all the earnestness and power that in me lies.

Strange and sad and terrible as are some of the scenes from which I
hare drawn this veil, I have not told the half of what exists. My
book, apart from the thread of fiction that runs through its pages,
is but a series of photographs from real life, and is less a work of
the imagination than a record of facts.

If it stirs the hearts of American readers profoundly, and so
awakens the people to a sense of their duty; if it helps to
inaugurate more earnest and radical modes of reform for a state of
society of which a distinguished author has said, "There is not a
country throughout the earth on which it would not bring a curse;
there is no religion upon the earth that it would not deny; there is
no people upon the earth it would not put to shame;"--then will not
my work be in vain.

Sitting in our comfortable homes with well-fed, well-clothed and
happy-hearted children about us--children who have our tenderest
care, whose cry of pain from a pin-prick or a fall on the carpeted
floor hurts us like a blow---how few of us know or care anything
about the homes in which some other children dwell, or of the hard
and cruel battle for life they are doomed to fight from the very
beginning!

To get out from these comfortable homes and from the midst of
tenderly cared-for little ones, and stand face to face with squalor
and hunger, with suffering, debasement and crime, to look upon the
starved faces of children and hear their helpless cries, is what
scarcely one in a thousand will do. It is too much for our