The standard of popular morals is
debased. Temptation in its most seductive form is forced upon
inflammable natures, and the most pernicious of all lessons is taught to
poor, honest, hard-working women. It is indeed wonderful that in
societies where this evil prevails so much virtue should still exist
among graceful, attractive women of the shopkeeping and servant class
when they continually see before them members of their own class, by
preferring vice to virtue, rising at once to wealth, luxury and
idleness, and even held up as objects of admiration or imitation.

In judging wisely the characters of men, one of the first things to be
done is to understand their ideals. Try to find out what kind of men or
of life; what qualities, what positions seem to them the most desirable.
Men do not always fully recognise their own ideals, for education and
the conventionalities of Society oblige them to assert a preference for
that which may really have no root in their minds. But by a careful
examination it is usually possible to ascertain what persons or
qualities or circumstances or gifts exercise a genuine, spontaneous,
magnetic power over them--whether they really value supremely rank or
position, or money, or beauty, or intellect, or superiority of
character. If you know the ideal of a man you have obtained a true key
to his nature. The broad lines of his character, the permanent
tendencies of his imagination, his essential nobility or meanness, are
thus disclosed more effectually than by any other means. A man with high
ideals, who admires wisely and nobly, is never wholly base though he may
fall into great vices. A man who worships the baser elements is in truth
an idolater though he may have never bowed before an image of stone.

The human mind has much more power of distinguishing between right and
wrong, and between true and false, than of estimating with accuracy the
comparative gravity of opposite evils. It is nearly always right in
judging between right and wrong. It is generally wrong in estimating
degrees of guilt, and the root of its error lies in the extreme
difficulty of putting ourselves into the place of those whose characters
or circumstances are radically different from our own. This want of
imagination acts widely on our judgment of what is good as well as of
what is bad. Few men have enough imagination to realise types of
excellence altogether differing from their own. It is this, much more
than vanity,