blest in type and the most fruitful in propagating
themselves. You will never find a permanently progressive race where the
position of women is low, the men libertine, and the state of society
corrupt. What was it that made the most brilliant civilization the world
has ever seen--the civilization which still gives us the inexhaustible
wells of our intellectual life--what was it that made it the
shortest-lived? Few, I think, would deny that the rapid decadence of
Greece, despite her splendid intellectual life, was due to moral causes.
Not the pure, but the impure--the brilliant Hetairae--were the companions
of men, and the men themselves were stained with nameless vices.
Speaking of the decay of the Athenian people, Mr. Francis Galton says:
"We know, and may guess something more, of the reason why this
marvellously gifted race declined. Social morality grew exceedingly lax;
marriage became unfashionable and was avoided; many of the more
ambitious and accomplished women were avowed courtesans, and
consequently infertile; and the mothers of the incoming population were
of a heterogeneous class."[38] What was it that made the Egyptian
civilization one of the longest-lived of ancient civilizations? Was it
not, as we now find by her monuments, that the position of women was
high; the wife was enthroned by the side of her husband, and impurity
was condemned by the moral sense of the nation? What was it that enabled
our barbaric ancestors, the Teutons, to overthrow the whole power of
civilized Rome? On the authority of Tacitus, we know that they were
singularly pure. Their women were held in the highest reverence, and
believed to have something divine about them, some breath of prophetic
insight. Their young men were not allowed to marry till they were
five-and-twenty--in other words, till their frame was thoroughly
matured. Impurity before marriage was strongly discountenanced in both
sexes. Therefore the whole power of Rome, honeycombed as it was by moral
corruption and sexual vice, could not stand before these pure
barbarians.

And if these mighty civilizations have perished from moral causes, do we
really think that the moral law--will

"Of which the solid earth and sky
Are but the fitful shadows cast on high"--

suspend its operation out of compliment to the greatness of the British
empire or of the American Republic, if they, too, become morally
corrupt; or will not those old vanished nations, in the magnifice