If you have asked the question, "Does it pay to labor among the fallen ones in prison—are the results from this work permanent in character?" let the answer be found in these letters. They come from writers' spontaneous offerings of gratitude, who have been restored to society as useful respected citizens:
My Dearest Friend: It is very gratifying to find myself alone long enough to pen you a few lines.
Arrived at 6:05 p.m. Well, I cannot tell you how very pleased everyone was to see me. Went in at once to see the president of a concern and told him everything. He was entirely satisfied and told me to commence work in the morning, which I did. They all have used me fine, and I would never know I had been away for no one mentions it. Brother, I think of you fifty times a day, of the unselfish, never fatiguing interest you manifested in my behalf, of the hundred and one favors, and when I think that was only a single factor in your work, I cannot but wonder how you stand the strain.
Cannot tell you how much I prize liberty, and I owe having it, to a great extent, to your dear self. I assure you your efforts and prayers of yourself and wife for me done wonders. I have fully resolved to be a good man.
Brother Herr, I am going to close, for I am going to write to you every few days, as I consider you as dear as an own brother. Give my sincere regards to any inquiring friends. My heartiest to your dear wife, and may God bless you both. I do.
I am affectionately yours,
W.
A TRIBUTE FROM JOS. M. O'HARA.
The success that has attended the efforts of this truly pious and angelic woman in her noble and heroic work of rescuing sinful men and women from the vortex of ruin and perdition is marvelous; and her labor among the prisoners of the county jail is not less remarkable. Mrs. Herr, unlike many religious workers, realizes that before attempting to moralize with a prisoner, his confidence must first be gained, and to accomplish this she invariably succeeds in dispelling that false and erroneous opinion so prevalent among criminals, that they are held in contempt by society and are considered undeserving of sympathy and assistance; then, by kind and encouraging words and gentle deed, instills, not by the dry and laborious way of the brain, but into the heart, the story of the kind and loving Saviour.
Like her contemporary, Mrs. Ballington Booth, Mrs. Herr possesses that divinely urgent and persistent, yet gentle and sympathetic spirit that can persuade where others cannot convince; that can subdue where others cannot conquer.