They built charming homes, reared healthy, active children whom they educated at any personal sacrifice--all within a circle of eighty saloons! To offset the saloons they built churches--a church for each sect--each more gorgeous than its neighbor.

It was in building churches that they showed the "greatest tenacity of purpose." They had a large temperance organization.

It supported a rest room and met fortnightly to pray "ardently and sincerely." How little this body of good women sensed their problem, how little they were fitted to deal with it, my informant's comment reveals.

"You doubtless remember the story," the letter runs, "of the old lady who deplored the shooting of craps because, though she didn't know what they were, 'life was probably as dear to them as to anybody.'" "It was just as it is everywhere." Busy with self and their immediate circles, they went their daily ways unseeing, though these ways were hedged with a corruption whose rank and horrible offshoots at every step clutched the feet of the children for whom they were responsible.
Perhaps there is nothing to-day needed in this country more than driving into the minds of women this personal obligation to do what may be called intensive gardening in youth.

Whether a woman wishes to see it or not, she is the center of a whirl of life.