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It is not the girl who, having a home, yet is homeless, who is responsible for her situation. Her necessity is to see herself acting as a responsible and useful factor in an intelligent plan. If the family does not present itself to her as a grave, dignified undertaking on which several persons dear to her have embarked, how can she be expected to tie to it? The old phrases which she may hear now and then "the honor of the family" "duty to parents"-only savor of cant to her. They have no pricking vitality in them. She gets no acute reaction from them. She sees herself merely as an accident in an accidental group, headed nowhere in particular.

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What it all amounts to is that the greatest art in the Woman's Business is using youth. It is no easy matter. Youth is a terrible force, confident, selfish, unknowing. Rarely has it real cour

age, real interest in aught but itself. It has all to learn, but it is youth, the most beautiful and hopeful thing in life. And it is the thing upon which the full development of life for a woman depends. She must have it always at her side, if she is to know her own full meaning in the scheme of things. It is part of her tragedy that she fails so often to understand how essential is youth to her as an individual, her happiness and her growth.

The fact that a woman is childless is no reason in the present world why she should be cut off from the developing and ennobling association. Indeed, the childless woman of to-day, in addition to her obligation to herself, has a peculiar obligation to society in the matter of the friendless child.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHILDLESS WOMAN AND THE FRIEND

LESS CHILD

ONE of the first conclusions forced on a thoughtful unprejudiced observer of society is that the major percentage of its pains and its vices result from a failure to make good connections. Children pine and even die for fruit in the cities, while a hundred miles away thousands of barrels of apples are rotting on the ground. Famine devastates one country, while the granaries of another are bursting with food. Men and women drink themselves into the gutter from sheer loneliness, while other men and women shrivel up in isolated comfort. One of the most pitiful examples of this failure to connect is that

of the childless woman and the friendless,

uncared-for child.

There never at any time in any country in the world's history existed so large a group of women with whom responsibility and effort were a matter of choice, as exists to-day in the United States. While a large number of these free women are devoting themselves whole-heartedly to public service of the most intelligent and ingenious kind, the great majority recognize no obligation to make any substantial return to society for its benefits. A small percentage of these are self-supporting, but the majority are purely parasitical. Indeed, the heaviest burden to-day on productive America, aside from the burden imposed by a vicious industrial system, is that of its nonproductive women. They are the most demanding portion of our society. They spend more money than any other group,

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are more insistent in their cry for amusement, are more resentful of interruptions of their pleasures and excitements; they go to greater extremes of indolence and of uneasiness.

The really serious side to the existence of this parasitical group is that great numbers of other women, not free, forced to produce, accept their standards of life. We hear women, useful women, everywhere talking about the desirability of not being obliged to do anything, commiserating women who must work, commiserating those who have heavy household responsibilities, and by the whole gist of their words and acts influencing those younger and less experienced than themselves to believe that happiness lies in irresponsible living.

Various gradations of the theory of which this is the extreme expression show themselves. Thus there are great

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