mes in their makeup! Parents
and teachers ordinarily have extraordinary skill in evading, but
little in facing, the facts of life.

Disarmed by her ignorance, the girl goes out to a freedom such as no
country has ever before believed it safe to allow the young, either
girl or boy. This freedom is of course the logical result of what we
call the "emancipation of women." It is the swinging of the pendulum
from the old system of chaperonage and authority. The weak point is in
the fact that the girl has not knowledge enough for her freedom. It is
not a return of the old system of guarded girls which is needed. That
is impossible under modern conditions, out of harmony with modern
ideas. The great need is that the women of the country realize that
freedom unaccompanied by knowledge is one of the most dangerous tools
that can be put into a human being's hands. The reluctance of women
to face this fact is the most discouraging side of the woman question.

The girl who goes forth should go armed with knowledge. Moreover, in
moments of loneliness, when she is ready to slip, she should be
literally jerked back by the pull of the home. This hold of the home
is no chimerical thing. It is a positive, living reality. The home has
a power of projecting itself into the lives of those who go out from
it. It is where the girl does not carry away a sense of an
uninterrupted relation--a certainty that she is a part of that group
and that achievement, that she is only carrying on, enlarging, helping
to extend, beautify, and ripen its work, that she is not homeless.
Nothing can so hold her in her isolation as that sense.

The Uneasy Woman of to-day who has fulfilled to the letter, as she
understands it, the Woman's Business, is frequently heard to say: "My
boys are in college; they do not need me. My girls are married or at
work, and they do not need me. I have nothing to do. My business is
complete, I am retired, sidetracked. It is for this reason that I ask
a part in politics." But her argument proves that she does not
understand her business. She may want and need some outside occupation
for the very health of her business, politics perhaps, but certainly
not because her business is done.

There is no more critical time for her than when her young people go
out to try themselves in the world. The girl particularly needs this
pull of the home, not only to keep her on a straight path, but to keep
her from the narrowness and selfishness