might at any season be reduced to such conditions, and with great inconvenience to my agent and doubtless with hardship to the farmers,
as speedily as possible I withdrew all my investment. But something
had to be done with the money, and in my reaction against unseen
horrors I bought a farm near my native village and also a flock of innocent-looking sheep. My partner in the enterprise had not chosen the
shepherd's lot as a permanent occupation, hut hoped to speedily finish
his college course upon half the proceeds of our venture. This pastoral
enterprise still seems to me to have been essentially sound, both economically and morally, hut perhaps one partner depended too much
upon the impeccability of her motives and the other found himself too
preoccupied with study to know that it is not a real kindness to bed a
sheepfold with straw, for certainly the venture ended in a spectacle
scarcely less harrowing than the memory it was designed to obliterate.
At least the sight of two hundred sheep with four rotting hoofs each,
was not reassuring to one whose conscience craved economic peace. A
fortunate series of sales of mutton, wool, and farm enabled the partners
to end the enterprise without loss, and they passed on, one to college
and the other to Europe, if not wiser, certainly sadder for the experience.
It was during this second journey to Europe that I attended a meet'
ing of the London match girls who were on strike and who met daily
under the leadership of well-known labor men of London. The low
wages that were reported at the meetings, the phossy jaw which was
described and occasionally exhibited, the appearance of the girls
themselves I did not, curiously enough, in any wise connect with what
was called the labor movement, nor did I understand the efforts of the
London trades-unionists, concerning whom 1 held the vaguest notions. But of course this impression of human misery was added to the
others which were already making me so wretched. I think that up to
this time I was still filled with the sense which Wells describes in one of
his young characters, that somewhere in Church or State are a body of
authoritative people who will put things to rights as soon as they really
know what is wrong. Such a young person persistently believes that
behind all suffering, behind sin and want, must lie redeeming magnanimity. He may imagine the world to be tragic and terrible, hut it
never for an instant occurs to him that it may he contemptible or
squalid or self-seeking. Apparently 1 looked upon the efforts of the