There is peculiar value in the influence of sisters. It is a special mission of young women to make virtue lovely. As the mother realizes all that such a high calling implies, as she fully understands the meaning of Virtue—as distinguished from Innocence—and the methods of clothing it in loveliness, the more she will perceive the noble character of a daughter’s influence and its vital importance. In this aspect small things become great through their uses. The principles of dress become worthy of study; health, grace, liveliness and serenity, sympathy, intelligence, conversational ability, accomplishments, receive a new meaning—a consecration to the welfare of the human race. To make brothers love virtue, to make all men love purity, through its incarnation in virtuous daughters, is a grand work to accomplish! The failure of young women in any country, to embody the beauty and strength of virtue is one of the most serious evils that can befall a State. The necessity of cultivating mental purity and respect for the principle of sex exists as strongly in relation to girls as to boys, and it is only by securing this mental purity that young women will unconsciously address themselves to the higher rather than to the lower instincts of their male companions.
The family home, carrying on its proper work, is no narrow circle of selfish exclusiveness, but a living centre, attracting to itself and widely radiating healthy social life. The moral influence of parents, and particularly of the mother, as the centre of the household, extends itself in two opposite directions—viz., in intercourse with the poorer classes, through servants, tradespeople, benevolence, etc.; with the richer, through social intercourse with equals. In both directions, her influence will exert a direct bearing upon the moral education of the young. The first and most important connection with the poorer classes is through domestic servants. It is essential, from the outset of family life, to select servants who will not injure the atmosphere of home. The difficulty of doing this should be a warning voice to every parent, and compel a careful search into the cause of this great and growing difficulty. What does it mean—a widespread corruption through the foundation of society, through the ranks of working women, so that virtue, truth, fidelity, are hard to find? If so, what are the causes, and what will be the influence exerted on the children of the family, both at home and when they go out into the world, and are thrown into unavoidable intercourse with this class of women? The more carefully this problem is considered, the more intimate will the relations of rich and poor be seen to be, the more vital their relations in respect to the great question of morality, the more imperative the duty of every mother to take a personal interest in her servants, to exert an ennobling influence upon them, and to consider the children of her poorer neighbours as well as her own, if only for the sake of her own children. The family is a centre of affection, and every servant should share in this life. It is wrong to retain a young servant in a household without entering into her joys and sorrows, being acquainted with her family and friends, providing her with honourable amusements, and helping her to grow. In connection with this branch of our subject there are two important principles that should be acted on by intelligent women. The first is the necessity of educating the sentiment of sex in girls into a self-controlling force, conscious of the weighty responsibility which its great influence involves. The second principle is the resolute abolition of an outcast class of women. Christian civilization can acknowledge no pariah class, but only erring individuals of either sex to be helped to a nobler life.
Equally important is the influence exerted by parents as members of society on their own class, thus helping to form public opinion, which is the foundation of law as well as custom. The moral tone of general society at present is a source of great injury to the young. The wilful ignoring of right and wrong in sex; the theory that it is a subject not to be considered; the custom of allowing riches, talents, agreeable manners, to atone for any amount of moral corruption; the arrangement of marriage on a commercial basis, material, not spiritual, considerations being of chief importance; and the deplorable delay of marriage in men until the period of maximum physical vigour is past—all contribute inevitably to the formation of a corrupt social atmosphere, equally injurious to the moral health of men and women. The purest family influence contends with difficulty against this general corruption. After the period of childhood, society becomes a powerful educator of young men and women. The seductions exercised by women and by men bear upon our youth of both sexes in various ways, under widely different aspects, but always with the same degrading tendencies, with the same unequal contest between inexperienced innocence and practised vice. Seeing how the highest aims of parental education are constantly shipwrecked by the influence of society, it becomes a necessity on the part of parents to change the tone of society. In this great work women quite as much as men must think and act. Two fundamental principles must be steadily held in view in this great aim: First, the discouragement of licentiousness; second, the promotion of early marriage. The methods of discouraging licentiousness in society require the gravest consideration of all parents, and emphatically of all married women. It is a subject so delicate, and yet so vital, that it must be treated with equal care and firmness, and the problem can only be solved by combined action. To admit men or women of licentious lives or impure inclinations to the home circle, or to receive them with welcome honour or cordiality in society, is a direct encouragement to vice and an equal discouragement to virtue.[45] Confirmed Vice must not be brought into intimate relations with young Virtue. It is a crime, a stupidity, to do so. On the other hand, no inquisitorial investigation of private life is desirable or permissible. A great duty also exists towards the erring and the vicious, towards all those who have oftentimes fallen into vice rather than voluntarily chosen it, who are the victims of circumstances, of gradual unforeseen deterioration. These fellow-beings demand the tenderest pity, the strongest sympathy, the wisest help. Clever or frivolous, unstable or hardened, charming or repellent, they are still precious human creatures, and the insight of large sympathy—that most powerful influence which Providence has intrusted to us—should be extended to all; but such sympathy can only be exerted by the experienced, the strong, and the right way of doing this must be sought for. One duty is perfectly clear: No persons of acknowledged licentious life should be admitted to the intimacy of home; no such persons should be welcomed with honour in society, no matter what lower material or intellectual advantages may be possessed. Their acquaintance is even more to be dreaded for sons than for daughters. The corrupt conversation so general amongst immoral men is a source of great evil to the young. As the perusal of licentious books marks the first step in mental degradation, vicious talk is often the second decided advance downward.
