'H : 
 
 
 W A
 
 L I E> RAHY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 U N IV LRSITY 
 
 Of 1LLI NOIS
 
 WORK IN BRIGHTON 
 
 OR, 
 
 VOMAN'S MISSION TO WOMEN. 
 
 BY 
 
 ELLICE HOPKINS, 
 
 AUTHOR OF ' ACTIVE SERVICE,' ' WORK AMONG THE LOST,' ETC. 
 
 ©Hit!) a Preface 
 BY FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 
 
 felftlx (Tbousanb, foiib Slbbiiiorts. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 HATCHARDS, PICCADILLY. 
 
 1878.
 
 ' This is a people robbed and spoiled. They are all of 
 them snared in holes, and hid in prison-houses ; they are for 
 a prey, and none delivereth ; for a spoil, and none saith 
 Restore,' — ha, xlii. 22.
 
 PREFACE TO NINTH EDITION. 
 
 From my own experience in long past years I am quite 
 sure that the way, as indicated in Work i7i Brighton, is 
 the only true way ; and I would entreat the women of 
 England to read the little book, and then judge, each for 
 herself, how best to use that influence, never to be for- 
 gotten, lost, or set aside, of every pure woman in the 
 cause — an influence which must one day tell for or 
 against, whether she will or no. She cannot be neutral. 
 This is the cause, one would think, of every English- 
 woman ; for to every Englishwoman Home and Family, 
 here imperilled, with or without her knowledge, have a 
 sacred name ; the cause of every wife and mother, for 
 the happy wife and mother (as was truly said by one of
 
 vi Preface to Ninth Edition. 
 
 these) has the strongest reason to do something to help 
 those who have no home and no happiness ; the cause 
 of God, who is the Father of the poor outcasts as well 
 as of the happy homes. 
 
 In these holy names I beg you to look at this work. 
 What is character given us for, but to help those who 
 have none ? I bid the work ' God speed ' with all my 
 heart, and soul, and strength. 
 
 Florence Nightingale. 
 
 London, Oct. 1877. 
 
 5 u;uc'
 
 PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION. 
 
 At the conclusion of a quarter of a century's work I 
 have been led to feel that penitentiary-work, important 
 and absolutely necessary as it is, can only undo the 
 last link or two of a chain of evil to which fresh links are 
 being added at the other end, by causes it leaves un- 
 touched. I have been led to feel that unless a radical 
 change of feeling and attitude can be brought about in 
 the educated women, and especially the mothers of 
 England, as long as they insist on ignoring the subject, 
 and therefore not exerting their legitimate influence, no 
 real progress can be made to a better state of things; and 
 therefore I gladly give to my friend's little book whatever 
 weight may attach to my name.
 
 viii Preface to First Editio7i. 
 
 I have come a long and toilsome way, and not many 
 more years of labour may lie between me and my eternal 
 rest, but if the many warm hearts who have befriended 
 me and my work still ask what they can do for me, I 
 answer, 'Read, and get others to read, this little book.' 
 Do not read it hastily, but ponder its statements, the 
 work of more than one mind, the result of many years of 
 thought, prayer, and suffering, and see if you cannot, by 
 home or social influence, by becoming one of an Asso- 
 ciation, by undertaking to distribute this little book 
 among your friends, or by some other method, do some- 
 thing to help a cause which in the name of Home and 
 Family should lie nearest and dearest to every woman's 
 heart. 
 
 Fanny Vicars. 
 
 6 Charlotte Street, Brighton, 
 February, 1877.
 
 WORK IN BRIGHTON; 
 
 OR, 
 
 WOMAN'S MISSION TO WOMEN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 W r HILST we are sending missionaries to the utter- 
 most parts of the earth, there is a mission close to 
 our own doors which we women refuse to recog- 
 nise, though only we can take it up ; a mission to 
 a ' land of darkness, as darkness itself, and of the 
 shadow of death, without any order, and where the 
 light is as midnight ;' to a people, in the words of 
 the prophet, ' robbed and spoiled ; they are all of 
 them snared in holes, and they are hid in prison- 
 houses ; they are for a prey, and none delivereth ; 
 for a spoil, and none saith, Restore f to those,
 
 io Work in Brighton. 
 
 fashioned like ourselves, speaking the same mother- 
 speech, born in the same Christian land, yet sunk in 
 worse than heathenism — a degradation to which 
 many a heathen would point with scorn. 
 
 My attention was first called to the subject by 
 reading some private journals of Sarah Robinson, 
 the well-known worker among our soldiers.* 
 
 In 1864, Miss Robinson, being then in tem- 
 porary charge of the Aldershot Military Mission 
 Hall, was led to take an interest in the outcast 
 women, who form one of the hideous concomitants 
 of standing armies, with their enforced celibacy. 
 She began her work among them by the usual 
 agency — a midnight meeting — of which in her 
 private journal she gives the following account : — 
 
 ' We got the tea ready for ten o'clock ; the 
 two Bible women were to help in the Hall, and 
 Mr. Michael was to be in the streets to bring in 
 any he could find and persuade to come. About 
 thirty girls came. Nearly all were the worse for 
 drink, and it took an hour's tea-drinking to get 
 them sober and fit to listen. Whilst Mr. Michael 
 
 * See a little shilling book, called Active Service, Twen- 
 tieth thousand. (Hatchards.)
 
 Work in Brighton. 1 1 
 
 was speaking to them they kept slipping out, on 
 one pretence and another, till only a dozen 
 remained ; and one of these went into a fit and 
 made a long interruption ; and another also became 
 faint and hysterical, and the Bible-women were 
 wholly occupied with smelling salts and cold 
 water. I found it quite hopeless to expect the 
 girls to listen to what was being said, so tried to 
 speak separately to a few. One girl greatly 
 interested me ; she is well educated and lady-like, 
 
 the daughter of a shire magistrate. She had 
 
 come in, not to tea, but entirely out of curiosity, 
 to see if any lady really would notice such girls, 
 as she had supposed Mr. Michael was joking when 
 he spoke to her in the streets. I took her alone 
 and talked to her just like a sister. She told me 
 all her history ; but though she seemed quite to 
 love me for my interest in her, I could not get her 
 to go into the Refuge ; she said she should soon 
 go mad, for she dared not let herself think. I 
 spoke most earnestly to her of the end ; she knew 
 everything, but said it was too late, and all I could 
 tell her of the love of Jesus, and His power to save 
 to the uttermost, was of no use. The only thing
 
 1 2 Work in Brighton. 
 
 that seemed to touch her was my caring for her ; 
 so I pressed that point, and begged her to let me 
 be her friend, even if she continued as she was. 
 She promised to meet me next day, Sunday, and 
 go with me on my usual visit to the Refuge, and I 
 promised no one should know who she was. When 
 I shook hands with her at parting, she looked at 
 me and thanked me with tears in her eyes. I 
 talked with four others ; altogether we hoped to 
 gain seven girls from the evening meeting ; they 
 made appointments to see Mr. Michael and myself, 
 and go with us to the Refuge. The next day not 
 one made their appearance.' 
 
 In consequence of this apparent total failure of 
 the midnight meeting, Miss Robinson was led to 
 turn her whole attention to morning and afternoon 
 visitation of the dens where these poor creatures 
 congregate. At that time they herded together in 
 colonies, as many as a hundred inhabiting a row 
 of small tenements, all communicating with one 
 another internally, by means of passages, and 
 named after the public-house which generally 
 formed the corner house ; a state of things which I 
 am thankful to say no longer exists.
 
 Work in Brighton. 1 3 
 
 Miss Robinson thus describes in her journal her 
 first attempt at penetrating into these dens : 
 
 ' I was very foolish about going into the girls' 
 rooms. I walked up and down praying for strength, 
 and feeling wretchedly incapable and without self- 
 control. Even the people in the low lodging- 
 houses advised me not to venture, as I should cer- 
 tainly be insulted. At last I dashed into it, and 
 found it really not so very difficult. Most of the 
 girls were not up ; nearly all, after their first sur- 
 prise, received me kindly. One poor creature, 
 Lizzie, I found in tears ; she is ill, and fears she 
 will die ; I talked and prayed with her ; she clung 
 to me as if I could save her, and I promised to 
 come again. Nearly one hundred girls live in this 
 " Shamrock," two in each room, — chums, as they 
 are called, girls of all grades, some shockingly dis- 
 eased. I then visited the infirmary to ask where 
 the girls there came from, and so got directed to 
 other dens, and spent most of the day in going 
 amongst them. I could not write down, I cannot 
 even bear to think of, the horrible things I saw 
 and heard \ but I only met with unkindness in 
 one place, where the women who were ironing
 
 14 Work in Brighton. 
 
 would have burnt me with a hot iron if I had 
 stayed.' 
 
 With regard to the two modes of working — 
 midnight meetings and visitation of dens-— Miss 
 Robinson says, ( I should always prefer the morn- 
 ing work, when the drink is out of them, and their 
 time is heavy on their hands. At night they are 
 dressed up, half drunk, eager to be after their 
 wretched gains ; in the morning everything is real 
 about them, no glitter, no illusion, no self-deception, 
 no excitement, but real misery, pain, remorse, and 
 the words you say are more likely to be felt as 
 real too. I have no doubt much of what took 
 place in the Hall last night seems to the girls a 
 dream this morning. God helping me, I will work 
 among them by day in future.' 
 
 And nobly was the resolve fulfilled. Once 
 more to quote from her journal : ' When I look 
 back on the work among these poor girls, it seems 
 almost miraculous to me. Now I can go into any 
 of the dens, and wherever they are herding, I have 
 only to mention my name to bring them all round 
 me ; while I am talking to them, they seem to 
 become softened and womanly again, quite different
 
 Work in Brighton, 1 5 
 
 creatures. If I met that horrid customary stare 
 now, I know at once it is a new girl who does not 
 know me. Such a number come in with every 
 fresh regiment, the town is overflowing with them ; 
 and if there is a hell upon earth it is the streets of 
 Aldershot of a night. No one can imagine it ; 
 they may think they can, but it is impossible. It 
 is an infernal carnival. I have felt it so good 
 that we cannot go beyond Christ's "uttermost," 
 and I am very sure He would not have sent 
 the message by me into these dens without 
 meaning something by it. Whether I see results 
 or not, I am quite satisfied His word carried there 
 will not be in vain. Lately I have become quite 
 hardened physically to the work, and the joy I feel 
 in it is quite divine ; no other word can express it ; 
 it is in one sense entering into the joy of my Lord. 
 As to the natural aptitude for this work, as far as I 
 can see, it consists in straightforwardness and 
 strength, as well as kindness. These poor things 
 feel, when not excited with drink, so utterly forlorn 
 and helpless that they want to lean on some one. 
 I try to work on this, and get them to cast them- 
 selves en the Saviour.'
 
 1 6 Work in Brighton. 
 
 So many did Miss Robinson rescue, and such 
 terrible cases, that at last she was actually requested 
 to desist, as the Refuge could no longer bear the 
 medical expenses. 
 
 After reading the above experience, I was so 
 forcibly impressed that this was the right agency 
 for reaching outcast women, that I naturally be- 
 came exceedingly anxious to try if it could be set 
 on foot in Brighton. Often and often I talked it 
 over with Mrs. Vicars, whose work in connexion 
 with the Albion Hill Home is so well known ;* but 
 being then both of us invalids, no way seemed to 
 open ; and all we could do was to pray earnestly 
 and in faith, casting our care upon Him who cares 
 for those whom man rejects — the great Brother of 
 the lost and the outcast. 
 
 At length the prayer was answered by two 
 clergymen's wives, one of whom, the wife of the 
 chaplain of the Albion Hill Home, afterwards 
 became the valued Lady Superintendent of our 
 Association, undertaking the work quite inde- 
 pendently of us, and without knowing how 
 
 * See Work among the Lost, is. 6d. 16th Thousand. 
 (Hatchards.)
 
 Work in Brighton. i y 
 
 earnestly we had been praying for it ; and to them 
 belongs the joy of having been the first fairly to 
 set the work on foot. 
 
 For some weeks I only met them for prayer. 
 But soon finding myself stronger, as a thank- 
 offering for returning health, I offered to go in the 
 place of Mrs. S., who was confined to the house 
 with a bad cold. 
 
 I shall never forget my first visit. We had 
 prayed earnestly, even with tears, before going. 
 After visiting one or two rooms together, my 
 companion left me alone with four girls, while she 
 went to find out another in the same house, whom 
 she was seeking. 'That girl,' said one of them, 
 pointing to a young thing of sixteen, \ is not one of 
 us : she's only just come in.' At once I crossed 
 over the room, sat down close beside her, laid my 
 hand on her shoulder, and pleaded with her as I 
 think I never pleaded with a human being before, 
 to come away with me at once, and let me save her 
 from this horrible life. It was like dashing myself 
 against a dead wall, for any impression my words 
 seemed to make on any of the four. At last I 
 exclaimed, 'Girls, I can't stand this. I can't touch 
 
 B
 
 1 8 Work in Brighton. 
 
 your hearts, but there's One who can. You must 
 kneel down and pray with me.' 
 
