No:  Mrs. Blank’s prayers for absolute protection will never be answered, in respect to her daughters.  Why not, then, find a better model for prayer in that made by Jesus for his disciples:  “I pray Thee, not that Thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldst keep them from the evil.”  A woman was made for something nobler in the world, Mrs. Blank, than to be a fragile toy, to be put behind a glass case, and protected from contact.  It is not her mission to be hidden away from all life’s evil, but bravely to work that the world may be reformed.

THE EUROPEAN PLAN

Every mishap among American women brings out renewed suggestions of what may be called the “European plan” in the training of young girls,—­the plan, that is, of extreme seclusion and helplessness.  It is usually forgotten, in these suggestions, that not much protection is really given anywhere to this particular class as a whole.  Everywhere in Europe the restrictions are of caste, not of sex.  Even in Turkey, travellers tell us, women of the humbler vocations are not much secluded.  It is not the object of the “European plan,” in any form, to protect the virtue of young women, as such, but only of young ladies; and the protection is pretty effectually limited to that order.  Among the Portuguese in the island of Fayal I found it to be the ambition of each humble family to bring up one daughter in a sort of lady-like seclusion:  she never went into the street alone, or without a hood which was equivalent to a veil; she was taught indoor industries only; she was constantly under the eye of her mother.  But in order that one daughter might be thus protected, all the other daughters were allowed to go alone, day or evening, bareheaded or bare-footed, by the loneliest mountain-paths, to bring oranges or firewood or whatever their work may be—­heedless of protection.  The safeguard was for a class:  the average exposure of young womanhood was far greater than with us.  So in London, while you rarely see a young lady alone in the streets, the housemaid is sent on errands at any hour of the evening with a freedom at which our city domestics would quite rebel; and one has to stay but a short time in Paris to see how entirely limited to a class is the alleged restraint under which young French girls are said to be kept.

Again, it is to be remembered that the whole “European plan,” so far as it is applied on the continent of Europe, is a plan based upon utter distrust and suspicion, not only as to chastity, but as to all other virtues.  It is applied among the higher classes almost as consistently to boys as to girls.  In every school under church auspices, it is the French theory that boys are never to be left unwatched for a moment; and it is as steadily assumed that girls will be untruthful if left to themselves, as that they will do every other wrong.  This to the Anglo-Saxon race seems very demoralizing.  “Suspicion,”