Was it not, as we now find by her monuments, that the position of women was high; the wife was enthroned by the side of her husband, and impurity was condemned by the moral sense of the nation?  What was it that enabled our barbaric ancestors, the Teutons, to overthrow the whole power of civilized Rome?  On the authority of Tacitus, we know that they were singularly pure.  Their women were held in the highest reverence, and believed to have something divine about them, some breath of prophetic insight.  Their young men were not allowed to marry till they were five-and-twenty—­in other words, till their frame was thoroughly matured.  Impurity before marriage was strongly discountenanced in both sexes.  Therefore the whole power of Rome, honeycombed as it was by moral corruption and sexual vice, could not stand before these pure barbarians.

And if these mighty civilizations have perished from moral causes, do we really think that the moral law—­will

    “Of which the solid earth and sky
    Are but the fitful shadows cast on high”—­

suspend its operation out of compliment to the greatness of the British empire or of the American Republic, if they, too, become morally corrupt; or will not those old vanished nations, in the magnificent words of the Hebrew prophet, greet the phantom of their departed greatness in the land of shadows:  “What, art thou, also, become weak as we?  Art thou also like unto us?  Thy pomp is brought down to the grave; the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee.”

“We talk of our greatness,” says Mr. Froude; “do we really know in what a nation’s greatness consists?  Whether it be great or little depends entirely on what sort of men and women it is producing.  A sound nation is a nation that is made up of sound human beings, healthy in body, strong of limb, true in word and deed, brave, sober, temperate, and chaste, to whom morals are of more importance than wealth or knowledge; where duty is first and the rights of man are second; where, in short, men grow up, and live, and work, having in them what our ancestors called ‘the fear of God.’  It is to form a character of this kind that human beings are sent into the world.  Unless England’s greatness in this sense has the principle of growth in it, it were better for us that a millstone were hanged about our neck, and that we were drowned in the midst of the sea.”

“I feel more and more,” said Mrs. Fawcett in words addressed to a great meeting of men in the Manchester Free Trade Hall—­words that I wish could be written upon every heart—­” that the great question whether the relations of men and women shall be pure and virtuous or impure and vile lies at the root of all national well-being and progress.  The main requisite towards a better state of things than now exists cannot be brought about by any outside agency.  There is no royal road to virtue and purity.  Law can do something to punish wickedness, but improvement