THE HELP THAT HARMS. 723 



many persons now living are abundantly familiar. One of the in- 

 teresting 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 char- 

 ity. 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 de- 

 grees 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 minis- 

 tries or sacrifices, we had been wont to picture as indolent, exclu- 

 sive, 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 benefi- 

 cence and the most untiring sympathies. 



But, in the times of which I speak, the service on the planta- 

 tion for the sick slaA r e (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 commu- 

 nities and under conditions where no such suspicion was possible. 

 IsFc 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 mod- 

 ern 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 pre- 

 sent to those who will follow me through these pages are not con- 

 cerned with these. What I am now aiming to get before my read- 

 ers 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, 



