L I B RARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UN IVLRSITY 
 
 or ILLINOIS
 
 fe
 
 A PLEA 
 
 FOR THE WMDER ACTION OF 
 
 %\)t Cljurrl) of CnglauD 
 
 IN .THE PREVENTION OF 
 THE DEGRADATION OF WOMEN, 
 
 AS SUBMITTED TO THE COMMITTEE OF CONVOCATION 
 Held on July 3, 1879. 
 
 BY 
 
 ELL ICE HOPKINS, 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'work IN BRIGHTON,' 'WORK AMONG THE LOST, 
 
 •notes on penitentiary work,' etc. 
 
 (fourth (Pbition. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 HATCH A R D .S, P I C C A DILL Y 
 
 1879. 
 
 PnW Threepence.
 
 LONDON : 
 
 Printed by Strangeways & Sons, Tower Street, 
 
 Upper St. Martin's Lane.
 
 PREFACE, 
 
 The greater part of this paper was read at the Annual 
 Conference of the Church Penitentiary Association in May, 
 1879, and it was afterwards submitted to the Committee of 
 Convocation on Prostitution, on occasion of my being asked 
 to bear evidence, July 3rd, 1879. I can only hope that 
 the deliberations of the Committee appointed by Convo- 
 cation for grappling with this difficult and terrible problem 
 may result in the formation of some powerful Church 
 organization, which will attack it root and branch, and 
 proclaim the absolute authority, for men and women 
 alike, of those great moral laws on which the welfare and 
 health of nations have most depended. Whether that 
 organization can be developed from an existing one, the 
 Church Penitentiary Association, or whether it had better 
 be constituted under a wider and more comprehensive 
 name, remains an open question. Only let it be a great 
 National Society for meeting a great national evil. 
 
 Christianity, of all the great religions of the world, has 
 alone proved itself able to eflcct the permanent elevation
 
 ( iv ) 
 
 of woman ; yet, strange and sad anomaly ! it is in Christian 
 civilisations that, amidst the elevation of the many, is 
 witnessed her deepest, most artificial, and systematic de- 
 gradation by man, to which many a heathen nation would 
 point with scorn and disgust. Surely the Church, which 
 believes in the Incarnation, that God sent forth His own 
 Son, made of a woman, will cease to look supinely on her 
 desecration, or to combat it only by the most inadequate and 
 desultory means ; but rather by the most powerful organization 
 she can command will endeavour to arrest and stamp out 
 this deadliest evil, and realise something of the divine ideal 
 of womanhood, what the fact of the Incarnation has made 
 it, consecrating it as the Divine Mother, to be the fountain 
 of life, and love, and purity to the world. 
 
 ELLICE HOPKINS. 

 
 I SUPPOSE we are all aware of the extreme gravity of 
 the evil which we meet to-day, in the presence of our 
 Redeemer, to consider; and to grapple with which the 
 Church Penitentiary x\ssociation exists. I presume we 
 should be all agreed, that while most of our other great 
 moral evils may be contemplated as diseases of the 
 extremities, this moral evil, as touching home, family, 
 marriage, all those life-giving functions of our nature which 
 make us akin to God Himself, as the parents of beings 
 formed in His image and heirs of immortality, — this is no 
 disease of the extremities, it is a disease at the very heart 
 of life, poisoning life at its very source. 
 
