In the next few months I had many letters from Mildred and Ralph,
letters full of the warm interest in life which came with returning
health and were an index of unceasing thought and activity in numberless
directions. Scarcely a state or territory from Utah to Virginia was left
unvisited and unbenefited by their brief stay.
Their course was not merely in the beaten track, a superficial glimpse
of the larger towns and fashionable resorts, but far away from railroads
and civilization. On horseback tours in forest and mountain regions they
passed from cabin to cabin among poor whites and blacks, studying the
people and their possibilities, the country and its resources.
The letters which Mildred sent me during these months would fill half a
volume, but I can find space for only one extract from them.
“Oh, my dear,” she once wrote, “I thought I knew before how much there
was that needed to be done, but I am finding every day, after all, how
little I actually realized the true state of things. It is not so much
the physical discomfort that appeals to my pity, as the apathy, the
ignorance and lack of ambition for anything better; the bitter religious
and political prejudices that still linger, and the spectacle of a
population increasing in numbers and increasing in illiteracy.
“Of course there are thousands of exceptions to all these observations.
I am not pessimistic.
“The South is awaking, is advancing rapidly in many ways, and, as I pass
swiftly from place to place and see new facts and phases of life, I am
constantly forced to reconsider and readjust my previous convictions.
Yet on the whole the main impression which I had in the beginning
survives. Here is a vast territory practically not so well known to us
Northerners as most European countries, and with a people who know us
far less than we know them; and here, as I am sometimes almost compelled
to believe, is the field for all my work and energy.
“If I had twice my wealth, I believe I should spend half of it in the
South. I would engage a few thousand of the best of our ‘surplus’ women
of New England and scatter them through the length and breadth of this
Southern land, and set them at work doing some of the things which so
need to be done.
“As it is, I have picked out certain strategic places where I shall put
a few at work, and for the boy or girl who is willing to study and not
afraid of manual labor, I have made a good education possible.
“That is the most that can be done. Putting the right persons in the
right places is the best that I can do, and then they must do the rest.
“As you know, I have never felt inclined to put my money into building
new institutions, thinking it best to work in other ways, or to help
sustain those institutions already established. But in these last months
my heart has gone out to the thousands of neglected little colored
children of the South who are orphans, and who in many places have not
even a county poorhouse to shelter them.
“I am thinking of establishing an orphanage in every one of the Southern
states similar to the one at Chattanooga which I have recently visited.
I could talk to you for hours about that brave Northern woman, Mrs.
Steele, who has so nobly been giving her life to this work.
“At first persecuted, ostracized, and despised, her building erected at
her own cost burned by incendiaries, she has gone unflinchingly on,
until now she has won the respect and has the aid of the best society in
Chattanooga.
“She has rescued hundreds of poor little orphan waifs from the
chain-gang where they were put for petty offenses, and from the street
where they roamed, with no bed but the sidewalk and gutter. She has
clothed them, fed them, taught them, mothered them, and saved them. In
all the South I can hear of but one other colored orphanage, for I find
that the people for the most part are not yet ready to tax themselves
for the support of ‘little nigger brats.’”
I did not see Mildred until February. She had telegraphed me to meet her
in New York, saying in her message that she and Ralph were about to go
abroad for four years.
By this time I had thrown away my crutch and was myself again, and I
hastened to meet her, as she had appointed, at our old rooms at the
Fifth Avenue Hotel.
She was out when I arrived, and I watched eagerly from the window for
her coming. Presently I saw her,—how vividly I recall the picture,—her
hand on her husband’s arm, tripping along briskly in the winter air, the
roses in her cheeks, her tall, slight figure clad in a trim suit of dark
green, her head surmounted by a soft toque of the same color, trimmed
with rich green holly-leaves and red berries.
How beautiful she was! More beautiful than ever, I thought, as in
glancing up she caught a glimpse of me waiting, breathless, and threw me
a kiss with girlish glee. In a moment we were in each other’s arms.
