“What do these women write to you about?” asked the proprietor of the paper under the auspices of which the syndicate was carried on.
I answered, laughingly, “Everything—from Marmalade to Matrimony.”
When he put the question, I was representing the need of an assistant, since I was getting twenty letters per diem. Four years later, a secretary and a stenographer shared the labor of keeping in touch with writers who poured in upon my desk an average mail of one hundred letters a day. Two years afterward, the average was over a thousand a week.
I have been asked often why I expend energies and fill my days in what my critics are pleased to depreciate as “hack-work.” Nobody believes my assertion that I heartily enjoy being thus brought into intimate association with the women of America. The Syndicate has extended its territory into twenty-five States, and it is still growing. Women, boys, and girls, and housefathers—no less than housemothers—tell me of their lives, their successes, their failures, their trials, and their several problems. From the mighty mass of correspondence I select letters dealing with topics of general interest, or that seem to call for free and friendly discussion, and base upon them daily articles for the Syndicate public. Thousands of letters contain stamps for replies by mail. Out of this germ of “hack-work” has grown “The Helping-Hand Club,” an informal organization, with no “plant” except my desk and the postal service that transports applications for books, magazines, and such useful articles as correspondents know will be welcome to the indigent, the shut-in, the aged, charitable societies and missions in waste places. Quietly, and without parade, our volunteer agents visit the needy, and report to us. We distribute, by correspondence, thousands of volumes and periodicals annually; we bring together supply and demand, “without money and without price,” and in ways that would appear ridiculous to some, and incredible to many.
“For Love’s Sake” is our motto, and it is caught up eagerly, from Canada to California. “The Big Family,” they call themselves—these dear co-workers of mine whose faces I shall never see on earth. When, as happens daily, I read, “Dear Mother of us all,” from those I have been permitted to help in mind, body, or estate, I thank the Master and take courage.
After eight years’ active service in the field so strangely appointed to me that I cannot but recognize (and with humble gratitude) the direct leading of the Divine Hand, I say, frankly, that I have never had such fulness of satisfaction in any other sphere of labor.
“But it is not Literature!” cried a friend to me, the other day, voicing the sentiment of many.
“No,” I answered, “but it is Influence, and that of the best kind.”