PREFACE TO "FOR HER DAILY BREAD."
I HAVE read, this story, this fragment of a life mingled with fragments of other lives, and have been pleased, interested, and instructed. It is filled with the pathos of truth, and has in it the humor that accompanies actual experience. It has but little to do with the world of imagination; certain feelings are not attributed to persons born of fancy, but it is the history of a heart and brain interested in the common things of life. There are no kings, no lords, no titled ladies, but there are real people, the people of the shop and street whom every reader knows, and there are lines intense and beautiful, and scenes that touch the heart. You will find no theories of government, no hazy outlines of reform, nothing but facts and folks, as they have been, as they are, and probably will be for many centuries to come.
If you read this book you will be convinced that men and women are good or bad, charitable or heartless, by reason of something within, and not by virtue of any name they bear, or any trade or profession they follow, or of any creed they may accept. You will also find that men sometimes are honest and mean; that women may be very virtuous and very cruel; that good, generous and sympathetic men are often disreputable, and that some exceedingly worthy citizens are extremely mean and uncomfortable neighbors.
It takes a great deal of genius and a good deal of selfdenial to be very bad or to be very good. Few people understand the amount of energy, industry, and self-denial it requires to be consistently vicious. People who have a pride in being good and fail, and those who have a pride in being bad and fail, in order to make their records consistent generally rely upon hypocrisy. The people that live and hope and fear in this book, are much like the people who live and hope and fear in the actual world. The professor is much like the professor in the ordinary college. You will find the conscientious, half-paid teacher, the hopeful poor, the anxious rich, the true lover, the stingy philanthropist, who cares for people only in the aggregate,—the individual atom being too small to attract his notice or to enlist his heart; the sympathetic man who loves himself, and gives, not for the sake of the beggar, but for the sake of getting rid of the beggar, and you will also find the man generous to a fault—with the money of others. And the reader will find these people described naturally, truthfully and without exaggeration, and he will feel certain that all these people have really lived.
The reader of this story will get some idea as to what is encountered by a girl in an honest effort to gain her daily bread. He will find how steep, how devious and how difficult is the path she treads.
There are so few occupations open to woman, so few things in which she can hope for independence, that to be thrown upon her own resources is almost equivalent to being cast away. Besides, she is an object of continual suspicion, watched not only by men but by women. If she does anything that other women are not doing, she is at once suspected, her reputation is touched, and other women, for fear of being stained themselves, withdraw not only the hand of help, but the smile of recognition. A young woman cannot defend herself without telling the charge that has been made against her. This, of itself, gives a kind of currency to slander. To speak of the suspicion that has crawled across her path, is to plant the seeds of doubt in other minds; to even deny it, admits that it exists. To be suspected, that is enough. There is no way of destroying this suspicion. There is no court in which suspicions are tried; no juries that can render verdicts of not guilty. Most women are driven at last to the needle, and this does not allow them to live; it simply keeps them from dying.
It is hard to appreciate the dangers and difficulties that lie in wait for woman. Even in this Christian country of ours, no girl is safe in the streets of any city after the sun has gone down. After all, the sun is the only god that has ever protected woman. In the darkness she has been the prey of the wild beast in man.
Nearly all charitable people, so-called, imagine that nothing is easier than to obtain work. They really feel that anybody, no matter what his circumstances may be, can get work enough to do if he is only willing to do the work. They cannot understand why any healthy human being should lack food or clothes. Meeting the unfortunate and the wretched in the streets of the great city, they ask them in a kind of wondering way, why they do not go to the West, why they do not cultivate the soil, and why they are so foolish, stupid, and reckless as to remain in the town. It would be just as sensible to ask a beggar why he does not start a bank or a line of steamships, as to ask him why he does not cultivate the soil, or why he does not go to the West. The man has no money to pay his fare, and if his fare were paid he would be, when he landed in the West, in precisely the same condition as he was when he left the East. Societies and institutions and individuals supply the immediate wants of the hungry and the ragged, but they afford only the relief of the moment.