he ought to marry,
for the good of the country. Women taking liquor: Skepsey had a vision
of his wife with rheumy peepers and miauly mouth, as he had once beheld
the creature:--Oh! they need discipline not such would we have for the
mothers of our English young. Decidedly the women of principle are bound
to enter wedlock; they should be bound by law. Whereas, in the opposing
case--the binding of the unprincipled to a celibate state--such a law
would have saved Skepsey from the necessitated commission of deeds of
discipline with one of the female sex, and have rescued his progeny from
a likeness to the corn-stalk reverting to weed. He had but a son for
England's defence; and the frame of his boy might be set quaking by a
thump on the wind of a drum; the courage of William Barlow Skepsey would
not stand against a sheep; it would wind-up hares to have a run at him
out in the field. Offspring of a woman of principle!... but there is no
rubbing out in life: why dream of it? Only that one would not have one's
country the loser!

Dwell a moment on the reverse--and first remember the lesson of
the Captivity of the Jews and the outcry of their backsliding and
repentance:--see a nation of the honourably begotten; muscular men
disdaining the luxuries they will occasionally condescend to taste,
like some tribe in Greece; boxers, rowers, runners, climbers; braced,
indomitable; magnanimous, as only the strong can be; an army at word,
winning at a stroke the double battle of the hand and the heart: men
who can walk the paths through the garden of the pleasures. They receive
fitting mates, of a build to promise or aid in ensuring depth of chest
and long reach of arm for their progeny.

Down goes the world before them.

And we see how much would be due for this to a corps of ladies like Miss
Graves, not allowed to remain too long on the stalk of spinsterhood. Her
age might count twenty-eight: too long! She should be taught that
men can, though truly ordinary women cannot, walk these orderly paths
through the garden. An admission to women, hinting restrictions, on a
ticket marked 'in moderation' (meaning, that they may pluck a flower or
fruit along the pathway border to which they are confined), speedily,
alas, exhibits them at a mad scramble across the pleasure-beds. They
know not moderation. Neither for their own sakes nor for the sakes of
Posterity will they hold from excess, when they are not pledged to shun
it.

The reason is,