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Page 7
At one of my mass meetings of working women in the North I was told at
its close that a woman wished to speak with me in private. As soon as I
could disengage myself from the crowd of mothers who were always eager
to shake hands with me, and to bless me with tears in their eyes for
taking up their cause, I went down the room, and there, in a
dimly-lighted corner of the great hall, I found a respectable-looking
woman waiting for me. I sat down by her side, and she poured out the
pent-up sorrow of her heart before telling me the one great favor she
craved at my hands. She had an only daughter, who at the age of sixteen
she had placed out in service, at a carefully-chosen situation. We all
know what a difficult age in a girl's life is sixteen; but our girls we
can keep under our own watchful care, and their little wilfulnesses and
naughtinesses are got over within the four walls of a loving home, and
are only the thorns that precede the perfect rose of womanhood. But the
poor have to send their girls out into the great wicked world at this
age to be bread-winners, often far away from a mother's protecting care.
The girl, however, in this case was a good, steady girl, and for a time
did well. Then something unsettled her, and she left her first place,
and got another situation. For a time it seemed all right, when suddenly
her letters ceased. The mother wrote again and again, but got no answer.
She wrote to her former place; they knew nothing of her. At last she
saved up a little money and went to the town where she believed her girl
to be. She sought out and found her last address. The family had gone
away, and left no address. She made inquiries of the neighbors, of the
police. Yes, they remembered the girl--a nice-looking girl with a bright
color; but no one had seen her lately. It was as if a trap-door had
opened and let her through. She had simply disappeared. In all that
crowded city her mother could find no trace of her. "It is now thirteen
years, ma'am, since I lost her."
But all through those thirteen years that poor mother had watched and
waited for her. All through those weary years, whenever she read in the
local paper of some poor girl's body being found in the river, some poor
suicide, who had leapt,
"Mad from life's history,
Swift to death's mystery,
Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world,"
that poor mother would get into her head it might be her dear girl that
was lying there alone and unclaimed; and she would pay her fare--if she
could afford it--or if not, trudge the distance on foot, creep,
trembling, into the mortuary or the public-house where the body lay,
blue from drowning, or with the ugly red gash across the throat, take
one look, and then cry with a sigh of relief, "No, it ain't my child,"
and return again to her watching and waiting.
"Once, ma'am," she said, "I had a dream. I saw a beautiful place, all
bright and shiny, and there were lots of angels singing so sweet, when
out of the midst of the glory came my poor girl. She came straight to
me, and said, 'Oh, mother, don't fret; I'm safe and I'm happy!' and with
those words in my ears I awoke. That dream has been a great comfort to
me, ma'am; I feel sure God sent it to me. But oh, ma'am," she exclaimed,
with a new light of hope in her face, and clasping her hands in silent
entreaty, "the thought came into my head whilst you were a-speakin', if
you would be so kind as to ask at the end of every one of your meetin's,
'Has anyone heard or seen anything of a girl of the name of Sarah
Smith?' As you go all about the country, maybe I might get to hear of
her that way."
Ah me! the pathetic forlornness of the suggestion, the last hope of a
broken-hearted mother, that I should go all over the three kingdoms
asking my large audiences, "Have you seen or heard anything of Sarah
Smith?" And I was dumb. I had not a word of comfort to give her. I had
heard the words too often from the lips of outcast girls in answer to my
question, "Does your mother know where you are?" "Oh, no; I couldn't
bear that mother should know about me!"--not to know what the fate of
that young girl had been. She had been trapped, or drugged, or enticed
into that dread under-world into which so many of our working-class
girls disappear and are lost. Possibly she had been sent out of the
country, and was in some foreign den. One's best hope was that she was
dead.
But picture to yourselves the long-drawn anguish of that mother, with
nothing but a dream to comfort her amid the dread realities of life.
Picture her as only one of thousands and thousands of our working-class
mothers on whose poor dumb hearts the same nameless sorrow rests like a
gravestone; and I think no woman--no mother, at least--but will agree
with me, that this is a matter from which we, as women, cannot stand
off. Even if we had not the moral and physical welfare of our own boys
to consider, we are baptized into this cause by the tears of women, the
dumb tears of the poor. But there is one last consideration, exquisitely
painful as it is, which I cannot, I dare not, pass over, and which more
than any other has aroused the thoughtful women of England and America
to face the question and endeavor to grapple, however imperfectly as
yet, with the problem. For some strange reason the whole weight of this
evil in its last resort comes crushing down on the shoulders of a little
child--infant Christs of the cross without the crown, "martyrs of the
pang, without the palm." The sins of their parents are visited on them
from their birth, in scrofula, blindness, consumption. "Disease and
suffering," in Dickens's words, "preside over their birth, rock their
wretched cradles, nail down their little coffins, and fill their unknown
graves." More than one-half of the inmates of our Great Ormond Street
Hospital for Sick Children are sent there by vice. But would to God it
were only innocent suffering that is inflicted on the children of our
land. Alas! alas! when I first began my work, a ward in a large London
penitentiary, I found, was set apart for degraded children! Or take that
one brief appalling statement in the record of ten years of work--1884
to 1894--issued by a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
In the classification of the various victims it is stated that the
society had dealt with 4460 pitiable child victims of debauchery! Alas
for our England, and the debasement which a low moral standard for men
has made possible in our midst! And, judging by the absence of proper
legal protection and the extraordinarily low age of consent adopted by
some of the States of the Union, I fear things are not much better in
America.
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