ng to thoughtless young people, however
innocent they may be of any deliberate wrong-doing. In the model
lodging-house there should be perfect liberty of conduct and action on
the part of guests--who will not be "inmates" in any sense of the word.
Such guests should have perfect liberty to go and come when they please
at any hour of the day or night; be permitted to see any person they
choose to have come, without question or challenge, so long as the
conventions of ordinary social life are complied with. Such an
institution, conducted upon such a plan and managed so that it would
make fair returns to its promoters, cannot fail to be welcomed; and
would be of inestimable benefit as an uplifting and regenerative force
with those for whom it is designed.

The other need is for a greater interest in the workwoman's welfare on
the part of the church, and an effort by that all-powerful institution
to bring about some adjustment of her social and economic difficulties.
I am old-fashioned enough to believe in the supreme efficacy of
organized religion in relation to womanhood, and all that pertains to
womanhood. I believe that, in our present state of social development,
the church can do more for the working girl than any of the proposed
measures based upon economic science or the purely ethical theory.
Working women as a class are certainly not ripe for the trades-union, as
I have already intimated; and the earnest people of the "settlements"
are able to reach but a small part of the great army of women marching
hopelessly on, ungeneraled, untrained, and, worst of all, uncaring.

Few are they who, like Tolstoi, can gracefully stoop to conquer; and
those who shall be ordained to revolutionize conditions will rise from
the ranks, even as did Booker T. Washington. This, of course, is the
ultimate object of settlement work: to prepare the leaven for the loaf.

But a live and progressive church--a church imbued with the Christian
spirit in the broadest and most liberal interpretation of the term--can
do for us, and do it quickly and at once, more than all the college
settlements and all the trades-unions that can be organized within the
next ten years could hope to do. And for this reason: the church has all
the machinery ready, set up and waiting only for the proper hand to put
it in motion to this great end. The Christian church has a vast
responsibility in the solution of all problems of the social order, and
none of those p