The war had torn the whole social fabric like an earthquake. Society seemed upheaved from its foundations—shattered, and scattered in chaos. Nowhere was this so apparent as in Washington. Women seeking their husbands; women, whose husbands were dead, left penniless with dependent children. Young girls, orphaned and homeless, with women adventurers of every phase and sort, all, sooner or later, found their way to Washington. The male population was scarcely less chaotic. Men, restrained and harmonized through life by the holiest influences of home, found themselves suddenly homeless, herded together in masses, exposed to hardships, danger and undreamed-of temptations. “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” seemed to be blazoned on the painted sign-boards of the dens of drink and sin, and on the debauched and brazen faces of the stranger men and women who jostled each other on the crowded thoroughfares. While thousands escaped unharmed the moral pestilence which brooded in the air, tens of thousands more were touched with its blight, and fell. Men and women who would have lived and died innocent, in the safe shelter of peace and home, grew demoralized and desperate amid the rack and ruin of war. In the hour when human nature needed every sacred safeguard, it found itself bereft of the sweetest and best that it had ever known. This was especially true of the hundreds of homeless women in the Capital seeking employment. Congressional appropriations made woman’s Government-employment at once a Congressional reward. Very soon, every woman’s appointment to work was at the mercy of some Member of Congress. Political or war-service might secure a man his, but what had the woman but her bereavements, or her personal influence? For the sake of the former, noble men, in many instances, sought and found honest employment for noble women, for women who had given their husbands, sons and fathers, their own heart’s blood, to their country, asking nothing in return but the chance to work for their own bread and their children’s. In order to secure any Government position, the first thing a woman had to do was to go and tell her story to a man—in all probability a stranger—who possessed the appointing power, her chance of getting her place depending utterly on the personal interest which she might be able to arouse in him. If he was sufficiently interested in her story, and in her, to make the official demand necessary, she obtained the coveted place, no matter what her qualifications for it, or her lack of them might be. If she failed to interest him, by no possibility could she secure that place, unless she could succeed in winning over to her cause another man of equal political power. If the men who held her chance for bread were good men, and she a good woman, well; if they were bad men, and she a weak woman, not so well. In either case, the principle underlying the appointment was equally wrong.