“It would probably learn to speak truth and not lies,” I answered.
CHAPTER XV.
In the next few months I had many letters from Mildred and Ralph, letters full of the warm interest in life which came with returning health and were an index of unceasing thought and activity in numberless directions. Scarcely a state or territory from Utah to Virginia was left unvisited and unbenefited by their brief stay.
Their course was not merely in the beaten track, a superficial glimpse of the larger towns and fashionable resorts, but far away from railroads and civilization. On horseback tours in forest and mountain regions they passed from cabin to cabin among poor whites and blacks, studying the people and their possibilities, the country and its resources.
The letters which Mildred sent me during these months would fill half a volume, but I can find space for only one extract from them.
“Oh, my dear,” she once wrote, “I thought I knew before how much there was that needed to be done, but I am finding every day, after all, how little I actually realized the true state of things. It is not so much the physical discomfort that appeals to my pity, as the apathy, the ignorance and lack of ambition for anything better; the bitter religious and political prejudices that still linger, and the spectacle of a population increasing in numbers and increasing in illiteracy.
“Of course there are thousands of exceptions to all these observations. I am not pessimistic.
“The South is awaking, is advancing rapidly in many ways, and, as I pass swiftly from place to place and see new facts and phases of life, I am constantly forced to reconsider and readjust my previous convictions. Yet on the whole the main impression which I had in the beginning survives. Here is a vast territory practically not so well known to us Northerners as most European countries, and with a people who know us far less than we know them; and here, as I am sometimes almost compelled to believe, is the field for all my work and energy.
“If I had twice my wealth, I believe I should spend half of it in the South. I would engage a few thousand of the best of our ‘surplus’ women of New England and scatter them through the length and breadth of this Southern land, and set them at work doing some of the things which so need to be done.
“As it is, I have picked out certain strategic places where I shall put a few at work, and for the boy or girl who is willing to study and not afraid of manual labor, I have made a good education possible.