The moral meanness of enslavement to passion, of selfish disregard to one’s weaker fellow-creatures exhibited by the profligate, should always be recognised by the parent. Consent should never be given to the union of an innocent child with a profligate. This plain dictate of parental love, this evident duty of the experienced and virtuous to the young and innocent, is strangely disregarded. Material advantages in such cases are allowed to outweigh all other considerations. Parents fail to recognise that the only source of permanent happiness must arise from within, from spiritual qualifications; they fail to recognise the inevitable effect of a corrupt nature upon a fresh young creature linked to it in the closest companionship. Thus, in the most solemn crisis of human life, the parent may betray the child. It is not only the individual child that is betrayed, but the rising generation also. On a previous page, the numerous external corrupting circumstances have been mentioned which gradually degrade the individual, but the subject of inherited qualities, of the inherited tendency to sensuality, was not then dwelt upon. The transmission of this tendency in a race is, however, a weighty fact, which must be distinctly noted in this connection. Change in the tendencies of a race can only be slowly wrought out in the course of generations. A most important step in this direction is the union of virtuous daughters with men of upright—or in the present day, it may be said, of heroic—moral life. The effect upon offspring produced by the noble and intense love of one man for one woman, with resulting circumstances, would in the course of generations produce an hereditary tendency to virtue instead of to sensuality. The known resolve of parents never to consent to the union of their children with men of licentious habits would of itself prove a valuable aid in regenerating society. Honour to virtue, expressed in this sacred and at the same time most practical manner, would be an encouragement, a reward, an incitement to all that is noblest in human nature; it would be a standard to guide youth, a real disinfectant of corrupt society.
The second principle to be kept steadily in view is the encouragement of early marriage. A statesman, writing a generation ago on the causes in the past, which have contributed to the prosperity of England, says: ‘The lower and working classes are an early and universally marrying people; this sacred habit is one which, while it has secured the virtue and promoted the happiness of the country, has multiplied its means and extended its power, and constituted Britain the most powerful and prosperous Empire of the world.’[46] A quaint old writer has said: ‘The forbidding to marry is the doctrine of devils.’ The universal testimony of experience may be summed up in the words of Montesquieu: ‘Who can be silent when the sexes, corrupting each other even by the natural sensations themselves, fly from a union that ought to make them better, to live in that that always renders them worse? It is a rule drawn from nature, that the more the number of marriages is diminished, the more corrupt are those who have entered into that state; the fewer married men, the less fidelity is there in marriage.’ All short-sighted Governments that impose unnatural restrictions upon marriage are compelled, by the increase of bastardy and its attendant evils, to repeal such restrictions. Grohman, speaking of the causes of the present immorality of the Tyrolese, says: ‘Very lately only has the Austrian Government annulled the law which compelled a man desirous of marriage to prove a certain income, and, further, to be the owner of a house or homestead of some kind, before the license was granted. Next in importance is the lax way in which the Church deals with licentious misconduct, it being in her eyes a minor iniquity expiated by confession.’ The obstacles to marriage in the military German Empire must be regarded as one of the causes of that moral corruption which we now observe in a country once so distinguished for home virtues—a corruption which threatens to shake the foundations of the great German race.
Early marriage, however, without previous habits of self-control, is unavailing to raise the tone of society. Marriage is no cure for diseased sex, and early licentiousness is really (as has been shown) disease. In those parts of the Continent where the lowest sexual morality exists, marriage is regarded as the opportunity for constant and unlimited license. The young man, therefore, is not allowed to marry (by the law of social custom) until he is over thirty years of age. If his health has been impaired by licentiousness, he is enjoined to resort less frequently to prostitutes, or to take a mistress; but marriage is positively forbidden by his medical advisers and discouraged by his relations. By the age of thirty his health is either completely broken down, and marriage, therefore, out of the question, or, having passed the most dangerous age of passion without breaking down, it is judged that his physical health will hold out under the opportunities of married life. The result of this system is inevitable. Marriage, being regarded as the legalization of uncontrolled passion, is so exercised until satiety ensues. Satiety is the inevitable boundary of all simply material enjoyments. Self-control being entirely wanting, the spiritual possibilities of marriage are unknown; social duty in respect to sex is a vague dream, not a reality. Physical satiety can only be met by variety; hence universal infidelity—destruction of the highest ends of marriage, the dethronement of the mother, the deterioration of the father, and the failure of the family influence as the first element in the growth of the nation.
