and wreaths of smoke curling up from
contented chimneys. And over on the South slope our big new brick county
house, with thick lips and lots of arched eye-brows, the house that us
ladies was getting seats to put in the yard of.
"Say what who will," thinks I, "I love that little town. And I guess
it's just about as good as any of us could expect."
I got to the City just before the Convention's evening meeting. I
brushed my hair up, and put on my cameo pin, and hurried right over to
the hall. And when I showed them my card, where do you guess they took
me? Up to one of the rows on the stage. Me, that had never faced an
audience except with my back to them--as organist in our church. (That
sounds so grand that I'd ought to explain that I can't play anything
except what's wrote natural. So I'm just organist to morning service,
when I can pick out my own hymns, and not for prayer meeting when
anybody is likely to pipe up and give out a song just black with sharps
and flats.) There were a hundred or more on the stage, and there were
flowers and palms and lights and colors. I sat there looking at the
pattern of the boards of the stage, and just about half sensing what was
going on at first. Then I got my eyes up a little ways to some pots of
blue hydrangeas on the edge of the stage. I had a blue hydrangea in my
yard home, so they kind of gave me courage. Then my eye slipped over the
foot-lights, to the first rows, to the back rows, to the boxes, to the
galleries--over the length and breadth of that world of folks--thousands
of them--as many as five times them in my whole village. And they were
gathered in a room the size and the shape and--almost the height of a
village green.
The woman that was going to talk that night I'd never even heard of. She
was a woman that you wouldn't think of just as a woman or a wife or a
mother or a teacher same as some. No, you thought of her first of all
as folks. And she had eyes like the living room, with all the curtains
up. She'd been talking a little bit before I could get my mind off the
folks and on to her. But all of a sudden something she was saying rang
out just like she had turned and said it to me. I cut it out of the
paper afterwards--this is it, word for word:
"_You who believe yourselves to be interested in social work, ask
yourselves what it is that you are interested in really. I will tell
you. Well, whether you know it or not, fundamentally what you care about
is_ PEOPLE. _Let us say it in a better way. It is_ FOLKS."
I never took my eyes off her face after that. For "folks" is a word I
know. Better than any other word in the language, I know that word
"folks."
She said: "Well, let us see what, in clubs, our social work has been: At
first, Clean-up days, Planting, Children's Gardens, School Gardens, Bill
Boards, the Smoke Nuisance. That is fine, all of it. These are what we
must do to make our towns fit to live in.
"Then more and more came the need to get nearer to folks--and yet
nearer. And then what did we have? Fly campaigns, Garbage Disposal, Milk
and Food Inspection, Playgrounds, Vocational Guidance, Civic and Moral
training in the schools, Sex Hygiene, Municipal Recreation, Housing. All
this has brought us closer and closer to folks--not only to their needs
but to what they have to give. That is fine--all of it. That is what we
have to do.
"But who is it that has been doing it? Those of us to whom life has been
a little kind. Those of us on whom the anguish and the toil of life do
not fall the most heavily. We are free to do these things. Clean,
cleanly clothed, having won--or been given--a little leisure, we are
free to meet together and to turn our thought to the appearance of our
cities--and to the other things. That is a great step. We have come very
far, my friends.
"But is it far enough?
"Here in this hall with us to-night there are others besides ourselves.
Each of us from near towns and far cities comes shepherding a cloud of
witnesses. Who are these? Say those others, clean and leisured, who live
in your town, and yours. Say the school children, that vast, ambiguous
host, from your town and yours and yours. Say the laboring
children--five hundred thousand of them in the states which you in this
room represent--my friends, the _laboring children_. Say, the seven
million and more women workers in your states and mine. Say the
men,--the wage earners,--toilers with the hands, multitudes, multitudes,
who on the earth and beneath it, in your town and yours and yours, are
at labor now, that we may be here--clean and at leisure. I tell you they
are all here, sitting with us, shadowy. And the immediate concerns of
these are the immediate concerns of us. And social work is the
development of the chance for all of us to participate more abundantly
in our common need to live.
"As fast as in you lies, let your civic societies look farther than
conserving or planting or beautifying, or even cleaning. Give these
things to committees--important committees. And turn you to the
fundamentals. Turn to the industries and to the government and to the
schools of your towns and there work, for there lie the hidings of your
power. Here are the great tasks of the time: The securing of economic
justice for labor, the liberation of women, and the great deliverances:
From war, from race prejudice, from prostitution, from alcohol, and at
last from poverty.
"These are the things _we_ have to do. Not they. We. You and I. These
are your tasks and mine and the tasks of those who have not our
cleanliness nor our leisure, but who will help as fast as ever we learn
how to share that help--as fast as ever we all learn how to work as
one.... Oh, my friends, we must dream far. We must dream the farthest
that folks can go. For life is something other than that which we
believe it to be."
When she'd got through, right in the middle of the power and the glory
that came in my head, something else flew up and it was: