My second cardinal point is, that the first step we have to take, the step which must precede all others, if anything is to be of the least avail, must be to restore the moral law and get rid of the double standard.  I know well how much has been said and written on this point; it has been insisted on possibly ad nauseam.  But even now I do not think we fully realize how completely we have been in the grasp of a “tradition of the elders,” which has emphatically “made the law of God of none effect.”  Side by side with the ethics of Christianity have grown up the bastard ethics of society, widely divergent from the true moral order.  Man has accepted the obligation of purity so far as it subserves his own selfish interests and enables him to be sure of his own paternity and safeguard the laws of inheritance.  The precepts which were primarily addressed to the man, as the very form of the Greek words demonstrate, were tacitly transferred to the woman.  When, in a standard dictionary of the English language, I look out the word “virtue,” which etymologically means “manliness”—­the manliness which would scorn to gratify its own selfish passions at the cost of the young, the poor, and the weak, at the cost of a woman—­I find one of its meanings defined, not as male but as “female chastity.”  Long ago I suggested that as manliness thus goes by default, the word had better be changed from virtue to “muliertue.”

In a passage in one of our standard school-books, Green’s Short History of the English People, the historian, alluding to the coarseness of the early Elizabethan drama, remarks that “there were no female actors, and the grossness which startles us in words which fall from a woman’s lips took a different color when every woman’s part was acted by a boy."[3] Why, in the name of all moral sense, should it be less dreadful that gross and obscene passages should be uttered at a public spectacle by young and unformed boys than by adult women, who at least would have the safeguard of mature knowledge and instincts to teach them their full loathsomeness?  Do we really think that boys are born less pure than girls?  Does the mother, when her little son is born, keep the old iron-moulded flannels, the faded basinette, the dirty feeding-bottle for him with the passing comment, “Oh, it is only a boy!” Is anything too white and fine and pure for his infant limbs, and yet are we to hold that anything is good enough for his childish soul—­even, according to Mr. Green, the grossness of the early Elizabethan stage—­because he is a boy?  But I ask how many readers of that delightful history would so much as notice this passage, and not, on the contrary, quietly accept it without inward note or comment, possessed as we are, often without knowing it, by our monstrous double standard?