I was told only the other day of a little six-year-old boy whose mother had brought him up from babyhood on these principles.  He was playing with his little sister on a bed, when suddenly he perceived that she was getting perilously near the edge which was farthest from the wall.  Instantly he dismounted and went round to the other side, and, climbing up, pushed her gently into the middle of the bed, remarking sententiously to himself, “I think boys ought always to take the dangerous side of their sisters.”  Ah me! if only you mothers would but train your boys to “take the dangerous side of their sisters,” especially of those poor little sisters who are thrust forth at so early an age to earn their own living, alone and unprotected, on the perilous highways of the world, skirted for them by so terrible a precipice, what a different world would it be for us women, what a purer and better world for your sons!

Surely the womanhood in our homes ought to enable us to bring up our boys in such an habitual attitude of serving a woman, of caring for her, of giving himself for her, that it would become a moral impossibility for him ever to lower or degrade a woman in his after-life.

In concluding these suggestions there is one point I must emphasize, the more so as in treating of one particular moral problem it is difficult not to seem to ignore a truth which is simply vital to all moral training.  Let us clearly recognize that there is no such thing as moral specialism.  Our moral being, like Wordsworth’s cloud, “moveth altogether if it move at all.”  You cannot strengthen one particular virtue except by strengthening the character all round.  Cardinal Newman points out—­I think in one of those wonderful Oxford sermons of his—­that what our ancestors would have called “a bosom sin” will often take an underground course and come to the surface at quite an unexpected point in the character.  Hidden licentiousness, which one would expect to evince itself in over-ripe sentiment and feeling, manifests itself instead in cruelty and hardness of heart.  The little habit of self-indulgence which you in your foolish fondness have allowed in that boy of yours may, in after-life, come out as the very impurity which you have endeavored so earnestly to guard him against.  This mystical interdependence and hidden correlation of our moral and intellectual being is a solemn thought, and can only be met by recognizing that the walls of the citadel must be strengthened at all points in order to resist the foe at one.  Truthfulness, conscientiousness that refuses to scamp work, devotion to duty, temperance in food and drink, rectitude—­these things are the bastions of purity of life, as well as of all high character.