fashionable neighbors in their style of living—­surely these sacrifices are not beyond us, to attain a great end, both for ourselves and our empire.  If indeed we think we can meet this evil without making sacrifices amounting to a silent revolution in our life; if we think, as I have sometimes thought some women do think, that we can quench this pit of perdition in our midst by, as it were, emptying our scent-bottles upon it,—­shedding a few empty tears, heaving a few sentimental sighs:  “It is very sad! of course I can’t do anything, but I am sure I wish all success to your noble work”—­possibly even giving a very little money, say a guinea a year, to a penitentiary—­all I can say is, God is not mocked.  I know but one thing in heaven or earth that will quench it, and that is life-blood.  Sometimes I have asked in anguish of spirit:  “Will women give it?” I believe they will.  But, whether we give it or not, what Matthew Arnold called “the noblest of religious utterances” holds good here:  “Without shedding of blood there is no remission of this sin.”

And it is because I know that mothers will spend their heart’s blood in saving their sons, and because I believe that women, with their new-born position and dignity, will not go on accepting as a matter of course that their womanhood should be fashioned like the Egyptian sphinx, half pure woman, crowned with intellectual and moral beauty, dowered with the homage of men; and half unclean beast of prey, seeking whom it may slay, outcast and abandoned and forced to snare or starve—­it is because of this, my rooted faith in women, that I have hope.

As long ago as 1880 Professor Max Mueller, ever anxious for the interests of his Indian fellow-subjects, when Mr. Malabari came to ask him how he could rouse English public opinion with regard to the injuries inflicted on young girls by Hindu child-marriages, answered him at once, “Write a short pamphlet and send it to the women of England.  They begin to be a power, and they have one splendid quality, they are never beaten."[44] And if this can be said of English women, still more may it be said of the women of America.

But, further, to strengthen us in this splendid quality, have we sufficiently recognized the new moral forces that are coming into the world?  Have our eyes been opened to see “the horses and chariots of fire” which are silently taking up their position around us, to guard us and fight for us, that we may not be beaten; the deepened sense of moral obligation, the added power of conscience, the altogether new altruistic sense which makes the misery and degradation of others cling to us like a garment we cannot shake off, a sense of others’ woes for which we have had to invent a new word?  Lord Shaftesbury’s legislation does not date so very far back; and yet when his Bill for delivering women and children from working in our mines was hanging in the balance, and the loss of a single vote might wreck it—­women,