suggestions
that I may make, across the dismal mud swamp that I often trod with such
an aching heart and faltering steps came to meet me God's best and
highest, with outstretched hands of help and encouragement. It was the
highly-cultivated and thoughtful women who, amidst the storm of obloquy
that beat upon me from every quarter, first ranged themselves by my
side, perceiving that the best way to avoid a danger is not to refuse to
see it. Some were women already in the field in connection with Mrs.
Butler's movement, to which our nation owes so much, some were roused by
my words.

In all our large towns where I formed Associations for the Care of
Friendless Girls I was in the habit of reporting my work to the clergy
of my own church, whose sympathy and cooperation I shall ever gratefully
acknowledge. Ultimately, the leading laity, as well as some
Nonconformist ministers, joined with us; often these conferences were
diocesan meetings--to which, however, Nonconformists were invited--with
the Bishop of the diocese in the chair; and after my address free
discussion took place, so that I had the advantage of hearing the
opinions and judgments of many of our leading men in regard to this
difficult problem, and getting at men's views of the question.

The matter that I lay before you, therefore, has been thoroughly and
repeatedly threshed out at such conferences, as well as in long,
earnest, private talks with the wisest and most experienced mothers and
teachers of our day; and it is in their name, far more than in my own,
that I ask you to ponder what I say.

Do not, however, be under any fear that I intend in these pages to make
myself the medium of all sorts of horrors. I intend to do no such thing.
It is but very little evil that you will need to know, and that not in
detail, in order to guard your own boys. We women, thank God, have to do
with the fountain of sweet waters, clear as crystal, that flow from the
throne of God; not with the sewer that flows from the foul imaginations
and actions of men. Our part is the inculcation of positive purity, not
the part of negative warning against vice. Nor need you fear that the
evil you must know, in order to fulfil your most sacred trust, will
sully you. This I say emphatically, that the evil which we have grappled
with to save one of our own dear ones does not sully. It is the evil
that we read about in novels and newspapers, for our own amusement; it
is the evil that we we