Culture and Women's Clubs 115 



bread, does any one imagine that in face of such con- 

 ditions this very large portion of our population can re- 

 main very long content? 



Abraham Lincoln did indeed in 1863 free three mil- 

 lion slaves; but the black men were at least clothed 

 and fed and housed, and kept in health ; other conditions 

 had made them useless, unprofitable. Our underpaid 

 are both black and white, possibly in about equal num- 

 bers. Lincoln hardly imagined that fifty years after his 

 master stroke we should contemplate the spectacle of ten 

 or even five millions of our fellows, so underpaid, as to 

 be under-fed, insufficiently clad, and badly housed. Can 

 we placidly contemplate such a spectacle as this, the 

 country full of riches, and still imagine there is no dan- 

 ger ? Believe it not ! 



Thousands of these toilers are women, girls who live 

 in cities, clerks in great stores, toilers in great factories, 

 drudges in great hotels and business palaces, even teach- 

 ers in schools, I am told, who have only meagerest wages, 

 hardly sufficient to keep soul and body together; not 

 enough for action, to say nothing of the other factors in 

 normal life, as suggested by Mr. Balfour. Think of a 

 woman deprived not only of all opportunity of meeting 

 her desire for knowledge, but deprived of all means of 

 gratifying her innate passion for beauty and starving 

 from day to day beside! Is there no peril to the Re- 

 public in these things, no problems here like those which 

 Abraham Lincoln gave his life to solve? 



But, you say, we do not like this: it begins to grow 

 serious; it is too grave for our societies of women. I 

 hope not. In Iowa, the other day, I heard President 



