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It will not do. Every sane woman who has arrived at the age of discretion is the guardian of her own honor. To relieve her of this responsibility is to insult her intelligence.

To divide the responsibility with men of the world is to place her on the same moral plane with the roue and the courtesan, ready to err should opportunity offer.

It is a trifle strange that those good people who value female purity so highly that they would reform every roue in Christendom to secure it, have little or nothing to say about the chief cause of hymeneal infidelity,– loveless marriages. No woman who really loves her husband can be untrue to him. Duty and inclination point the same way. But if a woman does not love her husband she will, in nearly every instance, love someone else. She may never manifest this illicit affection by word or look–she may not admit it even to her own heart; but no matter how strongly armed she be in honesty, she stands within the pale of danger. From the questionable act of bartering, according to due forms of law and with priestly blessing, an attractive person for wealth or social position, is a comparatively easy step to practices no more reprehensible, but wanting the sanction of society. Is it at all strange that an impulsive young woman, whose parents have persuaded her to marry a man she cordially detests, and who is perhaps four times her age, should conclude that moral codes are chiefly fashionable cant and that a pretense of observing them is all that is really necessary?

. . .

While the reformers are busy saving the world it is strange that they do not devise some method of checking the decided misogamistic tendency of the young men of to-day. Marriages are becoming decidedly unpopular with them, and the result is that thousands of young men, who should be model husbands, are living lives of but quasi- respectability; thousands of young women who should be honored wives and happy mothers are thrown upon their own resources,–forced to choose between virtue and rags and silks and shame. The latter soon learn that honest poverty brings almost as complete social ostracism, almost as much contumely, as dishonest finery, and, despairing of ever becoming true men’s wives, too many of them become false men’s mistresses.

Here is work in abundance for the reformer. To it, oh, ye saviors of the world. Teach the young men of the land that marriage is a thing to be desired, even though they be not millionaires and no heiress smiles upon them.

. . .

The true reformer will not wait for some grand “mission,” some mighty crusade to call him to action. The world is full of wrong which needs no preternatural prescience to discover–fraud which bears its name boldly upon its very face. The true reformer will denounce fraud and falsehood wherever found–will assail the wrong no matter how strongly intrenched it be in prescriptive right. But he will make haste slowly to change the fundamental principles upon which society is founded. He will proceed cautiously, modestly, until he does know, so far as aught is given to human wisdom to know, that it is a “condition and not a theory” with which he is dealing; that he earl point the world to new truths whose recognition and adoption will make better the condition of his species; then, if he be a true man, he will speak, not in humble whispers, lest he offend potentates and powers; not ambiguously, that he may escape “the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,” but in clarion tones, like another Peter-the- Hermit, who, bearing all, swerving neither to the right nor to the left, preached the crusade of the Holy Sepulcher till at last his words of fire burned through dull understandings, into cold hearts, and steel-clad Europe quivered like a million globules of quicksilver, then massed beneath his ragged standard.