Alas! that we should have made so little comparative use of it in these great moral questions.

Alas! that we should have to acknowledge the truth and justice of the poet's words: Ah, wasteful woman! she who may On her sweet self set her own price, Knowing he cannot choose but pay-- How has she cheapen'd Paradise, How given for nought her priceless gift, How spoiled the bread and spilt the wine, Which, spent with due respective thrift, Had made brutes men, and men divine!"[33] But even here is there not place for a hopeful thought, that if women have made so little comparative use of their well-nigh irresistible influence in setting a high standard and shaping men to a diviner and less animal type, it has been, as I have already said, chiefly owing to ignorance?
The whole of one of the darkest sides of life has been sedulously kept from us.

Educated mothers, till lately, have been profoundly ignorant of the moral evils of schools, and have never dreamt that that young, frank, fresh-faced lad of theirs had any temptations of the kind.

Their moral influence, which the poet blames them so strongly for misusing, has been largely, at least with good women, not so much a misused as an undirected force, and we know not, therefore, what that force may accomplish when a larger and truer knowledge enables it to be persistently directed to a conscious aim.

This fact, at least, has been stamped into my inmost being, that men will rise to any moral standard which women choose to set them.
I ask, therefore, cannot we get our girls to help us here more than we do, without being crippled by the fear of initiating them too much in the evil of the world or destroying that unconscious virginal purity which is, even as things are, so strong and pathetic an influence for good over young men?
In the addresses that I have given to large numbers of educated girls, I used often to begin by quoting a passage from the Jewish Prayer-Book.