attack any single organ of the human frame, but it withers all that is human—mind, body, and soul. It strikes our youth at the unhappy moment when they first cross the thresholds of vice. For them the spring has no more innocent freshness; their very friendships are polluted by foul suggestions and memories; they become strangers to all the honorable relations of a pure young life; and thus we see stretching wider and wider around us the circle of this mocking, faded, worn-out, sceptical youth, without poetry and without love, without faith and without joy."

Too soon and too earnestly we cannot teach our boys that the flaming sword, turning all ways, which guards the tree of life for him, is purity.

But thirdly, there are wider issues than the welfare, physical and moral, of our own boys which make it impossible for us to take up any neutral attitude on this question. We cannot remain indifferent to that which affects so deeply both the status and the happiness of women. We cannot accept a standard for men which works out with the certainty of a mathematical law a pariah class of women. We cannot leave on one side the anguish of working-class mothers just because we belong to the protected classes, and it is not our girls that are sacrificed. At least, we women are ceasing to be as base as that, and God forgive us that, from want of thought rather than from want of heart, educated women could be found even to hold that the degradation of their own womanhood is a necessity!

Take but one instance out of the many that crossed my via dolorosa of the anguish inflicted on the mothers of the poor. I take it, not because it is uncommon, but because it is typical.

At one of my mass meetings of working women in the North I was told at its close that a woman wished to speak with me in private. As soon as I could disengage myself from the crowd of mothers who were always eager to shake hands with me, and to bless me with tears in their eyes for taking up their cause, I went down the room, and there, in a dimly-lighted corner of the great hall, I found a respectable-looking woman waiting for me. I sat down by her side, and she poured out the pent-up sorrow of her heart before telling me the one great favor she craved at my hands. She had an only daughter, who at the age of sixteen she had placed out in service, at a carefully-chosen situation. We all know what a difficult age in a girl's life is sixteen; but our girls we can keep under our own watchful care, and their little wilfulnesses and naughtinesses are got over within the four walls of a loving home, and are only the thorns that precede the perfect rose of womanhood. But the poor have to send their girls out into the great wicked world at this age to be bread-winners, often far away from a mother's protecting care. The girl, however, in this case was a good, steady girl, and for a time did well. Then something unsettled her, and she left her first place, and got another situation. For a time it seemed all right, when suddenly her letters ceased. The mother wrote again and again, but got no answer. She wrote to her former place; they knew nothing of her. At last she saved up a little money and went to the town where she believed her girl to be. She sought out and found her last address. The family had gone away, and left no address. She made inquiries of the neighbors, of the police. Yes, they remembered the girl—a nice-looking girl with a bright color; but no one had seen her lately. It was as if a trap-door had opened and let her through. She had simply disappeared. In all that crowded city her mother could find no trace of her. "It is now thirteen years, ma'am, since I lost her."

But all through those thirteen years that poor mother had watched and waited for her. All through those weary years, whenever she read in the local paper of some poor girl's body being found in the river, some poor suicide, who had leapt,

that poor mother would get into her head it might be her dear girl that was lying there alone and unclaimed; and she would pay her fare—if she could afford it—or if not, trudge the distance on foot, creep, trembling, into the mortuary or the public-house where the body lay, blue from drowning, or with the ugly red gash across the throat, take one look, and then cry with a sigh of relief, "No, it ain't my child," and return again to her watching and waiting.

"Once, ma'am," she said, "I had a dream. I saw a beautiful place, all bright and shiny, and there were lots of angels singing so sweet, when out of the midst of the glory came my poor girl. She came straight to me, and said, 'Oh, mother, don't fret; I'm safe and I'm happy!' and with those words in my ears I awoke. That dream has been a great comfort to me, ma'am; I feel sure God sent it to me. But oh, ma'am," she exclaimed, with a new light of hope in her face, and clasping her hands in silent entreaty, "the thought came into my head whilst you were a-speakin', if you would be so kind as to ask at the end of every one of your meetin's, 'Has anyone heard or seen anything of a girl of the name of Sarah Smith?' As you go all about the country, maybe I might get to hear of her that way."

Ah me! the pathetic forlornness of the suggestion, the last hope of a broken-hearted mother, that I should go all over the three kingdoms asking my large audiences, "Have you seen or heard anything of Sarah Smith?" And I was dumb. I had not a word of comfort to give her. I had heard the words too often from the lips of outcast girls in answer to my question, "Does your mother know where you are?" "Oh, no; I couldn't bear that mother should know about me!"—not to know what the fate of that young girl had been. She had been trapped, or drugged, or enticed into that dread under-world into which so many of our working-class girls disappear and are lost. Possibly she had been sent out of the country, and was in some foreign den. One's best hope was that she was dead.

But picture to yourselves the long-drawn anguish of that mother, with nothing but a dream to comfort her amid the dread realities of life. Picture her as only one of thousands and thousands of our working-class mothers on whose poor dumb hearts the same nameless sorrow rests like a gravestone; and I think no woman—no mother, at least—but will agree with me, that this is a matter from which we, as women, cannot stand off. Even if we had not the moral and physical welfare of our own boys to consider, we are baptized into this cause by the tears of women, the dumb tears of the poor. But there is one last consideration, exquisitely painful as it is, which I cannot, I dare not, pass over, and which more than any other has aroused the thoughtful women of England and America to face the question and endeavor to grapple, however imperfectly as yet, with the problem. For some strange reason the whole weight of this evil in its last resort comes crushing down on the shoulders of a little child—infant Christs of the cross without the crown, "martyrs of the pang, without the palm." The sins of their parents are visited on them from their birth, in scrofula, blindness, consumption. "Disease and suffering," in Dickens's words, "preside over their birth, rock their wretched cradles, nail down their little coffins, and fill their unknown graves." More than one-half of the inmates of our Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children are sent there by vice. But would to God it were only innocent suffering that is inflicted on the children of our land. Alas! alas! when I first began my work, a ward in a large London penitentiary, I found, was set apart for degraded children! Or take that one brief appalling statement in the record of ten years of work—1884 to 1894—issued by a Society for the Prevention