In the lower half of the middle class the liberty allowed to young girls grows yearly more and more unchecked. They walk alone, travel alone, visit alone; and the gravest evils have been known to arise from the habit which modern mothers have of sending their daughters of sixteen and upwards unaccompanied in London to colleges and classes. Mamma has grown stout and lazy, and has always some important matter on hand that keeps her at home, half asleep in the easy-chair, while the girls go to and fro, and take the exercise befitting their youthful energies. Of course no harm can befall them. They are _her_ daughters, and the warnings given by the keener-eyed, who have had experience, are mere inventions of the enemy and slanders against the young. So they parade the streets, dressed in the most startling and meretricious costumes of the period; and that fatal doctrine of self-protection counts its victims by the score as the consequence. The world is fond of throwing the blame of any misfortune that may arise, now on the girl, now on the man concerned; but in honest fact that blame really belongs to the mothers who let their daughters run about the world without guide or guard. A work was given to them by nature and love to do which they have neglected, a duty which they have discarded. Whoever chooses may chaperon, accompany, mould their daughters, so long as they are freed from the trouble; and their dependence on the natural virtue of humanity and the beneficence of circumstance runs exactly parallel with their own indolence and neglect. In preserving the tone of society pure the modern mother is as far removed from the former ideal as she is in the duty of taking care of her girls. Too often she is found making herself prominent in support of the most objectionable movements; or, when doubtful questions are discussed in mixed society, she forgets that regard for the purity of her daughters should keep her silent, even if her own self-respect were too weak to restrain her. When the conscienceless world, living without a higher aim than that of success and what is known by getting on, condones all kinds of moral obliquity for the sake of financial prosperity and social position, do we find that, as a rule, mothers and matrons protest against opening their houses to this gilded rascality? If they did--if they made demerit and not poverty the cause of exclusion, virtue and not success the title to reception--there would be some check to the corruption which is so insolently rampant now.