Through the Eye of the Needle | Page 3

the
tenants are able to pay their rents promptly. The evictions once so
common are very rare; it is doubtful whether a nightly or daily walk in
the poorer quarters of the town would develop, in the coldest weather,
half a dozen cases of families set out on the sidewalk with their
household goods about them.
The Altrurian Emissary visited this country when it was on the verge of
the period of great economic depression extending from 1894 to 1898,
but, after the Spanish War, Providence marked the divine approval of
our victory in that contest by renewing in unexampled measure the
prosperity of the Republic. With the downfall of the trusts, and the
release of our industrial and commercial forces to unrestricted activity,
the condition of every form of labor has been immeasurably improved,
and it is now united with capital in bonds of the closest affection. But
in no phase has its fate been so brightened as in that of domestic service.

This has occurred not merely through the rise of wages, but through a
greater knowledge between the employing and employed. When, a few
years since, it became practically impossible for mothers of families to
get help from the intelligence-offices, and ladies were obliged through
lack of cooks and chambermaids to do the work of the kitchen and the
chamber and parlor, they learned to realize what such work was, how
poorly paid, how badly lodged, how meanly fed. From this practical
knowledge it was impossible for them to retreat to their old supremacy
and indifference as mistresses. The servant problem was solved, once
for all, by humanity, and it is doubtful whether, if Mr. Homos returned
to us now, he would give offence by preaching the example of the
Altrurian ladies, or would be shocked by the contempt and ignorance of
American women where other women who did their household
drudgery were concerned.
As women from having no help have learned how to use their helpers,
certain other hardships have been the means of good. The flattened
wheel of the trolley, banging the track day and night, and tormenting
the waking and sleeping ear, was, oddly enough, the inspiration of
reforms which have made our city the quietest in the world. The
trolleys now pass unheard; the elevated train glides by overhead with
only a modulated murmur; the subway is a retreat fit for meditation and
prayer, where the passenger can possess his soul in a peace to be found
nowhere else; the automobile, which was unknown in the day of the
Altrurian Emissary, whirs softly through the most crowded
thoroughfare, far below the speed limit, with a sigh of gentle
satisfaction in its own harmlessness, and, "like the sweet South, taking
and giving odor." The streets that he saw so filthy and unkempt in 1893
are now at least as clean as they are quiet. Asphalt has universally
replaced the cobble-stones and Belgian blocks of his day, and, though it
is everywhere full of holes, it is still asphalt, and may some time be put
in repair.
There is a note of exaggeration in his characterization of our men
which the reader must regret. They are not now the intellectual inferior
of our women, or at least not so much the inferiors. Since his day they
have made a vast advance in the knowledge and love of literature. With
the multitude of our periodicals, and the swarm of our fictions selling
from a hundred thousand to half a million each, even our business-men

cannot wholly escape culture, and they have become more and more
cultured, so that now you frequently hear them asking what this or that
book is all about. With the mention of them, the reader will naturally
recur to the work of their useful and devoted lives--the accumulation of
money. It is this accumulation, this heaping-up of riches, which the
Altrurian Emissary accuses in the love-story closing his study of our
conditions, but which he might not now so totally condemn.
As we have intimated, he has more than once guarded against a rash
conclusion, to which the logical habit of the Altrurian mind might have
betrayed him. If he could revisit us we are sure that he would have still
greater reason to congratulate himself on his forbearance, and would
doubtless profit by the lesson which events must teach all but the most
hopeless doctrinaires. The evil of even a small war (and soldiers
themselves do not deny that wars, large or small, are evil) has, as we
have noted, been overruled for good in the sort of Golden Age, or Age
on a Gold Basis, which we have long been enjoying. If our
good-fortune should be continued to us in reward of our public and
private virtue, the fact would suggest to