True _happiness is the result of conscious usefulness_. This I can
assert with the confidence of knowledge, not alone from my own
experience, but from observation of the great army of kindergartners
and child-savers whom I have met in my travels, and especially within
the past year; and it is evident that the service attaching to
protecting little neglected angels from the evil suggestions and the
cruel conditions that may make of them, not men, but beasts, is one
of the avenues of usefulness in which these "Angels of the State" meet
with the smile of the Master, who was the first Great Kindergartner;
whose teachings centred about and dwelt upon the care of children as of
first consideration, and who said, "Suffer Little Children to come unto
me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."
Childhood has suffered, manhood has suffered, progress has suffered,
for lo! these ages, the cruel assumption that mankind is naturally
depraved. In recent years public conscience has been dulled by
the anæsthetic that there must be a Have-To-Be-Bad Class in all
communities. This has been formulated into the assumption that there
is in every group of the Heaven-Sent Angels of Purity, a full ten per
cent that must be depraved and unredeemable except by the interposition
of special dispensation, which is a direct contradiction of all of
the observed Laws of Creation to which intelligence now subscribes.
The motto of this assumption is couched in this vicious legend: "The
hopelessly submerged ten per cent stratum of society."
Half an hour's walk from this hospitable mansion, on the shore of the
beautiful Geneva Lake, is a place called "Holiday Home." There are now
housed and thoughtfully cared for at the "Home" about one hundred of
the "Hopelessly Submerged Ten Per Cent Stratum of (Chicago's) Society."
During the summer half a thousand of these unfortunates will come for
two weeks each. When we touched at the wharf last evening after coming
from the concert given in their interest at Mr. Chalner's lakeside
home, the waifs met us with a merry class-yell, and greeted us with an
intelligence, a buoyancy, and a freedom, born of their holiday, such as
was not excelled at any of the other landings where only the children
of rich summer residenters were met. We all saw these "waifs" and we
marvelled at them, for, with the grime of the slum washed from their
sweet faces, and with clean, though sometimes ragged clothing, they
might have figured in the mix-up of "Pinafore," or have starred in a
dramatic representation of the "Prince and the Pauper," with all the
grace required of princelings.
They haven't been long from God, and they are god-like or not, as we
have welcomed and protected them, or rebuffed or neglected them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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