so radical a
social reform in but one establishment amidst so many in ardent
business competition with each other. It may be said in passing that
the practical charity of the Hecker Brothers continued to do credit
to the spirit which originally prompted their attempts at social
reform. During a period of general distress some years since they
distributed bread free, sending their own wagons around the city for
the purpose.

No small part of Isaac's distress arose from what the diary calls the
ugliness, vulgarity, and discord everywhere to be met with in his
daily round of duties. He had one refuge from this in his domestic
life--a pleasant, pure, and peaceful home; and another in the inner
chamber of his soul, better fitted every day to be a sanctuary to
which he could fly for solace. But his heart fairly bled for the vast
mass of men and of women about him, only a few of whom had such an
outer refuge, and perhaps fewer still the inner one. This sympathy he
felt his life long. He ever blamed the huge accretion of law and
customs and selfishness which is called society for much of this
misery of men, this hindrance to a fair distribution of the goods of
this world, this guilty permission on the part of the fortunate few
of the want and dirt and ugliness and coarseness which are the lot of
almost the whole race of man. Yet he was not blind to individual
guilt. Right here in his diary, after lamenting his enforced
inability to succor human misery, he says that some words dropped by
the workmen in conversation with him cause him to record his
conviction that suffering and injustice, together with the
deprivation of liberty, are due to one's own fault as well as to that
of others:

"Every evil that society inflicts upon me, the germ of it is my own
fault; in proportion as I free myself from my vices will I free
myself from the evils which society inflicts upon me. Be true to
thyself and thou canst not be false to any one. Be true to thyself
and it follows as night follows day that others cannot be false to
thee."

Of course this panacea offers only an inward healing, for none more
readily admitted than he who wrote these sentences that in externals
the true heart is often the first victim of the malice of the false
heart.

Ever and again we find in the diary reflections on the general aspect
of religion. The Protestant churches seemed to him to fail to meet
the aspirations of the natural man; that is the burden of his