Page:The Business of being a Woman by Ida Tarbell.djvu/216

 It is a beautiful and profitable study, and it is a type of what is required of a woman who would fulfill her obligation toward the youth of her neighborhood.

Could we have such study everywhere in country and town, what tragedies and shames we might be spared! A few months ago the whole nation was horrified by a riot in a prosperous small city of the Middle West which ended in the lynching of a young man, a mere boy, who in trying to discharge his duty as a public official had killed a man. Some thirty persons, over half of them boys under twenty years of age, are to-day serving terms of from fifteen to twenty years in the penitentiary for their part in this lynching.

Their terrible work was no insane outbreak. Analyzed, it was a logical consequence of the social and political conditions under which the boys had been