of all children.  The divine motherhood that is at the heart of every woman worthy of the name “rises up in wrath” within us and cries:  “We will fulfil our trust, not only to our own children, but to the helpless children of the poor.”  The day is at hand when every mother of boys will silently vow before God to send at least one knight of God into the world to fight an evil before which even a child’s innocence is not sacred and which tramples under its swine’s feet the weak and the helpless.

Indeed, when one reflects that this great moral problem touches all the great trusts of our womanhood, the sanctity of the family, the purity of the home, the sacredness of marriage, the sweet innocence of children, it seems like some evil dream that women can ever have asked, “Why cannot I leave this matter to men?  Why should I interfere?”

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  Dr. Carpenter does not hesitate to attribute this sharp dip in the male line of life to the indulgence of the passions in youth, and the subsequent rise to marriage and a more regular life.]

[Footnote 2:  Pendennis, vol. i., p. 16.]

CHAPTER III

FIRST PRINCIPLES

“But what can we do?” will be the next question, uttered perhaps in the forlorn accents of a latent despair.

Before answering this question in detail, I would endeavor to impress two cardinal points upon you.

The first point I want you to recognize, though it may seem to minister to the very hopelessness which most lames and cripples for effective action, is the depth and magnitude of the problem we have to grapple with.  All other great social evils, with the possible exception of greed or covetousness, which in Scripture is often classed with impurity, may be looked upon as more or less diseases of the extremities.  But the evil which we are now considering is no disease of the extremities, but a disease at the very heart of our life, attacking all the great bases on which it rests.  It is not only the negation of the sanctity of the family and the destroyer of the purity of the home, as I have already pointed out, but it is also the derider of the sacredness of the individual, the slow but sure disintegrator of the body politic, the dry-rot of nations, before which the mightiest empires have crumbled into dust.  The lagoons of Venice mirror it in the departed grandeur of her palaces, overthrown by the licentiousness of her merchant princes.  The mute sands that silt up the ruins of old empires are eloquent of it.  The most brilliant civilization the world has even seen through it became the most transitory.  Even the vast and massive structure of the Roman Empire, undermined by moral corruption, vanished before barbarian hordes like the baseless fabric of a dream.  To think that we can solve a problem of this depth and magnitude by any mere external means—­as so many good and earnest women seem to imagine—­by any multiplication of Rescue Societies, Preventive Institutions, and other benevolent organizations—­is to think that we can plug up a volcano with sticks and straws.  The remedy, like the evil, must be from within, and must to a great degree revolutionize our life.