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, "a beastly shame," and fight it both in themselves
and in others, for our sakes as well as their own. For the misery as
things are is this:--that men divide us into two classes--we pure women
for whom nothing is too go