dry-rot of nations, before which the mightiest empires have crumbled
into dust. The lagoons of Venice mirror it in the departed grandeur of
her palaces, overthrown by the licentiousness of her merchant princes.
The mute sands that silt up the ruins of old empires are eloquent of it.
The most brilliant civilization the world has even seen through it
became the most transitory. Even the vast and massive structure of the
Roman Empire, undermined by moral corruption, vanished before barbarian
hordes like the baseless fabric of a dream. To think that we can solve a
problem of this depth and magnitude by any mere external means--as so
many good and earnest women seem to imagine--by any multiplication of
Rescue Societies, Preventive Institutions, and other benevolent
organizations--is to think that we can plug up a volcano with sticks and
straws. The remedy, like the evil, must be from within, and must to a
great degree revolutionize our life.

My second cardinal point is, that the first step we have to take, the
step which must precede all others, if anything is to be of the least
avail, must be to restore the moral law and get rid of the double
standard. I know well how much has been said and written on this point;
it has been insisted on possibly _ad nauseam_. But even now I do not
think we fully realize how completely we have been in the grasp of a
"tradition of the elders," which has emphatically "made the law of God
of none effect." Side by side with the ethics of Christianity have
grown up the bastard ethics of society, widely divergent from the true
moral order. Man has accepted the obligation of purity so far as it
subserves his own selfish interests and enables him to be sure of his
own paternity and safeguard the laws of inheritance. The precepts which
were primarily addressed to the man, as the very form of the Greek words
demonstrate, were tacitly transferred to the woman. When, in a standard
dictionary of the English language, I look out the word "virtue," which