On the one hand we have "la jeune fille" in her white Communion robe,
kept so pure and ignorant of all evil, that "une société
ecclésiastique," I am told, exists for the emendation of history for her
benefit--Divine Providence, as conducting the affairs of men, being far
too coarse for her pure gaze; and at the other end of the stick we find
Zola, and a literature intended only for the eyes of men, of whose
chastity, according to Renan, "Nature takes no account whatever,"--a
literature which fouls with its vile sewage the very wellsprings of our
nature, and which, whatever its artistic merit, I make bold to say is a
curse to the civilized world.

Now, I earnestly protest that while we have this social code, which is
in direct violation of the moral law, we may set on foot any number of
Rescue Societies, Preventive Agencies, Acts for the Legal Protection of
the Young, etc., but all our efforts will be in vain. We are like a man
who should endeavor to construct a perfect system of dynamics on the
violation of Newton's first law of motion. The tacitly accepted
necessity for something short of the moral law for men will--again I say
it--work out with the certainty of a mathematical law a degraded and
outcast class, with its disease, its insanity, its foul contamination of
the young, its debasement of manhood, its disintegration of the State,
its curse to the community. You cannot dodge the moral law; as Professor
Clifford said, "There are no back-stairs to the universe" by which we
can elude the consequences of our wrong, whether of thought or action.
If you let in one evil premise by the back-door, be sure Sin and Death
will come out at the front.

Here, then, you must take a firm and watchful stand. As the mothers of
the future generation of men, you must look upon it as your
divinely-appointed task to bring back the moral law in its entirety,