Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/745

Rh many persons now living are abundantly familiar. One of the interesting and startling contrasts which might be presented to one anxious to impress a stranger with our American progress would be to take only our present century, and group together, out of its statistics, the growth and development, in its manifold varieties, during that period in any city, great or small, of institutional charity. But if such a one were just he would have, first of all, to put upon his canvas some delineation of that situation which, under so many varying conditions and amid such widely dissimilar degrees of privilege or of opportunity, preceded it. I listened the other day to the story of a charming woman, of marked culture and refinement, as she depicted, with unconscious grace and art, the life of a gentlewoman of her own age and class—she was young and fair and keenly sympathetic—on a Southern plantation before the civil war. One got such a new impression of those whom, under other skies and in large ignorance of their personal ministries or sacrifices, we had been wont to picture as indolent, exclusive, indifferent to the sorrow and disease and ignorance that, on a great rice or cotton or sugar plantation in the old days, were all about them; and one learned, with a new sense of reverence for all that is best in womanhood, how, in days that are now gone forever, there were under such conditions the most skillful beneficence and the most untiring sympathies.

But, in the times of which I speak, the service on the plantation for the sick slave (which, an ungracious criticism might have suggested, since a slave was ordinarily a valuable piece of property, had something of a sordid element in it) was matched in communities and under conditions where no such suspicion was possible. No one who knows anything of life in our smaller communities at the beginning of the century can be ignorant of what I mean. There was no village or smallest aggregation of families that had not its Abigail, its "Aunt Hannah," its "Uncle Ben," who, when there was sickness or want or sorrow in a neighbor's house, was always on hand to sympathize and to succor. I do not forget that it is said that, even under our greatly changed conditions, in modern cities this is still true of the very poor and of their kindness and mutual help to one another; and I thank God that I have abundant reason, from personal observation, to know that it is. But, happily, neither great cities nor small are largely made up of the very poor, and the considerations that I am aiming to present to those who will follow me through these pages are not concerned with these. What I am now aiming to get before my readers is that there was a time, and that it was not so very long ago, when that vast institutional charity which exists among us to-day,