dely divergent from the true
moral order. Man has accepted the obligation of purity so far as it
subserves his own selfish interests and enables him to be sure of his
own paternity and safeguard the laws of inheritance. The precepts which
were primarily addressed to the man, as the very form of the Greek words
demonstrate, were tacitly transferred to the woman. When, in a standard
dictionary of the English language, I look out the word "virtue," which
etymologically means "manliness"--the manliness which would scorn to
gratify its own selfish passions at the cost of the young, the poor, and
the weak, at the cost of a _woman_--I find one of its meanings defined,
not as male but as "female chastity." Long ago I suggested that as
manliness thus goes by default, the word had better be changed from
virtue to "muliertue."

In a passage in one of our standard school-books, Green's _Short History
of the English People_, the historian, alluding to the coarseness of the
early Elizabethan drama, remarks that "there were no female actors, and
the grossness which startles us in words which fall from a woman's lips
took a different color when every woman's part was acted by a boy."[3]
Why, in the name of all moral sense, should it be less dreadful that
gross and obscene passages should be uttered at a public spectacle by
young and unformed boys than by adult women, who at least would have
the safeguard of mature knowledge and instincts to teach them their full
loathsomeness? Do we really think that boys are born less pure than
girls? Does the mother, when her little son is born, keep the old
iron-moulded flannels, the faded basinette, the dirty feeding-bottle for
him with the passing comment, "Oh, it is only a boy!" Is anything too
white and fine and pure for his infant limbs, and yet are we to hold
that anything is good enough for his childish soul--even, according to
Mr. Green, the grossness of the early Elizabethan stage--because he is a
boy? But I ask how many readers of that delightful history would so much
as notice this passage, and not, on the contrary, quietly accept it
without inward note or comment, possessed as we are, often without
knowing it, by our monstrous double standard?

If we want to see what is the final outcome of this moral code, of this
one-sided and distorted ethic, we have only to turn our eyes to France.
On the one hand we have "la jeune fille" in her white Communion robe,
kept so pure and ignorant of all