Wherever there is squalor seeking ease, he is there. Wherever there is distress crying for succor, discontent complaining for relief, weariness sighing for rest, there is this missionary, offering the quack salvation of his temporal church. He knows and takes subtle advantage of the Jewish sisters sent to work for the education of Jewish brothers; the Irish, the Germans, the Russians, and the Syrians ground in one or another economic mill; the restless neurotic native daughters untrained for work and spoiled for play. He is at the door of the factory when it releases its white-faced women for a breath of night air; he is at the cheap lunch-room where the stenographers bolt unwholesome noonday food handed about by underpaid waitresses; he lurks around the corner for the servant and the shop-clerk. He remembers that these are girls too tired to do household work in their evenings, too untaught to find continued solace in books; that they must go out, that they must move about; and so he passes his own nights at the restaurants and theaters, the moving-picture shows, the dancing academies, the dance-halls. He may go into those stifling rooms where immigrants, long before they learn to make a half-complete sentence of what they call the American language, learn what they are told are American dances: the whirling "spiel" with blowing skirts, the "half-time waltz" with jerking hips. He may frequent the more sophisticated forms of these places, may even be seen in the more expensive cafés, or may journey into the provinces. But he scents poverty from afar. The Priestess of Humanity (_From "A History of European Morals"_) BY WILLIAM E. H. LECKY (English historian and philosopher, 1838-1903. The following much quoted passage may be said to represent the Victorian view of its subject) Under these circumstances, there has arisen in society a figure which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and sinfulness of man. Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people. Sisterhood