 Rather to my surprise they all knelt down, and 
 I prayed. Praying? It was more like shedding 
 one's life-blood for them, in one's utter sense of 
 helplessness to save from worse than death. 
 
 The door had not been closed two seconds 
 behind me, as I left, when I heard shrieks of 
 horrid laughter from all four, and fragments of 
 indecent jests, which I in vain strove not to 
 hear. 
 
 I went home literally bruised and bleeding. 
 My prayer seemed to have gone no higher than 
 the ceiling. 
 
 1 O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou 
 doubt?' Two days after, I heard that that young 
 girl had come away the next day of her own 
 accord, and gone straight up to the Home. She 
 was motherless, and had gone astray for only a 
 few weeks ; she is now doing well, and will, I hope, 
 be a happy, respectable little servant. 
 
 In three weeks between us we have rescued 
 seven. One girl, whom we had never seen, came 
 away simply from hearing that ladies were visiting
 
 Work in Brighton. 19 
 
 the dens, and thus realising that there were some 
 Christian hearts who did not despise their lost 
 sisters. 
 
 The work that thus began in this forlorn little 
 seed of life has since prospered and spread. A 
 number of ladies have formed themselves into 
 an Association for the Care of Friendless Girls, and 
 undertake to visit the Brighton dens once a-week, 
 a certain number being portioned out to every 
 pair of visitors. Once a-month we meet for ear- 
 nest, united prayer, and to discuss any difficult 
 cases or perplexities that may have arisen — and 
 in this work they are always many — meeting at 
 one another's houses ; so that each lady may have 
 the opportunity of asking some of her own friends 
 to attend the meeting, by this means spreading an 
 interest in the work, and enlisting fresh workers. 
 Once a quarter we receive the Holy Communion 
 together at the little Home Chapel. 
 
 Finding that we overcrowded and unsettled the 
 Home by placing the girls we had rescued there 
 till their cases could be inquired into ; finding, too, 
 that we were constantly stopped for want of room, 
 as well as from many of the girls objecting to go at
 
 20 Work in Brighton. 
 
 once into a Home ; Mrs. Vicars, with her accus- 
 tomed faith and energy, set to and raised the funds 
 to build a Cottage Home, which has proved in- 
 valuable in the work. 
 
 The work already accomplished by our Asso- 
 ciation, even though still in its infancy, is simply 
 marvellous. The mere presence of pure women 
 seems to act like a spell, letting in forgotten fresh 
 air and sunshine into these dark places of the earth 
 that are so full of cruelty. Even the keepers of the 
 dens respond to the better influences which they 
 have been so long without, and are often led to 
 turn with loathing against their vile trade — one 
 man having made up his mind to give up five 
 houses that he rented. Some streets have been 
 wholly purged of this evil ; and even the street 
 where these poor wanderers chiefly congregate is 
 quite a changed place. Seven of the houses are 
 closed, and have turned into respectable dwellings 
 — and let it be remembered that every such house 
 is a centre for propagating and multiplying vice, 
 sending out its evil emissaries to catch the thought- 
 less and unwary of both sexes — and there are no 
 longer the same disgraceful rows, and loud-tongued
 
 Work in Brighton. 2 1 
 
 obscenity, which once made it a perfect pande- 
 monium. 
 
 But though these are the general results of our 
 visiting, it is the individual cases that have been 
 rescued, with all their unspeakable sadness and 
 friendlessness, that constitute our most precious 
 reward. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 BUT perhaps you are all the time asking, ' Why 
 should I undertake this mission ? What are the 
 decided advantages of this plan to induce me 
 to undertake such repulsive work ? Why cannot 
 we go on as we have been doing ? I subscribe to 
 a Home ; I provide these poor, wretched girls 
 with the means of rescue ; and if they don't avail 
 themselves of it, that is their fault not mine. I 
 don't see I am called to meddle any further with 
 a subject I have always made a point of avoiding.' 
 'You don't mean to say,' said one lady to me, 
 ' you go amongst those poor, wretched, degraded
 
 22 Work in Brighton. 
 
 creatures ? Why, I should shrink from the defile- 
 ment of their mere presence. I should feel pol- 
 luted by going into such places.' 
 
 Now I ask first, Is this feeling right ? Have we 
 any right to it in God's sight ? Let us put it 
 plainly to ourselves ; if we had been born, like 
 many of those we despise, in a back street, if our 
 earliest sight had been a father coming home 
 drunk, our earliest sound an oath, the earliest talk 
 around us, things of which we in our sheltered 
 girlhood did not even know the existence of, which 
 of us could stand up and say, I should have been 
 just what I am now, I should have been pure ? 
 And if to us was given a pure sheltered girlhood, 
 screened from every breath of evil, oh ! if there 
 be a just God above us, must not our pure homes 
 and happy wedded love be given us as a trust 
 for the unhappy and the impure ? Are they 
 not given us as a vantage-ground from which 
 to feel for their misery and go forth to them, 
 embodying for them the blessedness of purity 
 and home, till they are led to long after better 
 things, and they too are brought into the fold of 
 Eternal Love? when by the very misery and pri-
 
 Work in Brighton. 23 
 
 vation and even sin of their lives,* they may pass 
 upwards, as they tread that dark flight of steps 
 underfoot to heights we have not reached. I have 
 seen it. Men and women I have picked out of the 
 gutter of sin and degradation, to whom my love, 
 my purity, my happy peace, first made passible the 
 love, the purity, the peace of heaven, I have seen 
 them pass me by, and attain, through the sorrow 
 and the misery of the past, to heights of holiness and 
 depths of self-devotion, which were utterly beyond 
 me, and they in their turn have had to help me to 
 [ come up higher.' Have we not, I ask, dislocated 
 this divine order ? Have we not laid selfish hands 
 on our home-happiness, forgetting its high purpose 
 as a divine promise for all sad and darkened souls ? 
 Have we not laid self-righteous claim to our 
 purity, which is so emphatically f not our own ; ' 
 but bought with such a price of human toil, and 
 lavish love, and costly refinement, and sheltered 
 grace, that we might spend it for the life of the 
 world ? Have we not made idols of these pure 
 homes of ours ; carefully curtaining out the thought 
 
 * 'To whom much has been forgiven, the same loveth 
 much.'
 
 24 Work in Brighton. 
 
 of the lost, as inconsistent with our purity ; and 
 leaving our outcast sister to perish, unhelped, un- 
 cared for, at their doors, with arms outstretched in 
 infinite appeal, to which none answers ? And may 
 not this purity, which thus worships and cares for 
 itself as ks own idol-end, be the worst impurity in 
 God's sight, who seeth not as man sees? an idol 
 white and comely, as the fair marble idols of old, 
 but with feet that cannot hasten to the rescue, with 
 eyes stone-blind to our lost sister's sin and degrada- 
 tion, with hands that refuse to deliver them who in 
 all fearful senses are ' drawn unto death.' And may 
 not the Judge who standeth before the door say 
 again of our self-righteousness as He said of the 
 Pharisees of old, ' Behold, the publicans and harlots 
 go into the kingdom of heaven before you ? ' 
 
 But again, let us clearly realise the position of 
 these poor lost children. A girl in a fit of giddiness 
 stays out too late with a flighty companion, and is 
 afraid to go home and encounter the harsh scolding 
 that awaits her. Or she has broken down from 
 over-work in her last situation, and ill and weak, 
 and with a dread of hard work upon her, flies in a 
 fit of desperation to the only life where she thinks
 
 Work in Brighton. 25 
 
 she can do as she likes. Or, perhaps, she has given 
 her heart to a man whom she loved, \ not wisely but 
 too well.' Or, once again, her mother is dead, and 
 she has got a step-mother, and a home where she 
 is not wanted. If from any of these, the most 
 common causes, a girl in an evil moment enters 
 a den, she is practically LOST. As a rule no 
 Christian foot crosses that threshold, no clergy- 
 man, no district visitor, no Scripture-reader ; no 
 Bible or Prayer-book is ever seen, no token that 
 there is a God above ; her own mother does not 
 know where she is ; no one ever approaches her 
 but to do her harm. If she hears of a Home, it is 
 from girls who have left it to go back to a life of 
 sin, and whose interest it is to represent it as a 
 dreary dungeon. And degraded and shame-stricken 
 as she is, especially before she has had time to get 
 hardened to the life, how can she ever show her face 
 among strangers, or brave the jeers and taunts and 
 persuasions of her companions ? Only one com- 
 forter remains to her, the drink, and to that she 
 too surely flies. And I do say it is positive cruelty 
 and hard-heartedness for Christian women to say 
 they have done their part in subscribing to a
 
 26 Work in Brighton 
 
 <i> 
 
 Home for these poor lost children, when a mo- 
 ment's real thought will show us that the stone 
 that shuts them up in their living grave is too 
 heavy for them to move ; and we only mock 
 them by offering them places of safety from which 
 a dead weight of evil cuts them off. No one can 
 fully realise their extreme helplessness to save 
 themselves, even with a well-managed Home, close 
 at hand, till one has seen it for oneself; a helpless- 
 ness greatest at first, when their shame is deepest, 
 and when there is the most hope of them, could they 
 only be rescued. Can a girl only be rescued before 
 she has been more than a few days or weeks in evil, 
 no evil habit has been formed, and the task of her 
 reformation is comparatively easy, the difficulty 
 increasing with the length of time she remains 
 in degradation, not in an arithmetical but geo- 
 metrical ratio. Can we then, I ask, name the 
 name of Christ, and refuse them the only thing 
 which in most cases can save them — to go, like the 
 good Samaritan, where they are, and clasp a strong 
 sister's hand in theirs and drag them out of the 
 mire into which they have fallen ? 
 
 One of our first cases will perhaps best illus-
 
 Work in Brighton. 27 
 
 trate the truth of what I say. I give it, not 
 because it is uncommon, but as typical of thou- 
 sands of others. A. B. was a child of fifteen 
 when she was led astray by her master, an edu- 
 cated gentleman. She loved him intensely, and, oh, 
 remember that, whilst a man falls by that which 
 is lowest in him, a woman often falls by that 
 which is highest in her, her longing to sacrifice her 
 best to him whom she loves : 
 
 And all life's loveliest they know 
 
 But as the thing that wrought their woe ! 
 
 To shame by flights of angels sung, 
 
 By Hope bright-handed led to wrong, 
 
 By Joy to anguish tricked forlorn, 
 
 By Faith to bitter death foresworn, 
 
 By Love a poisoned chalice given, 
 
 ' Drink thou and live and enter heaven: 5 
 
 Who, yielding up to him her soul, 
 
 Drank deep and died — Love's bitter dole. 
 
 After a year or so, in which he kept her in 
 luxury, he tired of his plaything, and deserted her. 
 What was this desolate, penniless child to do ? 
 They told her, ' You must do as we do ; you are 
 no better than us. You must go on the streets.' 
 A single Christian hand held out to her would
 
 28 Work in Brighton. 
 
 have saved her, for she loathed the life ; but no 
 ladies then visited the dens, and, ' behold, we knew 
 it not.' I can only say, that twice that girl, to 
 escape the misery of her life, tried to fling herself 
 off the pier-steps into the sea, 
 
 Mad from life's history, 
 Glad to death's mystery 
 Swift to be hurled, 
 Anywhere — anywhere out of the world. 
 
 Twice she was caught by a policeman, and threat- 
 ened with the world's great charity, the lock-up, 
 if she attempted to escape again from her degra- 
 dation. Often she would sit for hours, her young 
 head bowed upon her arms, weeping desolately ; 
 and when asked what was the matter, she would 
 wail out, ! Oh, that I had some friend who would 
 get me out of this life ! < At last, thank God, our 
 Ladies' Association was formed, and Mrs. S. and 
 myself visited her. Some hindrances prevented 
 her from coming off with us then, but her landlady, 
 knowing that she would escape from her the next 
 time, and fearing to lose her great gains, locked 
 her up every time we came into the streets. At 
 length we had a midnight meeting in connexion
 
 Work in Brighton. 29 
 
 with our work. The poor child was, of course, let 
 out at night. She heard of it, she entered the 
 room, and the first person she saw was one of the 
 ladies who had visited her. She simply walked 
 straight up to her and gave herself up, body and 
 soul, with one cry, ■ Save me ! ' She was taken to 
 the Home, and is now a respectable servant, en- 
 gaged to be married, and doing well, having shown 
 herself thoroughly virtuous under very strong tempt- 
 ations. 
 
 Do not tell me it needs a peculiar gift to do 
 this work. It seems to me we talk so much of 
 gifts now-a-days that we have forgotten that one 
 gift of gifts, that ' cometh down from the Father 
 of lights, who giveth liberally,' — the gift of simple, 
 soul-saving earnestness, which 'can do all things 
 through Christ strengthening' — the only gift I 
 ever hear St. Paul speak about, when a lost soul is 
 to be saved. 
 
