You’d see paintings and engravings being hung in the public schools by the Public School Art Society, till in a case such as that of the Drake School the collection in a single school building amounts in value to several thousand dollars.
You’d see wagonloads of coats and hats and dresses and trousers being carried from the School Children’s Aid Society to public schools in all parts of the city, to be secretly conveyed to boys and girls who otherwise could not come through wintry weather to their lessons.
You’d see flower gardens springing up in 201 many school yards, after a little encouragement and advice from the Women’s Outdoor Art League.
You’d see a girl behind the walls of the Northwestern University Building, over there on Dearborn Street, telling her story of deception, or of outrage, or of error, to the superintendent of the Legal Aid Society. It used to be the Women’s Protective Association till it was merged with the Bureau of Justice a few years since. It was initiated by the Chicago Woman’s Club a generation ago. It has ministered to thousands of young women cursed with that curse both of God and of man which gives them, however wronged, almost all the burden and almost all the shame of the event. It is due mainly to the work done here that in Illinois to-day a girl cannot legally consent to her own undoing till she is at least sixteen years old and that even till she is eighteen her injurer, immune from nature’s revenge, is not immune from the law’s.
These things you’d see, and innumerable others. All that I have mentioned have been suggested to me by lines of communication 202 which stretch out over the town from the one club I have particularly noted. If I tried to unravel all those lines to all their endings, I should keep you here beyond your patience. If I tried to extend my survey to other similar clubs, younger, smaller, but equally zealous, in this community, I should keep you here even beyond mine.
They began, those women of the Chicago Woman’s Club, with remembering that Goethe said that activity without insight is an evil. Last spring they remembered something else that Goethe said. Their president, retiring from office, comprehended the history of the club and of thousands of other woman’s clubs thus:
“Goethe, who started with the theory that the highest life was to be gained by self-culture, in later years concluded that service was the way to happiness. So we have risen by stepping stones to higher things; through study, through interest in humanity, the supreme motive of this club has come to be service to humanity.”
And yet I haven’t mentioned the greatest service ever rendered to the town by its women.
One day a woman went on a visit, one of many, to the jail. There were a lot of boys playing about a man in a dressing-gown and rocking-chair. She inquired about him. “Him?” said the children, “He’s a fellow just murdered his wife. He’s our boss.”