Miss Qiia M.? Copyright, 1890, All rights reserved. 362 FOURTH EDITION. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. PREFACE. THE question has very naturally been raised why heretofore no attempt should have been made at an adequate biography of Dorothea Lynde Dix; in fact, why — except for a few brief accounts of her career, printed in magazines, read before private clubs, or inserted in encyclopædias-no real information is to be had about her. Here is a woman who, as the founder of vast and enduring institutions of mercy in America and in Europe, has simply no peer in the annals of Protestantism. To find her parallel in this respect, it is necessary to go back to the lives of such memorable Roman Catholic women as St. Theresa of Spain or Santa Chiara of Assisi, and to the amazing work they did in founding throughout European Christendom great conventual establishments. Why, then, do the majority of the present generation know little or nothig of so remarkable a story? It was from no lack of pressure on the part of Imirers and venerators of the character and work of > exceptional a woman that this came about. The vincible obstacle lay in her own positive refusal to permit anything to be written of her. Living to the advanced age of eighty-five, and never pausing in her career of beneficent activity till fully eighty, she cherished all the disdain of the heroic soldier setting out on ever fresh campaigns, at the thought of quitting the post of present duty to look after the lustre of past laurels. Not in the winning of laurels, but in the súccor of human misery, lay the dominating purpose of her life. A woman of great pride and dignity of character, fully conscious, too, of the immensity of the work she had achieved on two continents, she yet shrank in utter aversion from what seemed to her the degradation of mere public notoriety. Two equally strong, but totally contrasted, natures lay in her the one the outcome of a sensitive, suffering temperament, instinctively seeking to shield itself from gall or wound; the other born of the fortitude of a martyr in fronting danger, loneliness, and obloquy, in championing the cause of the friendless and "ready to perish." To all this must be added a depth of self-abnegating religious faith which made her life one long struggle to prostrate a spirit naturally proud and imperious at the footstool of God, in the lowly cry, "Not unto me, not unto me, but unto Thy Name be the praise!" As far back as in 1851, Mrs. Sarah J. Hale, then engaged on a book to be entitled "Lives and Characters of Distinguished Women," applied to Miss Dix for data from which to write an account of her career. To this, as to numberless like appeals, Miss Dix re |