 I conclude also that we are not only aware of its deep 
 gravity, but of its appalling magnitude, and its tendency to 
 increase as civilised life presents more and more compli- 
 cated conditions of society. We are all aware that at the 
 heart of all our great Christian civilisations there has grown 
 up an immense outcast class of helpless women, and still 
 more helpless children. I am not at all sure that we do 
 realize the numbers of this class. Pere Hyacinthe stated in 
 St. James's Hall, that in Paris alone there are 150,000 of 
 these moral outcasts. Say that this is an exaggeration, 
 yet how tremendous must be the evil of which such an 
 exaggeration is possible from a man of such high authority 
 and so intimately acquainted with Paris ! The lowest 
 estimate I can get from any practical worker in London is 
 20,000 ; Mr. Acton places it as high as 80,000. I can only
 
 ( 6 ) 
 
 say from personal knowledge that the state of London is 
 appalling ; that there are streets on streets, and courts on 
 courts, inhabited almost exclusively by outcast women and 
 girls — thresholds, as a rule, crossed by no Christian foot; 
 streets on streets, and courts on courts, where young 
 children swarm who know every fhi7ig, many of them growing 
 up in houses of ill-fame, and forced, under the compulsory 
 powers of the Educational Acts, to attend school, to the 
 grievous corruption of other children. Nor need I dwell 
 on the misery and degradation of these outcasts; that 
 whatever fatal hold their mode of life gets over them, there 
 is not one of that vast multitude of our lost sisters who 
 can bear her misery and degradation without deadening it 
 by intoxicants. ' But for the drink we could not bear 
 our life,' they all say. Nor, again, need I dwell on the 
 terrible physical scourge which awaits so miany of them, in 
 which the grave seems literally to invade our life, and, in 
 living corruption, to cry, ' The wages of sin is death.' This 
 assembly being chiefly composed of practical workers, I 
 may take for granted that we are painfully familiar with 
 these terrible facts, as well as with the wide-spread poisoning 
 of our national health, the increase of insanity, the suffering 
 of innocent infants and wives, and all the black harvest 
 which results from such a fearful sowing. 
 
 And our children, surely we realize the terrible facts 
 with regard to them? Not only does the EngUsh law 
 recognise that a woman comes of age, at the age of tlnrtee?i, 
 for the purposes of vice, — in other words, that if a little 
 bird-witted child of thirteen consents to be ruined for life, 
 the law throws on that moral baby the responsibility, and 
 the man who has betrayed a child escapes scot-free, — but at 
 any age a little English girl can drift into this living grave,.
 
 ( 7 ) 
 
 before she is old enough to understand the consequences of 
 her actions. A little girl of thirteen, honestly earning her 
 IS. dd. a-week, was going down one of our Brighton streets, 
 when she was met by the keeper of a bad house. The 
 child was pretty; the wretched woman saw she was a 
 marketable article. ' I wouldn't work so hard, if I were 
 you,' she said, 'for a miserable ^s. 6d. ; you come along 
 with me, and I'll show you how to get silk dresses and 
 smart bonnets, and take you to the theatre, all for no work 
 at all.' The cJiild 7vent. Two days after she crept back in 
 the early dawn to her mother, and her mother brought her 
 up to us, a prostituted baby. And we had no legal redress; 
 there was neither conspiracy nor fraud. We could not go 
 and make it felony in that woman to have harboured such 
 a child for such a purpose. 
 
 But it is not only the children of the poor that are 
 perishing through our English laissez-faire. Some of us 
 realize but too painfully the grave moral evils that our 
 public schools present, and to which so many of our boys 
 fall victims, — evils which our high-minded schoolmasters 
 are doing their best to combat, with as yet imperfect 
 success, because the whole (question is shirked in the 
 Christian home. 
 
 And, lastly, do we realize the state of public opinion which 
 underlies and supports these terrible facts — that a large pro- 
 portion, if not a majority, of men, many of them good Christian 
 men, hold the necessity of the existence of this outcast class in 
 a civilised country, where marriage is delayed ; the necessity 
 of this wholesale sacrifice of women in body and soul ? So 
 little has the Christian Church hitherto effected in educating 
 Christian consciousness on this vital question, that I doubt 
 whether the mass of men are at all in advance of the Zulu
 