How tall and stalwart Ralph looked as he seized my hand in his strong
grasp!
I remembered that Mildred had once likened him to a young Norse god, and
I did not wonder. As for Mildred, after the first greetings were over
and we had ensconced ourselves on a _tête-à-tête_ for an evening’s talk,
I soon perceived that a certain indefinable change had come over her. I
could hardly tell what it was at first.
There was a vivacity and charm and sprightliness that I had never seen
before. I had always thought her charming, though perhaps a bit too
reserved and dignified. Some people had thought her cold, but I knew
better. Now all the latent passion and warmth of her nature had been
aroused, and I saw that she had possibilities of which I had not
dreamed.
“What is it, Mildred?” I asked, after Ralph had left us alone. “Somehow
you seem—I scarcely know what to say—you seem so young and happy, as
if”—
Mildred finished, “as if I had been drinking of the elixir of life and
had become a new creature. Yes, dear,” she added, “and so I have. Oh, I
am so happy, so unspeakably happy!”
Then suddenly turning impulsively and throwing her arms around me, her
face shining with a new light, she exclaimed, “How I wish every one else
were as happy too.
“Sometimes it seems as if it were too much, as if in this sorrowful
world I had no right to be so supremely happy. So often in these last
months,” she added musingly, “I have said to myself those lines that
seemed written for me alone:
“‘The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul, ...
Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink
Of obvious death, where I, who thought to sink,
Was caught up into love and taught the whole
Of life in a new rhythm....’
“Yes,” continued Mildred after a little pause, and her eyes grew soft
and tender, “a year ago I thought that love would never come, and I now
sometimes tremble at the thought of what I came so near missing. I do
not know how, once having learned the blessedness of this love, I could
have courage to live if Ralph were taken and I left. Oh,” she added in a
broken whisper, as for a moment she bowed her head in her hands, “if
when death comes it will only mercifully take us both together.” Ah me!
How little we both dreamed in what way that prayer was to be answered.
Presently she raised her head and continued, while her warm arms were
about me again and my head lay pillowed on her shoulder. “Ralph is so
kind, so good, so tender, so unselfish! Really, at first he seemed
almost sorry when I told him my secret and he learned that he had
married an heiress, as if he had lost the joy of working for me. How he
thanked me for keeping the secret!
“And oh, Ruby, the thought of what he is makes me so ashamed of myself,”
added Mildred humbly. “I have come to see how far beyond anything that I
have done was his noble consecration of all his time and culture and
ability to enrich the lives of those rough frontier men, while I have
done nothing but sit in a velvet chair and sign cheques for money which
I did not earn, and could never spend on myself.”
Then, after a pause: “Well, little sister,” she continued, “you do not
know, and I have no words to tell you, of my happiness. I never dreamed
of what I was losing in all those years before love came. I used to feel
so strong and self-contained and independent, and now, it is strange
enough, but I hardly know whether I have a mind of my own or not. If I
have, I cannot tell what it is until I have asked Ralph;” and she
laughed a happy laugh.
“Oh, Mildred, to think that I should ever live to hear you say that!” I
exclaimed, laughing too. “And do you still want to vote and decline to
obey? Is your haughty spirit quelled, and have”—
“Yes,” said Mildred, ambiguously. “Ralph is even more of a suffragist
than I, and declares that this nation has no right to call itself a
republic so long as one half of the people are disfranchised. And he
says the most splendid thing he ever saw a woman do was my stopping that
clergyman;” and she laughed again a ringing, girlish laugh.
After a while we began to talk about Mildred’s plans for the future.
“I want you to know everything, dear,” she said in her frank, confiding
way. “We are going away for four years, perhaps longer, for I want to
study many things, and I want to see Australia before I return—that is a
country with a future.
