In asking yourself whether you shall or shall not continue “to know” this lady, you are really and essentially asking yourself whether you shall act as judge, jury and executioner to a person accused of an offence against current convention, or, yes, if you like, against current morality. But I would point out to you that even in Law, which is at best but a rough and ready attempt to secure justice, the peculiar facts of the offence, the temptations that led up to it, are taken into some sort of account. The plea of extenuating circumstances has weight. Moreover, the accused is allowed to speak in his defence either by his own lips or those of skilled counsel. Now your court, the court which you in secret hold, and where you alone are judge, jury, prosecutor, and witnesses—your court knows nothing, and can know nothing, of peculiar facts, and of special temptations—it can mitigate nothing on account of extenuating circumstances, because it is wholly ignorant of their existence or non-existence. The accused’s lips are sealed, and there is no counsel to plead for her. Do you think, then, that a court so constituted is at all likely to get anywhere near to justice in its decisions? How would you like to be tried, and executed, by such a court, if you were charged with stealing a yard of ribbon?
You may reply, and I think you will, for you are a persistent little dialectician when you like, that an analogy is not an argument. And, besides, that in talking of “execution” I exaggerate: that anything so unimportant a person as yourself may do can matter but little to the lady. No, perhaps not, but it matters a good deal to you, child, and it is you with whom I am concerned. An unjust act hurts the doer, hurts especially if it be a stupidly unjust act. After it he will be a trifle stupider, blunter, more prejudiced than he was before. There is nothing roots itself—no, not even the horse-radish in our garden—so easily, and is so hard to eradicate, as prejudice. Now prejudiced and strong you may be, my child, but you can’t be prejudiced and delightful, and, as I have so often told you, above all things I want you to be delightful.
So far you are delightful, and you are strong, too, and it is because you are strong that I am going to say one thing more on this matter. The moral code of society is not equally valid in all its clauses. Some are of more importance and significance than others. Those which say we must not murder and we must not steal are of immeasurable importance, because they apply not to this time or that, or to that place or this, but to all times and to every place. A society which permitted or winked to any extent at murder or theft would cease, almost at once, to be a society. We are here now living in comparative comfort and security because societies in the past forbade murder and theft; therefore the commands which treat of these offences are of what we philosophical old buffers call universal validity. But there are other commandments in the moral code of the day which are only “of the day,” as it were. Time was when they were not—places are where they are not, and possibly time will come again when they will not be. The morality which they seek to maintain is never more than the morality of a phase in human evolution. It may be valid for that phase, but it has not universal validity. Now, judgments and actions based on universal validity must needs be ever so much more assured than judgments and actions based on phasal validity, if you will allow the phrase to pass. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t want to minimise the importance of the rules and regulations which are “only of the day,” for, after all, that day is the day in which we live. Still, you see there is a difference, isn’t there? Yes, and it is just one of those differences of which a wise and delightful young woman should take count.
Of course, I have not nearly exhausted my subject, but I have very nearly exhausted myself, and
I am your tired
Father.