e exercises a greater
influence in politics than any other American commonwealth save her
younger sister, has also placed the age of consent at eighteen years.
_All the other States trail the banner of morality in the dust before
the dictates of man's bestiality._

[16] The hundreds of earnest organizers in the great reform
movements of to-day; the sincere and profoundly religious
women who preach the Christian gospel every Sunday; the
leaders in the great temperance organizations who are also
leaders in various Orthodox churches, have, in spite of
their prejudices and the old-time faith which is often more
a legacy from the past than the result of a many-sided
investigation, yielded to the demands of their age, the
crying needs of the hour, and in defiance of the dogmatic
injunctions of Paul, have entered the vineyard of practical
reform, while still maintaining the anomalous position of
defending the verbal inspiration of the New Testament. This
singularly illogical position, however, is always met with
in a transition period, when a larger and more purposeful
life is struggling with time-hallowed traditions and the
memories and teachings made almost sacred by the childlike
acceptation, of loved parents, and teachers who have
vanished down the vale.

[17] It has been variously estimated by careful statisticians
that we have from 2,500,000 to 3,000,000 girls and women in
the United States who are making their own livings. The
Commissioner of Labor, in his report for 1885, estimated
that in New York City alone, there are over 200,000
employed in various wage-earning vocations. Mr. Carroll D.
Wright's fourth annual report in the U. S. Bureau of Labor
gives the results of statistics gathered from twenty-two
cities of women engaged in manual labor, not including the
great army engaged in professional and semi-professional
vocations, as something near 300,000, but the glaring
discrepancy in the figures as they relate to the Empire
City, shown by Helen Campbell, discredits the report.
Certain it is that in the cities mentioned if one begins at
the scrub women and passes through the various occupations,