“We must go now, though I leave so much which is only begun and to which
I wish to give my constant personal attention. But the mental strain
this year has been great. I could not live through another like it. We
both want to get far away from our responsibilities and possessions for
a while. I want to gain perspective, to have time for quiet thought and
study.
“This was my plan from the first, as you know, and now it is imperative.
It is impossible for Ralph to write his book with the cares and
distractions which we are constantly having.”
“His book?” I asked; “I had not heard of that. Pray what is it about?”
“It is to treat of the colored races in our country. He has been
gathering the material for a long time, and it will be an exhaustive
work,” she answered. Then she added, “I, too, have a little book
planned, but of a very different sort.”
“What! you, Mildred, an authoress!” I cried. “Shall you really write a
book?”
“Oh, that is nothing nowadays, when authors are as plenty as cooks and
the world is flooded with literary rubbish,” answered Mildred rather
disdainfully. “Any scribbler can write a book. It takes neither wit nor
wisdom for that.”
“Of course; but you are not a scribbler, and you won’t write rubbish,” I
retorted: “But tell me, what is it to be about? will it be a story?”
“No,” she answered. “The public does not need any more stories, at least
mediocre ones, and mine could never be anything else. I trust that I
have too much self-respect left to be guilty of inflicting another
purposeless book on the world’s already overstocked supply. Besides, you
know, Howells says all the stories have been told.”
“Then what is it?” I asked. “Is it sermons? or sonnets? or”—
“No,” interposed Mildred; “it is _Suggestions_,—suggestions to the idle
and thoughtless, the rich and the unconsciously selfish. I am confident
that there are some tens of thousands of people in this country who are
tolerably well-meaning, who have a superfluity of leisure and wealth and
strength which they are letting run to waste because no one has
suggested to them what they might do.
“Few people like to take the initiative. They wait for some one to plan
and organize and tell them definitely what to do.
“My first intention is to suggest to them that they are peculiarly
privileged mortals, and that life is worth living only on the condition
that one does something with it. That they are sinners above all other
sinners since civilization began, if they let themselves be ignorant of
what they should know and indifferent to the evil which they should
help; the more their culture and ability the greater their debt.
“I mean to suggest some very practical things which might be done, which
need to be done. There will be suggestions for those who have time and
no money, suggestions for those who have much money and no time,
suggestions for people who think they have neither time nor money, and
suggestions for developing influence and talent where there seems very
little to start with.
“Not that these will all be particularly new or original. That is not
necessary. We heedless mortals need to have a wise thing said many times
and in many ways before it makes much impression.
“I shall not attempt to suggest many new principles of work, but simply
to make many new applications of the old ones.
“Oh, Ruby,” exclaimed Mildred, her mobile features glowing with the
enthusiasm of the thought, “what a metamorphosis of this planet we
little mortals might make if we all did, and did wisely, what it is
quite in our power to do!”
“Such a book is a capital idea,” I exclaimed, much impressed with her
plan, “and it will have double weight because you have already provided
the most effective object lessons as illustrations of what might be
done.”
“That is not exactly what I mean,” replied Mildred, shaking her head.
“No; few persons have it in their power to work in the way that I have
done on a large scale. I am not sure after all that this is what is most
needed.
“Model tenement houses and libraries are not going to save people from
selfishness. There must be the tireless, personal, face-to-face and
hand-to-hand work of men and women who have come to know themselves as
their brothers’ keepers. Institutions and paid agents can never do this
work.”
“But they can help enormously towards it,” I replied.
“Certainly,” said Mildred; “they will organize and start the work; but
then it is all these people for whom I shall write my suggestions who
must do the rest of the work, and they alone can make it effective.
“Now, for instance, here is a plan which Ralph and I have just been
working out. It is to help save the half-grown boys and girls who night
after night find their chief delight in strolling arm in arm through the
streets, with smoking, and vulgar jests and silly laughter.
“You know well enough what the social dangers are to underpaid,
giddy-headed girls shut up all day in shop or factory and longing for
freedom and companionship.
