John Woolman and William Blake were both prophets, and so is Mildred Young. Already the author of a number of Pendle Hill pamphlets, she wrote the present study some years ago. Since then it has lain fallow in our files till resurrected this spring, to emerge as fresh and even more immediate than when it was first written—a rare thing to be said of any piece of writing.
Mildred has always been guided by concerns which were well ahead of their own time. In the 1930’s she and her husband left the pleasant security of Westtown School, where Wilmer Young was Dean of Boys, to work side by side with sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the South. When she writes of poverty, voluntary and involuntary, as she does in the present pamphlet, she knows whereof she speaks.
This essay was first presented as the annual John Woolman Memorial Lecture in September, 1963, at Mount Holly, New Jersey.
