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 etymologically means "manliness"-- the manliness which would scorn to gratify its own selfish passions at the cost of the young, the poor, and the weak, at the cost of a _woman_--I find one of its meanings defined, not as male but as "female chastity." Long ago I suggested that as manliness thus goes by default, the word had better be changed from virtue to "muliertue." In a passage in one of our standard school-books, Green's _Short History of the English People_, the historian, alluding to the coarseness of the early Elizabethan drama, remarks that "there were no female actors, and the grossness which startles us in words which fall from a woman's lips took a different color when every woman's part was acted by a boy."[3] Why, in the name of all moral sense, should it be less dreadful that gross and obscene passages should be uttered at a public spectacle by young and unformed boys than by adult women, who at least would have the safeguard of mature knowledge and instincts to teach them their full loathsomeness?
Do we really think that boys are born less pure than girls?
Does the mother, when her little son is born, keep the old iron-moulded flannels, the faded basinette, the dirty feeding-bottle for him with the passing comment, "Oh, it is only a boy!" Is anything too white and fine and pure for his infant limbs, and yet are we to hold that anything is good enough for his childish soul--even, according to Mr.Green, the grossness of the early Elizabethan stage--because he is a boy?
But I ask how many readers of that delightful history would so much as notice this passage, and not, on the contrary, quietly accept it without inward note or comment, possessed as we are, often without knowing it, by our monstrous double standard?
If we want to see what is the final outcome of this moral code, of this one-sided and distorted ethic, we have only to turn our eyes to France.
On the one hand we have "la jeune fille" in her white Communion robe, kept so pure and ignorant of all evil, that "une societe ecclesiastique," 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.