she receives into her
mighty bosom vast numbers drawn from the suffering peoples of the old
world, and gives them a mother's welcome. According as your civilization
is high and pure, or low and corrupt, so will those naturalized citizens
be. Decay with great empires, as with fish, sets in at the head; and the
moral decadence of England and America will sensibly lower the moral
standard of nearly one-third of the population of the world.[39] The
heart of the two nations is still sound. It is not too late. We are at
least free from the continental system, by which the degradation of
women is reduced to a systematized slavery, to meet what is openly
called a necessity of nature. The comparative purity of Englishmen and
Americans is still a wonder, and often a derision to foreigners. Our
women are a greater power than in any other country. We still start from
a good vantage-ground.

England, certainly through no merit of her own, has been called by the
providence of God to lead in great moral causes. We led in the matter of
slavery--the open sore of the world. We English and American women are
now called to lead, in this its hidden sore, for the healing of the
nations.

Secondly, since you have elected to go beyond your own confines and have
dependencies, and so take up the white man's burden of civilizing and
Christianizing the world, your men as well as ours will be exposed to
that dangerously lowering influence, contact with lower races and alien
civilizations. An Englishman in India, if he be not a religious man, is
apt to blind himself to wrongs done to womanhood, because those wrongs
are often done to a pariah caste who are already set apart for infamy;
though I have not yet heard of an Englishman possessing himself of
slaves on the ground that they were slaves already to their native
masters. Worse still, in savage or semi-civilized countries the native
girl, far from feeling herself degraded, considers that she is raised by
any union, however illicit, with a white man. It is the native men who
are furious. Which of us in England did not feel an ache of shame in our
hearts over the plea of the Matabele to the white man: "You have taken
our lands, and our hunting-grounds are gone. You have taken our herds,
and we want for food. You have taken our young men, and made them slaves
in your mines. You have taken our women _and done what you like with
them_." How many of our native wars may not have had as their cause that