circulation by my own efforts. I can but stretch out my hands to my many
dear unknown friends in America,--hands which have grown too weak to
hold the sword or lift the banner in a cause for which I have laid down
my all,--and ask any mother who may find help or strength in this book
to help me in return by placing it in the hands of other mothers of boys
she may know, especially,--I would plead,--young mothers. Do not say
they are too young to know. If they are not too young to be the mothers
of boys, they are not too young to know how to fulfil the responsibility
inherent in such motherhood. They at least can begin at the beginning,
and not have occasion to say, as so many mothers have said to me, with
tears in their eyes, "Oh, if I could only have heard you years ago, what
a difference it would have made to me! But now it is too late."

Enable me thus, by your aid, to do some helpful work for that great
country which I have ever loved as my own; and which with England is
appointed in the Providence of God to lead in the great moral causes of
the world.

If, indeed, each mother whom, either by word or deed, I may have helped
would do me this service of love now that I am laid aside, not yielding
to the first adverse criticism, which is so often only a cry of pain or
prejudice, but patiently working on at enlightening and strengthening
the hands of other mothers in her own rank of life, what vital work
would be done:--work so precious in its very nature, so far-reaching in
its consequences, that all the travail and anguish I have endured, all
the brokenness of body and soul I have incurred, would not so much as
come into mind for joy that a truer manhood is being born into the
world, even the manhood of Him who--

"Came on earth that He might show mankind