Feminism, having thrust such disastrous liberty on creatures as eager to grasp as they are unfitted to cope with the dangers thereof, is striving now, by way of women-patrols and police-women, to stem the evil with one hand--while with the other, it continues to open the flood-gates still wider. The only way to stem the evil is to stem it at its source. The home, with the vigilant supervision and guidance of a mother whose duty is publicly recognised and her authority strengthened thereby, whose time and faculties are devoted mainly to the making of home and to the safeguarding and disciplining of the young creatures she has brought into existence, is environment and shelter as indispensable to the impressionable youth of both sexes--but more particularly to the impressionable youth of one--as it is for the rearing of infancy and childhood. Such home-influences, reinforced by the strong hand of a father who likewise recognises his parental responsibilities, are the first of all the rights that matter for young womanhood. Later, should come a term of domestic service. Mistresses of households should realise not only their human but likewise their national responsibility to these young humbler members thereof. No other public service possible to them would equally conduce to national progress. As fathers are legally responsible for debts of sons under age, mothers should be responsible to the State for the virtue of daughters under sixteen. In the _personal_, vastly more than in any other field of operation, woman's chiefest value lies. When she exchanges it for public functions, and seeks to further progress by officialdom and politics, by institution of women-patrols, police-women, Mayoresses, and so forth, the supreme importance of the personal factor becomes impressed by the discovery of the utter inadequacy of any substitute to take its place. "If mothers did their duty, there would be no need for us," a woman-patrol stated recently. By the time young women have reached such phases of demoralisation that their conduct in public demands the intervention of police-women, it is too late to reform them, moreover. They will have lost the best promise and hope of their womanhood. And so it is and must be ever all along the line. The home and the family are the nursery of civic as they are of racial progress. We regard it as proof of civilisation that Law-Courts for Children have been instituted. Yet what a blot it is, in truth, upon both parentage and parenthood that, in our day of enlightenment, such should have become necessary. So have mother influences and maternal sense of responsibility declined, however, that mothers on all sides openly confess their utter lack of power to control boys and girls just in their 'teens. VIII The fashion is to pity and deride the "poor" early Victorian because she lacked the manifold and nerve-wracking outlets for that restlessness and boredom from which modern women suffer.