Means to the Unity of Communities
My interest in this movement, as it has been described to me, has been touched with enthusiasm because I see in it a channel for the restoration of the unity of communities. Because I am told that things have already happened which bear promise of this very thing.
I was told what is said to be a typical story of a very fine lady, a woman of very fine natural parts, but very fastidious, whose automobile happened to be stalled one night in front of an open schoolhouse where a meeting was going on over which her seamstress was presiding. She was induced by some acquaintances of hers whom she saw going into the building, to go in, and was at first filled with disdain; she didn’t like the looks of some of the people, there was too much mixture of the sort she didn’t care to associate with—an employe of her own was presiding—but she was obliged to stay a little while, it was the most comfortable place to stay while her automobile was repaired, and before she could get away she had been touched with the generous contagion of the place. Here were people of all sorts talking about things that were interesting, that revealed to her things that she had never dreamed of before with regard to the vital common interests of persons whom she had always thought unlike herself, so that the community of the human heart was revealed to her, the singleness of human life.