 ( 8 ) 
 
 chief whom the Government was anxious to ingratiate ; and 
 having racked their brains to think of what would please 
 him most, they sent him at last a present of waggons and 
 wheelbarrows. He gazed at them with fine scorn. ' What's 
 the use of those things,' he said, 'to bear our burdens, 
 whilst we have plenty of women ? ' ' What's the use,' says 
 the British Zulu, the average Englishman, ' of our bearing 
 the burden of self-control which civilised life throws on us, 
 whilst we have plenty of women ? ' ' What recks it that 
 weak women are crushed and cursed and degraded, as long 
 as we strong men find life the easier and pleasanter ? ' 
 
 But when we turn from the complex magnitude of the 
 evil with a sort of despairing cry for help to the Church of 
 the living God, to that pure and Apostolic branch of it to 
 which we belong, to the Church of England, which does 
 recognise that great special evils must be met with great 
 special agencies — which in her Temperance Society is 
 taking the van in the fight with our national intemperance 
 — 'what do we find ? We find, indeed, the Church Peni- 
 tentiary Association, a body called into existence to meet 
 this yet graver ill. But what does it offer? A single 
 specific, like a Russian physician going forth to meet the 
 'black death' with a single globule; and that specific 
 professedly a palliative and not a cure — Penitentiaries. 
 Penitentiaries, of which one of its most intelligent and 
 devoted members said in the Diocesan Conference of 
 Winchester, that we might at least have the satisfaction of 
 feeling that they went to the root of the evil, when they 
 only cure the evil after it is done, when they only touch 
 women, and leave the real vital factor, the man^ untouched, 
 and only save women in infinitesimal numbers. 
 
 But even this narrow basis on which to meet a world-
 
 ( 9 ) 
 
 wide evil must be further narrowed down. The Church 
 Penitentiary Association confessedly and knowingly, by the 
 constitution it adopts, excludes what I make bold to call 
 the most successful Penitentiary in England — at least, if 
 you challenge that assertion, the one which is exercising 
 the most profound influence on the Penitentiary work of 
 England — the Albion Hill Home of Brighton; a Church 
 Penitentiary, with a Clergyman of the Established Church 
 as its chaplain, with a Committee of Churchmen, with a 
 loyal daughter of the Church of England at its head, but 
 excluded by the organ of the Church to which it belongs, 
 because it recognises that * self-devoted women' can be 
 found among dependent working women as well as among 
 independent ladies -, and because, in return for the priceless 
 labour of love they give, which only the Master's ' Well 
 done ! ' can recompense, it recognises the Scriptural prin- 
 ciple, on which every endowed Church rests, that ' the 
 labourer is worthy of his hire.' 
 
 Why, I ask, should one system exclude the other? Is 
 there not room for both, for Training Homes worked by 
 self-devoted sisters, and for Training Homes worked by a 
 lady-superintendent and self-devoted working women, who, 
 as having no independent means, must of course be paid ? 
 You cannot urge that the first alone produce good results, 
 because the best results of all have been produced on 
 exactly the opposite system. Why not let us be true to the 
 great Church principle of recognising ' diversity of opera- 
 tions,' guided by the same spirit of love to our Master and 
 the souls He died to save ? 
 
 But waiving this narrower issue, let me return to the 
 wider one which I have raised, and which I have so 
 much more deeply at heart. Why should not the Church 
 
 A 2
 
 { 10 ) 
 
