The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1884-02-29
The destitute Rich.

Dv OuC Va tuOSo COuluOu IupulScS tu61
sweep periodically over the face of So
ciety every one with taste for philan-
thropy is turning to do something for
the destitute poor. The bitter cry OF
outcast London has reused the good
men and women Of the city to united ef-
tort to provide better homes for their.
poor. The recent pub ication of the
state of things in the Newsboys' home
of this city, compared with what Is done
in New York by the Children's Aid So
ciety, has had tie good result-of slduo-
ing q number of our noble-hearted
women to undertake to establish a
home for the waits of our streets.
Misunderstanding schools arc being
started all over the country to teach the
boys how to earn their living if need be
by honest toll.
There is one class whose sore needs
are completely overlooked by this out
burst of philanthropy, and yet it is the
class OF all most helpless and most
needing hand to be outstretched in its
behalf. 1t is not to be found among
the poor. This class belongs to the
destitute r.ch, and it is the most desti-
tute part of the destitute rich-the
daughters of the well-to-do and wealthy.
How destitute these girls are! They
have money, good clothes, a few smat-
terings of things in books and music,
but of the real acquisitions that make
woman a help to herself and 10 those
about ner-able to do little things in the
kitchen or great things in the s.cK-room
how little they have!
. These girls are most of them destined
to matrimony, and yet they are almost
utterly ignorant of all the details of
housekeeping. Their education has not,
as Chinese education does, cramped the
feet with which they promenade the
sidewalk. pass from counter to counter
of the fashionable dry-goods and mill
linery and iewelry stores, or thread the
maZes of the waltz. assuming that they
belong to the comparatively rude
aristocracy that mas not yet Leen re-
fined to the point of re Getting the dance
as being too much like fun and too
physical to be really in '.good FORM"
but it has dwar.ed their other means of
locOmotiOn.
These girls have no feet that can take
them to the bread-pan, or cook-stove,
or the broom, or the vegetable or meat
market, or the sewing-room, and,
worst of all, the nursery. They expect
their fathers to understand thoroughly
the business that supplies the bank ac-
count that enables them TO have done
for them all the things not one of which
they can do for themselves. Still more,
they insist that the young men they
marry shall know all the details of
their business. This demand that the
husband shall be an expert in the bust
ness from which runs the golden spring
that nourishes the elegant incfficiency
OF the fashionable wife of the period is
not to be condemned. 1t is the de-
mand of self-preservation. If both par
ties 10 high-life marriage were rs use
less and dependent and destitute of all
that makes human being independent
and strong as the gilded girls are, it
would be but few brief moons before
the entire establishment would come
down with run.
There is something amazing in the
selfish complaeency with which these
girls nestle down in the great palm of
society, confident that it will always be
glad and content to carry them in ease
and Incidence over all the rough PAGES
OF life without troubling them even to
look over the edge and see the perilous
and difficult places it is lifting them
&C Oss. William Morris, the English
poet, whose sympathetic heart has been
so affected by the misery of the poor
overgrowing the prosperity of England
as the mistletoe covers and kills its oaks,
tina. he has abandoned the luxury Of
verse-making for the sterner work of
reform agitation, declares that the mod
ern well-to-do classes, reposing as they
do on the labor of the workers beneath
them, are sinking into a condition of
more dangerous and more
than even that OF the
Roman patricians or the French nobili-
ty before the French Revoluti N. Grant
ed that this is the exaggeration of an
excitable poetic sensibility, it will be
hard for our girls to deny that it is true
of them, even if it be not true of their
brothers and fathers, who do perform
some of the world work
1t is time that mrathy for the help
less and the. philanthropy that is stir
ring in behalf of the dest tute should
do something for the destitute rich
girl of our American civilization.
Though they have good looks and fine
clothes. yet they are poor. They are
into wOmanhood without icing
given the resources. of womanhood:
they are hidden to make homes for their
without the training of head
or hand, by which alone home can be
made. Chicago Tribune.