n--cut out those pages, erase that
passage, but do not deny those young mothers the necessary knowledge to
guard the nursery or save their boys at school. And then try and follow
it up by quietly talking over the difficulties and the best method of
encountering them. Let us deny ourselves in order to give to
associations or institutions for the elevation of women, as well as to
that excellent society for men, the White Cross, which is spreading its
purifying work through both countries.[43] Let us do what we can to help
in organizing women's labor, so that a living wage may be secured and
no woman be driven by starvation into selling herself for a morsel of
bread. Let us endeavor to secure the franchise that we may have the
power of legislating for the protection of women on the one point on
which we stand in sharp opposition to all but good men; especially such
measures as raising the age of consent, so deplorably low in some of
your States, that your children are almost without legal protection;
resisting State regulation of vice in the army; cleansing the streets by
an Act pressing equally on men and women, and many others which will
suggest themselves to you. But let us, at the same time, clearly
recognize that the remedy must lie deeper than any external agency--must
be as deep as life itself, and must be worked out in the silence of our
own hearts and of our own homes. We must restore the law of God, quietly
but firmly insisting on the equal moral standard for men and women
alike; and we must maintain the sanctity and permanence of the marriage
bond as ordained by Christ himself.

I say again I do not think, I simply _know_, by my own experience, that
men will rise to any standard which women choose to set them. Ruskin's
noble words are the simple truth:

"Their whole course and character are in your hands; what you would
have them be they shall be, if you not only desire to have them so,
but deserve to have them so, for they are but mirrors in which you
will see yourselves imaged.... You fancy, perhaps, as you have been
told so often, that a wife's rule should only be over her husband's
house, not over his mind. Ah no! the true rule is just the reverse
of that: a true wife, in her husband's house, is his servant; it is
in his heart that she is queen. Whatever of best he can conceive,
it is her part to be; whatever of highest he can hope, it is hers
to promise. Al