 Penitentiary Association become the representative of the 
 Church of the Living God, with the full tide of her 
 glorious life flowing in its veins ? Why should it not 
 take its place by the side of the Church of England 
 Temperance Society, the Society for the Propagation of 
 the Gospel, and the Christian Knowledge Society, and so 
 show our Church as presenting a solid front against all 
 the powers of darkness, against intemperance, heathenism, 
 ignorance, and vice? By what evil fate are we con- 
 demned for ever to be picking up the dead leaves off 
 this deadly upas tree, and never to aim a blow at the 
 root ? If the good and holy men who formed this 
 Association suggested, rightly and wisely, the formation 
 of Penitentiaries as the first step to take, did they mean 
 us never to take a second and more advanced step ? Did 
 they really wish, or intend us to be, for ever bandaging up 
 our living limbs with cerements from their graves, so that 
 from dealing with results we cannot go on to attack causes, 
 perpetually pleading the constitution they imposed on us as 
 a reason why we cannot do the progressive work they would 
 have been the first to urge on us, had they lived and shared 
 in the growth that belongs to all true work? Suffer me to 
 use a very disagreeable, but still very helpful, analogy — the 
 treatment of an abscess by a quack and by a physician. 
 The quack's only thought is to cure results ; he sees a 
 nasty looking sore, and his only idea is to heal that ; so he 
 claps his patent plaster on it, and never gives a thought to 
 the aggravated cause which he has done nothing to cure. 
 The physician, on the contrary, takes the surface sore as 
 his guide, sees at once that nature is endeavouring by it to 
 eliminate some dead constituent, and proceeds to give his 
 whole attention to the irritating cause that is keeping up the
 
 ( " ) 
 
 •abscess, be it a bit of decayed bone, or some poisonous 
 matter, or what it may. Which method do we mean to 
 adopt, the quack's or the physician's ? The quack who 
 paUiates results, or the physician who cures the cause? 
 Penitentiaries are doubtless necessary palliatives, but I urge 
 that when advanced, not as a temporary palliative, but as 
 a sole specitic, the Church in so doing indirectly ministers 
 to the evil cause, tacitly acknowledges with the British Zulu 
 the necessity of prostitution, and contents herself with saving 
 as many victims of a necessary evil as she can. 
 
 What, then, is the wider action, the true moral thera- 
 peutics, the curing from within instead of patching from 
 without, the striking at causes rather than tinkering at 
 results, that I would venture to urge on the Church 
 Penitentiary Association as an existing Church organization 
 for dealing with this vital problem? 
 
 I St. — The broadening out of its Penitentiary basis, so 
 as to take in all good and thorough Church work in 
 training. On this I have already sufficiently dwelt. 
 
 2nd. — The appointment of Clerical Secretaries, similar to 
 the plan of. the Church of England Temperance Society. Let 
 the Secretary appointed be a wise and understanding man, 
 and a moderate Churchman, whose province it would be 
 to stir up and organize work in the various dioceses ; 
 to urge the formation of Cottage Training Homes for 
 the wants of each diocese — only sixteen out of the thirty- 
 two dioceses having Penitentiaries in connexion with 
 the Church Penitentiary Association ; to preach in tht 
 various churches, and get offertories ; personally to bring 
 the magnitude of the evil before the clergy, and get them 
 to deal more plainly with this vital question, at least in their 
 Confirmation classes — I believe, if once the example were
 
 ( 12 ) 
 
 set by a practised preacher of how to put things so as 
 not to harm the young girls of a congregation, many 
 would deal with it from the pulpit as well, instead of 
 shirking the whole subject which, as a rule, the mass of 
 the clergy do at present ; to influence, directly or in- 
 directly, the municipal authorities to put in force the 
 laws for securing the decency of the streets — our streets 
 at present being too often peripatetic schools of vice for 
 our youth, the shame and disgrace of our nation ; to urge 
 the formation of lock-wards under careful moral supervision 
 in connexion with all our general Hospitals, the only available 
 cure for women to be had at Workhouse Infirmaries being 
 of a most dangerously imperfect kind ; * in places where 
 prostitution is peculiarly rife, to hold meetings for men 
 only, and endeavour to rouse them to some sense of man- 
 liness, of the shame of this cowardly vice, the curse of 
 which falls so almost entirely on the woman, and to form, if 
 possible, brotherhoods or guilds for combating it ; to urge the 
 formation of those specific means for arresting the evil : Girls' 
 Friendly Societies, Associations for the Care of Friendless 
 Girls, Free Registry Offices, Training Schools, Factory-girls' 
 Club-rooms and Lodging-houses, &c. : in fact, to work in 
 those ever-varying ways which in the one work of educating 
 Christian consciousness he would find flowing into his hands. 
 We have got rid but too surely of all that is high and noble 
 
