s useful
fruits, but a protective, separating shield to shut out the insistent
demands of life in the place where they find themselves.

All of these women are rightfully classed as irresponsible, whether
they are moved by vanity, indolence, purposelessness, social
blindness, or, most pitiful, a sense of the emptiness of life
unattended by the imagination which reveals the sources from which
life is filled. No one of them is building a "House of Life" for
herself. They are building gimcrack palaces, gingerbread cottages,
structures which the first full blast of life will level to the
ground.

These women are not peculiar to city or to country. They are scattered
nation-wide. You find them on farms and in mansions, in offices and in
academic halls. In startling contrast there exists almost under the
very eaves of the roofs which shelter them a vast and pitiful group of
friendless children,--the deserted babe, the "little mother," the boys
and girls running wild on side streets in every village in our land
and in every slum in the cities, the factory child, the shop girl who
has no home. Let us remember that a goodly percentage of those at work
have homes and that they are engaged in a stimulating, if hard, effort
to "help," that they have the steadying consciousness that they are
needed. Nevertheless, this mass of youth is on the whole in an
unnatural position--an antisocial relation.

Society can never run rightfully until all its members are performing
their natural functions. No woman, whatever her condition, can escape
her obligation to youth without youth suffering, and without suffering
herself. One of the crying needs of to-day is a crusade, a jar, which
will force upon our free women the friendless children of the country,
give them some sense of the undeniable relation they bear to them,
show them that they are in a sense the cause of this pathetic group
and that it is their work to relieve it.

True, for a woman there is nothing more painful than putting herself
face to face with the suffering of children. Yet for many years now we
have had in this country a large and increasing number who were going
through the daily pain of grappling with every phase of the
distressing problems which come from the poverty, friendlessness, and
overwork of the young. Out of their heartbreaking scrutinies there
have come certain determinations which are being adopted rapidly
wherever the social sense is aroused. We may roug