And you may learn the means of
prevention for those yet uninjured. These will be found in a diffusion
of mental culture, simple tastes, best taught by your example, a
genuine self-respect, and, above all, what the influence of Man tends
to hide from Woman, the love and fear of a divine, in preference to a
human tribunal.
But suppose you save many who would have lost their bodily innocence
(for as to mental, the loss of that is incalculably more general),
through mere vanity and folly; there still remain many, the prey and
spoil of the brute passions of Man; for the stories frequent in our
newspapers outshame antiquity, and vie with the horrors of war.
As to this, it must be considered that, as the vanity and proneness to
seduction of the imprisoned women represented a general degradation in
their sex; so do these acts a still more general and worse in the
male. Where so many are weak, it is natural there should be many lost;
where legislators admit that ten thousand prostitutes are a fair
proportion to one city, and husbands tell their wives that it is folly
to expect chastity from men, it is inevitable that there should be
many monsters of vice.
I must in this place mention, with respect and gratitude, the conduct
of Mrs.
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