The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty YearsHarper, Ida Husted
History
The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years
Harper, Ida Husted
Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell), 1820-1906
MY DEAR SISTER: ... Your heart would break if you were here to see
the poverty and rags, and yet the people seem cheerful under it
all. Something surely must be wrong at the root to bear such fruit.
I have had an awfully "hard side of a board time" of ten hours in a
third-class car, paying therefor just as much as I would on the N.
Y. Central for a first-class ticket. I not only saved $4.25 by
going third-class, but I saw the natives. Men, women, boys and
girls who had been to the market towns with their produce were on
the train, and to see them as they tumbled in toward evening, at
town after town, one would think that whiskey and tobacco were the
main articles they bought. Any number of men and boys, and at least
four women, were drunk enough, and they brought bottles with them
and added to their puling idiocy as they went on. Nothing short of
a pig-sty could match the filth, but it is only in that class of
cars that you see anything of the vast number of poor farmers and
laborers. If they can not pay exorbitant rates, refined, educated
men and women are thrust into pens and seated face to face with the
smoking, drinking, carousing rabble. I have everywhere protested
against this outrage and urged the women to demand that the railway
companies should give them separate cars, with no smoking
allowed....
LEAMINGTON, October 1.
MY DEAR RACHEL: ... I must have told you of my good times at
Belfast with Miss Tod, who gave a reception for me and I had a
welcome all round.
Miss Osgood met me at Cork, and we went by rail to Macroom. Tuesday
morning we visited the convent, nuns' schools, and the poorhouse
with 400 helpless mortals, old and young; then took an Irish
jaunting-car, and were driven some forty miles through "the Gap" to
Glengariff. It rained almost all the way, much to our disgust. Next
morning we packed into two great stages with thirty or more others,
and started for the lakes of Killarney; but soon the rain poured
again, and as we were losing so much of the scenery we stopped
half-way at Kenmare. We visited the convent and the Mother Abbess
showed us every cranny. Thirty girls were at work on beautiful
Irish point and Limerick lace. These nuns have 400 pupils, and give
200 of the poorest their breakfast and lunch--porridge and a bit of
bread. At two we took stage again, the sky looked promising, but
alas! for half an hour it fairly poured. Then it grew lighter, and
we got very fine views of hills and dales. Killarney _is_
lovely....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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