 One of our workers — a lady with a large 
 family, and many pressing calls on her time and 
 energies, but who yet makes a point of giving 
 up an hour or two every week to the care of these 
 poor lost motherless children — in a letter to me
 
 30 Work in Brighton. 
 
 says, ' To those who regard this work as one in 
 which very few are fitted to engage, and who, by 
 way of deterring me from undertaking it, bring so 
 many difficulties to bear upon it, I often say that 
 " work among the lost " is just like a spectre, or some 
 other optical delusion, which, existing in the imagin- 
 ation only, and formidable in the distance, vanishes 
 when one comes" up with it face to face ; remem- 
 bering that difficulties are overcome, " not by 
 might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the 
 Lord of Hosts." ' It needs no gift beyond a love 
 for the Saviour of the lost, and those motherly com- 
 passions which God has implanted in every 
 woman's heart. Least of all, need we produce a 
 marriage certificate before we can save our pe- 
 rishing sisters. Any woman, not too young, married 
 or unmarried, can do it. 
 
 Form an Association of Ladies, and the work 
 falls lightly on the individual members ; one or 
 two hours a-week are enough, as a rule ; and the 
 busiest can and ought to undertake it. 
 
 Let there, I say, be no longer in all our large 
 towns these recognised slaughter-houses for women, 
 which we call dens ; recognised so far that it is an
 
 Work in Brighton. 31 
 
 understood thing that no Christian foot should 
 visit them, and that ladies should pass them by in 
 their districts. In every large town there are 
 scores of these houses set apart for the destruction 
 of women ; and yet we educated Christian women 
 quietly recognise this state of things, because it is 
 not our daughters that are sacrificed, and therefore 
 we make no stir. 
 
 Perhaps you will say I have no right to call 
 them ' slaughter-houses,' that women go volun- 
 tarily into them, and not like the poor beasts that 
 are driven blindfold to their fate. Do you know 
 w/wm we find in these dens ? Do you know that 
 we find motherless children, with faces as young 
 and fair as that girlish face you kiss in its sweet 
 innocence in your own home ? Do you know that 
 we have had children with their short sleeves and 
 pretty childish pinafores brought to the door of our 
 Home from a den ? Do you realise that a very 
 large proportion of them are children under twenty- 
 one ? — they mostly die before they are thirty. 
 
 On one occasion a child of sixteen escaped to 
 Mrs. Vicars. f Oh/ she said, in reply to some ques- 
 tions of Mrs. Vicars, ' Mother H.' — think of them
 
 32 Work in Brighton. 
 
 calling the old hag that keeps the den, ' mother,' 
 with a piteous bleat of their orphan lips — ' Mother 
 H. takes all our money,' 
 
 'What does she do for you, then?' inquired 
 Mrs. Vicars. 
 
 ' Oh, she keeps us in dress, and paint, and 
 gin.' 
 
 A child of sixteen ! 
 
 And we Christian women pass by the door 
 where children are kept in dress, and paint, and 
 gin, and vice, as unfit for our purity to enter, and 
 yet call ourselves by the name of Christ. 
 
 Have mercy upon us, O God, according to Thy 
 lovingkindness ; according unto the multitude of 
 Thy tender mercies blot out our transgressions. 
 
 Create in us a clean heart, O God, and renew a 
 right spirit within us. 
 
 And lay not this sin to our charge.
 
 Work in Brighton, 33 
 
 CHAPTER III, 
 
 Let me endeavour to meet some of the objections 
 which at present make so many of us educated 
 women hide our heads, like the foolish ostrich, in 
 desert sand, and refuse to look at the subject at all. 
 
 Perhaps with many others, you rest your re- 
 fusal on the authority of those about you. Your 
 husband, or your father, or the man whose judg- 
 ment you most trust, tells you you know nothing 
 about it, and it is a subject that every nice-minded 
 woman had much better let alone. 
 
 Only, unfortunately, God's word says : i If thou 
 forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death 
 and those that are ready to be slain ; if thou sayest, 
 Behold, we knew it not, doth not He that pondereth 
 the heart consider it ? and He that keepeth thy 
 soul, doth not He know it? and shall not He render 
 to every man according to his works ?' 
 
 Which are we to obey, God or man ? 
 
 Or is it that you hold, with a lady I was talking 
 with a few days ago, 'that these poor creatures 
 
 C
 
 34 Work in Brighton, 
 
 never can be really reclaimed ; they are rescued I 
 for a time, but they always go back sooner or I 
 later ?' Now I can only earnestly say to you in I 
 Mrs. Vicars' name, who has had five-and-twenty I 
 years' experience of them, and therefore must I 
 know, that this is a phantom of your own brain, a | 
 prejudice born of ignorance. As in intemperance, 
 many doubtless do go back, but we do not there- 
 fore say the drunkard cannot be reclaimed. Mrs. 
 Vicars calculates that of those who have been re- 
 ceived into her Home, one in five goes back ; that 
 is, twenty go wrong where eighty go right in every 
 hundred, surely not a very hopeless result to work 
 for, especially as they are, as a rule, girls whose 
 lives have been beset by bad conditions — bad 
 parents, bad examples, bad training, bad associates. 
 And I can only ask you, in your comparative 
 ignorance, to yield to her knowledge, a quarter of a 
 century's personal experience on the widest scale, 
 and resolutely to dismiss this prejudice from your 
 mind as baseless in fact. 
 
 But perhaps you say, \ I am told that this class 
 of women must exist, for the preservation of the 
 purity of our homes, wherever, as in a civilised
 
 Work in Brighton, 35 
 
 country, marriage is deferred.' If this be so, I can 
 only say, let us at least be honest about it. If we 
 have to offer such an iniquitous sacrifice on the 
 altar of our homes, — if, indeed, they rest on so im- 
 pure a basis, do not let us do as the heathens did 
 when they had to offer a milk-white bull to Jupiter, 
 chalk out the black spots. For Heaven's sake, let 
 us fling away the chalk, and not add hypocrisy to 
 uncleanness. Let us have the parsonage on the 
 one side of the church and the den on the other ; 
 on the one side the preachers of purity, on the 
 other the martyrs of purity ; and for my part, my 
 heart goes with the martyrs : it is so easy to preach, 
 it is so hard, so inexpressibly hard, to suffer and be 
 degraded. But, above all, let us honestly acknow- 
 ledge that Christianity, with its pure homes and its 
 enthronement of woman as the divine mother, has 
 resulted in a devil's worship, to which that of 
 Moloch was as nothing. Moloch did but destroy 
 the poor perishing body ; but this worship of Home 
 exacts the destruction of countless women, in soul 
 and body both. 
 
 But I shame myself, I shame our common 
 womanhood ; merely to utter the monstrous theory
 
 36 Work in Brighton. 
 
 is enough. It needs no refutation. Something 
 divine within us, something higher than mere 
 logic, rises up in wrath, and cries, ' It is not so. 
 refuse to accept life on such conditions ; I would 
 die rather.' There can be no ' must ' in evil, only a 
 terrible ' may be,' and against that we have to war 
 and fight. 
 
 But if you cannot trust the divine within you, 
 judge the tree by its fruits, and see if the sin of our 
 indifference has not already found us out. Has not 
 the existence of this class poisoned our national 
 health ? Has it not blighted, is it not blighting, 
 the lives of thousands of innocent mothers and 
 babes? How much of the madness that crowds 
 our asylums is due to it ? How much infanticide ? 
 How much of the disease and blindness of our 
 children ? How many are born with inherited 
 vicious tendencies ? Is not the axe already laid to 
 the root of a tree that bears such fruit as this ? 
 And whatever the solution of our difficult social 
 problems may be, is this not proved by the re- 
 morseless logic of facts to be the wrong one ? 
 
 But it is not only nor chiefly the physical result? 
 that are the bane. If I were asked what is one oi
 
 Work in Brighton. 37 
 
 the great causes of immorality amongst us, I should 
 say at once, the existence of an outcast class among 
 us. Do we, I ask, sufficiently realise the existence 
 in the very heart of our so-called Christian civili- 
 sation of this outcast class — an outcast class kept 
 up, let us remember, quite as much by the feeling 
 of pure men and women as by the impure ? That 
 in Paris alone, Pere Hyacinthe stated in St James's 
 Hall, there are 1 50,000 of these moral outcasts ; in 
 London alone it is said there are 70,000 to 80,000. 
 Some say that this is a gross exaggeration ; but when 
 one remembers that London has treble the popula- 
 tion of Paris, and that the number given is only 
 half the number of outcasts, would to God one 
 could feel quite sure that it is a gross exaggeration ! 
 Where an outcast class exists in the form of negro 
 slaves, we see clearly enough that it produces and 
 breeds the cruelty, the laziness, the licentiousness 
 of which at first it was the victim. We refuse to 
 see it when the outcast class are among ourselves 
 in the form of lost women. Yet, I have no hesita- 
 tion in saying that not one young man in a hun- 
 dred would be guilty of dragging a pure girl down, 
 and fewer still but would allow the detestable
 
 38 Work in Brighton. 
 
 wickedness of it. But once let a woman belong to 
 this outcast class, and sin against her becomes no 
 sin in his eyes. It does not make her lost ; she is 
 lost. If she is willing to earn her bread, without a 
 character she cannot get employment. Sin against 
 her is no sin, but a way of providing her with the 
 means of livelihood ; the very nature of it is dis- 
 guised by the fact of her being an outcast, cut off 
 from earning her own bread by honest work. 
 
 Now what I want women to do is to rise up in 
 a body and say, We will not have this outcast class 
 among us. We will no more hear of an outcast 
 woman than an enslaved woman. Do not mis- 
 understand me : I am not asking you to think 
 lightly of the sin of unchastity in a woman. We 
 do not think lightly of the sin of intemperance, yet 
 we do not make drunkards into an outcast class ; 
 we do not think it degrades us to talk to a drunkard 
 or to show him kindness, nor do we think we 
 commit an act of impropriety in going to his house, 
 or even following him into the public-house. I do 
 not want you to take an unreclaimed woman from 
 the streets into your service, any more than I want 
 you to make an unreclaimed drunkard your coach-
 
 Work in Brighton. 39 
 
 man. What I do want you to do is to break down 
 the artificial distinction between this and all other 
 sins, and treat her, and act towards her, and feel 
 towards her, as a sister, even as you would treat 
 the drunkard as a brother. 
 
 My sisters, I say it urgently and solemnly, we 
 have let men impose their views on us too long on 
 this subject. We must act and think for ourselves, 
 remembering what we have too long forgotten, that 
 if to men have been given the bodily strength and 
 the intellectual pre-eminence, it is the woman who 
 is the conscience of the world ; it is to us women 
 that God has intrusted the moral training of the 
 young, and therefore of humanity ; and for us, 
 therefore, slavishly to adopt the views of men on 
 moral points, is as disastrous as it would be for men 
 to adopt our physical weakness or our want of in- 
 tellectual training and knowledge. 
 
 Take the parallel of literature. We are shocked 
 at the impurity of French novels. But we forget 
 that French novels are written mainly for a public 
 of men ; nice-minded women are not, as a rule, 
 expected to read them. What is the result of the 
 withdrawal of the influence of women ? Why, a
 
 40 Work in Brighton* 
 
 French novel. But let women form a recognised 
 part of the reading public, and at once a rise in 
 moral tone takes place- — the rise that marks George 
 Eliot's works in comparison to George Sand's. 
 Bring in the yet stronger influence of women, and 
 we get the yet greater purity of American literature. 
 Society, as at present constituted, is the French 
 novel ; women are not expected to know what goes 
 on ; their legitimate influence is not, and cannot, 
 therefore, be exerted. But when women insist on 
 knowing — refuse to acquiesce any longer in the 
 babyish ignorance that unfits them for the care of 
 their own sons — may not precisely the same rise in 
 purity take place in society as we see already in 
 literature ? 
 
 Let us begin, I say, by forming Associations of 
 Ladies for the care of Friendless Girls. Some such 
 concrete expression of our responsibility towards 
 our lost sisters will react upon ourselves better than 
 any words. Let us no longer recognise for one 
 moment these dens, set apart for the destruction of 
 our sisters, but freely enter into them, and claim 
 them for the Saviour of the lost. For is not the 
 very essence of Christianity just this, that the king-
 
 Work in Brighton. 41 
 
 dom of God is come, and that now every spot of 
 God's earth can and ought to be claimed for Him 
 and His Christ ? Let us not send paid agents, but 
 go ourselves. ' I don't want you/ exclaimed a poor 
 outcast girl, bursting out into that horrid laughter 
 which is so emphatically not mirth. ' Get along 
 with you ; what good can you do me?' Suddenly 
 she became quite grave, and said, ' No ; I don't 
 mean that. I do believe there is something in you 
 ladies coming into such places as this, after the 
 likes of us. In them midnight meetings there is so 
 much preaching and excitement, and of course the 
 men are all paid for it. But now with you ladies it 
 is different. If anything can be done with us, it'll 
 be by you ladies visiting us like this. 5 
 
 Let us refuse to recognise them for one moment 
 as an outcast class, set apart for destruction ; let us 
 prove, by our kindly 'intercourse and helpful sym- 
 pathy, that they are not ; and let us teach men 
 that there is no more a lost woman on God's re- 
 deemed earth than a lost man ; and that when 
 they yield to temptation they destroy a woman 
 with a hopeful future and loving hands held out to 
 help her, not merely support an outcast who is lost
 
 42 Work in Brighton. 
 
 already. And believe me, men will respond, and 
 gradually — not all at once, but slowly and surely — 
 they will rise to the level of the Christ in us, instead 
 of our sinking to the level of the animal in them. 
 
