intercourse with her own girls the man who has done his best to make her
womanhood a vile and desecrated thing; only when no mother worthy the
name will, for the sake of wealth or position,--what is called "a good
match,"--give her pure girl to a man on the very common conditions, as
things have been, that some other ten or twenty young girls--some poor
mothers' daughters--have been degraded and cast aside into the gutter,
that she, the twenty-first in this honorable harem, may be held in
apparent honor as a wife; only when no woman worthy the name will marry
under the conditions portrayed by our great novelist, George
Eliot,--that of another woman being basely forsaken for her sake--then,
and then only, will this reproach that men level at us drop off; then,
and then only, shall we be able to save our own sons and bring in a
better and purer state of things, enabling them to fight the battle of
their life at less tremendous odds; then, and then only, shall we be
able to evolve the true manhood, whose attitude is not to defile and
destroy, but "to look up and to lift up."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: _Short History of the English People_, by J.R. Green, p.
247.]

[Footnote 4: See a little White Cross paper entitled, _Medical
Testimony_.]




CHAPTER IV