e the really good
women of earth are always on a plane above and beyond the physical. When
any woman falls from her pedestal you despise her.

How dare you, madam, sitting in your cold, white chastity, lay down laws
of what you consider purity, morality, and cleanliness, for other human
souls?

How dare you condemn those who do not reach your standard?

What do you know of life, great, palpitating, throbbing, vital life,
terrible and beautiful life, terrible while passing through the valleys
of temptation, beautiful upon the heights of self-control?

How dare you assume greater virtue, greater respectability, greater
fineness of sentiment, than the tempest-tossed, passion-beaten souls,
about you?

What do you know of real virtue, real strength?

You have been poor, you tell me, in worldly riches, and you have been
lonely, yet you have never once degraded your womanhood by an "unworthy
" impulse. Never known a temptation of the senses. Those things
disgusted you.

You have preferred toil to taking favours from inferiors, and you have
kept yourself clean in thought, word, and deed, and now you have the
reward of such virtues--a good home, a husband, and children.

You are a more devoted mother than wife, as you have always dwelt upon a
lofty white peak of chaste womanhood, from which any descent into the
earthly realms of life and love was repugnant--so rarely "pure" and high
your nature.

Yet you have been a dutiful, loyal wife, and you are a devoted mother.

You despise all carnal-minded women, and cannot understand how women
fall--save that they lack good birth and breeding.

You will aid in a benefit for their reformation, but you do not want to
see them or to come near them. It makes you ill.

You are to be congratulated on never having added to the evil in the
world.

But permit me, madam, to tell you some truths about yourself--and the
large army of "respectable women" you represent.

However "well born" you may be, you are only half-born. The complete
human being has three sides to his nature--spiritual, mental, physical.

The men and women who are evenly developed on the three sides are few.
This is sometimes their fault--sometimes their misfortune.

We all pity the human being who is mentally dwarfed. We are sorry for
the one whose spiritual nature is undeveloped.

But why should the many women who are devoid of the physical qualities
of human nature presume to lay claim to perfection and to