“I am told by men who have lived there that in certain provinces a chaste woman is a thing unknown. Let us hope this exaggerates the truth. As to that I have no knowledge. But that the land of the Kaiser has lost its chivalry I have no doubt whatever. The loss of chivalry stands for the loss of conscience—for moral degradation. A man's value as a man may be accurately measured by his respect for women. A man who has no respect for women will have respect for your rights only because he has to. He would steal your purse if he dared. He is rotten to the core. Moreover, unless women are pure there can be no purity because they have the tender soul of childhood in their keeping.
“We ought to establish a moral quarantine here and save ourselves from the peril of German leprosy. It has arrived. It is spreading. You will find its symptoms in our theaters, now largely in the hands of the Germans.
“I have traveled much these late years and have failed to find an American city in which there was not one or more plays or moving pictures which reflected the morals of the swine-yard. There I have found girls and boys and children who are to make the life of America, drinking at the fountain of pollution, cleverly designed by the sex maniacs who live in the white lights of Broadway. On every sort of specious pretext—mostly that of warning the young—spaniel youths and porcelain-faced daughters of iniquity are paraded in libidinous enterprises. The cabarets and brothels of New York, with their fist fights between young women, their desperate, bull-dog encounters between sex maniacs, their ogling, besotted degenerates, sometimes with a lame pretense of a moral and sometimes without it, are shown for the entertainment of young America.
“The Huns have already invaded America, my friend. They are armed with things more deadly than guns and bullets. Their gun is the camera, their ammunition, the moving picture. That picture penetrates to the heart and soul of the young and no surgery can remove it. To them, seeing is believing.
“A man is mostly the sum of his memories. Think back and tell me what you remember of your childhood. It's the pictures you saw. I think the first thing I remember is the picture of a cat which my mother drew on a slate for me—a highly benevolent cat it was. The one I have remembered best is that of my mother standing in the morning sunlight among the hollyhocks by the open door and waving her handkerchief to me the day I went away to school. How often it has flashed out of my memory in these last forty years. There is no power like that of a picture for good or evil in the life of a child. Pictures are, indeed, the universal language of childhood.
“Now what is there in this special claim of the sex mongers that the truth about life—however hideous and revolting it may be—would best be known of all? Just this—it should be made known but not publicly in books and theaters. It should not be made a familiar thing—sitting at meat and lying down in bed with the sensitive imagination of the young. That will be sure to make it the one great truth of life. I prefer the privacy of home and the loving caution of a mother, taking care to impart the whole truth with its setting of perils and with no glamour of romance about it. I would as soon have my daughter's feet enter a brothel as her brain. She might shake the dust from her feet.
“What were the fruits of this home method in old New England? I would remind these European Americans who provide our amusements for us that the world has never seen a civilization like that of old New England. I am not saying that it had no faults, but its human product has justly excited the wonder and admiration of the world. There was not much of it. You could pick up those six little states and set them down within the boundaries of Minnesota and have 19,200 square miles to spare. Yet they gave to the world in the space of forty years, men of the stamp of Daniel Webster, Silas Wright, Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, William M. Evarts, George F. Edmunds, James G. Blaine, E. J. Phelps, Rufus Choate, Henry Ward Beecher, Dr. Channing, Lyman Abbott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry W. Longfellow, John G. Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Edmund C. Stedman, the Dwights, the Washburns.