preoccupation with good and pure things, which is a far more
promising protective from evil and its temptations than a keen scent
and an eager notice of every tainted thing in the wind. If you choose
the crow for your guide, you must expect your goal to be carrion. The
travellers, who, after making the tour of the United States, write
books taken up with the frequency of divorce among us, or devoted to
such limited and exceptional aspects as that presented by the Mormon
settlement at Utah, are not to be accepted as sound expositors of our
social and moral condition. A De Tocqueville is a truer and more
adequate teacher. Many recent writers on the relation of the sexes in
the present age, writers belonging to the medical, priestly, and
literary professions, appear to be infested with the suspicion that
certain wicked and disgusting customs are almost universal. They seem
occupied in looking everywhere to trace the signs of those customs.
Their writings are less adapted to prevent or cure the deprecated
evil than they are to fix a diseased gaze on it, and thus to
aggravate its mischief. Their readers must get more harm than benefit
from them. The belief in the exceptionality and the loneliness of
vice is a restraint from it; the belief in its commonness is a
demoralizing provocative to it. There are well-meant books now having
a wide circulation in consequence of the efforts made to push them,
which I cannot help believing do more injury than many books which
are universally condemned. They give their readers the suspicion that
the vilest forms of sensuality are universally prevalent, and induce
in them the habit of looking for their signals in every direction. To
every pure and lofty soul, such a suspicion and habit are enough to
turn the sunshine into a stench and make the very landscape
loathsome. The crowding of population in manufacturing and commercial
centres, our thronged and exposed hotel-life, the expensive habits of
fashion, the excessive luxury of wealth and vanity, are, undoubtedly,
causes of much personal vice. But, notwithstanding all this, the vile
and degraded men and women are the marked exception in every
community among us. The vile and degraded are more segregated into a
class by themselves, and are therefore more conspicuous and obtrusive
than ever before. Licentiousness may have been more prevalent
formerly than now, as I believe it was; but less prominent and less
noticed, because of its greater dif