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.... Her recently awakened realization of equality, the new broom that her conscience is, revolts at a policy that establishes a municipal clinic for women prostitutes, yet by a curious, cowardly subterfuge, overlooks the male’s share in infection; as though the plague created and disseminated in common could have but one source! And in addition to all this, she is learning that when she is ready at last to attack the vested, organized, recognized institution of prostitution, the first result of her activities will mean greater misery and perhaps speedier death for the woman who is already at the lowest point of the social scale.... But over against this set this fact: There are seven hundred women in San Francisco whose one aim in civic life is to found a state training school for girls gone wrong who would go right. This association has a representative in Sacramento whose sole business it is to further a bill for the establishment of a helping station to girls on the way to usefulness and moral health, modeled upon similar establishments in other states. Here is work, backed by thirty thousand club women of the state, proceeding definitely, practically to a solution of one of the most appalling obstacles to the crusade against vice.... But the time has not yet come when woman will face her individual share of atonement for a social sin in which she has acquiesced. Ultimately, with universal suffrage, the wheel of time must place at the door of the protected woman responsibility for the prostitute. As yet she cannot see herself, in her own home, taking up the broken lives, diseased bodies, debased minds and deadened souls—the by-product of that which men tell her has always been and always must be. PREVENTION It is not merely by drastic legislation directed immediately at the social evil that women are attempting to solve the problem. They know full well the complexity of the disease. They are coming more and more to the view that the indirect attack on low wages, bad housing conditions, and the other evils which lower standards of living is more effective than the frontal assault. They are also attacking the problem with measures designed to safeguard young girls who for economic reasons must work out of the home.