sees herself merely as an accident in an
accidental group, headed nowhere in particular.

What it all amounts to is that the greatest art in the Woman's
Business is _using_ youth. It is no easy matter. Youth is a terrible
force, confident, selfish, unknowing. Rarely has it real courage,
real interest in aught but itself. It has all to learn, but it is
youth, the most beautiful and hopeful thing in life. And it is the
thing upon which the full development of life for a woman depends. She
must have it always at her side, if she is to know her own full
meaning in the scheme of things. It is part of her tragedy that she
fails so often to understand how essential is youth to her as an
individual, her happiness and her growth.

The fact that a woman is childless is no reason in the present world
why she should be cut off from the developing and ennobling
association. Indeed, the childless woman of to-day, in addition to her
obligation to herself, has a peculiar obligation to society in the
matter of the friendless child.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHILDLESS WOMAN AND THE FRIENDLESS CHILD

One of the first conclusions forced on a thoughtful unprejudiced
observer of society is that the major percentage of its pains and its
vices result from a failure to make good connections. Children pine
and even die for fruit in the cities, while a hundred miles away
thousands of barrels of apples are rotting on the ground. Famine
devastates one country, while the granaries of another are bursting
with food. Men and women drink themselves into the gutter from sheer
loneliness, while other men and women shrivel up in isolated comfort.
One of the most pitiful examples of this failure to connect is that
of the childless woman and the friendless, uncared-for child.

There never at any time in any country in the world's history existed
so large a group of women with whom responsibility and effort were a
matter of choice, as exists to-day in the United States. While a large
number of these free women are devoting themselves whole-heartedly to
public service of the most intelligent and ingenious kind, the great
majority recognize no obligation to make any substantial return to
society for its benefits. A small percentage of these are
self-supporting, but the majority are purely parasitical. Indeed, the
heaviest burden to-day on productive America, aside from the burden
imposed by a vicious industrial system, is that of its nonproductive
wo