.

In this the girls are deliberately the tempters, and many boys and young
men are led into sin who would not have sought it. Here one must not
blame the women or the girls, for the original sin is with the men, who,
through the terribly degrading system of polygamy and slave concubinage,
have introduced since centuries that which destroys the purity of the
home, and makes it impossible for the children to grow up clean-minded.
It is a sad fact that the evil effect of this seems to have acted more
on the women and children than on the men.

One feels sorely for the boys brought up in this land without a glimpse
of purity in true home life; with never a notion of a woman being the
most holy and chaste and beautiful of all God's creation, and never
seeing even the beauty of girlhood purity.

One is glad to see that among many of the men there is a growing feeling
that they have lost much in this way; and often in talking to men on the
subject of women and their naturally depraved condition, I have shown
them how, where women are given the place God meant them to have in the
home and in the social and religious life of a people, their character
is always the most regenerating thing in the life of a nation, and that
it is useless for them to wish their women to be different when they do
everything to prevent the possibility. With the boys in my own compound
and under my own care I am bound to forbid all intercourse with girls
because of their evil minds and influence. Of course such a thing is
fearfully unnatural and cuts off from a boy's life all those influences
which we in Christian lands consider so much tend to strengthen and
deepen and soften his character.

It is easy to see from the above the reason why amongst those who are
careful to preserve a semblance of chastity, the girls are carefully
secluded from a tender age and not allowed outside their compounds
except under exceptional circumstances, until the time that they are
about to be taken to the house of the man to whom they have been
betrothed.

This preservation of virtue by force, points to the fact that there is
no public opinion; no love of purity for its own sake; no real and vital
principle in Islam which tends to preserve and build up purity.

A mere lad, the viciousness of whose first wife had led him quickly to
take a second, said to me when protested with for doing it, "Our women
are not like yours, and you can never tell what it all means to