One word more, a sad and painful one, but one which comes from my inmost heart.  Do not pass by the sadder aspects of this great moral question and refuse “to open thy mouth for the dumb,” for those “who are appointed unto destruction.”

You cannot keep your son in ignorance of the facts; the state of our miserable streets, every time he walks out in the evening in any of our large towns, absolutely forbids that possibility.  But you can place him in the right attitude to meet those facts whether in the streets or among his own companions.  It is by fighting the evils without that we can best fight the evils within.  It is in dragging them down that we are lifted up.  A noble passion for the wronged, the weak, the sinful, and the lost is the best means for casting out the ignoble passions which would destroy another in order to have a good time one’s self.  At present the stock phrase of a virtuous young man is, “I know how to take care of myself.”  You have to put into his lips and heart a stronger and a nobler utterance than that:  “I know how to take care of the weakest woman that comes in my path.”  Surely it is requiring no impossible moral attitude in our sons, rather mere common manliness, to expect that when spoken to by some poor wanderer, he should make answer in his heart if not with his lips, “My girl, I have got a sister, and it would break my heart to see her in your place, and I would rather die than have any part in your degradation.”  One mother I know, who had been much engaged in rescue work, and into whose heart the misery and degradation of our outcast girls had entered like iron, taught her young son always to take off his hat before passsing on, whenever he was accosted.  He told a friend of mine that he had scarcely ever known it to fail.  Either the poor girl would say, “Sir, I am very sorry I spoke to you”; or more frequently still that little mark of human respect would prove too much, and she would silently turn away and burst into tears.  If our sons cannot bare their heads before that bowed and ignoble object on whom the sins of us all seem to have met—­the wild passions of men, as well as the self-righteousness of the Church—­then our young men are not what I take them to be,—­nay, thank God! what I know them to be, sound of head and sound of heart.  They get hold of facts by the wrong end; they cut into the middle of a chain, and look upon the woman as the aggressor, and contemplate her as an unclean bird of prey.  They do not in the least realize the slight and morally trivial things that cast too many of our working-class girls down into the pit of hell that skirts their daily path—­often as mere children who know not what they do, often from hunger and desperation, often tricked and drugged, and always heavily bribed.  But let them know the facts, let them read a little paper such as the Black Anchor, the Ride of Death, or My Little Sister,[28] and they will feel the whole thing to be, in their own rough but expressive words,