 But perhaps some who are already working in 
 connexion with one of our over-crowded Homes 
 will say, ' We have already, from want of room, to 
 turn away many who come, what is the use of setting 
 on foot an agency to rescue more, when already 
 we cannot accommodate those who come of their 
 own free will ?' I answer, Because the rescue of 
 individual cases does not touch the causes, but only 
 saves the last link that comes from the forge. But 
 bring the influence of pure women to bear on the 
 dens of our large cities, and in a great measure you 
 put a stop to the forge itself. There is much that 
 goes on with impunity in safe and secret darkness 
 that cannot go on in the light. The mere fear of 
 exposure will stop it ; the mere sense that it is 
 likely to come to the knowledge of women in good 
 social position would act as a deterrent. You 
 cannot close these houses by legal force — to do so, 
 except in cases where they are greatly in excess, is 
 useless, at any rate till a great and general rise in
 
 Work in Brighton. 43 
 
 moral feeling takes place ; as things are, you only 
 drive the disease deeper into the social system, and 
 it is certain to break out with increased virulence 
 elsewhere. You have done nothing towards its 
 cure. A moral evil must be met by moral means. 
 But I repeat, let one such house be closed by the 
 force of Christian love and moral suasion (and our 
 Association has closed many), and you have got 
 rid of a centre for the propagation and multipli- 
 cation of vice, and saved numbers of both sexes 
 from being ensnared. 
 
 Do you still cry, ' But it is so hopeless ; this 
 class has always existed, and always will exist?' 
 Why ? Slavery was once universally thought ne- 
 cessary ; but all Christian nations have now aban- 
 doned the practice of slavery. It was once thought 
 universally necessary to inflict stripes and chains 
 on the lunatic ; but now any Christian nation 
 would feel itself disgraced by allowing such treat- 
 ment. Gambling - houses were once thought a 
 necessary evil ; now the common moral sense is 
 against them, and they are put down. Why should 
 we hastily conclude that the evil which inflicts the 
 greatest degradation, and misery, and disease, and
 
 44 Work in Brighton. 
 
 that too on a woman, is alone eternal ? Why 
 should not the moral murder of a woman come to 
 be looked upon in the same light as the murder of 
 her body only ? I am not speaking of ordinary 
 immorality, such as exists in our villages and in 
 all low states of society, but of professional vice, 
 which is quite a distinct thing and a far deeper 
 violation of nature — I must earnestly ask my 
 reader not to confuse between the two — the exist- 
 ence of a recognised class set apart for destruction ; 
 and it is this, I contend, that is no more a necessary 
 and eternal evil than slavery. Every great move- 
 ment against evil has begun in a minority of one. 
 Some men and women have been found with 
 sufficient high courage to trust the naked affirm- 
 ations of their moral sense ; affirmations however, 
 divinely enforced from without by the misery, the 
 degradation, the disease, that God has wrapped up 
 with every accepted evil, and to which they can 
 always appeal as a proof that the thing is wrong, 
 — a dynamic force, for ever slowly accumulating, 
 till at last mankind is compelled to feel that the 
 abuse is intolerable, and in its fall by its own weight 
 of evil, humanity is raised to a higher level, in which
 
 Work in Brighton. 45 
 
 the old things have passed away, and behold, all 
 things are made new. More and more we are 
 coming to see, outside Christianity as well as within, 
 that man is an organic whole ; that we are members 
 of one body, and that each member can only se- 
 cure its own true healthful life by living not for it- 
 self, but for the whole ; and that no member can 
 be dishonoured and sacrificed without the whole 
 body suffering from it. If in the fall of slavery, 
 mankind has been raised to a higher level of free- 
 dom, in which he recognises the sanctity of the 
 individual, and the brotherhood of man, may not 
 this other great world-evil exist to teach us in a yet 
 closer and direr form what it is to sacrifice another 
 to our selfishness, and in its ultimate fall to raise 
 man to the level of a purity which is love, and a 
 chastity which is service ? 
 
 I know in arguing thus, I go against the opinion 
 of some medical men. But, apart from the fact 
 that the medical profession is divided on the point 
 — some maintaining the necessity of this great evil, 
 and others as strongly maintaining the contrary — I 
 would ask, Have the dicta of medical men proved 
 so universally true, that we should give them that
 
 46 Work in Brighton. 
 
 almost superstitious credence which the British 
 mind is apt to accord to what a doctor says, even 
 when it conflicts with the dictates of our own con- 
 science ? Once the practice of bleeding was uni- 
 versally thought advisable ; now it is as universally 
 condemned as harmful. Once the medical profes- 
 sion prescribed alcoholic drinks in large quantities ; 
 now the profession is coming more and more to the 
 conclusion that such drinks, not to be harmful, 
 must be used in the greatest moderation. At the 
 very time that the Quakers were introducing the 
 mild treatment of the insane, the great medical 
 authority, Dr. Cullen, was advising severity, and 
 in some instances flogging, as necessary for the 
 treatment of insanity. May there not be one or 
 two other things which the medical profession has 
 yet to grow out of under the influence of an en> 
 larged and enlightened public opinion ? 
 
 But, taking the medical opinion at its very 
 worst, what does it amount to ? Not that all 
 health is impossible to a young man as a celibate, 
 but only the highest perfection of health. But to 
 how many things do young men sacrifice the 
 highest perfection of health already, without a
 
 Work in Brighton. 47 
 
 thought and without an effort ? To hard work 
 or hard reading, to ambition and the exigencies 
 of a career ; to late hours and convivial habits ; to 
 an over-love of boating or athletics, &c. Is it pos- 
 sible that, after nineteen centuries of Christianity 
 and civilisation, we have emerged so little from 
 savage life as to hold that a woman's degradation 
 in body and soul is of less account than each and 
 all of these ? Cannot we teach our sons the 
 rascality of purchasing the highest physical well- 
 being, or mere selfish pleasure, for themselves, by 
 the moral sacrifice of another, and that other a 
 woman — too often a starving woman, whose neces- 
 sities they basely take advantage of — purchasing it 
 on conditions which involve the existence of an 
 immense class set apart to moral and physical de- 
 struction ? Verily there is a saving one's life which 
 is a losing it to all eternity. 
 
 What the real results are to health, apart from 
 mere medical opinion, recent legislation has but too 
 painfully taught us. 
 
 Still, perhaps, you plead that as things are now, 
 in rescuing one poor girl you only make room for 
 another who must be got to fill her place, and
 
 48 Work in Brighton. 
 
 where's the good ? Now this is both the deepest 
 and the shallowest objection. The shallowest as 
 against work. The same argument applies equally 
 to reclaiming a young thief. The master thief will 
 certainly look out for another likely lad to train in 
 evil, in the place of the one rescued. Yet no one 
 urges it against saving our street Arabs. And in 
 the work we are speaking of this plausible sophism 
 is especially false. Let us remember that tempta- 
 tion does not come only from men, as is sometimes 
 supposed ; but that these poor lost creatures, with 
 whomsoever the blame of their first dragging down 
 may rest, are the worst seducers to sin, many young 
 men being just as much led astray as young girls, 
 and that in this case lessening the supply must lessen 
 the demand, and diminish prevailing immorality. 
 There is no fixed number of these dens that must 
 be kept constantly filled ; any house may turn into 
 a den, and turn back into a respectable house ; the 
 immorality of a town can be just as much lessened 
 as its intemperance. 
 
 But it is impossible to deny that practically this 
 is the deepest of all objections. There is no ques- 
 tion that this evil cannot be attacked from one side
 
 Work in Brighton. 49 
 
 only, that rightly to deal with it, there must be a 
 corresponding moral advance of both sexes, or the 
 old evils will only give place to new. But here 
 again we women have the key of the position, if 
 only we can be awakened to a sense of our respon- 
 sibilities. For it is to the influence of mothers 
 that we must chiefly look for a better state of 
 things. 
 
 I appeal to every mother of sons. Are not 
 Pere Hyacinthe's words true, that if, in the divine 
 order of things, the man is the head of the woman, 
 the woman is the heart of the man ? and whilst 
 his heart is corrupt, whilst young men come 
 into familiar contact with desecrated woman- 
 hood, I ask you, can they realise their own man- 
 hood ? In Frederick Robertson's words, there are 
 two great rocks in a man's life, on which he must 
 either anchor or split — God and woman ; and I 
 cannot believe in the existence of any mother 
 worthy the name, who can refuse to use her influ- 
 ence and teaching as a beacon to save from ship- 
 wreck, and guide into the haven where the rock 
 becomes a shelter from the storm. I believe that 
 if mothers do refuse to stretch out saving hands to 
 
 D
 
 50 Work in Brighton. 
 
 their own sons, it is because, while longing to save, 
 they don't know how. 
 
 Now what I would suggest is amiss in the teach- 
 ing of men, for one thing, is, that we leave them 
 with no higher ground on which to overcome than 
 self-restraint. Talk to an average steady young 
 man, and what will he tell you ? ' That he knows 
 how to take care of himself ; ' he has never been 
 taught that what he has to do far more, is to take 
 care of the weakest and the most sinful woman that 
 comes in his path. His parents, if they warn him 
 at all, and do not leave him to go unwarned and 
 unarmed into the world, without even the most 
 ordinary knowledge of the facts of his own body, 
 and his relations to the world he lives in, warn him 
 against the strange woman ; not a word is said to 
 him about the strange woman being his lost sister 
 whom he has got to save, if needs be, from herself. 
 He is taught to take care of his own virtue ; he is 
 never taught that chastity is just the law of service 
 which he must keep to for the sake of others, for the 
 sake of those who bear the same sacred weakness, 
 the same gracious dependence on his strength as 
 his own mother and sisters. In one word, he has
 
 Work in Brighton. 51 
 
 to fight the terrible battle in the weakness of the 
 old law of self-restraint, the old ! Thou shalt not ; ' 
 not in the strength of the new commandment of 
 love. Which of us does not know that the old law 
 1 Thou shalt not,' is weak through the flesh ? Which 
 of us does not recognise that the source of man's 
 sin is the self in him which sets itself up as an end 
 to itself; that so long, therefore, as his eyes are 
 fixed on himself, even though it be on his own 
 virtue, or his own goodness, he is and must be, in 
 the reason of things, fatally weak ? And that, 
 therefore, Christ placed the fulcrum that was to 
 lift up man's nature, outside himself in the principle 
 of faith, and made that fulcrum rest not on self- 
 virtue, but on love — love to God, and love to his 
 fellow-man, — something, as we say, that takes him 
 out of himself? Which of us has not felt a sin, 
 that we have gone on carelessly yielding to when 
 only our own character was at stake, become im- 
 possible to us, when we were made to realise that 
 it involved injury to another, love overcoming where 
 virtue was weak ? I say it is no wonder that men 
 are weak and selfish with such weapons as we pro- 
 vide them with in the conflict with evil in them-
 
 52 Work in Brighton. 
 
 selves. Christianity would be false, the gospel a 
 lie, if they could so overcome. 
 
 I would, therefore, beseech every mother, for 
 the sake of her own boys, not to remain any longer 
 in sinful ignorance as we have hitherto been con- 
 tent to do, but to face this subject ; never to send 
 a boy unwarned and unarmed to a public school. 
 I would entreat you not to leave this vital point to 
 a father's influence ; remember that in your own 
 womanhood you have a potent weapon of defence 
 for your boy, which no man can have. See that he 
 knows all he ought to know from pure lips, and not 
 have to gather it from the impure talk of school- 
 boys, innocent curiosity being too often the source 
 of much evil. Teach him from his earliest years 
 the sacredness of his body, that it is a temple of the 
 Holy Ghost, not his own to do what he likes with, 
 but subjected to certain physical and moral laws 
 imposed by an Infinite Will, the violation of which 
 must lead to its derangement, and to ill results 
 which must fall on others, as well as himself; for 
 never let him think he can sin and suffer alone ; 
 and entreat him never to indulge in actions and 
 talk which he would be ashamed for you to know
 
 Work in Brighton. 53 
 
 of, or which he knows would bring a blush to his 
 sister's cheek. Teach him that the moral laws are 
 just as certain in their action as the law of gravity, 
 or any other physical law ; never teach him that 
 a thing is wrong merely because the Bible says it 
 is, but that the Bible says it is wrong because, as the 
 violation of moral law, it will bear evil fruit to him- 
 self and others ; that he cannot indulge in so much 
 as impure thoughts without a certain amount of phy- 
 sical derangement, which in its turn will react upon 
 him, and tempt him to harm others by talk or deed. 
 Above all, I would beseech you to inculcate 
 in your boys an enthusiasm of womanhood, a sense 
 that a woman, ay, even a sinful, degraded woman, 
 is God's trust to a man, that chastity is that by 
 which he fulfils this trust before God, that by 
 which he becomes a fountain of life and home 
 happiness, breaking which he sinks into a destroy- 
 ing devil. Bring him up as much as possible 
 from his earliest years in a position of trust 
 towards his sisters. Little* things, such as his 
 sisters being sent out for a walk, or to a party 
 under his care ; little habits taught of jumping up 
 to get them a chair, instead of leaving them to get
 
 54 Woi'k in Brighton. 
 
 it themselves ; little acts of respectful consideration 
 inculcated to the maid-servants in the house, all go 
 to form an habitual attitude of mind, which in after 
 years will make it simply impossible for him ever 
 to degrade or dishonour a woman. 
 
