Accordingly his letters to her continued to concern themselves with intellectual and other external things. He wrote her half a ream of comment upon Darwin’s book, taking up for discussion every marginal note she had made concerning it. But that part of his letter was as coldly intellectual as any of their horseback conversations had been. In all the intimate parts of that and his other letters, he wrote only as one might to a sympathetic friend, as he might have written to Edmonia, for example. He even took half unconscious pains to emphasize the fatherly character of his relations with her, lest they assume some other aspect to her apprehension.
On her side Dorothy began now to write outside of herself, as it were. She described to him all her new gowns and bonnets, laughing at the confusion of mind in which a study of such details must involve him. In her childlike loyalty she told him of the wooings that so distressed her, but she did so quite as she might have written to him of the loves of Juliet and Ophelia and the Lady of Lyons. For the rest she wrote objectively now, in the main, and speculatively concerning certain of those social problems in which she knew him to be profoundly interested, and which she was somewhat studying now, because of the interest they had for him.
The word “slumming” had not been invented at that time by the insolence that does the thing it means. But Dorothy, chiefly under the guidance of her friends among the newspaper men, went to see how the abjectly poor of a great city lived, and she wrote long letters of comment to Arthur in which she told him how great and distressing the revelation was, and how she honored his desire to do something for the amelioration of these people’s lives. “Your aspiration is indeed a noble one,” she wrote in one of her letters; “the life you proposed to yourself, and from which you were diverted by your inheritance of a plantation, is the very greatest, the very noblest that any man could lead. I once thought you were doing even better in the care you are taking of the negroes at Wyanoke and Pocahontas, and in your efforts ultimately to set them free. But that was when I did not know. I know now, in part at least, and I understand your feeling in the matter as I never could have done had I not seen for myself.
“People here sometimes say things to me that hurt. But I am ready with my answer now. One woman—very intellectual, but a cat—asked me yesterday how I could bear to hold negroes in slavery, and to buy fine gowns with the proceeds of their toil. I told her frankly that I didn’t like it, but that I couldn’t help it, and in reply to her singularly ignorant inquiries as to why I didn’t end the wrong or at least my participation in it, I explained some difficulties to her that she had never taken the trouble to ask about. I told her how hard you were working to discharge the debts of your estate in order that you might send your negroes to the west to be free, and that you might yourself return to New York to do what you could for the immeasurably worse slaves here. She caught at my phrase and challenged it. I told her what I meant, and as it happened to be in a company of highly intellectual people, I suppose I ought not to have talked so much, but somehow they seemed to want to hear. I said:
“ ‘In Virginia I always visit every sick person on the plantation every day. We send for a doctor in every case, and we women sit up night after night to nurse every one that needs it. We provide proper food for the sick and the convalescent from our own tables. We take care of the old and decrepit, and of all the children. From birth to death they know that they will be abundantly provided for. What poor family around the Five Points has any such assurance? Who provides doctors and medicine and dainties for them when they are ill? Who cares for their children? Who assures them, in childhood and in old age, of as abundant a supply of food and clothing, and as good a roof, as we give to the negroes? I go every morning, as I just now said, to see every sick or afflicted negro on my own plantation and on that of my guardian. How often have you gone to the region of the Five Points to minister to those who are ill and suffering and perhaps starving there?’
“ ‘Oh, that is all cared for by the charitable organizations’ she said, ‘and by the city missionaries.’
“ ‘Is it?’ I answered. ‘I do not find it so. I have emptied my purse a dozen times in an effort to get a doctor for a very ill person here, and to buy the medicines he prescribed, and to provide food for starving ones. And then, next day I have found that the sick have died because the well did not know how to cook the food I had provided, or how to follow the doctor’s directions in the giving of medicine. I tell you these poor people are immeasurably worse off than any negro slave at the South is, or ever was. So far as I can learn there is no working population in the world that gets half so much of comfort and care and reward of every sort for its labor, as the negroes of Virginia get.’
