Either the poor girl would say, "Sir, I am very sorry I spoke to you"; or more frequently still that little mark of human respect would prove too much, and she would silently turn away and burst into tears.

If our sons cannot bare their heads before that bowed and ignoble object on whom the sins of us all seem to have met--the wild passions of men, as well as the self-righteousness of the Church--then our young men are not what I take them to be,--nay, thank God! what I know them to be, sound of head and sound of heart.

They get hold of facts by the wrong end; they cut into the middle of a chain, and look upon the woman as the aggressor, and contemplate her as an unclean bird of prey.

They do not in the least realize the slight and morally trivial things that cast too many of our working-class girls down into the pit of hell that skirts their daily path--often as mere children who know not what they do, often from hunger and desperation, often tricked and drugged, and always heavily bribed.

But let them know the facts, let them read a little paper such as the _Black Anchor_, the _Ride of Death_, or _My Little Sister_,[28] and they will feel the whole thing to be, in their own rough but expressive words, "a beastly shame," and fight it both in themselves and in others, for our sakes as well as their own.