The individual woman’s obligation toward the children and young people in her neighborhood is very like this obligation of the man to public affairs.  It is for her to know the conditions under which the children, the boys and girls, young men and maids, in her vicinity are actually living.  It is for her to be alert to their health, amusements, and general education.  It is for her to find the one—­and there always is one—­that actually needs her.  It is for her to correlate her personal discoveries and experiences with the general efforts of the community.

This is no work for an occasional morning.  It does not mean sporadic or even regular “neighborhood visiting.”  It means observation, reflection, and study.  It has nothing to do save indirectly with societies, or groups, or laws.  It is a personal work, something nobody else can do, and something which, if it is neglected, adds just so much more to the stream of uncared-for youth.  How is it to be done?  Have you ever watched a woman interested in birds making her observations?  She will get up at daylight to catch a note of a new singer.  She will study in detail the little family that is making its home on her veranda.  From the hour that the birds arrive in the spring until the hour that they leave in the fall she misses nothing of their doings.  It is a beautiful and profitable study, and it is a type of what is required of a woman who would fulfill her obligation toward the youth of her neighborhood.

Could we have such study everywhere in country and town, what tragedies and shames we might be spared!  A few months ago the whole nation was horrified by a riot in a prosperous small city of the Middle West which ended in the lynching of a young man, a mere boy, who in trying to discharge his duty as a public official had killed a man.  Some thirty persons, over half of them boys under twenty years of age, are to-day serving terms of from fifteen to twenty years in the penitentiary for their part in this lynching.

Their terrible work was no insane outbreak.  Analyzed, it was a logical consequence of the social and political conditions under which the boys had been brought up.  In a pretty, rich, busy town of 30,000 people proud of its churches and its schools, eighty saloons industriously plied their business—­and part of their business, as it always is, was to train youths to become their patrons.

What were the women doing in the town?  I asked the question of one who knew it.  “Why,” he said, “they were doing just what women do everywhere, no better, no worse.  They had their clubs; I suppose a dozen literary clubs, several sewing clubs, several bridge clubs, and a number of dancing clubs.  I think they cared a little more for bridge than for literature, many of them at least.  They took little part in civic work, though they had done much for the city library and city hospital.  Many girls went to college, to the State Institute, to Vassar and Smith.  They came back to teach and to marry.  It was just as it is everywhere.”