“Then the woman broke out. She said: ‘You are dressed in a superb satin’—it was at a social function—‘and every dollar of its cost was earned by a negro slave on your plantation.’ I answered, ‘You are equally well dressed. Will you tell me who earned the money that paid for your satin gown?’ Then, Cousin Arthur, I lost my temper and my manners. I told her that while we in Virginia profited by the labor of our negroes, we gave them, as the reward of their labor, every desire of their hearts and, besides that, an assurance of support in absolute comfort for their old age, and for their children; while the laboring class in New York, from whose labor she profited, and whose toil purchased her gown, had nobody to care for them in infancy or old age, in poverty and illness and suffering. ‘It is all wrong on both sides,’ I said. ‘The toilers ought to have the full fruits of their toil in both cases. The luxury of the rich is a robbery of the poor always and everywhere. There ought not to be any such thing anywhere. The woman who made your underclothing was robbed when you bought it at the price you did. You wronged and defrauded the silk spinners and weavers and the sewing women when you bought your gown. Worse than that; you have among you men who have accumulated great fortunes in manufactures and commerce. How did they do it? Was it not in commerce by paying the producers for their products less than they were worth? Was it not in manufactures by paying men and women and children less than they have earned? Was not the great Astor estate based upon a shrewd robbery of the Indian trappers and hunters? And has it not been swelled to its present proportions by the growth of a city to whose growth the Astors have never contributed a single dollar? Isn’t the whole thing a wrong and a robbery? Isn’t the “Song of the Shirt” a reflection of truth? Isn’t there slavery in New York as actually as in Virginia, and isn’t it infinitely more cruel?’
“Then the woman shifted her ground. ‘But at least our laborers are free,’ she said. ‘Are they?’ I answered. ‘Are they free to determine for whom they will work or at what wages? Cannot their masters, who are their employers, discharge them at will, when they get old or feeble or otherwise incompetent, and leave them to starve? No master of a Virginia plantation can do that. His neighbors would actually lynch him should he turn a decrepit old negro out to die or even should he deny to him the abundant food and clothing and housing that he gives to the able-bodied negroes who make crops. And,’ I added, for I was excited, ‘this cruelty is not confined to what are ordinarily called the laboring classes. I know a man of unusual intellectual capacity, who has worked for years to build up the fortunes of his employers. He has had what is regarded as a very high salary. But being a man of generous mind he has spent his money freely in educating the ten or a dozen sons and daughters of his less fortunate brother. He is growing old now. He has earned for his master, a thousand dollars for every dollar of salary that he ever received just as all his fellow workers in the business have done. But he is growing old now, and under the strain of night and day work, he has acquired the habit of drinking too much. He hasn’t a thousand dollars in the world as his reward for helping to make this other man, his master, absurdly, iniquitously rich. Yet in his age and infirmity, the other man, luxuriating in his palatial summer home which is only one of the many palaces that other men’s toil late into the night has provided for him, decides that the old servitor is no longer worth his salary, and decrees his discharge. Is there anything so cruel as that in negro slavery? Is that man half so well off as my negro mammy, who has a house of her own and all the food and clothes she wants at the age of eighty, and who could have the service of a dozen negro attendants for the mere asking?’
“Now, Cousin Arthur, please don’t misunderstand me. Even what I have seen at the Five Points doesn’t tempt me to believe in slavery. I want of all things to see that exterminated. But, really and truly, I find an immeasurably worse slavery here in New York than I ever saw in Virginia, and I want to see it all abolished together, not merely the best and kindliest and most humane part of it. I want to see the time when every human being who works shall enjoy the full results of his work; when no man shall be any other man’s master; when no man shall grow rich by pocketing the proceeds of any other man’s genius or industry. I said all this to that woman, and she replied: ‘You are obviously a pestilent socialist. You are as bad as Fourier and Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley.’ That was very rude of her, seeing that Mr. Greeley was present, but I’ve noticed that the people who most highly pride themselves on good manners are often rude and inconsiderate of others to a degree that would not be tolerated in Virginia society—except perhaps from Mr. Madison Peyton. By the way, Mr. Jefferson Peyton was present, and to my regret he said some things in defence of slavery which I could not at all approve. Mr. Greeley interrupted him to say something like this: