Nobody had ever seen anything like the World’s Fair.  My friend Dr. Bayard Holmes of Chigago, whose acquaintance I made through missing a suburban train, expressed a common feeling when he said he could weep at the thought that it was all to be destroyed—­that the creation evolved from the best brains of America should be dissolved.  Much of our human toil is lost and wasted, and much of our work is more ephemeral than we think; but this was a conscious creation of hundreds of beautiful buildings for a six months’ existence.  Nowhere else except in America could the thing have been done, and nowhere else in America but in Chicago.  At the Congress of Charity and correction I found every one interested in Australia’s work for destitute children.  It was difficult for Miss Windeyer, of Sydney, and myself—­the only Australians present—­to put ourselves in the place of many who believed in institutions where children of low physique, low morals, and low intelligence are massed together, fed, washed, drilled, taught by rule, never individualized, and never mothered.  I spoke from pulpits in Chicago and Indianopolis on the subject, and was urged to plead with the Governor of the latter State to use his influence to have at least tiny mites of six years of age removed from the reformatory, which was under the very walls of the gaol.  But he was obdurate to my pleadings and arguments, as he had been to those of the State workers.  He maintained that these tiny waifs of six were incorrigible, and were better in institutions than in homes.  The most interesting woman I met at the conference was the Rev. Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer, pastor of Bell Street Chapel, Providence.  I visited her at home, in that retreat of Baptists, Quakers, and others from the hard persecution of the New England Orthodoxy, the founders of which had left England in search of freedom to worship God.  Her husband was the Unitarian minister of another congregation in the same town.  At the meetings arranged by Mrs. Spencer, Professor Andrews, one of the Behring Sea arbitrators, and Professor Wilson were present; and they invited me to speak on effective voting at the Brunn University.

In Philadelphia I addressed seven meetings on the same subject.  At six of them an editor of a little reform paper was present.  For two years he had lived on brown bread and dried apples, in order that he could save enough to buy a newspaper plant for the advocacy of reforms.  In his little paper he replied to the critics, who assured me that it was no use worrying, as everything would come right in time.  “Time only brings wonders,” he wrote, “when good and great men and women rise up to move the world along.  Time itself brings only decay and death.  The truth is ’Nothing will come right unless those who feel they have the truth speak, and Work, and strain as if on them alone rested the destinies of the world.’” I went to see a celebrated man, George W. Childs, who had made a fortune out of The Philadelphia Ledger,