guardians, and venturing to make some suggestions which, as the result
of much collective wisdom and prayer, I think may prove helpful to you
in that which lies nearest your heart. Only, if some of the facts are
such as may prove both painful and disagreeable to you, do not therefore
reject them in your ignorance as false. Do not follow the advice of a
politician to a friend whom he was urging to speak on some public
question. "But how can I?" his friend replied; "I know nothing of the
subject, and should therefore have nothing to say." "Oh, you can always
get up and deny the facts," was the sardonic reply.

Let me first of all give you my credentials, all the more necessary as
my long illness has doubtless made me unknown by name to many of the
younger generation, who may therefore question my right to impart facts
or make any suggestions at all. Suffer me, therefore, to recount to you
how I have gained my knowledge and what are the sources of my
information.

In the first place, I was trained for the work by a medical man--my
friend Mr. James Hinton--first in his own branch of the London
profession, and a most original thinker. To him the degradation of
women, which most men accept with such blank indifference, was a source
of unspeakable distress. He used to wander about the Haymarket and
Piccadilly in London at night, and break his heart over the sights he
saw and the tales he heard. The words of the Prophet ground themselves
into his very soul, with regard to the miserable wanderers of our
streets: "This is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of them
snared in holes and hid in prison-houses; they are for a prey, and none
delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, Restore."

The very first time he came down to me at Brighton, to see if I could