“Night after night have Ralph and I walked up and down watching them,
listening to their silly giggles and cheap talk, noting their tawdry
jewelry and ribbons and frowzy bangs.
“How I pity them! I should so like to make life a little better worth
living for them. Who can blame them for not wanting, after a hard day’s
work, to stay in their crowded, noisy homes or dreary boarding-house
hall-bedrooms?
“Everywhere that we have been we have made it a practice to visit the
dime museums and cheap theatres, and to study the amusements which these
young people crave! Everywhere I find it the same.
“I used to know in a vague way about this night-side of things, but not
until recently have I realized the awful temptations which are besetting
these empty-headed girls who have no resources in themselves.
“Free lectures, or concerts, or libraries have small charm for such as
they. They want to exercise, to flirt, above all to talk and laugh to
their heart’s content.
“The churches do not meet more than one in a hundred of such girls and
not more than one in a thousand of such young men. They have no desire
to spend an evening at a prayer-meeting, they would feel out of place at
a church sociable, and they are too tired and unambitious to care for
any classes or study.
“They want a good time; they want ‘fun,’ and they have no idea that it
can be found among members of their own sex alone. And in this their
instinct is half right.
“These young people ought to exercise and have ‘fun,’ and they ought to
have it together.
“There are various coffee-rooms for temperate men, and various girls’
club-rooms for girls alone, but, so far as I know, scarcely a
respectable place in the whole city where an honest, self-respecting,
poor girl can go and be able to meet honorable young men, under the
protection of those who would see that her natural instincts were
gratified without sacrifice of her womanhood.
“It is just such a place as this that we have decided to establish, a
social club for young men and women, where they may laugh and talk to
their heart’s content and have plenty of innocent fun.”
“And fall in love with each other?” I inquired.
“Certainly,” was the reply. “Why not? Does not all experience show it to
be impossible to purify society by breaking natural instincts or
ignoring them? Oh, my dear,” continued Mildred earnestly, “the pure love
of man and woman should be the most blessed thing in life, and I who
know the joy of this love would gladly keep these brothers and sisters
of mine from letting it be trodden in the mire, or on the other hand
slip forever out of their lives.”
“But how can this be done?” I questioned skeptically. “By simply
substituting for the sidewalk a room in which to giggle and flirt?”
“Listen,” said Mildred. “We shall not begin by building until the
experiment is assured, but we have already hired ten places in different
parts of the city, where, with the help of the ‘King’s Daughters’ and
the young people of the Society for Christian Endeavor, we shall begin
this work.
“The first thing we did was to engage a kind-hearted, middle-aged
married woman to be the responsible head of each social club. She is to
see that pleasant pictures are hung upon the walls, that potted plants
are put into the windows, and everything made homelike and cosy and in
good taste.
“There are to be no printed rules and mottoes hung around the wall, as
if it were an institution and we were trying to do the people good. They
would be suspicious of anything of that sort.”
“How many rooms have you in each place?” I asked.
“Oh, that varies,” answered Mildred. “In most of them there is a small
hall with waxed floor and piano to be used for dancing or singing
classes or debating clubs. There is another room for gymnastics, with
apparatus and a piano, where a competent person will direct, and
gradually insinuate various sensible ideas in regard to high heels,
tightlacing and a bad carriage, and try to make physical culture seem a
desirable thing.
“There will be another room for quiet games like checkers and dominoes,
several bath-rooms, and a parlor where the girls can bring their fancy
work and receive their friends.”
“But, Mildred,” I cried in alarm, “you will get a perfect mob, if you
are not careful. They will bang your piano to pieces, they will have
rude kissing games, the girls will waltz with men whom they never saw
before; and then, if you make rules and don’t let them have their own
way, they won’t come. I know the kind of people whom you want to help,
and they are the most independent creatures living.”
