a
farce. I soon found that it was not a farce but a tragedy. These women were
admittedly necessary but outcast. They were the safeguards of the rest. I
wish that men would try for a moment to put themselves in the place of a
young girl who learns for the first time that prostitution is the safeguard
of the virtuous! I think that they would never again wonder at the
rejection of such "moral standards" by the rising generation of women. You
would only wonder why women had tolerated such a combination of folly
and cruelty so long. You would not ask them to accept or to suffer for a
"standard" like that.

Again, this morality for which (it is affirmed) society is prepared to pay
so horrible a price--what is it? A physical condition! A state of body,
which any man can destroy! an "honour" which lies at the mercy of a
ruffian! A woman raped is a woman "dishonoured." Are her "morals" then at
the mercy of another person? Is "morality" not a state of mind or of will,
a spiritual passion for purity, but a material, physical thing which is
only hers as long as no one snatches it from her? How senseless! How false!

When you ask a woman to-day to make the great sacrifice "in the interests
of morality," you must offer her a morality that _is_ moral--a morality
whose justice and humanity move her to a response; not a morality which
offends every instinct of justice and reality the moment the person to whom
it is offered understands what it means. For what is asked to-day is too
often that women should sacrifice themselves for the convenience of other
people--of a hypocritical society which preaches a morality as senseless as
it is base.

When older people tell me that the young seem to have "no morals at all,"
I ask myself whether the repudiation of much that has been called morality
was not, after all, a necessity, if we are to advance at all. When I
reflect on, for example, Lecky's "History of European Morals," and
remember that it was not a profligate or a hedonist, but an honourable and
respectable member of a civilized society, who proclaimed the prostitute
the high priestess of humanity--the protectress of the purity of a thousand
homes[A]--I am prepared to say that to have "no morals at all" is better
than to accept such infamy and _call_ it "morals"; as it is better to be an
agnostic or an atheist than to worship a devil--to have no standard than to
say: "Evil be thou my good."

[Footnote A: Lecky's "History of European M