 * In garrison towns where the C. D. A. is not in force, or on the 
 repeal of that legislation, which, with such representative minds as 
 Frederic Denison Maurice, James Martineau, John Stuart Mill, and 
 Herbert Spencer ranged against it, can only be a question of time, the 
 patient on admission might be required to sign a paper, consenting to 
 remain as long as the surgeon sees necessary, compulsory powers being 
 obtained for enforcing, if necessary, the agreement. This would meet 
 a grave sanitary difficulty, without having recourse to measures which 
 strike many as immoral, unjust, and unconstitutional.
 
 ( 13 ) 
 
 in asceticism ; but it seems to me that we have still to make a 
 vigorous effort to shake ourselves loose from what I should 
 call the dregs of asceticism — the sense that our bodies are 
 more or less the seat of evil, that there is something low and 
 shameful about some of their highest functions, which leads 
 the British parent to make a conscience of ignoring the whole 
 subject, and to send his boy to a public school without the 
 most ordinary knowledge of the laws of his own body or its 
 relation to the world he lives in, and to leave the most 
 powerful elements for moral weal or woe in our nature to 
 the guidance of chance and impure gossip. The Christian 
 Church has yet got frankly to receive the teaching of modern 
 science, that this ' matter ' which we have been accustomed 
 to call ' brute,' ' gross,' ' dead,' is a ceaseless activity, a 
 glory and a wonder only second to the reasonable soul 
 itself; to recognise the material part of us as a far more 
 vital factor in the divine life than she at present does ; to 
 teach with far more emphasis that the body is the temple 
 of the Holy Ghost, and train us in that habitual reverence 
 for our body which would make us recognise its functions 
 as the visible sign and token of the high purpose and 
 meaning from which they are not to be divorced without 
 our incurring for ourselves and for others ' sundry kinds 
 of death.' 
 
 There is one agency which it might be possible for 
 your Secretary to set on foot, on which I have already 
 touched, and for which my inmost soul yearns. Would 
 it not be possible to band young men together in some 
 sort of brotherhood, or society, or guild, for the pro- 
 tection of women and children from prostitution and 
 degradation — to give them a more aggressive form of 
 purity, something higher and more vivifying than taking
 
 ( 14 ) 
 
 care of their own virtue, that manly, militant virtue which 
 grows strong in fighting the battle of God for the weak and 
 defenceless, the lower passions cast out by the higher 
 passion? Mere self-restraint will never fight this battle. 
 Passion must cast out passion. You want an enthusiasm to 
 lift a young man above himself. What I crave is some 
 agency that would infuse into young men a good, strong, 
 passionate sense of the pitiful meanness of it all ; the utter 
 unmanliness of crushing and degrading women, inflicting a 
 curse which they do not share with so much as their little 
 finger ; going back to their own jolly lives, their pleasant 
 homes, their friends, their career, their power of marrying ; 
 and leaving the unhappy girl to become an outcast, cutting 
 her off from ever being an honourable wife and mother, 
 exposing her to a hideous disease, dooming her to live a 
 degraded life and die a Godless, Christless, hopeless death \ 
 If we could get the feeling into them of what, in their own 
 rough language, they would call ' the beastly shame ' of it 
 all ! A single stroke of active work will wake a young man 
 up to this side of the question: the literally unte7?iptahle 
 men are the men who have been actively engaged, not 
 in taking care of their own virtue, but, in one way or the 
 other, in saving women. Would it not be possible, with 
 care and circumspection, to form in our large towns bands 
 of strong young ' knights of God,' bound to work for the 
 cause of womanhood in various ways, and in communica- 
 tion with wise Christian women, who would undertake any 
 part of the work which it might not be expedient for them 
 to carry out ? 
 
