Page:The Business of being a Woman by Ida Tarbell.djvu/210

 slum in the cities, the factory child, the shop girl who has no home. Let us remember that a goodly percentage of those at work have homes and that they are engaged in a stimulating, if hard, effort to "help," that they have the steadying consciousness that they are needed. Nevertheless, this mass of youth is on the whole in an unnatural position—an antisocial relation.

Society can never run rightfully until all its members are performing their natural functions. No woman, whatever her condition, can escape her obligation to youth without youth suffering, and without suffering herself. One of the crying needs of to-day is a crusade, a jar, which will force upon our free women the friendless children of the country, give them some sense of the undeniable relation they bear to them, show them that they are in a sense the cause of this