on the other hand, is a mother of nations in another sense, since she receives into her mighty bosom vast numbers drawn from the suffering peoples of the old world, and gives them a mother’s welcome.  According as your civilization is high and pure, or low and corrupt, so will those naturalized citizens be.  Decay with great empires, as with fish, sets in at the head; and the moral decadence of England and America will sensibly lower the moral standard of nearly one-third of the population of the world.[39] The heart of the two nations is still sound.  It is not too late.  We are at least free from the continental system, by which the degradation of women is reduced to a systematized slavery, to meet what is openly called a necessity of nature.  The comparative purity of Englishmen and Americans is still a wonder, and often a derision to foreigners.  Our women are a greater power than in any other country.  We still start from a good vantage-ground.

England, certainly through no merit of her own, has been called by the providence of God to lead in great moral causes.  We led in the matter of slavery—­the open sore of the world.  We English and American women are now called to lead, in this its hidden sore, for the healing of the nations.

Secondly, since you have elected to go beyond your own confines and have dependencies, and so take up the white man’s burden of civilizing and Christianizing the world, your men as well as ours will be exposed to that dangerously lowering influence, contact with lower races and alien civilizations.  An Englishman in India, if he be not a religious man, is apt to blind himself to wrongs done to womanhood, because those wrongs are often done to a pariah caste who are already set apart for infamy; though I have not yet heard of an Englishman possessing himself of slaves on the ground that they were slaves already to their native masters.  Worse still, in savage or semi-civilized countries the native girl, far from feeling herself degraded, considers that she is raised by any union, however illicit, with a white man.  It is the native men who are furious.  Which of us in England did not feel an ache of shame in our hearts over the plea of the Matabele to the white man:  “You have taken our lands, and our hunting-grounds are gone.  You have taken our herds, and we want for food.  You have taken our young men, and made them slaves in your mines.  You have taken our women and done what you like with them.”  How many of our native wars may not have had as their cause that last sentence in the plaint of the Matabele, a cause carefully concealed from the public eye?  For God’s sake, let mothers teach their sons that first rudiment in manly character, the recognition that the girls of a conquered race, or of a barbarian tribe inhabiting one of our spheres of influence, from the very fact that they are a conquered race, or, if not conquered, hopelessly and piteously in our power, are ipso facto a most sacred trust