THE COST OF MODERN SENTIMENT. By Agnes Repplier. _Atlantic._ This writer on matters of culture and art for leisurely readers, a vigorous defender of child labor on the stage on the ground of its artistic value, has had it borne in upon her that human interests are today arousing more and more public interest and emotion. Three of these absorbing human issues are the progress of women, the condition of labor and the social evil. Miss Repplier counsels against the misdirecting of sentiment through incomplete knowledge. * * * * * The recall last month of a San Francisco municipal court judge, for setting so low a bail on a man charged with rape as to make it possible for him to escape trial by skipping bail, gives special interest to a recent article in _The Sunset Magazine_ by Miriam Michelson. This is an analysis of the dawning sense of responsibility of the women of a suffrage state toward the social evil: Now this threatened recall of a police judge is undertaken, I should say, not because the women believe this particular judge to be unique in flagrant adherence to a police court system of leniency in sex-crimes; not because they think him the worst of his type that San Francisco has known; but because they consider him a type and because they consider the police court system one that must be changed. This recall presents something definite, something to do, which feminine hands have been aching for. Miss Michelson continues: You may talk to women of the futility of figuring social sex sins, but they seem to be congenitally incapable of believing you. I heard a man talk to an audience in behalf of this measure, and when he touched upon that old, old text—_it always has been; it always will be_—there came a curious resemblance in every woman’s face within my vision; for every face had hardened, stiffened, was marked with the family likeness of rebellion. The lecturer was addressing himself to deaf ears, to eyes determined not to see. And this is at once the weakness and the strength of the new element in elections. Those who have watched the ardor of the most eager and high-minded reformers burn out in commissions, in barren resolutions and recommendations, see in the average woman’s limitations that power, that one-idead incapacity to look philosophically on both sides of a question which marks Those Who Can Change Things. You may object that such qualities produce a Carrie Nation. They do, but they also make a Joan of Arc, a Harriet Beecher Stowe....