The foregoing observations of course have their exceptions, and, after all, men and women are brothers and sisters; the man's mother was a woman, and from her he inherits beauties of character, and the woman's father was a man, and from him she inherits ennobling qualities. The two sexes, in fact, have more in common than is dreamed of in the philosophy of a thoughtless person.
But yet the two sexes are divergent in physique, functions, education and inclinations, for "a man is a man even to his thumbs, and a woman is a woman down to her little toes".
Normal man has a profound chivalrous feeling for woman which is far superior to the mere equality shared by animals with their females; and in any shipwreck he will unhesitatingly say, "Women and children first!" protecting them at every cost to himself, and shielding them from imposition and degradation.
But if corrosive impurity is harbored in his breast, this natural nobility of character becomes blighted, and his acts of gallantry are nothing but superficialities.
Candor compels us to admit that innumerable men have become so infamously perverted from the true spirit of manliness that they harm, destroy, and tyrannize over that portion of womankind who are under no protection, and who, by reason of their ignorance of the world, are unequal to the task of meeting them in competition.
Women rarely harm men, but men are rough playfellows to them shame on our sex! Since history has been recorded, men have been rough to them; but shall we in this glorious age of enlightenment continue such an infamous business?
What true man can join in such sport. Effeminacy is not to be attributed to the pure, chaste men who are sympathetic and tender and valiant in their protection of women and their offspring, nor can such men see any excuse for the unmanliness of those who sport with women's most priceless possessions by pushing them down into the river of filth, and merely feeding them with such requisites and luxuries as will serve to keep them in condition for the satisfaction of their gluttonous depravity.
To such lustful men we cry out: "Stop your cowardly wantonness!. Abuse yourselves, if you will, by every filthy degradation and defilement that is detestable to men, but leave off your brutal coarseness with tender women, in the lowest of whom there is the possibility of motherhood and reform!".
The time has come when society, at the very least, should set aside these ghouls upon a common level with their victims; when it should deny them entrance into clean homes, and regard them as a diseased lot of perverted degenerates, unfit for the holy offices of fatherhood, and as the enemies of women, of posterity, and of civilization.
Some carnivora kill merely for the pleasure of destruction; others, like vampires, suck the blood of their victims and throw the carcasses aside; and so some men pluck the roses from maidens, and leave them, heart-broken and dishonored, nothing but the thorns. The man who illegitimately becomes a father commits against both mother and child an awful crime which can only be atoned for by marriage; nothing else will satisfy both mother and child, money may appease the mother, but never the child.
So also the man who breaks the vows made in marriage by falling into licentiousness, bringing disease to innocent ones, forcing separations and divorces, and degrading her whom he has promised to cherish, is the perpetrator of an unpardonable crime, and shows himself to be a liar whom all decent men should shun.