I have not
earned a half-dollar this winter. Mattie has had a very good place,
where she has had seventy-five cents a week; she has not spent any of it
in the family, only a very little for mother. Father has had very small
pay, but I think he has more now; he is a watchman on the ---- ----,
that runs from here to ----.'
"Here, says the Southern editor, is a family, one of thousands of
families in New England in similar circumstances, where one daughter
thinks it a 'very good place' where she can get seventy-five cents a
week; another has not earned a half-dollar during the winter, and all
are 'very poor;' yet the son and brother goes off and deserts a mother
and sisters thus situated,--a mother and sisters who, though poor, have
evidently the most affectionate feelings and tender sensibilities,--for
the purpose of liberating a class of people, not one of whom knows
anything of the want or privation from which his own family is
suffering, or who would not look without contempt upon such remuneration
as seemed the height of good fortune to the destitute sisters and mother
of this abolitionist. When we bear in mind the intelligence and
sensibilities which characterize the wives and daughters of the poorest
classes equally with the richest in New England, it is most amazing that
men should overlook such misery at their own doors--nay, should forsake
their own kith and kin who are suffering under it--the mother who bore
them, the sisters who love them with all a sister's tender and
solicitous love, and run off to emancipate the fattest, sleekest, most
contented and unambitious race under heaven.
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