“Ah, but wait a minute,” replied Mildred calmly. “The ‘mob’ are not to
be invited to pour in from the street. Each one must apply for a
membership ticket, give name and address, and wait a few days before it
is granted. There may be, perhaps, a slight nominal fee. They will
appreciate it more to have this little formality about it. Moreover, the
lady who is at the head of the club, and who will be a person of
character and tact, will have authority to exclude any unruly member.
Nothing will be said about rules. They will be received as if they were
of course expected to behave well.
“Five or six of the ‘King’s Daughters’ have agreed to be in attendance
every night, with as many gentlemen who are their escorts. They will
play for dancing and gymnastics whenever it is needed. They will act as
daughters of a host and receive and introduce their guests. They will
join in the singing and the games and the conversation, and, with the
gentlemen whom they bring, will, I think, be far more effectual in
encouraging good manners than any number of rules.
“Now that everything has been planned and the wherewithal provided, I
have had no difficulty in getting some hundreds of agreeable, well-bred
young ladies from the different churches who have each pledged
themselves to bring some gentleman to assist them and to give one
evening a week faithfully to the social club.
“It is distinctly understood that there is to be no authority exercised
by them, no patronizing tolerated, and charity, and that other odious
word philanthropy, not so much as thought of.
“All are to meet on the same footing, simply as young people who are met
to have a good time in an orderly, pleasant way.
“At first there will doubtless be hoidenish manners, a good deal of
simpering and whispering and flat talk, which of course must be ignored.
But by and by the presence of ten refined, Christian young gentlemen and
ladies with tact and quick wit will make itself felt. There will be
charades and word games like twenty questions, and a hundred such merry
ways of passing the time, of which these girls have never dreamed. They
will go home with new ideas about dress and manners and ways of having a
good time. The veriest boor, who may begin by tipping back in his chair
and picking his teeth, will not fail to observe finally that if he
wishes to retain the respect of his ‘best girl’ his manners must conform
a little more to those of that young law student who spent half an hour
the other night showing her how to play parchesi, and then helped her on
with her waterproof, put up her umbrella for her, and bowed her a
pleasant good evening.
“I assure you,” continued Mildred, “I have made the discovery that the
best way to turn a silly little chit into a self-respecting woman is for
a gentleman to treat her as if she were one. And the best way to make a
stupid clown appear at his best is for a young lady of tact to try to
draw him out.
“But this is not all. There are endless things that such a club might
do.
“I hope it will develop all sorts of latent talent and mutual
helpfulness, and lead the way to discussion, comparison, and emulation
in a thousand ways.
“It will give each member an opportunity to make fifty acquaintances
where now he or she has but one,—Protestants and Catholics, Jews and
Gentiles, mechanics, factory operatives, shop-girls, bookkeepers, young
professional men, teachers, millionaires’ daughters, all meeting on the
simple ground of their youth and American citizenship, and giving each
other the pleasure of their company, the benefit of their experience.
And the rich will find that they get even more than they give.”
“But, after all,” I urged, “can you make oil and water mix? Is this a
feasible scheme?”
“That is to say,” answered Mildred, “can people of different social
rank, education, and employments meet socially with mutual profit and
pleasure? That, I am convinced, depends entirely upon the tact and
spirit of genuine friendliness which is exercised by those of the higher
rank.
“Anything that is done perfunctorily is sure to fail, but genuine
interest will create genuine interest. It all depends, you see, upon my
helpers. Without them my money can do nothing. I can only organize; they
must execute. But I am convinced that it is an experiment worth trying.”
“So you are contemplating a social revolution,” said I, as Mildred
paused, her cheeks glowing with the excitement of the thought. “Well,
sister mine, if ever one is brought about, I think it will be by your
way of doing, by trying to put the right people in the right place.
After all, I suppose this one little scheme of yours and Ralph’s, that
may help to start thousands of lives in a different direction, probably
costs no more to permanently endow than what some families would pay for
diamonds and horses and yachts for themselves alone.”
