achieving the apotheosis of the Puritan ideal with a dictagraph in every bedroom and closet in the town, and it all would be of no avail. The study must survey the whole field of social and domestic relations, until the vast mystery of life is understood, and the relation between its wide antitheses established as Tolstoy presents them in his story of the poor mother who took her daughter to the public house in the village, and the rich mother who, at the same time, took her daughter to the court at St. Petersburg. It will be found perhaps in the long run, for which so few are ever willing to remain, that the eradicable causes of prostitution are due to involuntary poverty, and the awful task is to get involuntary poverty out of the world. It is a task which has all the tremendous difficulties of constructive social labor and it is as deliberate as evolution itself. And even if it is ever accomplished, there will remain a residuum in the problem inhering in the mysteries of sex, concerning which even the wisest and most devoted of our scientists will confess they know very little as yet and have not much to tell us that will do us any good.
LI
In taking the present occasion to say so much
about the work in morals which a mayor is expected
to perform, I have a disquieting sense that I have
fallen into a tone too querulous for the subject, and
perhaps taken a mean advantage of the reader in
