Appended to the above was the letter which the reader will find in the
Appendix, page 111. The _Times_ did not publish this letter, nor did it
pay any attention to several letters of protest which followed. I leave
it to the reader to judge whether the silence of the paper was one of
dignity or of fear. The following despatch from the New York _World_ of
May 17, 1910, records the experiences of the Garden City ladies, and
makes clear how much in need of sympathy my "victims" were.
All three of the young women are in rare spirits. They have gone
about their usual occupations and recreations, and Mrs. Trask
found time yesterday to talk about the single tax in the course of
a conversation that had to do primarily with her newer interest.
"We are getting the most extraordinary number of letters about
this adventure of ours," Mrs. Trask said. "They began to come the
first day, and to-day there were lots of them. They come from some
of the most unexpected places and they contain some of the most
unexpected things.
"What most astonishes me is that of all those who write to tell
us that they have tried just what we are doing, not one has told
us of a failure. There isn't any reason why they shouldn't write
to say that we are foolish and that we can't hope to gain what we
want, but dozens of them have reiterated the promise that we'll
never regret having made our experiment.
"One New York woman told us something that we had wondered about
more than once. Her husband had suffered greatly from rheumatism,
and finally he tried fasting. Not dieting like ourselves, but
fasting. He went without food of any kind, she said, for nineteen
days. He kept on at his work, too, which was the thing we had been
wondering about.
"We've heard from another physician, too. He lives in Boston and
has made a specialty of dietetics. He warned us not to stick too
closely to milk, because we'd find that after a day or two it
would quit being of the service it had been at first. People we
never heard of tell us that thus and so was their experience, and
when we measure our own discoveries beside theirs we find new and
convincing evidence that we picked the true way to the end we
hoped to reach.
"I know that for myself I'll have reason to be grateful always
that I took this up. We have been greatly benefited."