Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/122

 women and the raising of the status of nurses to a position for which the Sairey Gamps of the past could not have qualified. To Mrs Josephine Butler praise must be paid for a new attitude towards old offences, a growing conviction on the part of most that purity should be a masculine as well as a feminine virtue.

Throw a stone into a pool and circle after circle in ever-widening radius reveals the place where it struck the water. The social conscience which these women succeeded in developing has extended far beyond the limits that their special work prescribed. Never was any age, and certainly never was any country, so rich in workers for the common good as this age and this country. The number of associations for human betterment is legion. The British Women's Temperance Association is not the only women's Temperance Society, but it is typical. It is an association of women who are all pledged to abstain from the use of intoxicating beverages and to persuade others to do the same. Rosalind, Countess of Carlisle, is their head, and the number of their members is 155,000. The mainspring of their activity is the knowledge that women are the greatest sufferers from the drink habit, the conviction that the solution of every other problem is complicated by this question of intemperance, and the determination to save their children from the perils of