THE delicate ladies on Beacon Street, who order their ices and creams flavored with vanilla or pear-juice, may not know that bituminous coal, rope-ends, and creosote, furnish a larger proportion of the piquant seasoning than the blossoming bean or the orchard-tree; but every man of science does.[11]
Already the chemist furnishes the attar of Cashmere from heaps of offal that lie rotting by the way. It is as if God forced man face to face with every repellent fact of nature, and said, "Slake thy thirst at this turbid fountain, child of the dust; or the purer streams of the hillside shall trickle for thee in vain."
Somewhat so, I am compelled to turn your eyes to the most repulsive side of human life. I do not do it willingly, but of a necessity; not because I like it, but because it is essential to the argument. May the contact prove, that the perfumed joy of later years has disguised itself, for both of us, in the rotting accumulations of our social life!
It rests with yourselves to decide. These lectures may be useless; they may fill your minds with painful details, open hideous vistas, and blind you to the tempting, heavenward ways which we love to see the young and beautiful pursue.
But, in such case, the responsibility is not mine. I would have you look on vice, that you may learn to loathe it; I would have you realize, that what a noble friend of ours has called the "perishing classes" are made of men and women like yourselves.
Bidding you trust, to a certain extent, to the truth of those terrible statistics that crush Thomas Henry Buckle in their grasp, I would still have you remember, that, beside the active laws of moral and material life, there is ever the living God immanent in the world; and that it is always for you to change the results of history, at any given era, according to the great first law,—none the less real because so often forgotten,—that this living God helps or hinders you as you will, and becomes, at any moment that you choose, an important element in each calculation.
The subject at present before us is "Woman's Claims to Labor."
These claims rest upon three points:—