isite
sonnet on a three-year-old child being presented with a toy globe, has
portrayed the consecration of a child's innocence, bathing the world
itself in its baptismal dew:

"She patted all the world; old empires peep'd
Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
Was welcome at all frontiers."

And when at length they turn "her sweet unlearned eye" "on our own
isle," she utters a little joyous cry:

"Oh yes, I see it! Letty's home is there!
And while she hid all England with a kiss,
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair."

By the side of that exquisite picture of the beatitude of a child's
innocence place the picture of that long procession of desecrated
children, with no "sweet unlearned eye," but eyes learned in the worst
forms of human wickedness and cruelty; and let any woman say, if she can
or dare, that this is a subject on which she is not called to have any
voice and which she prefers to let alone. Surely our womanhood has not
become in these last days such a withered and wilted thing that our ears
have grown too nice for the cry of these hapless children! As women, we
are the natural guardians of the innocence of all children. The divine
motherhood that is at the heart of every woman worthy of the name "rises
up in wrath" within us and cries: "We _will_ fulfil our trust, not only
to our own children, but to the helpless children of the poor." The day
is at hand when every mother of boys will silently vow before God to
send at least one knight of God into the world to fight an evil before
which even a child's innocence is not sacred and which tramples under
its swine's feet the weak and the helpless.

Indeed, when one reflects that this great moral problem touches all the
great trusts of our womanhood, the sanctity of the family, the purity of
the home, the sacredness of marriage, the sweet innocence of children,
it seems like some evil dream that women can ever have asked, "Why
cannot I leave this matter to men? Why should I interfere?"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Dr. Carpenter does not hesitate to attribute this sharp dip
in the male line of life to the indulgence of the passions in youth, and
the subsequent rise to marriage and a more regular life.]

[Footnote 2: _Pendennis_, vol. i., p. 16.]

CHAPTER III

FIRST PRINCIPLES

"But what can we do?" will be the next question, uttered perhaps in the
forlorn accents of a latent despair.

Before answering this quest