they send out into the world—­the so-called manhood that either makes and maintains the miserable sinner of our streets or is content to give a tainted name to the mother of his child, or the true manhood lifted into God, whose marriage is the type of the eternal union of God and the soul, of Christ and the Church, and whose fatherhood claims kinship with the Father of lights.  It is impossible for women who are agitating for the enfranchisement of their sex to accept as a necessary class in the midst of a democratical society a class of citizens who, in Dr. Welldon’s[42] words, addressed to the University of Cambridge, “have lost once for all time the rights of citizenship—­who are nobody’s wives, nobody’s sisters, nobody’s friends, who live a living death in the world of men.  There are one hundred and fifty thousand such citizens,—­perhaps far more, in England and Wales—­and all are women.”

These old positions are simply impossible, each a moral reductio ad absurdam.  We must institute a new and higher order.  To do so we women must unite in a great silent movement, a temple slowly rising up beneath our hands without sound of axe or hammer.  It will not make itself heard on platforms; its cry will not be heard in our streets.  It will go on beneath the surface of our life, probably unheeded and unnoticed of men.  Women must educate women; those who know must teach those who are in ignorance.  Let mothers who have been roused to the greatness of the issues at stake take as their field of labor the young mothers whom they may know—­possibly their own married daughters or nieces, possibly those who are only bound to them by ties of friendship.  Use this book, if you will.  If there are things in it which you don’t approve of—­and oh, how much of the divine patience of our Lord do we need with one another in dealing with this difficult question—­cut out those pages, erase that passage, but do not deny those young mothers the necessary knowledge to guard the nursery or save their boys at school.  And then try and follow it up by quietly talking over the difficulties and the best method of encountering them.  Let us deny ourselves in order to give to associations or institutions for the elevation of women, as well as to that excellent society for men, the White Cross, which is spreading its purifying work through both countries.[43] Let us do what we can to help in organizing women’s labor, so that a living wage may be secured and no woman be driven by starvation into selling herself for a morsel of bread.  Let us endeavor to secure the franchise that we may have the power of legislating for the protection of women on the one point on which we stand in sharp opposition to all but good men; especially such measures as raising the age of consent, so deplorably low in some of your States, that your children are almost without legal protection; resisting State regulation of vice in the army; cleansing the streets by an Act pressing equally on men and women, and many others