mother of all living."

Only be sure of this: that men will rise to the level of any standard
that we set them. For the present standard of what Sainte Beuve calls
"l'homme sensuel moyen," which we have accepted and tacitly endorsed, we
women are largely to blame. In my conferences with the clergy and
earnest laity held in all our large towns it was always this that men
spoke of as the greatest stumbling-block in their way. With the utmost
bitterness they would urge that men of known fast life were admitted
into society, that women seemed to prefer them rather than not; and it
seemed to make no difference to them what kind of life a man
led--whether he reverenced their womanhood or not. How could I deny this
bitter accusation in the face of facts? All I could urge in extenuation
was that I believed it was due rather to the ignorance than to the
indifference of women, owing to the whole of this dark side of life
having been carefully veiled from their view; but now that this
ignorance was passing away, I was only one of hundreds of women who ask
nothing better than to lay down their lives in the cause of their own
womanhood. Only when women learn to respect themselves; only when no
woman worthy the name will receive into her own drawing-room in friendly
intercourse with her own girls the man who has done his best to make her
womanhood a vile and desecrated thing; only when no mother worthy the
name will, for the sake of wealth or position,--what is called "a good
match,"--give her pure girl to a man on the very common conditions, as
things have been, that some other ten or twenty young girls--some poor
mothers' daughters--have been degraded and cast aside into the gutter,
that she, the twenty-first in this honorable harem, may be held in
apparent honor as a wife; only when no woman worthy the name will marry
under the conditions portrayed by our great novelist, George
Eliot,--that of another woman being basely forsaken for her sake--then,
and then only, will this reproach that men level at us drop off; then,
and then only, shall we be able to save our own sons and bring in a
better and purer state of things, enabling them to fight the battle of
their life at less tremendous odds; then, and then only, shall we be
able to evolve the true manhood, whose attitude is not to defile and
destroy, but "to look up and to lift up."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: _Short History of the English People_, by J.R. Green, p.
247.]

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