Before society was ready to proceed against the institution of slavery
as such, groups of men and women by means of the underground railroad
cherished and educated individual slaves; it is scarcely necessary to
point out the similarity to the rescue homes and preventive associations
which every great city contains.

It is always easy to overwork an analogy, and yet the economist who for
years insisted that slave labor continually and arbitrarily limited the
wages of free labor and was therefore a detriment to national wealth was
a forerunner of the economist of to-day who points out the economic
basis of the social evil, the connection between low wages and despair,
between over-fatigue and the demand for reckless pleasure.

Before the American nation agreed to regard slavery as unjustifiable
from the standpoint of public morality, an army of reformers, lecturers,
and writers set forth its enormity in a never-ceasing flow of invective,
of appeal, and of portrayal concerning the human cruelty to which the
system lent itself. We can discern the scouts and outposts of a similar
army advancing against this existing evil: the physicians and
sanitarians who are committed to the task of ridding the race from
contagious diseases, the teachers and lecturers who are appealing to the
higher morality of thousands of young people; the growing literature,
not only biological and didactic, but of a popular type more closely
approaching "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

Throughout the agitation for the abolition of slavery in America, there
were statesmen who gradually became convinced of the political and moral
necessity of giving to the freedman the protection of the ballot. In
this current agitation there are at least a few men and women who would
extend a greater social and political freedom to all women if only