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.