Just so will it be here. The work for these girls must be done _now_. If we do not help them, there is no help for them, and instead of life and light there is nothing but blackness of darkness before them. Their influence will widen and deepen just the same, only instead of a blessing it will bring a curse, until the old sentence may be repeated for us, and our lives go for their lives and our people for their people. * * * * * THE RELATION OF THE FAMILY TO THE NATION’S WELFARE BY MISS E. B. EMERY, GORHAM, ME. The materialist boldly tells us that physical law is the only law, and that there is no sin but the violation of the laws of our physical being, and that if these were understood and obeyed by all, there would be no sorrow, suffering or disorder in the world. But with a deeper insight, we do not need to live long on earth to learn that violation of moral law for a time will bring into fearful disorder, and actually subvert, physical law. If any truth in this world is manifest, it is that a nation is well balanced and secure just in proportion to the observance of the moral law respecting the _family_; that a commonwealth is prosperous and invincible, in its material as well as spiritual interests, exactly in proportion to the strength and purity of its homes, even to the humblest. Naught can bring such dire confusion and destruction as laxity of family relations; what, then, can you expect of those for whom the family was obliterated, and that by legal statute, for many generations? The freed people are by no means the only sufferers, for in obedience to the divine principle just referred to, precisely to that degree that the colored woman refuses to recognize marriage and a home, just so far is the whole region demoralized; and this obliquity over wide extent threatens the very vitals of our great republic. Educate, Christianize, inspire the young colored woman, and you save and elevate not only the entire colored race, but you brace up the white people of the South to moral standards far from universal now; you save all, in all their interests, temporal and eternal. The domestic relations are the deepest in life; they dictate and control all others. Make the _home_ pure and powerful, and the soil will yield, and demand and supply will adjust themselves; cities will rise, and laws will protect, and schools will flourish, and the church will grow apace, and there is work and education and salvation for all. This is no idle picture; every one of us knows the reality of it. And it is because the home is the basis and centre of all earthly life—and who makes the home? Mainly, it is the woman. Therefore, save the woman; build her up hour by hour; feed her with wisdom of every kind; regulate her passion and emotion, discipline her reason, fortify her will, nerve her with principle, fire her with enthusiasm, and make her tender with Christ’s own love. In every