The unutterable sadness of it all and the stern warning to mothers that children’s homes are not just in four walls, but are in towns and cities and nations! How utterly ineffectual seem an individual mother’s effort for the safety of her child. How evident is it that a mother’s care must have back of it power—power in council and legislative hall. How strongly the lack of social sympathy is brought out; the mother’s indifference to the great crying needs of the world. This mother’s “place was the home,” and to what did all her negative efforts avail in shutting the danger away from her cherished daughters in a nation, in a world, which holds a traffic system of such Machiavellian adroitness, a system which can afford, so great are its profits, to reach into the inner recesses of a home, to work with endless patience and resourcefulness and which can enlist on its side such power that even the London police, perhaps the least corrupt in the world, can answer evasively to the frantic cry, “Do you know such a house?”—“We have a great many on the list, but not many such as you describe;” and follow this statement with the maddening inactivity which Miss Robins describes with vivid accuracy. Her book is a terrific arraignment of the conditions which make such a tragedy possible. Respectability and indifference are personified scathingly in the monumental aunt, deaf to the world voices of agony. All society is arraigned as the Elder Sister storms at her aunt, “sitting massive, calm, with a power of inert resistance.” Her bewildered answer to the mad cry for help,—“It isn’t possible, this is England,”—sounds strangely natural to us. It is the burden of so many recent New York editorials, “such things don’t happen”!—and that in our land where the record of the Chicago Immigration League tells of 1,700 girls between the railroad terminals of New York and Chicago alone, reported lost in one year. Thus wails the Elder Sister,—“So old and unbelieving, I felt she had looked on unmoved at evil since the world began.... She rose, O! but slowly;—slow, stiff and ponderous. I felt in her all the heaviness of acquiescence since time began.” Thus is the unbelievable apathy of society pictured! Thus Miss Robins touches lightly, pitifully on the problem of a girl’s handicap in the lack of preparation for life. What a picture she gives of the sheltered girl—“Such a little thing, my not knowing how to telephone, yet it might cost my mother her life.” Again this motive is sounded when the daughter is begging her mother for knowledge about her experiences, and the great gray danger—“It is not the kind of thing you need ever know,” answers the mother with fatuous finality.