Will they ever reach the heart of the problem?
Can they ever hope to do more than reclaim a few individuals?
This much did the missionaries before them.
"We could reclaim fully seventy-five per cent," declares Miss Miner, "if only we could find a way to begin nearer the beginning." To begin the reform of any evil at the beginning, or near the beginning, instead of near the end is now regarded as an economy of effort.

That is what educators are trying to do with juvenile delinquency; what physicians are doing with disease; what philanthropists are beginning to do with poverty.
Hardly any one has suggested that the social evil might have a cause, and that it might be possible to attack it at its source.

Yet that any large number of girls enter upon such a horrible career, willingly, voluntarily, is unbelievable to one who knows anything of the facts.
There must be strong forces at work on these girls, forces they find themselves entirely powerless to resist.
Miss Miner and her fellow probation officers are the visible signs of a very important movement among women to discover what these forces are.
Meager, indeed, are the facts at hand.

We have had, and we still have, in cities east and west, committees and societies and law and order leagues earnestly engaged in "stamping out" the evil.

It is like trying to stamp out a fire constantly fed with inflammables and fanned by a strong gale.