vanity, in slothfulness, in sex.  It does not, however, follow that a person possessing these characteristics in an abnormal degree is bound to fall.  If such a person is protected by parental care, no evil results need necessarily ensue.  It is when low instincts are combined with a bad home that the worst is to be feared.  This fact was clearly and emphatically brought to light by the parliamentary inquiry which took place in France a few years ago.  M. Th.  Roussel, one of the highest authorities on the committee, the man, in fact, from whom the inquiry derived its name, thus sums up some of its results:  “However large a part in the production of prostitution must be allowed to the love of pleasure and of finery, to a dislike of work and to debased instincts, the cause which, according to the facts cited, appears everywhere as the most powerful and the most general, is the want of a home, the want of maternal care.”  Here are some of the facts on which M. Roussel bases his general statement.  “At Bordeaux, out of 600 ’filles inscrites’ 98 were minors.  Of the latter, 44 appear to have fallen through their own fault alone.  The remaining 54 grew up under abnormal, domestic conditions; 14 were orphans, without father or mother, 7 had only one parent, 32 had been abandoned or perverted by their parents.”

In England it would be impossible to conduct a parliamentary inquiry on the lines of the “Enquete Roussel,” but it is very probable if such an inquiry were instituted it would reveal a condition of things very similar to what exists in France.  The scattered and fragmentary information we do possess points to that conclusion, and the conclusion, it must be admitted, is not at all a hopeful or comforting one.  Supposing that all the homeless and deserted female children we have now in our midst were immediately placed under the protection of the State (as a matter of fact, most of them are), it does not follow that they will grow up to lead regular lives.  According to the thirty-second report of the Inspector of Reformatory and Industrial Schools, the authorities are unable to account satisfactorily for the character of more than four fifths of the inmates of girls’ industrial schools who have left these institutions on an average for two or three years.  That is to say, it is probable that about twenty out of every hundred girls go to the bad within two or three years of leaving an industrial school.  The proportion of girls discharged from reformatory schools, whose character is bad within two years of their discharge, is still larger than in the case of industrial schools.  This is only what might be expected, for it is the worst cases that are now sent to reformatory schools.  “Since the passing of the Elementary Education Act,” said Miss Nicoll of the Girls’ Reformatory, Hampstead, at the Fourth Conference of the National Association of certified Reformatory and Industrial Schools, “a great change has gradually been made in the character