If we want to see what is the final outcome of this moral code, of this one-sided and distorted ethic, we have only to turn our eyes to France.  On the one hand we have “la jeune fille” in her white Communion robe, kept so pure and ignorant of all evil, that “une societe ecclesiastique,” I am told, exists for the emendation of history for her benefit—­Divine Providence, as conducting the affairs of men, being far too coarse for her pure gaze; and at the other end of the stick we find Zola, and a literature intended only for the eyes of men, of whose chastity, according to Renan, “Nature takes no account whatever,”—­a literature which fouls with its vile sewage the very wellsprings of our nature, and which, whatever its artistic merit, I make bold to say is a curse to the civilized world.

Now, I earnestly protest that while we have this social code, which is in direct violation of the moral law, we may set on foot any number of Rescue Societies, Preventive Agencies, Acts for the Legal Protection of the Young, etc., but all our efforts will be in vain.  We are like a man who should endeavor to construct a perfect system of dynamics on the violation of Newton’s first law of motion.  The tacitly accepted necessity for something short of the moral law for men will—­again I say it—­work out with the certainty of a mathematical law a degraded and outcast class, with its disease, its insanity, its foul contamination of the young, its debasement of manhood, its disintegration of the State, its curse to the community.  You cannot dodge the moral law; as Professor Clifford said, “There are no back-stairs to the universe” by which we can elude the consequences of our wrong, whether of thought or action.  If you let in one evil premise by the back-door, be sure Sin and Death will come out at the front.

Here, then, you must take a firm and watchful stand.  As the mothers of the future generation of men, you must look upon it as your divinely-appointed task to bring back the moral law in its entirety, the one standard equally binding on men and women alike.  Whatever your creed, you have got to hold fast to this great truth, which life itself forces upon you, and which is a truth of Christian ethics because first of all it is a truth of life.  It is simply a moral Q.E.D., that if chastity is a law for women—­and no man would deny that—­it is a law for every woman without exception; and if it is a law for every woman, it follows necessarily that it must be for every man, unless we are going to indulge in the moral turpitude of accepting a pariah class of women made up of other women’s daughters and other women’s sisters—­not our own, God forbid that they should be our own!—­set apart for the vices of men.

But perhaps, looking at our complicated civilization, which, at least in the upper classes, involves, as a rule, the deferring of marriage—­looking at the strength of the passions which generations of indulgence have evolved beyond their natural limits, some women will feel constrained to ask, “Is this standard a possible one?  Can men keep their health and strength as celibates?  Is not my husband right when he says that this is a subject we women can know nothing about, and that here we must bow to the judgment of men?”