 To pass on to the third point, on which I need not 
 detain you so long. Let every Penitentiary be the nucleus 
 of recognised work outside itself. Here I stand as firm as
 
 ( 15 ) 
 
 a rock. As long as masses of young girls are practically 
 abandoned in the midst of our Christian civilisation, you 
 may build any number of Penitentiaries, but the whole evil 
 will go on. Nothing short of our going personally amongst 
 them, as our Lord Jesus Christ came personally amongst 
 us, will avail. Let Ladies' Associations for the Care of 
 Friendless Girls be formed in all our large towns. Let some 
 such Association be as much a recognised part of a Peni- 
 tentiary as its work of training those who are rescued. Let it 
 be the work of some of the Associates to visit, befriend, and 
 mother these girls in the vile precincts where they herd. 
 Do not let us be content with picking up the last link, but 
 let us strike at the forge where all the links are being fa- 
 bricated. Such work will form the most powerful protest 
 to men that we simply will not recognise a class of our own 
 sisters, the helpless children of the poor, set apart for de- 
 struction of body and soul. You know our work in 
 Brighton;* how, in one street alone, we have shut seven 
 of those houses ; and other streets have been completely 
 purged. I am thankful to be able to say that, in the 
 course of little more than a year, Birmingham, Bristol, 
 Nottingham, London, Edinburgh, Torquay, Cheltenham, 
 Southampton, Winchester, Bedford, Dundee, Perth, &c., 
 are following our example, and forming Associations for 
 the Care of Friendless Girls. Should a great Church organ- 
 ization be set in operation for attacking prostitution from 
 the root, I would thankfully hold myself in readiness to start 
 Associations in any place where the Secretary considered 
 there was an opening, since it might be difficult work for a 
 gentleman to organize. 
 
 But, besides the work of visitation and rescue, these 
 
 * See IVor^ in Brighton. 15th Thousand. Trice ()J. (Hatchards.)
 
 ( i6 ) 
 
 Associations do a good deal of preventive work. We hunt 
 up little girls, just past the School Board age, the conditions 
 of whose homes are so bad as, more or less, to set them 
 apart for a terrible, nameless fate, some of them being 
 actually brought up at houses of ill-fame — a contingency 
 for dealing ivith which no provision is made ivhatever in the 
 Educational Acts. By their agency you can remove a boy 
 who is in certain danger of being brought up a thief; you 
 cannot remove a girl who is in certain danger of being 
 brought up a prostitute — though the one only grows up to 
 filch money, the other grows up to filch money, virtue, and 
 health all at once. In one case we tried, through the 
 School Board, to rescue a little girl living in a bad house, 
 and attendijig school from thence ; in conjunction with the 
 School Board officer we worked the various clauses of the 
 Industrial School Act backward and forward, but found we 
 could not touch the case. We had to rescue her through 
 our own private resources ; and when we fetched her away, 
 we found her in a room with three men and her own 
 mother — all drunk. One of the first steps of an influential 
 Church agency should be to get this omission in Clause 14 
 of the Industrial Schools Act remedied, if it be but for the 
 sake of the children of the respectable poor who attend 
 our schools. It could be done by simply adding to the 
 paragraph, 'Any child that frequents the company ol 
 reputed thieves,' the words ' or prostitutes.' * Let us prove 
 
 * Classes of Children to be Detained in Certified Industrial Schools. — Any 
 Person may bring before Two Justices or a Magistrate any Child apparently under 
 the Age of Fourteen Years that comes within any of the following Descriptions, 
 namely, — 
 
 That is found begging or receiving Alms (whether actually or under the Pretext 
 of selling or offering for Sale any Thing), or being in any Street or public Place 
 for the Purpose of so begging or receiving Alms ; 
 That is found wandering and not having any Home or settled Place of Abode, or 
 
 proper Guardianship, or visible Means of Subsistence ; 
 That is found Destitute, either being an Orphan or having a surviving Parent 
 
 who is undergomg Penal Servitude or Imprisonment 
 'I'hat Irequents the Company of reputed Thieves.
 
