“‘How will you do it?’ I asked.
“‘Why with lectures upon it, with plays dramatizing its dangers, and these moving pictures of the white slave traffic. These are some of the means we are employing.’
“‘I suppose you never thought of marriage,’ I suggested. ‘That is nature’s method.’
“‘Oh, marriage, but you see they can’t marry. Men won’t have them; not enough men anyhow. Besides a great many of them ought not to marry the kind of men they can and do marry. These very unions breed most of our criminals.’
“There you have a sample of the intelligence of this place. It is so wrong from beginning to end that no problem of living in it can be solved right. Everybody must therefore beg the question. These girls are not fit to become wives, these men are not fit to become husbands, so they are to be saved by informing them of what they miss in marriage. I doubt if it saves them.
“However, they have got as far as naming the problem ‘eugenics.’ They hold conventions around about this place to decide how a thoroughbred human animal can be produced. Laws are being passed, or framed for passing, which require a physician’s certificate of health from the contracting parties in marriage. It sounds right. It would be right if such laws could be enforced. But they cannot be. You might as well pass a law that smoke shall not rise, that stones shall not fall. When two people love one another that way they will marry whatever their physical rating may be.”
When A Circuit Rider’s Widow was published it was interpreted in some quarters as an attack on Methodism or upon the Methodist Church, South; there were also allegations that Mrs. Harris had been blasphemous in certain passages. The charge of blasphemy was foolish and the conclusion respecting Mrs. Harris’s attitude toward Methodism must be modified upon reading her very direct statement:
“I believe in the Methodist church, its doctrines, the liberty and breadth of its original purpose. I believe in Felix Wade [the central figure in A Circuit Rider’s Widow] as the preacher to come who will deliver this church from what is almost a military system of government, menacing to its spiritual power. In short, I believe in the democracy of the religion of Jesus Christ. Such spirituality cannot be properly interpreted by an autocracy nor by a commercialized civilization which we are very rapidly developing in this country.”
The reader will be mindful, reading the last sentence, that it was uttered in 1916, a year before America’s entrance into the war against Germany.
Mrs. Harris’s books require reading, not critical discussion. And having read them the criticism ensuing will not be literary criticism but a criticism of life—which literature is sometimes held to be. In the valley she lives with her daughter Faith, now Mrs. Harry Leech. It should be noted that the acknowledged original of Susan Walton in her book, The Co-Citizens, was Mrs. William H. Felton, Georgia’s pioneer suffragist, a woman much honored for her public spirit and for public services rendered as a private person, notably the production at the right moments of a scrapbook in which were pasted all sorts of bits of information about officeholders and candidates. Mrs. Felton collected these items for years. She was over 80 when Mrs. Harris wrote her into The Co-Citizens and although she lived in Cartersville, near “the valley,” the two women did not meet until after the publication of the novel.