evil, that "une societe
ecclesiastique," I am told, exists for the emendation of history for her
benefit--Divine Providence, as conducting the affairs of men, being far
too coarse for her pure gaze; and at the other end of the stick we find
Zola, and a literature intended only for the eyes of men, of whose
chastity, according to Renan, "Nature takes no account whatever,"--a
literature which fouls with its vile sewage the very wellsprings of our
nature, and which, whatever its artistic merit, I make bold to say is a
curse to the civilized world.

Now, I earnestly protest that while we have this social code, which is
in direct violation of the moral law, we may set on foot any number of
Rescue Societies, Preventive Agencies, Acts for the Legal Protection of
the Young, etc., but all our efforts will be in vain. We are like a man
who should endeavor to construct a perfect system of dynamics on the
violation of Newton's first law of motion. The tacitly accepted
necessity for something short of the moral law for men will--again I say
it--work out with the certainty of a mathematical law a degraded and
outcast class, with its disease, its insanity, its foul contamination of
the young, its debasement of manhood, its disintegration of the State,
its curse to the community. You cannot dodge the moral law; as Professor
Clifford said, "There are no back-stairs to the universe" by which we
can elude the consequences of our wrong, whether of thought or action.
If you let in one evil premise by the back-door, be sure Sin and Death
will come out at the front.

Here, then, you must take a firm and watchful stand. As the mothers of
the future generation of men, you must look upon it as your
divinely-appointed task to bring back the moral law in its entirety,
the one standard equally binding on men and women alike. Whatever your
creed, you have got to hold fast to this great truth, which life itself
forces upon you, and which is a truth of Christian ethics because first
of all it is a truth of life. It is simply a moral Q.E.D., that if
chastity is a law for women--and no man would deny that--it is a law for
every woman without exception; and if it is a law for every woman, it
follows necessarily that it must be for every man, unless we are going
to indulge in the moral turpitude of accepting a pariah class of women
made up of other women's daughters and other women's sisters--not our
own, God forbid that they should be our own!--set apa