White Slaves; or, the Oppression of the Worthy PoorBanks, Louis Albert
History
White Slaves; or, the Oppression of the Worthy Poor
Banks, Louis Albert
Poor -- Massachusetts -- Boston; Sweatshops; Working class -- Massachusetts -- Boston
In another field Mr. Charles Dudley Warner gives us the same warning,
in his story of "A Little Journey in the World." In this Mr. Warner
tells us of one of the sweetest and purest of young women, who has the
highest ideals, and whose standards of morality are of the noblest, who
is married to an unprincipled young speculator on Wall Street, New
York; and under the influence of her husband, and the society into
which she is drawn by his business relations, in which he gathers
millions of money, all her holy and lofty ideals are overthrown, and
she becomes simply a material, worldly woman. This is the way he
reasons about it: "But we, I say, who loved her, and knew so well the
noble possibilities of her royal nature, under circumstances favorable
to its development, felt more and more her departure from her own
ideals. Her life in its spreading prosperity seemed more and more
shallow. I do not say she was heartless; I do not say she was
uncharitable; I do not say that in all the externals of worldly and
religious observance she was wanting; I do not say that the more she
was assimilated to the serenely worldly nature of her husband, she did
not love him, or that she was unlovely in the worldliness that ingulfed
her and bore her onward. I do not know that there is anything singular
in her history. But the pain of it to us was in the certainty--and it
seemed so near--that in the decay of her higher life, in the hardening
process of a material existence, in the transfer of all her interest to
the trivial and sensuous gratifications--time, mind, heart, ambition,
all fixed on them--we should never regain our Margaret. What I saw in a
vision of her future was a _dead soul_--a beautiful woman in all the
success of envied prosperity, with a dead soul."
[Illustration: CHILDREN PLAYING IN COPP'S HILL BURYING GROUND.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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