I was grieved to hear a physician quote
Lecky's false and immoral statement before the Physicians' Club of
Chicago. The managing editor of one of our decent and moral morning
papers quoted Lecky in a short talk I had with him.

When the educated and moral are so deceived, what can we expect of the
ignorant and immoral? The devil's dogma, that prostitution is a
protection to virtue, is thrust upon us continually by the vilest men
and women, and by those who create, promote and exploit vice. This creed
is assiduously preached by divekeepers and madams throughout the world.
Thereby they have their wealth, for thereby honest people are deceived
into tolerating these enemies of the human race--destroyers of youths
and maidens, of innocent wives and guilty husbands, of cities,
civilizations and nations.

SIN IS NOT A BLESSING.

The prostitute will be a blessing to good women when Satan is actually
transformed into a holy angel--but not till then. While the hideous
caricature of womanhood is responsible by her diseases for one-fourth or
more of the surgical operations upon innocent wives--operations made
necessary by disease which their husbands bought of the prostitute,
perhaps years before marriage--we cannot regard her and her criminal
male partners as anything less than the red-handed slayers of good
women. While the eye doctors attribute one-fourth of blindness,
particularly of helpless babies, to the same source, we cannot quote
except to condemn, this sophistry that makes the worse appear the
better cause and garlands the woman whose pursuit is death itself,
suicide and murder in one.

While this perverted or enslaved creature that Lecky and Arnold would
glorify drives herself and her criminal patrons to suffer locomotor
ataxia, necrosis of bone and brain, or incurable insanity at public
expense in our asylums, we will give her no garland, except apple
blossoms--of the apples of Sodom.

GOOD WOMEN ARE NOT PROTECTED BY BAD.

Nor do hundreds of brothels illegally legalized in a city protect
virtuous women, maidens and little girls from bestial assault. On the
contrary, good women are a thousand times safer where no such hells
exist to manufacture degenerates. The men who consort with vile women
lose their respect for all women, and by their base fellowship inflame
infernal fires which are the utmost menace to all good women.

We have had in Chicago numerous recent illustrations of the way in which
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