give him any help, speaking of all he had seen and heard, his voice
suddenly broke, and he bowed his face upon my hands and wept like a
child. That one man could suffer as he did over the degradation of this
womanhood of ours has always been to me the most hopeful thing I know--a
divine earnest of ultimate overcoming. The only thing that seemed in a
measure to assuage his anguish was my promise to devote myself to the
one work of fighting it and endeavoring to awake the conscience of the
nation to some sense of guilt with regard to it. In order to fit me for
this work he considered that I ought to know all that he as a medical
man knew. He emphatically did not spare me, and often the knowledge that
he imparted to me was drowned in a storm of tears. We were to have
worked together, but his mind, already unhinged by suffering, ultimately
gave way, and, with all that this world could give him--health, fame,
wealth, family affection, devoted friends--he died prematurely of a
broken heart.

For ten years, therefore, after my friend's death I gave up everything
for the purpose of carrying on the work he left me, and beat wearily up
and down the three kingdoms, holding meetings, organizing practical
work, agitating for the greater legal protection of the young,
afterwards embodied in two Acts--one for removing children from dens of
infamy and one known as the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which have done
much to educate the public sentiment of the country; but always making
it my chief object to rouse educated women to face the facts about their
own womanhood, and, above all, to rouse mothers to realize the perils of
their own boys and to be determined to know enough to enable them to act
as their guardians.

During those ten years of warfare, passing as I did from family to
family, and always concerned with questions that touch upon the