which will suggest themselves to you.  But let us, at the same time, clearly recognize that the remedy must lie deeper than any external agency—­must be as deep as life itself, and must be worked out in the silence of our own hearts and of our own homes.  We must restore the law of God, quietly but firmly insisting on the equal moral standard for men and women alike; and we must maintain the sanctity and permanence of the marriage bond as ordained by Christ himself.

I say again I do not think, I simply know, by my own experience, that men will rise to any standard which women choose to set them.  Ruskin’s noble words are the simple truth: 

“Their whole course and character are in your hands; what you would have them be they shall be, if you not only desire to have them so, but deserve to have them so, for they are but mirrors in which you will see yourselves imaged....  You fancy, perhaps, as you have been told so often, that a wife’s rule should only be over her husband’s house, not over his mind.  Ah no! the true rule is just the reverse of that:  a true wife, in her husband’s house, is his servant; it is in his heart that she is queen.  Whatever of best he can conceive, it is her part to be; whatever of highest he can hope, it is hers to promise.  All that is dark in him she must purge into purity; all that is failing in him she must strengthen into truth; from her, through all the world’s clamor, he must win his praise; in her, through all the world’s warfare, he must find his peace.”

Last, but not least, we must set ourselves to make our lives simpler and plainer, and oppose the ever-increasing luxury and love of pleasure, with its sure and certain result, a relaxed moral fibre, which, to a race called to such high destinies and difficult tasks as our Anglo-Saxon race, is simply fatal.  It can, and it must be done.  As Philip Hammerton remarks: 

“It is entirely within the power of public opinion to relieve the world from the weariness of this burthen of expensive living; it has actually been done to a great extent with regard to the costliness of funerals, a matter in which public opinion has always been very authoritative.  If it will now permit a man to be buried simply when he is dead, why cannot it allow him to exist simply whilst he is living?”

To lessen the expense of dress, which has risen twenty per cent, within the last thirty years; to restore amusements to their proper place, as recreation after hard work for the good of others; to resist the ever-increasing restlessness of our day, leading to such constant absences from home as seriously to threaten all steady work for the amelioration of the stay-at-home classes, and use up the funds which are needed for that work; to keep a simple table, so that the future Sir Andrew Clark may no longer have to say that more than half of our diseases come from over-eating; to resist the vulgar tendency to compete with our richer or more