She had been trapped, or drugged, or enticed into that dread under-world into which so many of our working-class girls disappear and are lost.

Possibly she had been sent out of the country, and was in some foreign den.

One's best hope was that she was dead.
But picture to yourselves the long-drawn anguish of that mother, with nothing but a dream to comfort her amid the dread realities of life.
Picture her as only one of thousands and thousands of our working-class mothers on whose poor dumb hearts the same nameless sorrow rests like a gravestone; and I think no woman--no mother, at least--but will agree with me, that this is a matter from which we, as women, cannot stand off.

Even if we had not the moral and physical welfare of our own boys to consider, we are baptized into this cause by the tears of women, the dumb tears 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.