since I wrote last week, many things have combined to show that the
distress is rapidly increasing, and that there is a pressing need
that we should go beyond the borders of our own county for help. . .
. I remember what I have read of the Godlike in man, and I look with
a strange feeling upon the half-famished creatures I see hourly
about me. I cannot pass through a street but I see evidences of deep
distress. I cannot sit at home half-an-hour without having one or
more coming to ask for bread to eat. But what comes casually before
me is as nothing when compared with that deeper distress which can
only be seen by those who seek it. . . . There have been families
who have been so reduced that the only food they have had has been a
porridge made of Indian meal. They could not afford oatmeal, and
even of their Indian meal porridge they could only afford to have
two meals a day. They have been so ashamed of their coarser food
that they have done all that was possible to hide their desperate
state from those about them. It has only been by accident that it
has been found out, and then they have been caught hurriedly putting
away the dishes that contained their loathsome food. A woman, whose
name I could give, and whose dwelling I could point to, was said not
only to be in deep distress, but to be also ill of fever. She was
visited. On entering the lower room of the house, the visitors saw
that there was not a scrap of furniture; the woman, fever-stricken,
sat on an orange-box before a low fire; and to prevent the fire from
going quite out, she was pulling her seat to pieces for fuel bit by
bit. The visitors looked upstairs. There was no furniture there--
only a bit of straw in a corner, which served as the bed of the
woman's four children. In another case a woman, who was said to be
too weak to apply for relief, was visited. Her husband had been out
of work a long time by reason of his illness; he was now of a
fashion recovered, and had gone off to seek for work. He left his