in a tainted and uncertain condition with respect to
female virtue. Here, there is that certain and marked line, above which
there is no toleration or allowance for any approach to license of
manners or conduct, and she who falls below it, will fall far below even
the slave. How many will incur this penalty?

And permit me to say, that this elevation of the female character is no
less important and essential to us, than the moral and intellectual
cultivation of the other sex. It would indeed be intolerable, if, when
one class of the society is necessarily degraded in this respect, no
compensation were made by the superior elevation and purity of the
other. Not only essential purity of conduct, but the utmost purity of
manners, and I will add, though it may incur the formidable charge of
affectation or prudery,--a greater severity of decorum than is required
elsewhere, is necessary among us. Always should be strenuously resisted
the attempts which have been sometimes made to introduce among us the
freedom of foreign European, and especially of continental manners. This
freedom, the remotest in the world from that which sometimes springs
from simplicity of manners, is calculated and commonly intended to
confound the outward distinctions of virtue and vice. It is to prepare
the way for licentiousness--to produce this effect--that if those who
are clothed with the outward color and garb of vice, may be well
received by society, those who are actually guilty may hope to be so
too. It may be said, that there is often perfect purity where there is
very great freedom of manners. And, I have no doubt, this may be true in
particular instances, but it is never true of any _society_ in which
this is the general state of manners. What guards can there be to
purity, when every thing that _may possibly_ be done innocently, is
habitually practiced; when there can be no impropriety which is not
vice. And what must be the depth of the depravity when there is a
departure from that which they admit as principle. Besides, things which
may perhaps be practiced innocently where they are familiar, produce a
moral dilaceration in the course of their being introduced where they
are new. Let us say, we will not have the manners of South Carolina
changed.

I have before said that free labor is cheaper than the labor of slaves,
and so far as it is so the condition of the free laborer is worse. But
I think President Dew has sufficiently shown that