 Do not let any one delude you into fearing lest 
 you should lose influence with your sons, that it 
 will sully you in their eyes, as some mothers say, 
 ' if you meddle with the subject' On the contrary, 
 you will gain an influence such as you have never 
 known before. I have come to the deliberate con- 
 clusion — the result of much experience, my own 
 and others — that one of the greatest hindrances to 
 men's respecting us women — and that, too, even 
 with men of the world, whom you would have 
 thought had never felt at all on the subject — is 
 the heartless, cruel indifference we maintain to- 
 wards our lost sisters, the helpless, hopeless, 
 Christless attitude we have assumed as befitting 
 our purity. Where this is abandoned, where it is 
 replaced by womanly compassions, by the divine 
 mother of the sad, the lost, and the sinful, which is 
 in every woman worthy of the name, it is just like 
 a new revelation of womanhood to men.
 
 Work in Brighton. 55 
 
 Believe me, young men will respond to this 
 higher teaching. They are often thoughtless about 
 themselves, but till the world and the world's ways 
 have hardened them, they are never wanting in 
 generosity. A young man may be made to feel 
 the hideous meanness of the bargain he makes, 
 retaining his own social advantages, his friends, 
 his refinements, all the bright prospects of his life, 
 and leaving the curse of his wrongdoing to fall 
 upon the woman, making her an outcast from God 
 and man, cutting her off from the hope of wifehood 
 and motherhood, exposing her to frightful disease, 
 to live a degraded life, and die a dishonoured death. 
 What he has not felt wrong when his thoughts were 
 fixed upon himself, will become nothing short of 
 moral murder to him when his thoughts are fixed 
 on woman and her good. The old knightly man- 
 hood will yet be seen amongst us, that reverence 
 for womanhood, which, to a man, is as ' fountains 
 of sweet water ' in the bitter sea of life, to keep 
 him ' a living soul'
 
 5 6 Work in Brighton. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 AND now let me endeavour to give you some 
 suggestions as to the objects of an Association for 
 the Care of Friendless Girls, and how best to do 
 the work of visitation connected with it. 
 
 First, as to the general objects. Let it be a 
 fundamental rule of every such association that it 
 exists to attack causes, not merely to cure results ; 
 not merely, as Mrs. Vicars says, to undo the few 
 last soiled links of an interminable chain. I would 
 suggest, therefore, that all the members should not 
 necessarily be required to undertake the work of 
 visitation, but all alike should be bound to work in 
 their own rank, in one or all of the many ways 
 open to us — by distributing suitable publications, 
 and using our own living, personal influence, be- 
 einnino; with our own immediate circle of friends, 
 and working outwards as fresh channels open ; by 
 endeavouring to influence the young men with 
 whom we have to do ; by befriending any we may 
 hear of as alone in professions or in business iq
 
 Work in Brighton. 57 
 
 the place where we live, and opening our houses 
 to them, — for how many a young man has been 
 driven to seek the society of women in question- 
 able ways, who would have been saved by the 
 friendship and kindly interest of a pure woman ; 
 above all, by trying to enlighten and impress young 
 mothers. My own invariable experience has been, 
 once get a mother to face the facts, once get the 
 horror of it all into a mother's heart, and as a 
 rule she never fails to turn out her boys as pure 
 as her girls. Much, too, might be done, by the 
 members of an Association, in quietly and earnestly 
 stirring up ministers and preachers, and high- 
 minded men, no longer to blink this terrible ques- 
 tion, but to come forward boldly, as Pere Hya- 
 cinthe and M. Monod have already done, and 
 endeavour to influence young men. And I would 
 specially urge that we should never lose an oppor- 
 tunity of pointing out to such men where we feel 
 the radical defect in the teaching of men lies, that 
 the teaching of purity is based at present on ideals, 
 not on facts, on self-virtue, not on a regard 
 for others, inculcated as some lovely abstract 
 quality, at which they have to aim for the good of
 
 58 Work in Brighton. 
 
 their own souls, not enforced as a necessity based 
 on the facts of physiology and their relations to the 
 world they live in. And let us beseech all who 
 speak on this subject to young men, no longer to 
 appeal only to the self-restraint which is weak, but 
 to the generosity which is strong in them ; no 
 longer to fix their thoughts on themselves, their 
 own virtue, their own character, their own personal 
 dignity, but to direct their attention to the un- 
 utterable consequences that their wrongdoing 
 bears to women, and the curse it is bringing on , 
 others ; and if there be a spark of manliness, a 
 spark of generosity left, to shame them out of 
 being participators in it. For my part, I believe 
 that most young men might be brought to feel, like 
 some I know, that they would rather die than have 
 art or part in this great woman's curse. 
 
 I can only state again, with Mrs. Vicars, that 
 this general work in our rank is of far greater 
 importance even than rescuing the poor victims 
 of our social evils. Till we get rid of the self- 
 risrhteousness, and the selfish isolation of our 
 homes and family life, which has so eaten into the 
 heart of our Christianity, till we get something
 
 Work in Brighton. 59 
 
 better and more Christ-like than the goodness 
 ivhich is so busy taking care of itself that it has no 
 time to take care of others, the interminable chain 
 must go on growing, no progress can be made to a 
 better state of things. 
 
 But now, with regard to the practical work of 
 visitation, I should suggest that a list of the 
 houses needing visitation should be obtained 
 from either the parochial clergy or the police ; 
 and as the Association increases in numbers, be 
 apportioned out among the workers, progress being 
 reported at the monthly meeting for prayer and 
 counsel* It is best that no lady should go alone, 
 at any rate, till she is known. 
 
 A respectable shop, however, in the bad dis- 
 tricts will give all the information needed to begin 
 with. 
 
 In the next place, with regard to the best time 
 for visiting. The morning has great advantages, 
 
 * If a certain number of ladies can be got together to 
 meet us, one or two of our Association would gladly attend, 
 and endeavour to interest them in the work, and help start 
 it ; only one proviso being made, that we may be allowed to 
 fix the time, as our hands are very full.
 
 60 Work in Brighton. 
 
 and generally we prefer it. The girls are quieter 
 and more sober, and it is easier to get a quiet talk 
 with them one by one, often before they are up» 
 On the other hand, the doors are more often locked 
 in the morning ; in the afternoon they are always 
 open, and access therefore is easier. But which- 
 ever time we choose, both day and hour must 
 constantly be changed, else the landlady learns to 
 expect us, and to take precautions against our 
 effecting an entrance.. 
 
 Before starting, it is a rule in our Association 
 that there should be earnest prayer. If you are 
 content to go into this work in the ordinary 
 prayerful frame of mind in which we go to other 
 work, you will find yourself simply paralysed by 
 the force of evil around you. Indeed, to gain 
 real power in coping with the evil that meets 
 us — the overcoming love that fainteth not, neither 
 is weary, the loving earnestness that can plead 
 with the first girl it meets, as if there were 
 no other lost soul in the world but that one 
 — we find it absolutely necessary to remain in 
 silent prayer up to the last moment, and so step 
 out of the presence of the great Father into the
 
 Work in Brighton. 61 
 
 presence of these His wandering children, who, like 
 lost sheep, have erred and gone astray. 
 
 Having fixed upon the house to be visited, do 
 not knock at the front door,* but go boldly in 
 
 * With regard to the upper class of dens which possess a 
 locked front door, and a servant to open it, and to which 
 these directions do not therefore apply, we have as yet no 
 experience. To find entrance into them does indeed require 
 tact and care. I should suggest all the formalities of a regu- 
 lar call being observed ; to dress in one's very best, and to 
 .send up one's card,- having, if possible, obtained the name, 
 but if not, asking for the lady of the house, and stating that 
 one calls on business ; and then having once got in, trusting 
 to kindness, and tact, and simple human friendliness to gain 
 •a footing. One has always some sense of loneliness re- 
 sulting from the feeling of being looked down upon, to work 
 upon. Anything like preaching would of course be out of 
 the question; deep womanly compassion, the tender, hu- 
 man-hearted ' Christ in us, 5 that beauty of the Lord our God 
 upon us which drew all classes of sinners to Him, must do 
 the work here, speaking to them not as a class of sinners 
 apart, but as those who, like us, have wandered from their 
 Father; they in one way, we in another, as those who have 
 tasted the nothingness of human love, and whose hearts 
 want that ' place of rest imperturbable where love is not for- 
 saken if itself forsaketh not,' who need, like us, a Saviour 
 and a Friend. In cases where our visit excites anger, or is 
 resented as an impertinent intrusion, a little gift of flowers
 
 62 Work in Brighton. 
 
 if the door is not locked, and knock at the door 
 of one of the upstair rooms ; for be it remembered, 
 these houses have not the rights of private houses ; 
 they are illegal, and, strictly speaking, have no 
 rights at all. In this way you will probably not 
 meet the landlord or landlady ; but if you do, 
 do not pass them by as if there was no Sa- 
 viour for them — remember that somewhere, hidden 
 away from all eyes but His, is a soul athirst even 
 unto death for the water of life, unhappy in its 
 vileness, but never hearing a kind word — and 
 boldly give the message of the Father's pardoning 
 love. If neither Jew nor Mahommedan will ever 
 tread on a bit of paper, lest the name of God be 
 written upon it, may we Christians never trample 
 on a human soul, however vile, remembering that 
 it was made in the image of God, and that Christ 
 has written His name in His own life-blood upon it. 
 
 Of course, in many cases you must be pre- 
 pared for a perfect torrent of abuse. 
 
 If the owner of the house be a man, look him 
 
 the next day, accompanied with a kind note, might open the 
 door again for further intercourse. What an untried field of 
 labour lies open here to anyone who would attempt it !
 
 Work in Brighton. 6 
 
 o 
 
 quietly and firmly in the face : a man finds it very 
 hard to go on insulting a lady when she is looking 
 straight at him ; and as soon as there is a pause, 
 ask him quietly and gently, ' If you had a sister 
 or a daughter in one of these houses, wouldn't you 
 like a lady to come and be a friend to her ? Well, 
 then, these poor girls are some man's sisters, some 
 mother's children ; don't grudge them a friend in me.' 
 Firmness and gentleness, with some such appeal to 
 better feelings, will often do wonders. Anyhow, let 
 us, as good soldiers of Jesus Christ, endure hardness, 
 and bear abuse and insult gladly for Him who bore 
 to be called a devil and a drunkard for us. Cannot 
 He turn it to our advantage ? In the Crimean 
 war a cannon-ball pierced the side of the hill 
 where our troops were encamped, and without 
 injuring any of our men, it shattered the rock and 
 let out a secret spring, which for many months 
 afforded our soldiers a supply of fresh, living water. 
 And so, when in the deadly fight with evil we are 
 struck by cruel insult, it strikes not us only, but 
 Him ; and forthwith from the smitten Rock there 
 gush forth streams of living tenderness : ' I, even 
 I, am he that comforteth you : who art thou, that
 
 64 Work in Brighton. 
 
 thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die?' 
 ' Fear not, thou art mine, I will hold thee by thy 
 right hand ;' — living streams that flow out, not 
 only for us, but so often for the poor sinful soul 
 who has injured us. Once it did -happen to Mrs. 
 Vicars to be most grievously insulted in one of 
 these dens to which she had gone alone. Un- 
 daunted by the cruel pain it gave her, the brave 
 heart went again two days after ; she found the 
 woman in an agony of repentance, and not only 
 was her own heart opened, but she thankfully 
 allowed Mrs. Vicars to take her daughter and one 
 of her lodgers to a Home. 
 
 On another occasion, in one house they visited, 
 there was a girl who greeted Mrs. S. and her 
 friend with such a torrent of coarse abuse every 
 time they came, that it really seemed of no use to 
 persevere in the face of insults that pained like a 
 blow. Once or twice the door being shut in their 
 faces, Mrs. S. pleaded with her through the open 
 window, but always with the same ill-success. 
 
 ' Don't let us give her up ; let us try some 
 flowers.' Accordingly the next time her friend 
 made up a lovely nosegay of white azaleas and scar-
 
 Work in Brighton. 65 
 
 let geraniums, and fastened round it the divine 
 words, ' Come, let us reason together, saith the 
 Lord ; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall 
 be white as snow ; though they be red like crim- 
 son, they shall be as wool.' 
 
