re lost. Possibly she had been sent out of the
country, and was in some foreign den. One's best hope was that she was
dead.

But picture to yourselves the long-drawn anguish of that mother, with
nothing but a dream to comfort her amid the dread realities of life.
Picture her as only one of thousands and thousands of our working-class
mothers on whose poor dumb hearts the same nameless sorrow rests like a
gravestone; and I think no woman--no mother, at least--but will agree
with me, that this is a matter from which we, as women, cannot stand
off. Even if we had not the moral and physical welfare of our own boys
to consider, we are baptized into this cause by the tears of women, the
dumb tears of the poor. But there is one last consideration, exquisitely
painful as it is, which I cannot, I dare not, pass over, and which more
than any other has aroused the thoughtful women of England and America
to face the question and endeavor to grapple, however imperfectly as
yet, with the problem. For some strange reason the whole weight of this
evil in its last resort comes crushing down on the shoulders of a little
child--infant Christs of the cross without the crown, "martyrs of the
pang, without the palm." The sins of their parents are visited on them
from their birth, in scrofula, blindness, consumption. "Disease and
suffering," in Dickens's words, "preside over their birth, rock their
wretched cradles, nail down their little coffins, and fill their unknown
graves." More than one-half of the inmates of our Great Ormond Street
Hospital for Sick Children are sent there by vice. But would to God it
were only innocent suffering that is inflicted on the children of our
land. Alas! alas! when I first began my work, a ward in a large London
penitentiary, I found, was set apart for degraded children! Or take that
one brief appalling statement in the record of ten years of work--1884
to 1894--issued by a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
In the classification of the various victims it is stated that the
society had dealt with 4460 pitiable child victims of debauchery! Alas
for our England, and the debasement which a low moral standard for men
has made possible in our midst! And, judging by the absence of proper
legal protection and the extraordinarily low age of consent adopted by
some of the States of the Union, I fear things are not much better in
America.

One of our sweetest poets, Charles Tennyson Turner, in an exqu