“By the way, Ruby,” asked Mildred the next day, as we sat sipping our
after-dinner coffee, while Ralph had gone out to see some lawyers, “do
you remember the first time I saw you, a little more than a year ago, at
aunt Madison’s?”
“Remember? I wonder if I shall ever forget it, or what you said to those
three rich good-for-nothing”—
“No,” broke in Mildred, “not ‘good-for-nothing,’ though I fear I thought
them so at the time. I fancy I must have spoken pretty savagely, didn’t
I?” Then, without waiting for an answer, she continued: “I felt sure, as
I thought it over afterwards, that they would hate me, that is, if they
took the trouble to think about me at all. But, do you know, I think it
really startled them into asking themselves some pretty plain questions.
“It set them to thinking, and” —she continued with a laugh— “I verily
believe that I was in a measure the humble means of grace which brought
two of them to conviction of sin and led to their conversion.
“Let me read to you part of a letter which cousin Will received and
which he forwarded to me,” said she, drawing an envelope from her
pocket. “It is from Ned Conro, the one with the blond mustache, you
remember.
“He says,—let me see,”—and she glanced down the first page, and, turning
the leaf, read aloud:—
“I began for the first time to do a little thinking that last six
months at Cambridge.
“Somehow that cousin of yours had said something, that night I was at
your house, which kept running through my head and bothered me every
now and then. I began to wonder if I weren’t about as useless a lot as
a fellow with two millions in his own right and a prospective Harvard
sheepskin ever gets to be.
“I had shirked all the work that I dared to. I divided my time, as you
know, pretty evenly between the Boston Theatre and Young’s Hotel. I
had no incentive to work, and did not propose to follow in your steps
and study a profession. I planned after I left college to go abroad
for some years. I had some vague notion of a trip to India and
tiger-hunting. At all events I meant to have good sport and plenty of
it too.
“The last thing I thought of was giving up any fun to stay at home and
play the home missionary. But every time I had settled the matter
completely in my own mind, those stinging words of that girl would
come back and make my ears tingle:—
“‘Oh, the last thing that you ever dream of is that you have a debt to
pay and are basely repudiating it.’
“I had thought that all poppycock when she said it, but when she got
her money and set to work practicing what she had preached, giving not
only her money but her whole time with her money, that just stumped
me.
“One day I took up a New York paper giving an account of her great
library scheme. ‘There,’ said I, ‘Miss Brewster has done what no man I
ever heard of would have thought of doing.’
“A man, now, would have put up a stunning ten-million-dollar library,
with his name in gilt letters on the front of it. He would put half of
the money into the building and half of the remainder into rare books
which no one would look at once a year. It would be a grand thing, no
doubt, but how many people would it reach compared with those whom
Miss Brewster’s little libraries will stimulate and help?
“Why, a library can change the future of a whole community! I tell
you, Miss Brewster has found where to sow her seed so that it will
bring forth a hundredfold.
“I wondered what _I_ could do. I could throw away my money easily
enough, endow another chair at Harvard, erect another statue to some
one, build a hospital; but, after all, what was _I_ to do, provided
that I did anything?
“Well, one day—it was Thursday afternoon—Mather said, ‘Conro, let’s go
into chapel and hear Brooks.’ So we went. I hadn’t been inside the
place for months. My set, you know, didn’t go in for that sort of
thing much.
“Somehow, something Brooks said that afternoon stirred me up all over
again and set me to thinking. Mather and I didn’t say anything as we
came out, but I knew he too was thinking.
“We started off on a walk, and after a while, as we tramped along down
past old John Harvard’s statue and on past the gymnasium, he threw
back his head and, clapping me on the shoulder, burst out, ‘I say, old
fellow, that man is a brick!’
“We turned down Craigie Street and sauntered on. Presently John Fiske
turned the corner and nodded in a jolly way over his glasses at us.
