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 exquisite 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