If one has found some poor woman who lives on the money which he pays for her defilement, would that he might curb his passions and lend his support toward reforming her and helping her to engage in a reputable pursuit! Would that men might not trifle with a fellow mortal's annihilation, but help to save her whose honor rests upon our manly sympathy! Why should Man be the only created being to degrade women, when not a single animal illtreats, deserts, or destroys the female of his kind, but rather shares with her all the delights of life, its pastimes and its labors! We are made to help, not to destroy one another, and there can be no logical support for the degradation of one human being to maintain another's health.
Mrs. Josephine E. Butler, in an address on the Social Purity question, delivered before the students of Cambridge University, England, said:
"Were it possible to secure the absolute physical health of a whole province or an entire continent by the destruction of only one poor sinful woman, woe to that nation which should dare by that single act to purchase this advantage to the many."
In the company of real men, who are well grounded upon the truth, no person can dare to say that the degradation of some particular woman is a necessity for him, without either being kicked out of their presence as a poltroon, or being classified as a low, vulgar, villainous rascal. Where these women are forced to congregate there assembles a hellish class of abandoned men, liars, thieves, assassins, blackmailers, soiled and diseased men, syphilitica, men with chronio gonorrhoea; thieves devise their plans there, criminals and swindlers retreat there, abortionists work there. The police and those familiar with city life will corroborate every word of this.
Were it necessary that the sexual functions should be exercised in order to maintain health, men could not sail the seas or make campaigns or undertake explorations without the companionship of women; nor could men be continent during the months when their wives are pregnant; and the women, being not so different from ourselves, would also have to indulge in the same prescription; and thus all the bulwarks of home life and of civilization, such as we strive for, would be overthrown.
Whatever ideas men entertain about incontinence, it must, however, be remembered that no equivalent for sexual improprieties can ever be advocated for women outside of marriage. A father may even be found who will encourage his sons to be impure, but scarcely one who will permit it in his daughters.
Outside of marriage, every sexual act not having in view the propagation of the species is perverse. Marriage is of course exceedingly desirable, and, in that relationship, the temperate gratification of the sexual passion is healthful, and immensely increases the love between husband and wife. But "purchased or forced love is not real love" (Mantegazza); and without this element, and without the intention of assuming the proper responsibility toward the fruits of intercourse, every sexual act is grossly immoral and a perversion to be greatly ashamed of.
Every one is aware of the advantage to a child if its parents have both been physically and mentally perfected and prepared for the act of procreation by a hygienic course of living and thinking from the very initial periods of their life histories.
Mirabeau, in speaking of the proper age at which to begin a child's education, is reported to have said: "I would begin twenty years before he is born by educating his mother"; and Oliver Wendell Holmes has well said: "If you want to reform a man, begin with his grandfather." Any marriageable man is, of course, likely to be the ancestor of a posterity to whom he is under a certain unwritten obligation; and, if he be thoughtful, he will not care to be the one to start his race on the road to degeneration by impairing his own functions of body and character with disease which is the fruit of his sin.
" One often hears the expression that a child is a chip off the old block; but this is only a very partial truth, for a child is preeminently a composite chip off of many old blocks. Galton has compared the complex nucleus of the fertilized ovum" (i.e., the embryo child) "to a modern Italian building which has been constructed of material a column here, a cornice there, a lintel yondergathered from different classic buildings of varying antiquity."