ork done here that in Illinois to-day a girl cannot legally consent
to her own undoing till she is at least sixteen years old and that
even till she is eighteen her injurer, immune from nature's revenge,
is not immune from the law's.

These things you'd see, and innumerable others. All that I have
mentioned have been suggested to me by lines of communication which
stretch out over the town from the one club I have particularly noted.
If I tried to unravel all those lines to all their endings, I should
keep you here beyond your patience. If I tried to extend my survey to
other similar clubs, younger, smaller, but equally zealous, in this
community, I should keep you here even beyond mine.

They began, those women of the Chicago Woman's Club, with remembering
that Goethe said that activity without insight is an evil. Last spring
they remembered something else that Goethe said. Their president,
retiring from office, comprehended the history of the club and of
thousands of other woman's clubs thus:

"Goethe, who started with the theory that the highest life was to be
gained by self-culture, in later years concluded that service was the
way to happiness. So we have risen by stepping stones to higher
things; through study, through _interest_ in humanity, the supreme
motive of this club has come to be _service_ to humanity."

And yet I haven't mentioned the greatest service ever rendered to the
town by its women.

One day a woman went on a visit, one of many, to the jail. There
were a lot of boys playing about a man in a dressing-gown and
rocking-chair. She inquired about him. "Him?" said the children,
"He's a fellow just murdered his wife. He's our boss."

Visits like that, scenes like that, were the beginning of the Juvenile
Court in Chicago. As the idea began to traverse the local sky, it
gathered about it a most useful and honorable aura of masculine
interest. But the nucleus of it was feminine. And it is to women that
the United States really owes its first Juvenile Court law.

The incident might end there and be notable enough. But it goes
farther.

At the very first session of the Chicago Juvenile Court there appeared
two women. One of them offered to be a probation officer. The other,
with a consciousness of many friends behind her, offered to accumulate
a fund on which a staff of probation officers might be maintained.

From those offers grew the Juvenile Court Committee. Its work during
the next eight year