playing a game with it or using it for gain. But what has happened to
these wretched girls? Why has this beneficent current cast them upon
the shores of death and destruction when it should have carried them
into the safe port of domesticity? Through whose fault has this basic
emotion served merely to trick and deride them?

Older nations have taken a well defined line of action in regard to
it.

Among the Hull-House neighbors are many of the Latin races who employ
a careful chaperonage over their marriageable daughters and provide
husbands for them at an early age. "My father will get a husband for
me this winter," announces Angelina, whose father has brought her to a
party at Hull-House, and she adds with a toss of her head, "I saw two
already, but my father says they haven't saved enough money to marry
me." She feels quite as content in her father's wisdom and ability to
provide her with a husband as she does in his capacity to escort her
home safely from the party. He does not permit her to cross the
threshold after nightfall unaccompanied by himself, and unless the
dowry and the husband are provided before she is eighteen he will
consider himself derelict in his duty towards her. "Francesca can't
even come to the Sodality meeting this winter. She lives only across
from the church but her mother won't let her come because her father
is out West working on a railroad," is a comment one often hears. The
system works well only when it is carried logically through to the end
of an early marriage with a properly-provided husband.

Even with the Latin races, when the system is tried in America it
often breaks down, and when the Anglo-Saxons anywhere imitate this
régime it is usually utterly futile. They follow the first part of the