To many people, who have all the means of existence they care for without a struggle, it seems that the only thing that can give a thorough interest and zest to life is to devote themselves to the elevation of the degraded classes of society.  They find such monotony in their own comfortable ways of living, and the misery of the very poor seems so appalling to them, that they cannot escape from the passionate desire to spend themselves in their service.  The problems connected with the relief and the prevention of the wretchedness by which they are surrounded have all the interest of a scientific experiment, and are capable of calling out all the fervor of a religion.  But for the few people here and there who have now the passion of the reformer it is not impossible that another generation may see many thousands.  A second christianization of the world may convert all the happy into the consolers of the unhappy, instead of leading people to absorb themselves in the question of their own salvation.  No one can say how great a change might be made in the fair face of the earth if the effort to remove the causes of poverty and of disease should become the serious occupation of half mankind.  In the lower stages of existence the extermination of evil has been the work of a slow and gradual process.  Millions of individuals have been sacrificed in order to produce the few who were fitted to their surroundings.  But at last a creature has been produced of so much intelligence that he is able to undertake his own further development.  He can speculate upon the causes of his failures in the search for happiness, and he can apply remedies.  It is true that those remedies have often been productive of more harm than good, it is true that it would be hard to calculate the evil effects of the English poor-laws, for instance, but all the experiments that have hitherto worked badly are but so much material from which to draw a knowledge of better methods.  When the Wlllimantic Thread Company has found a way to make its girls come singing from their work as they go to it, and to make better thread at the same time, no one can say that great changes may not be brought about when once scientific methods shall have been discovered for the extermination of disease and crime.  What more interesting field for investigation, for theory, for active work, can women find than that large kind of charity which is to supersede in the future the indiscriminate alms-giving of the past?  The unselfishness that is demanded by the life of a reformer they have already in large abundance.  There is no limit to the devotion which many women show their families, but such devotion has in these days become so unnecessary as to be little more than a higher form of selfishness.  Perhaps it only needs a leader to turn this store of energy into wider channels and to make it subservient to larger ends.  Perhaps the labor and patience and self-renunciation that are necessary to the regeneration