would go by default.  Under these circumstances I had no choice but to do so.  But as I sat in the committee room while the order of the meeting was being arranged, and heard my audience shouting, singing, crowing like cocks, whistling like parrots, caterwauling like cats, and keeping up a continuous uproar, I thought to myself, “I have got to go into that, and control it somehow so as to be heard”; I confess I did feel wrecked upon God.  Professor Maclagan, who took the chair, agreed that a prayer was impossible, a hymn was equally out of the question.  The only thing was to push me at once to the front; and almost immediately after a few very brief words from the distinguished chairman I found myself face to face with an audience that evidently meant mischief.  By some instinct I told them at once about James Hinton, whom, of course, they knew by name as the first aurist of his day; how, with all that this life could give him, he had died of a broken heart, a heart broken over the lost and degraded womanhood of England, the hosts of young girls slain in body and soul whom he met with at night in our terrible streets.  This seemed to strike and sober them, that a man should actually die over a thing which to all of them was so familiar and to many had been only the subject of a coarse jest.  Fortunately, there is a stage of nervous terror which rounds again on desperate courage, and having once got hold of my audience, I determined to use the occasion to the uttermost and venture on the most perilous ground.  In the course of my address I asked them to take notice of a great silent change that was taking place all round them in the position of women, the full significance of which they might not have grasped.  Everywhere women were leaving the seclusion of their homes and were quietly coming forward and taking their place by their side in the great work of the world.  I thanked them for the generous welcome that they had accorded them.  But had they seized the full meaning, the ulterior bearings of this changed attitude in women, and the wider knowledge of the world that it brought with it?  Not so long ago it was an understood thing that women should know nothing of the darker side of life; and there was nothing dishonorable in a man keeping the woman he loved in ignorance of the darker side of his own past, if such there were.  But in the greater knowledge that has come to women, and the anguish some of them feel over the misery and degradation of their lost sisters, can this attitude any longer be maintained without conscious deception?  “What would you say,” I asked, “if the woman you loved with the whole strength of your soul passed herself off as an undamaged article upon you, and let you worship her as the very embodiment of all that is white and pure, when something unspeakably sad and sinful had happened in her past life?  You know you would be half mad at the wrong done to you if after marriage you found it out.  And what are you going to do, I ask some of you who are so