 ( 17 ) 
 
 that the honour of our women is at least as dear to us as 
 the security of our property. 
 
 Such children as these we get away from their evil sur- 
 roundings to Training Schools during the two most difficult 
 years of a girl's Hfe— fourteen to sixteen. Most of these dear 
 children are saved before any mischief befalls them; and even 
 when not so, it does not leave the same indelible brand as 
 adult sin. Take another instance from our Brighton work. 
 A child of twelve, called ' the devil,' having been twice in 
 hospital from vice, was acting as a regular ' decoy-duck' for 
 some of our low publicans, to entice girls into the public- 
 house, where they were drugged and ruined. I ask. What 
 is the use of our leaving a regular manufactory of fallen 
 womanhood in full play, and burdening ourselves with Peni- 
 tentiaries to accommodate the results'^ Were it not better, 
 by personal effort and loving care, to shut up the manu- 
 factory? The publicans are closely watched. The child 
 has been sent to a Training School, and is doing well. 
 In this way alone we could cut off a vast mass of the raw 
 material out of which prostitution is made, and save multi- 
 tudes of our young girls from passing into this living 
 grave at all, and multitudes of young men from ever 
 knowing them as their worst tempters. We also, in some 
 places, open Free Registry Offices, Factory-girl Club-rooms, 
 Training Homes; we distribute publications; and all our 
 Associations alike are bound to influence women of our own 
 rank, especially with regard to the training of their sons — a 
 wide subject, on which I have no time to enter.* 
 
 And now for my fourth and last suggestion. Should the 
 Church Penitentiary Association become the organ of the 
 
 * See Work in Brighton (Hatchards), page 49-55, where, however, 
 the subject is necessarily very imperfectly and incidentally dealt with.
 
 i8 ) 
 
 Church in dealing vitally with this great question, why 
 should it not make use of the powerful agency of the Press ? 
 How much might be done by its instrumentality in bringing 
 to the notice of the clergy useful publications 1 Take, for 
 instance, that wise and potent little tract, A Word to School- 
 mistresses^ published by Hatchards. Our National School- 
 mistresses might do very much in this great question, and 
 would do it if stimulated and urged from without. 
 
 Again, we have been holding a Conference of poor 
 mothers, and hope to issue a httle paper, to be worked 
 periodically through 'Mothers' Meetings,' on the early 
 training of our boys and girls in habits of modesty and de- 
 cency, much of this terrible evil originating in immodest 
 sleeping arrangements and immodest habits generally. What 
 a material help it would be if we Churchwomen might look 
 to you to disseminate among our clergy, and their wives 
 especially, anything wise and to the point which we may 
 be able to write ! Once again, is there not a crying want 
 of a wise and authoritative physiological guide to a young 
 man, stating the facts about his own body and the re- 
 lations of that body to the world in which he lives ; a 
 book that a father or a widowed mother could put into his 
 or her son's hands before sending him to school or college ? 
 Knowledge of some kind he will have. Our only choice 
 lies in whether he shall have that knowledge in a pure, 
 unemotional, scientific form, or whether he shall get it in 
 the form of impure, false, and stimulating gossip, by which 
 the mind and conscience are too often permanently defiled. 
 Surely an Association like this might be able to induce 
 some well-known physician — Dr. Routh, or Dr. Andrew 
 Clarke, or some other physiologist, who recognises the 
 unity of the moral and physical laws — to provide such a
 
 ( 19 ) 
 
 guide ? Nature is profoundly moral, but through ignorance 
 young men too often find this out by her punishments rather 
 than by her priceless blessings. 
 