 1 Oh, what beautiful flowers ! Well, now, that is 
 nice!' exclaimed the girl, evidently touched at the 
 kindness of the little gift in return for all her coarse 
 abuse. 
 
 Weeks passed away, when Mrs. S„ sitting in 
 the little reception-room of the Albion Hill Home, 
 was told a young person wanted to be admitted. 
 The door opened, and in walked this very girl. For 
 the moment Mrs. S. did not recognise, in the gentle 
 face and imploring manner, the rude, defiant occu- 
 pant of the den she and her friend had so often 
 visited in such despair. ' I don't think you know 
 me, ma'am. I'm Lizzie, and hope you will forgive 
 me for all the bad things I said when you came to 
 see me. Indeed, I never meant them. If you will 
 forgive me and take me, I want to come into the 
 Home. And please, ma'am, I have brought a 
 friend with me.' 
 
 Yes, there she was, humbly asking for admit- 
 
 E
 
 66 Work in Brighton. 
 
 tance into the Home she had so often vowed 
 nothing should induce her to enter, and already 
 saving others. 
 
 ' But what has changed you so, my girl ? 
 How has it all come about?' Mrs. S. asked, in 
 amazement. 
 
 1 It was the flowers that lady brought me, and 
 the beautiful text. Them words, " Though your 
 sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow," 
 went to my heart.' 
 
 Soon after another of Lizzie's companions 
 was admitted. On being told, she clasped her 
 hands and exclaimed joyously, ' Thank God ! ' 
 Her heart, once so hard and degraded, had 
 already learned to sing with the angels over one 
 lost one found. 
 
 On gaining access to a den, our whole efforts 
 must be directed to getting any girl who may be 
 impressed to come away with us at once — 'Some 
 save with fear, pulling them out of the fire.' Make 
 an appointment with her some other day, because 
 it does not suit your convenience to take her away 
 just then, or allow an unseasonable hour, or a feel- 
 ing of fatigue to interfere with providing for her, if
 
 Work in Brighton, 6y 
 
 she comes up to your house, and you have almost 
 certainly lost her. Earnestness and promptness are 
 essential in this work. If they refuse to come away 
 at once, never omit leaving your address, so that if 
 they want a friend at any hour of the day or night, 
 they may know where to find one. In this way 
 our own homes form so many Houses of Mercy, 
 where poor, friendless and fallen girls who have 
 wandered into Brighton can come to find a friend ; 
 and surely this is what every pure home ought to 
 be : its door, a gate called Beautiful, where the 
 feet of the lame and the lost receive strength to 
 seek again their Father's face, and the homeward 
 path. 
 
 ' But where am I to take them, if they are 
 willing to be rescued?' This, of course, is one of 
 the first difficulties to be solved, as, if one has 
 young servants, one cannot bring them to one's own 
 home. It has been the subject of much anxious 
 discussion between Mrs. Vicars and myself, and our 
 deliberations have resulted in some modifications 
 of our earlier suggestions. The best plan would 
 be for the Association to find out two or three 
 Christian women who would undertake to lodge
 
 68 Work in Brighton. 
 
 and board a girl whilst further arrangements were 
 being made for her. Do not undertake the ex- 
 pense of a temporary refuge, but if there is no local 
 Home let your whole efforts be directed towards 
 having a Cottage Home of your own, to which you 
 can send the girls you rescue. This had better 
 be built in connexion with some existing centre, 
 where the work of training is understood and the 
 methods are good. This will result in a great 
 saving of expense, as the Cottage Home would share 
 in the common laundry premises, chapel, chaplain, 
 lady superintendent, &c. It would also present the 
 advantage of placing a girl in altogether fresh 
 surroundings, and removing her from old scenes of 
 temptation. If isolated Cottage Homes are built 
 whenever an Association if formed, not only do 
 these old scenes present a greater temptation to go 
 back to the old lawless life, but there would be a 
 want of the appliances for training any but a very 
 small number ; and also there is the fear of great 
 inexperience in the ladies who manage it, and con- 
 sequent bad results, ending by the work being given 
 up in disgust. 
 
 Only before fixing on a Centre, I would warn
 
 Work in Brighton. 69 
 
 every Association to gain a personal knowledge of 
 its methods. Let us bear in mind that these poor 
 children have mostly never known a real mother's 
 care,and that what theypre-eminently want is a home 
 and a mother, and cheerful, natural, thorough home 
 training in domestic service ; that no other training 
 answers ; and that when, therefore, the methods are 
 so ecclesiastical as to interfere with the bright, lov- 
 ing home character of the training, I would urge 
 every Association to have nothing to do with them, 
 but to have their own local Cottage Home, and 
 manage it as best they can. Any 'best,' as long as 
 it is human and loving, answers better than ascetic 
 discipline with this class of girls. 
 
 But perhaps you will say, to have such a 
 Cottage Home would cost a good deal of money, 
 and you are ' such a bad beggar.' I beseech you, 
 have faith in God. Believe, at least, that in the 
 richest country in the world no soul need be lost 
 for want of money to save. If a soul is lost, it 
 is not from want of money, but from want of faith. 
 When are we going to begin to believe in Christ- 
 ianity, to believe in what Our Lord says, that faith 
 can move mountains and pluck up strong-rooted
 
 70 Work in Brighton. 
 
 trees, that in the line of God's will we are practi- 
 cally omnipotent ? When shall we realise that an 
 Almighty power, like the great forces of nature 
 which are also His, stands ready, waiting for our 
 use ? Some years ago Miss Robinson was bewailing 
 to me the state of Portsmouth, that our soldiers had 
 no place of refuge from the thousand gin-palaces 
 and public-houses to which they were asked even 
 before they could disembark ; but that the evil 
 was so enormous, it could only be met on a 
 national scale, and it seemed hopeless to try and 
 meet it in the face of so many difficulties. We had 
 both of us shown a remarkable inability to raise 
 money, we were emphatically what people are so 
 proud of declaring themselves, ? bad beggars.' But 
 we knelt down, and asked our God in faith to help 
 us to do the right thing, and save our soldiers. 
 The answer to that prayer was 15,000/. And don't 
 you think that the few hundreds you may need for 
 saving your lost sisters will be given you, if you too 
 ask in faith, not doubting in your heart, but be- 
 lieving that those things you ask shall come to 
 pass ? It is not in the line of God's will that we 
 should interfere with the laws of nature, and work
 
 Work in Brighton. jt 
 
 idle wonders by removing material mountains, or 
 plucking up material trees ; the divine Power by 
 which faith works is but the divine Will in action ; 
 the very condition of its use, as in the use of one of 
 the forces of nature, is obedience to law. But it 
 must be in the line of God's will, Who wills that all 
 men should be saved, that the mountain of sin and 
 difficulty should be moved off some despairing 
 heart, crushed down by it into degradation ; that 
 evil habits, the growth of years, and deep-rooted as 
 the great Eastern sycamines, or our own English 
 oaks, should be plucked up and cast into the depths 
 of the sea. Have faith in God and you shall do it. 
 Let us say with St. Theresa, when she set to work 
 to establish a much-needed House of mercy with 
 only three half-pence in her pocket, ' Theresa and 
 three half-pence can do nothing, but God and three 
 half-pence can do all things.' Remember to begin 
 with, that the purse is an organ that lies next the 
 heart, not the head, and commence by trying to 
 excite an interest in the subject, and get at 
 the feelings. Send a copy of Work among the 
 Lost, or Work i?i Brighton, or anything else that 
 you know of that has interested you, to those
 
 72 Work in Brighton. 
 
 who have the means of giving. Convince people 
 that there is a practical need, by telling them of 
 cases you have already got under your care, and 
 the makeshifts to which you are reduced in trying 
 to fulfil your trust. And above all, get the co- 
 operation of well-judging people whose names 
 inspire trust, and you will soon find that money 
 can be got for any good purpose in England. 
 
 A Cottage Home can be built for from £6$o to 
 ^■700, and when once erected can be made nearly 
 self-supporting, so that the Association would not 
 have any very heavy burden in raising the neces- 
 sary sums in annual subscriptions. The Albion 
 Hill Home has ground belonging to it sufficient for 
 four or five such Cottage Homes, each bearing the 
 name of the town to which it belongs. There 
 would be no massing bad girls together, as each 
 cottage would be kept perfectly distinct, and they 
 would only meet all together at chapel ; the moral 
 effect of which would be only good, as showing 
 how many were anxious to do better. 
 
 In addition to this more methodical plan, I 
 would earnestly suggest that any lady whose heart 
 has been touched by the sufferings and degrada-
 
 Work in Brighton. J$ 
 
 tion of women, and who, though not perhaps 
 wealthy, has still with care and self-denial two or 
 three hundred a-year to spare, should undertake 
 a Cottage Home of her own, in which she would 
 maintain and train a few of these lost and wan- 
 dering children, either living with them herself or 
 placing them under the care of a good Christian 
 woman, and watching over them daily. An ordi- 
 nary house could be readily adapted for the purpose, 
 and fitted up with the proper dormitory arrange- 
 ments ; laundry and machine-work would contribute 
 materially to its support. One or two of the 
 steadier girls might be trained as cooks at the 
 lady's own house, should she not live with them, or 
 the cooking connected with a I sick kitchen ) might 
 be undertaken. Are there no mothers who, having 
 seen their own children grow up in pure and 
 sheltered girlhood, and become happy mothers in 
 their turn, will now care for a few of those who 
 have 'no home and no happiness,' and who too 
 often have lost, or never known, a mother's love ? 
 
 But in the practical work of visitation it is un- 
 questionably a great help to have some intermediate 
 link between the Home and the dens ; such as
 
 74 Work in Brighton. 
 
 boarding out with a Christian woman would afford, 
 or such as the Cottage Refuge we have built on 
 purpose presents. Often a girl, owing to the 
 causes I have already touched upon, has an in- 
 superable objection to entering a Penitentiary. 
 In that case we can say, ' I am not asking you 
 to go into the Home, but to leave this vile life, 
 and come with me to a little lodging we have 
 built for you.' Once out of her evil surround- 
 ings she can see things with other eyes, and is 
 generally the first to ask for admission into the 
 Home she had so dreaded. 
 
 The Cottage Home, too, is invaluable in the 
 cases of prevention, which form so blessed a feature 
 of our work, and which in themselves plead for the 
 existence in all our large towns of some such Asso- 
 ciation as ours. Strangers and very young girls 
 are too often entrapped into houses of bad char- 
 acter. One case that came under our care was the 
 most unhappy wife of an unfaithful husband. Un- 
 able to live with him any longer, she had arrived 
 at Brighton late one evening, alone, and friendless, 
 and penniless. She went to the police-station to 
 ask to be directed to a respectable lodging for the
 
 Work in Brighton. 75 
 
 night, but received for answer that the station was 
 not a lodging-house, and she must go elsewhere for 
 information. A woman, apparently taking pity 
 upon her, came forward and offered to take her in 
 for the night ; an offer which was eagerly accepted, 
 only to find out later on the nature of the house 
 into which she had been beguiled. She had been 
 there only two days, being too poor at once to 
 seek another lodging, and not knowing where to 
 turn, when two of our visitors came upon her. 
 She naturally resented the thought of going into a 
 Penitentiary : ' What have I done that I should go 
 to a place like that, as if I had lost my character?' 
 she exclaimed indignantly. But on being told of 
 the Cottage Home she thankfully agreed to go to 
 it the next day. But at half-past ten that same 
 night she made her appearance at the door of the 
 lady who had visited her, and who had taken care, 
 as we always do, to leave her address. Her land- 
 lady, finding out she was likely to lose her, had 
 endeavoured to force her to lead an evil life ; and 
 she had escaped to the friend she knew would save 
 her. Miss J., regardless of the late hour and the 
 inclement night, at once walked up to the Cottage
 
 7 6 Work in Brighton. 
 
 with her, roused the household, and the poor 
 friendless wanderer was at once admitted. ' I was 
 a stranger and ye took Me in.' She confessed 
 afterwards that she had fully made up her mind to 
 throw herself into the sea. 
 
 Another case was that of a young servant girl, 
 who, owing to some dispute, was suddenly dis- 
 missed from her place, weak and ill from overwork. 
 With that incredible carelessness of some mis- 
 tresses which at the last day will lay the sin of so 
 many of these poor wanderers at their door, she 
 was turned off without a thought or a question as 
 to what would become of her. She trailed herself 
 wearily through several streets seeking a respect- 
 able lodging in vain, and at last was directed, I am 
 shocked to say by a policeman, to William Street. 
 In perfect good faith she paid five shillings in ad- 
 vance for her lodging, discovering, when it was too 
 late, the nature of the house. She was too ill and 
 too poor to seek another lodging, and could only 
 lie still and pray that God would send her some 
 friend. Falling into a troubled doze, she was 
 awakened by the kind voice and touch of two ladies 
 standing by her bedside. An angel of God could
 
 Work in Brighton. 77 
 
 not have been more welcome and more unexpected. 
 In ten minutes she was up and dressed, and being 
 conveyed in a fly to a place of safety. 
 
