Let me first of all give you my credentials, all the more necessary as my long illness has doubtless made me unknown by name to many of the younger generation, who may therefore question my right to impart facts or make any suggestions at all.  Suffer me, therefore, to recount to you how I have gained my knowledge and what are the sources of my information.

In the first place, I was trained for the work by a medical man—­my friend Mr. James Hinton—­first in his own branch of the London profession, and a most original thinker.  To him the degradation of women, which most men accept with such blank indifference, was a source of unspeakable distress.  He used to wander about the Haymarket and Piccadilly in London at night, and break his heart over the sights he saw and the tales he heard.  The words of the Prophet ground themselves into his very soul, with regard to the miserable wanderers of our streets:  “This is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of them snared in holes and hid in prison-houses; they are for a prey, and none delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, Restore.”

The very first time he came down to me at Brighton, to see if I could give him any help, speaking of all he had seen and heard, his voice suddenly broke, and he bowed his face upon my hands and wept like a child.  That one man could suffer as he did over the degradation of this womanhood of ours has always been to me the most hopeful thing I know—­a divine earnest of ultimate overcoming.  The only thing that seemed in a measure to assuage his anguish was my promise to devote myself to the one work of fighting it and endeavoring to awake the conscience of the nation to some sense of guilt with regard to it.  In order to fit me for this work he considered that I ought to know all that he as a medical man knew.  He emphatically did not spare me, and often the knowledge that he imparted to me was drowned in a storm of tears.  We were to have worked together, but his mind, already unhinged by suffering, ultimately gave way, and, with all that this world could give him—­health, fame, wealth, family affection, devoted friends—­he died prematurely of a broken heart.

For ten years, therefore, after my friend’s death I gave up everything for the purpose of carrying on the work he left me, and beat wearily up and down the three kingdoms, holding meetings, organizing practical work, agitating for the greater legal protection of the young, afterwards embodied in two Acts—­one for removing children from dens of infamy and one known as the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which have done much to educate the public sentiment of the country; but always making it my chief object to rouse educated women to face the facts about their own womanhood, and, above all, to rouse mothers to realize the perils of their own boys and to be determined to know enough to enable them to act as their guardians.