Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/41

Cost of Modern Sentiment imagination enough to identify the possible saint with the certain sinner, and who habitually confined their labours to fields which promised sure results. "In my judgment," wrote Huxley, "a domestic servant, who is perhaps giving half her wages to support her old parents, is more worthy of help than half a dozen Magdalens."

If we are forced to choose between them,—yes. But our esteem for the servant's self-respecting life, with its decent restraints and its purely normal activities, need not necessarily harden our hearts against the women whom Mr. Huxley called "Magdalens," nor against those whom we luridly designate as "white slaves." No work under Heaven is more imperative than the rescue of young and innocent girls; no crime is more dastardly than the sale of their youth and innocence; no charity is greater than that which lifts the sinner from her sin. But the fact that we 25