 But besides this chance work of prevention, if I 
 may so call it, every association should be doing a 
 steady work of prevention in hunting up little girls, 
 in bad localities, just past the School-board age, 
 the conditions of whose lives are so bad as simply 
 to set them apart for ruin in body and soul — 
 children, in South's terrible words, ! not so much 
 born as damned into the world.' No country is so 
 fearfully and culpably careless about the chastity of 
 her female children as England. Other countries 
 recognise, at least, nominally, in their statute-books, 
 the legal age, twenty-one, as the earliest at which 
 a girl can give herself to vice without the consent 
 of her legal guardians. But at any age little Eng- 
 lish girls can drift into a den before they are in 
 the least old enough to understand the consequences 
 of their own actions, dashed down this moral pre- 
 cipice before they know how to choose the good 
 and refuse the evil ; and there is no law by which 
 we can make it felony up to a certain age, and 
 misdemeanour for a year beyond it, — misdemeanour
 
 78 Work in Brighton. 
 
 in the den-keeper to have harboured such a child 
 for such a purpose. In default, therefore, of any 
 protection from the law, any recognition of the 
 minority of children for the purposes of vice, we 
 save them in one of three ways : — 
 
 i. By getting them clothes and placing them 
 out at service. This, however, is only possible oc- 
 casionally, as in general they are too untrained to 
 keep a situation when they get it. 
 
 2. By placing them with a Christian woman, 
 who will train them for five shillings a-week, in her 
 own house for a few months, and draft them on 
 into a respectable situation. 
 
 3. By placing them in a training school, which 
 is the most efficient, but also the most expensive 
 way. Thence they are turned out well-trained and 
 respectable servants, able to take really good sit- 
 uations, while they are removed from their old bad 
 associations. 
 
 In this way when Ladies' Associations for the 
 Care of Friendless Girls are formed in every large 
 town, multitudes of girls will be saved from worse 
 than death ; and multitudes of young men saved 
 from ever knowing them as their worst tempters.
 
 Work in Brighton. 79 
 
 And I would especially point out, that our 
 \ Girls' Friendlies,' admirable as they are, only help 
 respectable girls. By one of the fundamental rules, 
 they cannot help those that most want helping to 
 save them from a downward course. They em- 
 phatically need supplementing by our Associations 
 for the Care of Friendless Girls, and then we shall 
 form one golden chain of love bound about our 
 unprotected working-class girls, to save them from 
 ever falling a sacrifice to that terrible social Moloch 
 so largely kept up, alas ! by the wealth of our own 
 class. 
 
 In order that women in our own rank, who can 
 guard their own little girls from every breath of 
 evil without, may realise what are the conditions 
 but too often of these poor children whom we leave 
 to perish in our back streets, let us take one case. 
 Two of us ladies passing down Derby Place met a 
 very pretty child of thirteen or fourteen paddling 
 down the muddy flags with her bare feet, and roughly 
 told to get along by a policeman — an injunction 
 which she greeted with a familiar laugh. Taking 
 her kindly by the hand, we led her back to what 
 she called her home, — a common lodging-house, —
 
 80 Work in Brighton. 
 
 and found that her mother, a drunken Irishwoman, 
 sold flowers, and left this pretty girl alone with a 
 lot of low men in the lodging-house all day, and 
 with absolutely no employment. A motherly- 
 hearted woman connected with the lodging, who is 
 one of our best allies and fellow-workers, implored 
 us to do something for her, as she was fast going to 
 ruin. The girl was almost naked, and the first step 
 was evidently to clothe her for service ; so she was 
 told to come up that same evening to my house. 
 Very shy and silent she sat while a heap of cast-off 
 clothing was being turned over to see what would 
 do for her, till at last she could contain herself no 
 longer, and burst out, \ My heart do so jump for 
 joy at the sight of such beautiful things.' They 
 were only old clothes, the cast-off things of other 
 girls as fair and young as Mary, but born to a 
 brighter lot ; girls who, if mothers would only bring 
 them up to feel that that brighter lot is a trust for 
 other girls, a store of wholesome life-giving sun- 
 shine to spend on some sad young heart, whose 
 pleasures — the dancing-saloon and the street — are 
 sadder even than its griefs, might have cared for this 
 neglected child. Is there anything so pathetic in
 
 Work in Brighton. 8 1 
 
 life as the little, the very little, that will make a 
 human ' heart jump for joy ? ' 
 
 1 And yet 
 We do refuse, neglect, forget, 
 To give that little ere 'tis fled, 
 
 Ah, me ! Ah, me ! 
 And sad hearts go uncomforted.' 
 
 Poor little Mary ! after two or three hours' ex- 
 perience of my peaceful Christian home, she sat on 
 the area-steps crying bitterly, and sobbing out, ' It 
 was so dreadful to go back to all that drinkin' and 
 fightinV So finding that she was cruelly beaten, I 
 took her into my own home, my excellent Christian 
 servants offering to cleanse and clothe her. She 
 was literally alive from head to foot with vermin, 
 her tender girlish body was scarred all over with 
 blows, apparently inflicted with a poker, and one of 
 her arms bore the marks of her mother's teeth, 
 where, in her drunken fury, she had severely bitten 
 her ; and her voracious appetite showed she had 
 been half starved. I ask, under such conditions, 
 untrained and unemployed, what chance had she 
 but to swell the ranks of the lost, — lost in body and 
 soul through our selfish isolation in our pure and 
 
 F
 
 82 Work in Brighton, 
 
 comfortable homes, that leaves the children in our 
 back streets to perish in a living death ? These, or 
 something like these, are the conditions which have 
 beset many of the poor girls on whom we too often 
 sit in judgment as 'poor degraded wretches,' and 
 refuse to go, like the good Samaritan, where they 
 are, lest we should be insulted and defiled. Does a 
 vision never come to us that the self-righteousness 
 and cruelty that can thus use the unmerited gifts 
 of God, — our pure homes, our modest sleeping 
 apartments, our sheltered circumstances, all our 
 lovely influences, — use them to condemn instead of 
 to save, not to lift up them that are bowed down, 
 but to spurn them when down, — that this self- 
 righteousness and cruelty of ours may be worse in 
 our Lord's sight than the sin of our lost sisters? 
 And that if we will go forth to them in His strength, 
 ' loving, not loathing,' they may save us from more 
 than we can save them ? 
 
 Little Mary was ultimately placed in a school 
 at Norwood, and is doing well. She was found to 
 have been born and baptized a Roman Catholic ; 
 and as she did not wish to give up her religion, 
 and so separate herself from her only respectable
 
 Work in Brighton. 83 
 
 relative, a young brother, who is also doing well at 
 a training-school, some Catholic ladies took the 
 charge of her. We are thankful to be able to add, 
 that owing to this sad case, the Catholics have 
 since established a little training-school in Brighton 
 for their destitute girls, who, owing to their religion, 
 cannot be taken into our Protestant schools, the 
 priests refusing in all cases to give them up.* 
 
 But in work that is not prevention, but cure, let 
 me give you one word of earnest caution. It may 
 be that you will have to work for weeks and see no 
 fruit. But it may be that you will rescue such 
 large numbers that it will be a sore difficulty and 
 perplexity to know what to do with them. Do 
 not, I beseech you, yield to what will then be a 
 strong temptation, to send them out at once into 
 service. I know there are some who act on this 
 system, and state that the results are satisfactory. 
 But I contend that the evil that must result is of 
 such a secret kind as not easily to be detected. 
 
 * See a little penny tract called Ladies' Associations for 
 the Care of Friendless Girls : being an account of the Work 
 in Brighton. We should be grateful if ladies would inclose 
 a copy of it in their letters, and so help to make the work 
 known.
 
 84 Work in Brighton. 
 
 The first thing an unreclaimed woman will da is to 
 corrupt the minds of the boys of the family, if 
 there are any. I do not speak from conjecture, 
 but from facts that have come under my own 
 notice. In another case that I know of, a woman 
 whose past history it is a shame even to think of, 
 has been introduced as a nursery governess into a 
 private family without the unfortunate mother 
 knowing the circumstances of her past life. Now I 
 say, better a thousand times that this fearful social 
 disease should be localised in certain spots, which 
 we call dens, than that by our hasty and injudicious 
 benevolence it should be struck into the very bosom 
 of our families. Indeed the prayer that \ lovers of 
 the lost ' need most constantly, is that beautiful 
 collect of our Church, ' Grant us by the help of the 
 same Spirit a right judgment in all things.' The evil 
 we contend against is full of sorrowful confusions ; 
 and is emphatically the Medusa's head in life, apt to 
 turn either one's love or one's judgment to stone. 
 
 I believe myself that the true principle is to re- 
 cognise, with Mrs. Vicars, that these girls have 
 sinned, and to exact, if possible, some proof of re- 
 pentance, some penalty, such as going for a time to
 
 Work in Brighton. 85 
 
 a Home,* which will mark the distinction between 
 a girl who has gone astray, and another who has 
 resisted the same temptations, remembering that 
 justice is ever the back-bone of mercy. 
 
 Great care, as has been already said, must be 
 taken in the choice of a Home, the little book, 
 Work among the Lost>f now existing as a guide. 
 Of course, in having the Albion Hill Home to 
 do the work well and effectually of training 
 those whom we rescue, we have an unspeakable 
 advantage ; but why should there not be many 
 Albion Hill Homes ? Much might be done 
 
 * I do not know whether it is necessary to notice Mrs. 
 Butler's objection in her Hour before the Dawn to our peni- 
 tentiary system. That it is capable of great improvement I 
 should be the first to admit ; but she urges the folly and in- 
 justice of herding these girls together as a class in a way we 
 should certainly not do with immoral young men. But she 
 seems to overlook the fact that we do not make them a 
 class, they are a class by themselves. All we do is to make 
 use of an existing distinction for the ultimate purpose of 
 being able with safety to break it up, and disperse these girls 
 through the community. 
 
 t Work among- the Lost, is. 6d., 16th edition. (Hatchards.) 
 I need scarcely say that the profits of this little book go to 
 the Albion Hill Home,
 
 86 Work in Brighton 
 
 <v 
 
 by an united effort in remodelling a local Home 
 that neglects, as too many do, some of the 
 most fundamental principles worked out by Mrs. 
 Vicars. Especially is this the case in the arrange- 
 ment of the dormitories, on which Mrs. Vicars 
 lays the most absolute stress. In one newly- 
 erected Home the dormitory is one long room with 
 a number of beds arranged side by side, no parti- 
 tion, no curtain even, to secure privacy and decency ; 
 the washing basins ranged down one side of the 
 room in full view ; no supervision ; nothing to prevent 
 obscene talk going on half the night, and every 
 facility offered to the last comer to undo what pro- 
 gress had been effected in reclaiming the others. 
 In Mrs. Vicars' Home, on the contrary, each bed 
 is inclosed in a partition running up some eight 
 feet, so as to allow free ventilation at the top. 
 Each compartment has its own door, the outside 
 bolt of which the matron slips when the girls retire 
 to rest ; or if this is objected to, rolling doors 
 will answer the same purpose. Each little room 
 thus formed has its own snowy little bed, its own 
 washing-stand, its pretty picture and illuminated 
 text, its brush-and-comb-bag, all as bright and
 
 Work in Brighton. Sy 
 
 neat and pretty as possible. Those who have had 
 any practical experience of the visitation of dens 
 will know how absolutely necessary these arrange- 
 ments are for effecting any reformation, and form- 
 ing habits of womanly modesty, neatness, and 
 cleanliness. It is no use urging that this arrange- 
 ment takes up too much room. After five-and* 
 twenty years' experience, Mrs. Vicars has found it 
 is the only effective one ; and she would say that we 
 had better do our work thoroughly, at the cost of 
 some apparent result of numbers, since only thorough 
 work will stand. When shall we realise that, in 
 merely massing a number of bad girls together, we 
 have done nothing towards their reformation ? Too 
 often we first neglect the most fundamental princi- 
 ples of reformatory work ; and then, when we reap 
 the fruit of our own bad work, we turn round on 
 these poor children, and say in disgust that they 
 cannot be reclaimed. 
 
 When once you have got a girl safely housed 
 in a Home, do not forget her. Do not make 
 her feel by your conduct that you have com- 
 mitted her to a grave. Visit her now and then, 
 if possible, and give her the help of your kindly
 
 88 Work in Brighton. 
 
 interest and sympathy ; write her a few words of 
 cheery encouragement, send her a little gift or 
 an illuminated card. Such a trifle pleases these 
 poor children. Many a girl would have gone 
 bravely through her time of probation and train- 
 ing, if only one heart in the great outside world 
 had remembered her. 
 
 But many cases will not need a Home. Many 
 are received home by their parents or friends ; 
 some marry, the presence of pure-minded women 
 amongst them acting in a variety of health-giving, 
 light-bringing ways. 
 
