Page:Uncivil Liberty.djvu/9

 sixteen." "Where do you live?" "With my mother, in Eldridge street." "What can we do for you?" "Get me some work, please." "Where have you been working?" (Hesitatingly). "In a concert saloon." "Where?" "Corner of Chatham street and Bowery." "That's it, eh? Why did you leave it?" "Well, you see, I got into a row there. Two men in one night, and I heard them say they were going to rob a young man who was kind to me, when I told them I wouldn't let them; then, for spite, they said I stole money from them. I was taken to the Toombs, and the judge, after discharging me, sent me here for work." "Where were you before going to the saloon?" "In a factory." "Why did you leave it?" "Because I only got $3 a week; my sister got the same, but it wasn't enough to support us, and we could make a great deal more as waiter girls." "How much were you paid at the saloon?" "Three dollars a week, and what we could make." "What do you mean by what you can make?" "Well, you see, ma'am, we are allowed five cents on every drink, and then the young men treat us, and when they give us a dollar, if they are spunky and decent, they will not take back the change; besides, we get lots of jewelry, brooches, ear-rings, &c." "How much did you make a week?" "From $15 to $18, according to trade; if it was good we'd go up to $20, then down to $10." "But isn't it wicked?" (Hanging down her head.) "I suppose so, ma'am; but it is hard to be hungry." "Would you like to leave the saloon?" "Yes, if I can make a living and help my poor mother." She was sent to work where she could make from $3 to $4 a week. Nothing has been heard of her since. Poor Mary! she is a good subject for some of the pity and philanthropy now going round loose in John Allen's quarters.—New York Sun.

One result of the religious meetings held in the dance-halls of that famous locality, was the awakening of wayward ones by the exhortations and prayers of the warm-hearted missionary. As the penitent girls stood around him in tears, ready to earn their living by better means, if permitted, he did not know what to do with this converts, who though fit for Heaven were thought unfit for society in this world, and he was obliged to confess that the religion be represented had no salvation for them here; that the boasted Christianity of the great metropolis had not heart, wit or money enough to open a way of escape from their fearful surroundings. When the women of Lyons took to suicide in great numbers, and "from no apparent cause," it was checked, as a similar mania before by the Roman Senate, by an order that the bodies of all who drowned themselves should be publicly exposed in the market-place, naked. Thus was even the right to die denied by rude legislators, who thought to cure the evil, not by making life more attractive, but death more repulsive. The Welsh girl, Hester Vaughn, comes to our country in quest of relatives and work. Betrayed by a trusted protector she seeks shelter in the solitude of the great city of brotherly love. In a lone garret in mid winter, without fire, food or friend, she gives birth to the man's child, which is found dead when she revives from the terror and agony of nearly three days' labor. Government comes not to relieve and amend, but to damn its victim to darker infamy. Execrated or ignored by self-righteous public opinion, she is arrested—tried—her last dollar taken by a lawyer for defence not made—and sentenced to be hanged. After many months' imprisonment she is pardoned by the Governor of Pennsylvania, only on condition that she will leave the country! Her "protector" is at large and votes for that Governor's re-election. In a city, known as the "heart" of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a young woman of intelligence, refinement, with a father, husband, brothers, uncles, able to provide support, but unable to perceive that unliberated and unemployed energies are self-destructive, brought back to a life she loathed, and endeavored to destroy once by laudanum, walks out to the railway depot, flings herself under the wheels of a moving freight-train and is killed instantly. Like the slaveholder's jury of inquest over the body of a murdered negro, who concluded he "died of the will of God or some other disease," the coroner's verdict in this case was that she came to her death by "temporary mental aberration." Well may woman assail the constituted order which assumes to restrain, rule, judge and condemn her without a hearing; nor while this various guardianship, with man, is conveniently impossible, to her it is a disastrous cheat. For her the prison, the scaffold, the