Had "S. W. H. C." been with me then, or had he seen so many of just such cases as I have seen, he would be much slower in coming to judgment of the poor organ-grinder. For it is this love of wife and children, which we honor, or ought to honor, which sends the married soldier on the street to beg in this way, rather than take life easy, and "fight his battles o'er and o'er again" in an asylum. The soldier above referred to is still alive, thanks to the assistance given him by General Butler and the good ladies of the Association. The asylums, as they are at present ordered, cannot meet cases like these; but they merit help, and should have it in some fashion. The Ladies' Union Relief Association does much to keep a great number off the street who would otherwise present much more disagreeable pictures than the organ-grinders to the eyes of your sensitive correspondent; but their means are limited. They cannot reach all who need. Until the country has reached out her helping hand to all to whom she owes assistance as a right, it is in bad taste to find fault with the mode in which the disabled soldier tries to earn a living for his family. MCWATTERS. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TEN DOLLARS A MONTH: A STORY OF GRIEF AND JOY. It is a painful comment upon the state of society, or the character of our civilization, that our most cherished literature, both of poetry and prose, has its origin in human woes and wrongs. "Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn." Dickens, with all his wealth of genius, so much prized, would have found no use for it in a decent world, unless, perchance, it might have shone as brightly upon the face of Joy, as it beamed pathetically upon the tortured visage of Misery. Hood, in his immortal "Song of the Shirt," and the "Bridge of Sighs," and in many other of his verse; Tennyson, in the best of his poems; Mrs. Browning, with her vast power of thought and feeling, to say nothing of many other great writers of the past and present; our own blessed poet Whittier, etc., have given us their noblest works with pens dipped in human tears, or sharpened by human sufferings. So, too, of the great good deeds of the other philanthropists--the Howards, the Nightingales, the McWatterses. They could only have had their origin in the wrongs which man does to his fellow-man; in the outrages which the tyrant classes do to the weaker; in the riot of wars for governmental supremacy; in the sufferings of the outraged, trampled into the dust by the powerful robbers of society in their mad greed for wealth, or cheated by pious and talented hypocrites out of their moral as well as physical rights.