buncombe, and when the day of deliverance comes it will turn to
ashes in their arms.


Their error, as I say, lies in overestimating the courage and
enterprise of man. They themselves, barring mere physical valour, a
quality in which the average man is far exceeded by the average
jackal or wolf, have more of both. If the consequences, to a man,
of the slightest descent from virginity were one-tenth as swift and
barbarous as the consequences to a young girl in like case, it would
take a division of infantry to dredge up a single male flouter of that
lex talionis in the whole western world. As things stand today, even
with the odds so greatly in his favour, the average male hesitates and
is thus not lost. Turn to the statistics of the vice crusaders if
you doubt it. They show that the weekly receipts of female recruits
upon the wharves of sin are always more than the demand; that
more young women enter upon the vermilion career than can make
respectable livings at it; that the pressure of the temptation they hold
out is the chief factor in corrupting our undergraduates. What was
the first act of the American Army when it began summoning its
young clerks and college boys and plough hands to conscription
camps? Its first act was to mark off a so-called moral zone around
each camp, and to secure it with trenches and machine guns, and to
put a lot of volunteer termagants to patrolling it, that the assembled
jeunesse might be protected in their rectitude from the immoral
advances of the adjacent milkmaids and poor working girls.