was
established and is maintained by the Probation Association of New York,
consisting of the probation officers in many of the city courts, and of
men and women interested in philanthropy and social reform. The District
Attorney of New York County, Charles S. Whitman, is president of the
Association, Maude E. Miner is its secretary, Mrs. Russell Sage, Miss
Anne Morgan, Miss Mary Dreier, president of the New York Women's Trade
Union League, Mrs. Richard Aldrich, formerly president of the Women's
Municipal League, Andrew Carnegie, Edward T. Devine, head of New York's
organized charities, Homer Folks, and Fulton Cutting are among the
supporters of Waverley House. Miss Stella Miner is the capable and
sympathetic superintendent of the house.

The place is in no sense a reformatory. It is an experiment station, a
laboratory where the gravest and most baffling of all the diseases which
beset society is being studied. Girls arrested for moral delinquency and
paroled to probation officers are taken to Waverley House, where they
remain, under closest study and searching inquiry, until the best means
of disposing of them is devised. Some are sent to their homes, some to
hospitals, some to institutions, some placed on long probation.

Maude E. Miner, who declined a chair of mathematics in a woman's college
to work in the Night Court, is one of an increasing number of women who
are attempting a great task. They are trying to solve a problem which
has baffled the minds of the wisest since civilization dawned. They have
set themselves to combat an evil fate which every year overtakes
countless thousands of young girls, dragging them down to misery,
disease, and death. At the magnitude of the effort these women have
undertaken one stands appalled. Will they ever reach the heart of the
problem? Can they ever hope to do more than reclaim a few individuals?
This much did the missionaries before them.

"We could reclaim fully seventy-five per cent," declares Miss Miner, "if
only we could find a way to begin nearer the beginning."

To begin the reform of any evil at the beginning, or near the beginning,
instead of near the end is now regarded as an economy of effort. That is
what educators are trying to do with juvenile delinquency; what
physicians are doing with disease; what philanthropists are beginning to
do with poverty.

Hardly any one has suggested that the social evil might have a cause,
and that it might be possible to attack