s 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 wors