I do not doubt that I am voicing the experience of many if I say that when I first began to ask such questions I met first of all with extreme horror at such a question being put at all; and that, when I persisted, I found that it was almost entirely by women that the cost was to be borne.  Women were to conform strictly to the moral standard (whose basis I was not questioning), but men need not and, generally speaking, did not.  I reasoned that if men need not be chaste there must exist at least a certain number of women who could not be so, and that this reduced “morality” to a farce.  I soon found that it was not a farce but a tragedy.  These women were admittedly necessary but outcast.  They were the safeguards of the rest.  I wish that men would try for a moment to put themselves in the place of a young girl who learns for the first time that prostitution is the safeguard of the virtuous!  I think that they would never again wonder at the rejection of such “moral standards” by the rising generation of women.  You would only wonder why women had tolerated such a combination of folly and cruelty so long.  You would not ask them to accept or to suffer for a “standard” like that.

Again, this morality for which (it is affirmed) society is prepared to pay so horrible a price—­what is it?  A physical condition!  A state of body, which any man can destroy! an “honour” which lies at the mercy of a ruffian!  A woman raped is a woman “dishonoured.”  Are her “morals” then at the mercy of another person?  Is “morality” not a state of mind or of will, a spiritual passion for purity, but a material, physical thing which is only hers as long as no one snatches it from her?  How senseless!  How false!

When you ask a woman to-day to make the great sacrifice “in the interests of morality,” you must offer her a morality that is moral—­a morality whose justice and humanity move her to a response; not a morality which offends every instinct of justice and reality the moment the person to whom it is offered understands what it means.  For what is asked to-day is too often that women should sacrifice themselves for the convenience of other people—­of a hypocritical society which preaches a morality as senseless as it is base.

When older people tell me that the young seem to have “no morals at all,” I ask myself whether the repudiation of much that has been called morality was not, after all, a necessity, if we are to advance at all.  When I reflect on, for example, Lecky’s “History of European Morals,” and remember that it was not a profligate or a hedonist, but an honourable and respectable member of a civilized society, who proclaimed the prostitute the high priestess of humanity—­the protectress of the purity of a thousand homes[A]—­I am prepared to say that to have “no morals at all” is better than to accept such infamy and call it “morals”; as it is better to be an agnostic or an atheist than to worship a devil—­to have no standard than to say:  “Evil be thou my good.”