Mr. Kirk Munroe to the Round Table Order.
My Dear Fellow-members of the Round Table:
I have just returned from a visit that I wish every one of you might have made with me. It was to the Good Will Farm away down in the State of Maine. There I spent two happy days, and from there I have come away filled with enthusiasm for the most splendid charity of which I have any knowledge. If you could only see what I have seen, and hear what I have heard, that manual training-school that we are proposing to build for the Good Will boys some time would long since have been built and in active operation. As you can't see it, and probably know just as little about it as I did before going there, which was practically nothing at all, I am going to try and give you a slight idea of what the Good Will Farm is, and what it is doing.
The man who conceived the idea of Good Will Farm, and has made it his life-work, is the Rev. G. W. Hinckley, a splendid, manly, whole-souled Christian, who when he was a boy had as a playmate the son of a very poor widow. This woman went away from home every day to work after giving her boy his breakfast. Then she locked the house, and left the boy to shift for himself outside until she came home at night and prepared the second and only other meal of the day. Between those two meals the boy used to get awfully hungry, and one day he was caught with his hand in a workman's dinner pail. For this he was sent to a State reform school, from which he emerged three years later a thorough-going young criminal, ruined for life in body and mind. Distressed at the sad fate of his young playmate, Mr. Hinckley then and there declared his intention of devoting all the energies of his life to the saving of destitute boys from reform schools. By years of hard work he laid up $2000, with which, less than six years ago, he purchased a farm of 240 acres on the upper Kennebec River in Maine, about midway between the cities of Waterville and Skowhegan. Here, in an old farm-house, he began his work with three boys. He had no source of income, and the work is carried on entirely by voluntary subscriptions. These come from everywhere, and generally from strangers, of whom Mr. Hinckley has had no previous knowledge.
To-day Good Will Farm owns, besides the original farm-house, which has been wholly rebuilt, five handsome cottages, each in charge of a matron, and in each of which fifteen boys between eight and sixteen years of age find a comfortable, happy home. There are now seventy-six boys, most of them orphans, many without a relative in the world, and nearly all of them of American parentage, living, working, and growing up to a useful manhood amid the splendid influences of this farm. Each of the cottages in which these boys live has cost $3000, and has been presented as a free gift to the farm either by individuals or by societies, such as the Christian Endeavor Society of Maine, who presented the one that is named after it, and in which I was lodged.
Beside these cottages there is a splendid brick school building that cost $20,000, which was presented by two Maine ladies as a memorial to their brother.
The farm needs more cottages, many more of them, for Mr. Hinckley has been obliged to refuse nearly 700 applications for admission to Good Will this year for lack of accommodations. It also needs a manual training-school, and needs it very much indeed. We, the Knights and Ladies of the Round Table, promised, more than two years ago, to build that school for them; but we haven't done it yet, and when visitors to the farm ask to be shown the Round Table building they are led to a most beautiful site, on which rest two great piles of stone, hauled there for the foundations. They are told that here is where the school will stand whenever the young Knights and Ladies get ready to build it; and Mr. Hinckley always adds, "They are certain to do it, for they have promised, and I have never yet been disappointed in any promise made in connection with this work."
It made me feel awfully ashamed to think that we made that promise two years ago and had not fulfilled it yet. How do you feel about it?
All the work of the farm is done by the boys themselves. They chop wood, and fetch water, and plough, and make hay, and bake all the bread, and wait on table, and sweep, and do a thousand other things, besides having regular study hours and drills. In addition to all this they somehow find time to attend to their own little private gardens—the produce of which, is bought by the Farm at the regular market price—to play ball, go in swimming, build "Cubbies" or cubby houses down by the river out of bits of refuse lumber, and do almost everything else that hearty, happy boys find to do in the country.
The most striking features of the farm are the utter absence of profanity or even vulgar language, for I did not hear a word while there that could not have been uttered with perfect propriety in a Sunday-school; the prompt obedience to orders; the happy, homelike air pervading the whole farm, and Mr. Hinckley's infinite patience in dealing with the boys. He is always ready to listen to them, always ready to advise them, and is always interested in their most trivial affairs. As he says, "If I encourage them to come to me freely with their little perplexities, they will come to me for advice concerning their greater affairs later on."
One boy is kept at the farm by an Odd Fellows Association, of which his father was a member, and who have pledged $100 per year for his support until he is fitted to care for himself. The head waiter of the dining-room, a merry-faced, curly-headed, sixteen-year-old chap, is to be sent through Bowdoin by this year's graduating class of that college; while this year's class of Colby has promised to send another Good Will boy through that university.
Many of the boys don't want to go to college, but are very anxious to learn trades. The present facilities for teaching them are two carpenter benches and a few tools, all huddled into one little room in the old farm-house. Now don't you think this is a splendid charity, and that those boys need that manual training-school, and that it is a fine thing for us to work for? I do; though I must confess that I wasn't very greatly interested before I went there. But that was because I didn't know about it, and the reason the school building that we promised isn't occupying the lovely site set apart for it is because you haven't really known about it. But now you know about it, for I have been there and have told you something of what I saw; and I feel certain that you will believe that all I have said is true. So now we will go to work and build that school, won't we? Do you know that even five cents apiece from each Knight and Lady of the Round Table would do it? Who will follow me if I head a—let me say, ten-cent subscription list for the Good Will Farm Industrial School? I am sure every member of all the "K. M." chapters will, and I am almost certain that every member of our splendid order of modern chivalry will. At any rate, I am going to try it, and shall enclose a dime in this very letter to Messrs. Harper & Bros. Next summer I want to go again to Good Will Farm; but I shall not unless that school building is ready for dedication. In the mean time, I remain to all the Knights and Ladies of the Round Table, their loving friend and fellow-member,
Kirk Munroe.