 In conclusion, perhaps you will say, in urging this wider 
 and deeper action on the Church Penitentiary Association, I 
 am as one who should urge on the National Life-boat Associa- 
 tion the duty of teaching swimming, since then life-boats might 
 be less needed; when, of course, they would make answer that 
 they were instituted, not to teach swimming but to provide 
 life-boats. On one point I accept the analogy. Yours is, 
 indeed, a life-boat, for the want of which whole nations 
 as well as individuals have been wrecked. But I urge 
 that this life -boat never reaches the wreck at all; that 
 hundreds of men and women are going down into this bitter 
 sea, that never gives up its dead, for the want of the help 
 you could give them ; while the men who man her keep 
 on pleading that their constitution forbids them to put 
 out on that dark and stormy sea, or do aught but pick 
 up the few women who may chance to be washed ashore, 
 and see, if possible, to their being brought to life. 
 
 But surely, surely, having passed in review all that 
 might be done by a powerful Church Organization, all 
 that cries, and wails, and groans to be done, and seeing 
 that as yet we have only taken the first step, we shall not 
 stay where we are, but say with one voice and with one 
 heart with our Divine Master, and those who have gone 
 before, 'Arise, let us go hence,' to 'build again this taber- 
 nacle which has fallen down,' the ruins of that body which 
 is the temple of the Holy Ghost
 
 WORKS BY ELLICE HOPKINS. 
 
 WORK AMONG THE LOST. 
 
 1 8th Thousand. With an important Appendix and Two Plans. 
 
 Square i6mo. is. 6d. 
 
 ' If any words of ours commend the little book which lies before us, and the 
 good work of which it is a simple and pathetic record, it is well. Every page is 
 full of proof of sagacity and kindness.' — Spectator. 
 
 WORK IN BRIGHTON; or, Woman's Mission to Women. 
 
 With Additions, and Preface by Florence Nightingale. 
 
 15th Thousand. Square i6mo. sewed, 6d. 
 
 ' From my own experience in long past years, I am quite sure that the way 
 indicated in " Work in l^righton " is the only true way ; and I would entreat the 
 women of England to read the little book, and then judge, each for herself, in 
 what way she can help a cause which, for the sake of home and family, has a 
 claim on every woman. I bid the work "God speed" with all my heart, and 
 soul, and strength.'— Florence Nightingale. 
 
 LADIES' ASSOCIATIONS FOR THE CARE OF 
 FRIENDLESS GIRLS. 
 
 Being an Account of the ' Work in Brighton. ' 
 9th Thousand. 3200. sewed, price id. 
 
 NOTES ON PENITENTIARY WORK. 
 
 Just pubhshed, crown 8vo. in wrapper, price 6d. 
 
 ' The Authoress brings forward some valuable suggestions for the better 
 carrying out of this work. Such " Notes " are of incalculable service by way of 
 guiding earnest and true-hearted Christian workers into methods which will give 
 usefulness to their ende:a.vom-s.'—C/iristz(iu IVoj-ld. 
 
 WORK AMONGST WORKING MEN. 
 
 Second Edition, square fcap. Svo. 3^-. 6d. 
 
 ' We strongly recommend this admirable little book to our readers, lay and 
 
 clerical, who have the welfare of their fellow-countrymen at heart A 
 
 delightful and interesting book, and full of practical suggestions.' — Guardian. 
 
 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES HINTON. 
 
 Edited by Ellice Hopkins, with Preface by Sir William Gull. 
 Third Edition, crown Svo. with Portrait, 8.r. 6d. 
 
 A FEW WORDS TO SCHOOLMISTRESSES. 
 
 By L. M. H. Editor of ' The Woman s Gazette.' 
 Price Q-d. each, or 100 for distribution at half-price. 
 
 COUNSELS TO PARENTS ON THE MORAL 
 EDUCATION OF THEIR CHILDREN. 
 
 By Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. Svo, sewed, \s. 6d. 
 
 HATCHARDS, 187 PICCADILLY, LONDON.