File:Beauty for ashes (1914) (14781680014).jpg

Identifier: beautyforashes01baco (find matches)
Title: Beauty for ashes
Year: 1914 (1910s)
Authors: Bacon, Albion Fellows, 1865-1933
Subjects: Working class Tenement houses Poor
Publisher: New York, Dodd, Mead and company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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vid. It lay spread out before me —my State, dotted with growing towns, set in such avastness of field and forest that crowding seemedcriminal! At night I lay sleepless, the darkness throngedwith faces I had seen in our tenements, multiplied,repeated, even as a broken mirror multiplies.There were burning eyes of the consumptives, hope-less faces of the mothers, and white, moaning babies.And these were no images of fancy! I had knownthem by name, here in our own city. And all theother cities and towns had their poor! What wouldthey have in fifty years? What was the immolation of one life, to all thatmisery? One could have dashed it down cheerfullyto save all that, as men do, fighting for their country. There sounded a bugle call, to take up arms formy State, and every power of my being leaped to thesummons. The call of ones country, the call ofhumanity — they are both the call of God. Hence-forth, wherever that voice led, I would go. There need be no frenzy, no cant, about a special
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LAYING FOUNDATIONS 179 The air is ringing with calls. If onlya few hear, the few must answer. Do you think that no one else could have donethat work but you? ^ remonstrated a friend. Someone else would have done it if you had waited. Some one might have done it, but no one had,and no one was offering to do it, and I couldnt wait,I answered. Sometimes I marvel at the way it allcame about, that steadily and without one moment ofhesitation, every step was taken that was neces-sary to prepare the way for a tenement law. Thestrangest thing about it was that the way seemedmapped out and decisions made for me, and that,almost without volition, I seemed to be not led, butmoved, by a great Hand. Under a fearful tensionof work and responsibility, night and day, formonths, I have never known a time when thought wasso clear and so unflagging. Even the decision to do all that was necessary tosecure a state law seemed less a decision than agrowing knowledge that I was to do it. I did notknow what t

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