se. Moreover, the Mohammedan nations, for all
purposes of common elevation and for all efforts of philanthropy and
liberty, are (as they live in public and beyond the inner recesses of
their homes) but a truncated and imperfect exhibition of humanity. They
are wanting in one of its constituent parts, the better half, the
humanizing and the softening element. And it would be against the nature
of things to suppose that the body, thus shorn and mutilated, can
possess in itself the virtue and power of progress, reform, and
elevation. The link connecting the family with social and public life is
detached, and so neither is _en rapport_, as it should be, with the
other. Reforms fail to find entrance into the family or to penetrate the
domestic soil where alone they could take root, grow into the national
mind, live, and be perpetuated. Under such conditions the seeds of
civilization refuse to germinate. No real growth is possible in free and
useful institutions, nor any permanent and healthy force in those great
movements which elsewhere tend to uplift the masses and elevate mankind.
There may, it is true, be some advance, from time to time, in science
and in material prosperity; but the social groundwork for the same is
wanting, and the people surely relapse into the semi-barbarism forced
upon them by an ordinance which is opposed to the best instincts of
humanity. Sustained progress becomes impossible. Such is the outcome of
an attempt to improve upon nature and banish woman, the help-meet of
man, from the position assigned by God to her in the world.

[Sidenote: Yet the veil necessary under existing circumstances.]
At the same time I am not prepared to say that in view of the laxity of
the conjugal relations inherent in the institutions of Islam some such
social check as that of the veil (apart from the power to confine and
castigate) is not needed for the repression of license and the
maintenance of outward decency. There is too much reason to apprehend
that free social intercourse might otherwise be dangerous to morality
under the code of Mohammed, and with the example before men and women of
the early worthies of Islam. So long as the sentiments and habits of the
Moslem world remain as they are some remedial or preventive measure of
the kind seems indispensable. But the peculiarity of the Mussulman
polity, as we have seen, is such that the sexual laws and institutions
which call for restrictions of the kind as founded o