But thirdly, there are wider issues than the welfare, physical and moral, of our own boys which make it impossible for us to take up any neutral attitude on this question.  We cannot remain indifferent to that which affects so deeply both the status and the happiness of women.  We cannot accept a standard for men which works out with the certainty of a mathematical law a pariah class of women.  We cannot leave on one side the anguish of working-class mothers just because we belong to the protected classes, and it is not our girls that are sacrificed.  At least, we women are ceasing to be as base as that, and God forgive us that, from want of thought rather than from want of heart, educated women could be found even to hold that the degradation of their own womanhood is a necessity!

Take but one instance out of the many that crossed my via dolorosa of the anguish inflicted on the mothers of the poor.  I take it, not because it is uncommon, but because it is typical.

At one of my mass meetings of working women in the North I was told at its close that a woman wished to speak with me in private.  As soon as I could disengage myself from the crowd of mothers who were always eager to shake hands with me, and to bless me with tears in their eyes for taking up their cause, I went down the room, and there, in a dimly-lighted corner of the great hall, I found a respectable-looking woman waiting for me.  I sat down by her side, and she poured out the pent-up sorrow of her heart before telling me the one great favor she craved at my hands.  She had an only daughter, who at the age of sixteen she had placed out in service, at a carefully-chosen situation.  We all know what a difficult age in a girl’s life is sixteen; but our girls we can keep under our own watchful care, and their little wilfulnesses and naughtinesses are got over within the four walls of a loving home, and are only the thorns that precede the perfect rose of womanhood.  But the poor have to send their girls out into the great wicked world at this age to be bread-winners, often far away from a mother’s protecting care.  The girl, however, in this case was a good, steady girl, and for a time did well.  Then something unsettled her, and she left her first place, and got another situation.  For a time it seemed all right, when suddenly her letters ceased.  The mother wrote again and again, but got no answer.  She wrote to her former place; they knew nothing of her.  At last she saved up a little money and went to the town where she believed her girl to be.  She sought out and found her last address.  The family had gone away, and left no address.  She made inquiries of the neighbors, of the police.  Yes, they remembered the girl—­a nice-looking girl with a bright color; but no one had seen her lately.  It was as if a trap-door had opened and let her through.  She had simply disappeared.  In all that crowded city her mother could find no trace of her.  “It is now thirteen years, ma’am, since I lost her.”