How many fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, friends and lovers throughout this country, have lived through the agony endured by the Elder Sister and the lover in Miss Robins’ book? That which had been their greatest care and burden, the frail health of Bettina, becomes the Elder Sister’s one comfort and hope. How many a bereft father and mother today not only cling in anguish to that hope, but desperately refuse to believe but that their girl is dead! And with reliable students estimating the life of the white slave in this country at five years, we know that many a flower-like highly organized Little Sister has met mercifully her release in a few weeks—a few months.
To those who know how considerable a factor in the whole problem of the white slave traffic is the girl who is taken, not the girl who goes, the girl who is under compulsion, not the girl who stays, this book is a great contribution. The Survey printed some time since a poster that has been used in this country from ocean to ocean: “Danger! Mothers, beware! 60,000 innocent girls wanted to take the place of 60,000 white slaves who will die this year in the United States.” If My Little Sister will only make the truth of this warning more real, more individual more poignant, then, in the pain-soothing words that close this book, “She will not have suffered in vain, and others will thank her too.”
Such a book is not merely a literary production, an exquisite work of art: it is a high, sincere human service. Front a literary point of view it is a great book. One is reminded of the Aeschylean definition of tragedy: “That which purifies the heart through pity and terror.” But this book not only reaches great tragic and dramatic heights, but its subtle art is such that it blends with the tragedy in an almost eerie way a lyric chord which echoes throughout, an unbroken strain of hope and pity, of the essential dignity and sanity and rightness of life.
MOTHERHOOD
Isabel Kimball Whiting
I see them come crowding, crowding,
Children of want and pain,
Dark sorrow their eyes enshrouding
Where joy’s touch should have lain.
They stand in silence beseeching,