in the law is mainly valuable as an indication that the public standard of morality is raised.  Let us get good laws if we can; but there is only one way of really obtaining a nobler national existence, and that is by each of us individually learning to hate and detest the vile self-indulgence that covers the life of those who are the victims of it with shame and degradation.  Self-control and respect for the rights of others are the only cure for the terrible national danger which threatens us.  If men and women would learn never to take pleasure in what brings pain, shame, misery, and moral death to others, earth would be turned into a heaven.  It would be incredible if it were not true that for mere selfish indulgence thousands of men are willing to drag women down to what even these men themselves recognize as the lowest dregs of humanity.  Where is their chivalry?  Where is their common humanity?  Some would say that such men do not possess either.  For my part, I do not believe this.  Let women thankfully acknowledge that, so far as other matters are concerned, they are constantly indebted to the chivalrous self-sacrifice of men.  Chivalry is not dead; generous self-sacrifice is not dead; but in far too many cases, with regard to the all-important question of personal purity, they are sleeping.  Our efforts must be directed to awakening them.  We must try and make men realize the callous cruelty of all actions which lower the womanhood of even the poorest and most degraded of women.”

And if we refuse, sunk in our own selfish interests and pleasures, and content that the daughters of the people should perish as long as our own are safe, then it will not be by an European coalition that the British Empire will perish, it will be by moral decay from within; in Blake’s rough, strong words: 

    “The harlot’s curse from street to street
    Shall be old England’s winding sheet.”

The British Empire, the great American Republic, the two greatest civilizing, order-spreading, Christianizing world-powers ever known, can only be saved by a solemn league and covenant of their women to bring back simplicity of life, plain living, high thinking, reverence for marriage laws, chivalrous respect for all womanhood, and a high standard of purity for men and women alike.

Suffer me to lay before you three considerations, which will prove to you at once that this great moral question is more vital to our two nations than to any other, and that we are peculiarly vulnerable to the action of moral causes.

Firstly, England, and in one sense England alone, is the mighty mother of nations.  Three great nations have already sprung from her loins; a fourth in Africa is already in process of consolidation.  From the narrow confines of our sea-girt island our people pour into all quarters of the globe; and if we suffer England to know corruption we send forth polluted waters into all lands.  Your great Republic,