The same important truth is exemplified in the social condition of our great Indian Empire. There the custom of early, even infantine, marriage co-exists with a licentiousness truly appalling in its strength and character.[47] Lads of sixteen, thoroughly corrupted in childhood, become the fathers of a degenerate race, the girl-mothers being the hopeless slaves of simple physical instincts. Early marriage is the safeguard of society only when the self-control of chastity exists, a self-government which is essential to the formation of manly character as well as conducive to vigorous health. With the acceptance of this essential condition, the aim of all wise parents will be to secure for their children the great blessing of early marriage, to provide for them opportunities of choice, and to promote the design of Providence that the young man and young woman suited to each other shall together gain the wider experience of life.
This proposition is always met by a host of social difficulties which perplex the inquirer, and finally quiet the conscience of society into a passive acquiescence in evil customs. These difficulties, however, must be met and overcome. It is cowardly not to face them, and weak not to vanquish them. Wise early marriage is the natural and true way out of disorder and license into the providential order of human existence. The first condition of improvement is to accept this plan as a living faith, not an abstract ideal; to consider how difficulties can be removed, not be cowed by them; and to study the possibilities, not the impossibilities. It leads to diametrically opposite practical action, whether we dwell upon the advantages of a certain course of life and strive in every way to attain it, or whether we lose ourselves in doubts and discouragements. ‘Put your shoulder to the wheel, and call upon Hercules to help,’ is the only true plan now, as in the days of Æsop. It is a matter of every-day experience that if we resolutely determine to do a thing, and steadily apply the common-sense and intelligence (the germs of which exist in every human being) to its accomplishment, success will follow.
The difficulties urged are the foolishness of first love; the impossibility of providing for a family; the craving for wild adventure, excitement, change. These are the spectres which bar the entrance to the right way of life. But such arguments are all false. They are founded on the sandy basis of removable conditions—on false methods of education, narrow family exclusiveness, on lack of self-control, vicious customs, and perverted tastes. All sound argument, based on the permanent facts of human nature, enjoins us to provide for early marriage as the basis of social good. The young man accustomed from boyhood to mix freely with young women under honourable conditions, is no longer bewildered by the first woman he meets, whilst the free, friendly companionship, secured by the family circle with its wide connections, has supplied a want that his growing nature craves; his taste and judgment have grown and strengthened, and he is no longer the victim of baseless fantasies. Accustomed to free association with young women of his own class, he is able at an early age to know his own mind and make a wise selection of his future partner. To the young woman an early marriage is the natural course of life; to this end she tends, and, consciously or unconsciously, prepares herself to secure it according to the requirements of society. Her unperverted taste is for the young man a little older than herself—a companion she can admire, respect, and, love—but still a companion, not a father. If taught by the silent though still powerful voice of society that harmony of character, of aims, of temperament—i.e., mental attraction—is the indispensable foundation of great and lasting happiness in marriage; that material advantages are secondary to this unspeakable blessing; that thrift, knowledge of household economy, power of creating an attractive home, are essential to the attainment of this great good, then her instincts, by an inevitable law of nature, will tend to the acquirement of these qualifications. If, on the contrary, she feels, through the influence of society (still unexpressed), that physical effects are the things chiefly sought for, that physical charm or the power exercised by corporeal sex is the chief or only possession that draws attention to her, then, by the same inevitable law, she will strive to exercise this physical power, and the means of doing so will become the all-absorbing occupation of an ever-increasing number of young women. As already stated, the direct result of the mastery of young men by irresistible physical instinct will be to create a necessity in young women for dress which will bring physical attractions into prominence or supply their deficiency. The craving for riches and luxury, the ignorance of economy, so often urged as an obstacle to marriage, are the inevitable results of licentiousness, which strengthens and cultivates exclusively material desires and necessities. Children should look forward to beginning life as simply as their parents began it, but with the added advantages of education. It is a totally false principle that they should expect to begin where their parents left off. Filial honour for their parents’ lives and inherited vigour would alike lead them to commence life with extreme simplicity. The power of rendering such simplicity attractive would prove that they had acquired the refinement and breadth of view which is the result of true culture instead of being enervated by luxury. They would thus, whilst beginning life as did their parents, begin it, nevertheless, from a vantage-ground, the result of their parents’ labours. Each generation would thus make a solid gain in life instead of encountering the destructive results which always attend the strife for material luxury.
There are many important points bearing on this vital question of early marriage—such as the exercise of self-control in married life and the teaching of sound physiology, which is needed to reconcile marriage with foresight—whose discussion would be out of place in the present essay. But that the topic must be thoroughly and wisely considered by parents resolved to aid one another in securing this inevitable reform, is certain. The increasing tendency to delay marriage is so serious an evil, that methods for checking this tendency must be found if our worth as a nation is to continue. The early and solemn betrothal of young people is an old custom now fallen into disuse. The possibility of its readoption as a beneficial social practice, with its duration, duties, and privileges, is worthy of serious consideration.