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