As to the mothers who send out their young girls into society the victims of their fashionable dressmakers, to be a fountain, not of high, pure thoughts to young men, but a spring of low temptations and impure suggestions, I do not blame the young girls here; but surely the severest blame is due to the criminal folly, or worse, of their mothers, who must know what the consequences of immodest dressing necessarily are to the inflammable mind of youth.

But that that unlovely phenomenon “the girl of the period,” is also deeply to blame for the lowered traditions of English society, and consequently of English manhood, I have only too sorrowfully to acknowledge.  I remember Mrs. Herbert of Vauxhall telling a very fashionable audience how on one occasion she had to rebuke a young man moving in the first London society for using some contemptuous expression with regard to women, and was led to appeal very earnestly to him to reverence all women for his mother’s sake.  He turned upon her with a sort of divine rage and said:  “I long to reverence women, but the girls I meet with in society won’t let me.  They like me to make free with them; they like me to talk to them about doubtful subjects, and they make me”—­and he ground his teeth as he said it—­“what I just hate myself for being.”  Alas! alas! can sadder words knell in a woman’s ears than these?

But side by side with this desecrating womanhood there rises up before me the vision of a young girl, not English, nor American, but French—­now a mature woman, with girls and boys of her own, but who in her young days was the very embodiment of all that I have been urging that our girls might become to their brothers.  She was a daughter of the great French preacher, Frederick Monod, and had an only brother who was all in all to her.  She knew enough of the evil of the world to know that a medical student in Paris was exposed to great temptations; and she was resolved, so far as she could, to make her womanhood a crystal shield between him and them.  She entered into all his pursuits; she took an interest in all his friends and companions; she had always leisure for sympathy and counsel in his difficulties and troubles.  She had a little room of her own to which she used to get him to come every evening and talk over the day with her, so that she might keep herself heart to heart with him in all that concerned him.  She even overcame her girlish reserve, and would get him to kneel down by her side and pour out her sweet girlish heart in prayer that God would guide him in all his ways, and keep him unspotted from the world.  Years after, when he was a married man, with boys of his own, he said to her:  “You little know all that you were to me as a young man.  My temptations were so maddening that I used sometimes to think that I must yield to them and do as other young men did all round me.  But then a vision of you used to rise up before me, and I used to say to myself:  ’No; if I do this thing, I can never go and sit with her in her own little room; I can never look into her dear face again.’” And the thought of that young girl, the angel of her presence in the midst of the furnace, kept that young man unspotted from the world through all the gutters of Paris life.  Could not our sweet English and American girls be to their brothers what that young French girl was to hers?