‘Did you know, Conro,’ asked Mather, after we had passed out of
hearing, ‘that Fiske could read fifteen languages, and knew no end of
history and everything else, and had made his mark, before he was as
old as we are by some years?’
“I didn’t know it, but I hadn’t time to say so before I looked up and
saw just in front of us the gray beard and brown eyes of the man whom
I, for one, think to be the greatest poet America has ever had.
“I had just got hold of Lowell last winter. Those lines of his which
Miss Brewster quoted to us had set me to looking him up, and I was
amazed to see how little I had known of his power.
“Well, whether it was Miss Brewster, or Phillips Brooks, or these men,
the two best writers of English on the continent, and the thought of
what they had made their lives mean in the world of ideas, I don’t
know, but suddenly it all came over me, the thought of earnest lives
that stood for something, and my own confounded folly, and I broke out
for the first time: ‘I say, Mather, if a fellow has been a deuced fool
for the first twenty-two years of his life, what is he likely to be at
the end of the next twenty-two?’
“Mather evidently didn’t think that was a question which required an
answer, and we tramped along together in silence for a while longer.
Then he began, ‘Conro, didn’t what Brooks said to-day make you think
of that night last winter when that black-eyed girl over there at
Louisburg Square just laid us fellows out?
“‘Gracious! how she did seem to take it all to heart, as if we had
committed the unpardonable sin, as Gordon said. Whew!—didn’t it make
him mad, though?—but—well—somehow I don’t know but she was more than
half right after all.
“‘Some things she said have been running through my head lately:
“Never a time or place where heart and brains and hands could find
such work to do and reap such far-reaching results.... Everything has
been done for us, to be sure, but we can’t be expected to go out of
our way to see that it is passed along.”’
“Well, Madison, that was the beginning of it all; and then we talked,
and the long and short of it is, that Mather and I didn’t take long in
coming to the conclusion that if a fellow ever proposed to make
anything of himself, twenty-two or three wasn’t any too early to begin
to think about it. We mulled over it a while, until finally we struck
on a scheme.
“Mather’s mother had come from the South, and he had some far-away
cousins there who had been the hottest kind of rebs. Perhaps that was
what suggested it to us; but at any rate we are in for it now, and
have given each other our word of honor to stick to it for three years
at least, and then—well, we shall see.
“I had two millions and he eight hundred thousand. I have no family,
you know, and he has only married brothers and sisters; so we are free
on that score; and we have decided to put half of our fortunes into
buying up enough stock in a lot of Southern papers to give us
practical control of the country papers over a large area down here.”
“He writes from some little town in Alabama,” said Mildred in
parenthesis. Then she continued:
“We have brought with us five or six bright Harvard boys whom we know,
and whom we are going to work in as editors of dailies in strategic
places. Each fellow will also have general supervision of a dozen
small weekly papers scattered through the states here.
“These papers form almost the sole outlook upon the world’s affairs
which the people down here ever get, and, with the exception of the
locals with which they are padded, are about as useful as Rollins’
Ancient History.
“Mather and I are hard at work studying local history and politics and
prejudices, and are planning some of the tallest kinds of innovations.
We haven’t shown our hand yet, of course, and it is generally
understood that we are here to invest in land.
“Of course we shan’t make a cent out of it all—too many niggers, and
the whites are frightfully poor—can’t pay for and don’t want anything
better than they have; but, by Jove, if I don’t succeed in shaking up
some of these consummate old Bourbons down here by the end of the next
three years, then my name isn’t Edwin G. Conro!—that’s all. However,
they aren’t all such a bad lot.”
“Well,” said Mildred, as she skimmed through the last page in silence
and slowly returned the letter to the envelope, “whether these aspiring
youths succeed in bringing the millennium down there by the time they
are twenty-five remains to be seen, but at all events they will learn
some things Harvard College has not yet taught them, and whether they
help those people much or not they have taken the first step to save
themselves.”