 One other practical difficulty I must touch 
 upon, though it is one to which no satisfactory 
 solution is possible. Most of these girls owe rent. 
 But rent is not the only, nor even the chief, profit 
 which the keepers of these dens make out of these 
 poor girls, which accounts for the fact of their being 
 allowed to be in such heavy arrears, when, in a 
 common lodging-house, they would be turned out 
 at once. This fact must always be remembered in 
 estimating this claim. At the same time if we 
 refuse to recognise it at all in rescuing a girl, the 
 houses are almost closed against us, There is no
 
 Work in Brighton. 89 
 
 right in wrong. All one can do is to compromise 
 matters. If the girl has nothing of her own that 
 can go towards liquidating it, we generally agree 
 to pay a part of the debt, and with this the owner 
 of the house is usually content. 
 
 Besides our regular visitation, we find an occa- 
 sional meeting, with a good deal of hymn-singing 
 and one or two stirring religious addresses, is very 
 necessary, and often makes the hidden seed, that 
 has been sown in many an earnest private talk, 
 spring up and bear fruit. We find the best way of 
 accomplishing this is by a breakfast at 12 o'clock, 
 and plenty of hot coffee, the tickets having been 
 previously distributed in visitation. This plan has 
 several advantages over Midnight Meetings, valu- 
 able as they have proved : it does not try the 
 health of the workers so much ; it does not 
 involve keeping servants up and deranging one's 
 household ; above all, the girls are not excited 
 with drink at that early hour, as they almost 
 always are at Midnight Meetings, and time hangs 
 heavier on their hands. Many ladies shrink from- 
 the very thought of a Midnight Meeting ; but no 
 one can feel any difficulty in getting up a breakfast
 
 9<d Work in Brighton. 
 
 for these poor lost children, and sitting down and 
 eating with them like our Divine Master. Only I 
 would have every lady well prepared for the scene 
 that will offer itself, the shrieks of horrid laughter 
 and the coarse jests which will only too probably 
 answer every earnest appeal — laughter, however, 
 which one learns to recognise as half hysterical, 
 and often had recourse to to hide the inner response 
 of a stricken heart. Often where there has been 
 the most reckless mocking, afterwards there has 
 been the most peaceable fruit of righteousness. 
 But after all is said, the sight of their awful 
 degradation, something so far lower than a man 
 can fall, something that stands so completely alone, 
 must come upon one as a crushing surprise. Let 
 it at least open our eyes to what is the sin, in God's 
 eyes, of our self-righteous \ purity,' which, while 
 children of fifteen and seventeen are being fashioned 
 into consummate devils in our professedly Christian 
 land, has so long passed by on the other side and 
 refused to face this terrible evil lest our purity 
 should be sullied. 
 
 The following is a letter, one of many such that 
 we receive, from the mother of a girl who was
 
 Work in Brighton. 9 1 
 
 impressed at our first breakfast, and who, after 
 being repeatedly visited, at length made up her 
 mind to go home, her whole soul being gradually 
 led to revolt from her evil life. One of our 
 workers herself took her the greatest part of the 
 way home : — 
 
 'Clifton, Nov. 24, 1876. 
 ' Madam, 
 
 * My child arrived quite safe, and I want 
 to thank you for your great kindness. I cannot 
 thank you enuff for what you have done in sending 
 my child back to me ; I felt almost broken-hearted ; 
 I have not been able to rest day or night. . . . 
 May the Lord bless you and keep you, and send 
 you a hundred fould for your goodness and kind- 
 ness to a stranger. I hope it will be a lesson to 
 her. She will not be 18 till next August. She 
 wishes me to tell you how thankful she is to be at 
 home once more. I am sorry I cannot see you to 
 thank you mysealf. May the Lord bless you in 
 your going out and coming in. 
 
 ' Believe me, your humble servant, 
 
 ' Elizabeth H — -,'
 
 92 Work in Brighton. 
 
 Will not some mother in our rank try and 
 realise what it would be to her not to know where 
 ker child was, only to know that she is lost to God 
 and man, and yet be too poor and too tied with 
 the support of a home to be able to go and seek 
 her? Will she not, thinking of some dear girl's 
 face in her own home, which she can always shield 
 from the least breath of evil, — will she not give up 
 an hour or two a-week to the service of those poor 
 mothers whose children, by the mere accident of 
 their birth, are exposed to this fearful fate of being 
 'drawn unto death,' — a living death that destroys 
 both body and soul in hell ? 
 
 Do not tell me that you think prevention is 
 better than cure, and therefore that you do not 
 wish to engage in this work. If you want to 
 quicken that principle into a living power amongst 
 us, give and get others to give an hour or two 
 a-week to working among the lost ; for if \ preven- 
 tion is better than cure ' is written on your hearts, 
 it is stamped in blood and fire into ours. But why 
 should not our own girls take part of the work 
 off our hands, and help us in prevention ? How is 
 it that we so often bring up our girls with the
 
 Work in Brighton. 93 
 
 selfish belief that they were born with a prescriptive 
 right to their social advantages, their graceful culture, 
 the refinement that surrounds them, their rinks and 
 entertainments, and pleasant summer trips, when 
 other girls, as fair as they, and with the same thought 
 in their hearts that they can be young only once in 
 their lives, have to stand year in and year out at the 
 wash-tub, or toil in crowded factories, or in heated 
 work-rooms — girls who go astray and are lost just 
 for the want of a little fun, and brightness, and 
 change? Would not the generosity that is in 
 every young heart respond better to the teaching 
 that they hold all this — their pretty rooms, their 
 bright accomplishments, their high culture — as a 
 trust, to bring a little brightness, and beauty, and 
 higher life into the hard, monotonous, toiling girl- 
 lives around them ? My first work, undertaken in 
 much fear and trembling, when I was nineteen, was 
 to ask eight of these respectable girls — chiefly 
 •daughters of washerwomen — to come and drink 
 tea with me every Sunday afternoon, and see if I 
 could not be their friend ; and I soon found that 
 I could get some of the prettiest, dressiest girls in 
 •the place to come to me, because I was a girl like
 
 94 Work in Brighton. 
 
 themselves, and not — •with all respect to OUT 
 maturer selves — an old fogey. What really keeps 
 back many girls from doing the same thing, is that 
 fatal idea which has got into so much of our inter- 
 course with the poor — that it is necessary to preach 
 to them ; and girls have much, too much of the 
 gracious modesty of youth willingly to take to 
 that. But if they were taught to feel that what is 
 really needed is simple human fellowship between 
 girls of different ranks, and the sympathy of one 
 young thing for another, how many bright young 
 hearts would come forward, and either by a singing, 
 or a drawing, or an arithmetic class, or even by a 
 simple Bible-class, get into friendly, affectionate, 
 social intercourse with girls without their advan- 
 tages, sharing their own upward struggles with 
 them, and trying by all sorts of simple devices to 
 bring brightness and helpful influences into their 
 lives ! How many a poor girl might be saved by 
 forming a friendship with a girl in a higher rank, 
 who, shielded from her temptations, can give her 
 what she has not got ! 
 
 And only next to their home influence, I 
 implore women to use their social influence in
 
 Work in Brighton. 95 
 
 defence of desecrated womanhood. As you value 
 the salvation of your sons, as you reverence the 
 womanhood of your daughters, the womanhood 
 that once bore the Divine under its heart, and 
 has been consecrated as the divine Mother to the 
 most sacred uses, never overlook its desecration 
 in a man. I am well aware we cannot constitute 
 ourselves the moral inquisitors of men's private lives. 
 But there are men who are well known as the moral 
 murderers of women, who make no secret of that 
 dastardly cowardice, which, with an unconscious, 
 cutting irony, they are pleased to call ' gallantry ;' 
 and that such men are received and courted in 
 society — and this by women — may well make 
 thoughtful men denominate our Christianity a 
 civilised heathenism, rotten to the core. I can only 
 beseech you never to let rank varnish, or money 
 gild over, that indelible stain on a man's cha- 
 racter of a woman's blood. Do not call 'gay' 
 what God calls ' cursed.' Let this mind be in you, 
 which was also in Christ Jesus, who said of that 
 man who causes His little ones to fall, that it were 
 better for him that a mill-stone were hanged about 
 his neck, and that he were cast into the depths
 
 96 Work in Brighton. 
 
 of the sea. If any man have not the spirit of 
 Christ in this, he is none of His. It may be that 
 you are so placed as to be obliged to have social 
 intercourse with such men, and even receive them 
 under your roof. But was ever a woman at a loss to 
 express her disapprobation and dislike, even in the 
 closest intercourse, or lacking in fine methods of 
 making a man feel it, even whilst she is observing 
 all the outward civilities of society ? We all know 
 the uses of ice, that it is perfectly smooth, polished, 
 and — irresistible, having been known to split 
 granite itself. Did women only know what is going 
 on behind the embroidered veil of our civilised life ; 
 did they know for themselves the uses to which 
 their womanhood is being put ; did they know the 
 facts that we know and cannot utter for very 
 shame, they would soon revolutionise society ; and 
 the mother could not be found who, for the sake of 
 rank or money, would sell her pure and innocent 
 girl to a man who has done his best to make her 
 womanhood a vile and desecrated thing. 
 
 Only let me ask you if the facts I have laid 
 before you have made any impression on you — and 
 what woman's heart could dare to say they have
 
 Work in Brighton. 97 
 
 not ? — do not let it run out of your eyes in a few idle 
 tears, or evaporate from your lips in a few empty 
 sighs, and be as if it had never been ; but stamp it 
 in upon your inmost souls by action of some kind. 
 Act on the impression made at once ; set to work 
 at once, and try and get a better state of feeling 
 among educated women by distributing copies of 
 this little book among your personal friends^ and 
 earnestly discuss it with them ; form an Asso- 
 ciation for the Care of Friendless Girls ; even if 
 you cannot work in it yourself, stir up others who 
 can, and give them your prayers. Send a donation, 
 if possible a subscription, to Mrs. Vicars, now she 
 is ill and worn with the burthen of supporting her 
 seventy-seven outcast girls, safely housed, and be- 
 ing carefully trained ; send cast-off clothing to the 
 Cottage Home, Albion Hill ; above all, consecrate 
 your home and social influence to the cause, which, 
 as Mrs. Vicars says, in the name of Home and 
 Family, ought to be nearest and dearest to our 
 hearts. Do something ; fix the feeling by action 
 of some kind. It is no passing impression I want 
 the facts I have laid before you to make upon 
 you, but a life-long change of thought, and view, 
 
 G
 
 98 Work in Brighton. 
 
 and conduct. For of this I am sure, no one can 
 look them in the face and remain the same as 
 before : consecrate or harden they must. 
 
 And may there not be locked up in this great 
 world evil, with all its mystery of degradation, misery, 
 and disease, a great force, if we would only set it free, 
 if the Church of the living God would only grapple 
 with this evil, as she has done from the first with 
 slavery ; a force constraining us to give ourselves and 
 our children instead of our money, since nothing 
 less will save our perishing sisters ; constraining us 
 to recognise the awful sacredness of those functions 
 of our nature which make us life-givers, as well as 
 the terrible curse that living to self must bring to 
 some part of the social organism. In that life of 
 which the smallest details have a divine significance, 
 was it for nothing that, according at least to the 
 tradition of the Church, a repentant harlot was 
 made the messenger of the risen Life to the world ? 
 
 In conclusion, I make no appeal. The evil is 
 too vast. In the presence of that vast multitude of 
 our lost sisters, women sunk below the beasts that 
 perish, women who can only bear the misery of 
 their life by deadening the pain of it with intoxi-
 
 Work in Brighton. 99 
 
 cants, women who while yet warm and living but 
 too often know the corruption of the grave, what 
 can we do, but with bowed head, and darkened 
 heart, and lips struck dumb for pain, just cast our- 
 selves down at the feet of that one Love which is 
 deeper than our deepest neglect, deeper than our 
 deepest fall, deeper even than our despair ? 
 
 Our Christ stands in our midst. Once again 
 He shows us His feet and His hands, hands that 
 suppliant show the wounds of His love, dumb 
 mouths that surely plead with us for love and 
 loyalty to the death. Dare we show Him in return 
 unwounded hands and feet, feet that have refused 
 to be pierced in treading sharp and difficult paths 
 of duty, hands that have refused to be wounded in 
 saving others for whom He was contented to be 
 wounded unto death? Once again in the end of 
 the ages, He is willing to make us women the 
 bearers of the risen Life to the world, even that 
 higher life in which impurity, and selfishness, and 
 hate, and destruction, are swallowed up of LOVE. 
 \ Go, tell my brethren,' He says ; and shall we not 
 answer, ' Master, here am I ; send me' ? 
 
 At least, let there be no longer in our large
 
 ioo Work in Brighton. 
 
 towns a certain number of spots abandoned to the 
 devil, the threshold of which no Christian foot ever 
 crosses, and where large numbers of girls are prac- 
 tically imprisoned from the want of moral courage 
 to effect their own escape. And when our Lord 
 asks us, ' Where is thy sister ?' let us no longer 
 have to say, ' I know not ; } but even from the dens 
 of our great cities may we be able to answer, 
 ' Here, Lord ; and I am with her, striving in Thy 
 strength to be her keeper and preserver.'