It is poisonous to its core;
it never did any one any good, and has done incalculable harm. It has
blinded the eyes of hundreds of thousands of babies; it has brought
hundreds of thousands more rotten into the world. Hosts of dead men,
women, and children are its victims. It is indeed good that a man should
be a man, and not a worm on stilts; it is indeed good that women should
prefer men to be men, and that as soon as possible they should cease to
accept in marriage the feeble, the cowardly, the echoers, and the sheep.
But this is a very different thing from asserting that it is good for
young men, before marriage, to adopt a standard of morality which would
be thought shameful beyond words in their sisters, and which has all the
horrible consequences that have been alluded to, and many more. Now,
vicious though the wild oats doctrine be in itself and in its
consequences, we have to grant that there is little need of it, for
young manhood needs the insertion of no doctrines from without to
encourage it towards the satisfaction of what are in themselves natural
and healthy tendencies. Our right procedure therefore should
be--notwithstanding the unhealthy tendency of high civilization in this
respect, and notwithstanding the terrible folly, traitorous to their
sex, of those women who decry marriage, and seek to delay it--to prepare
girlhood and public opinion, and even to modify, so far as may be
necessary, economic conditions, in order that the girls who are worthy
to marry at all shall do so at the right age, and shall join themselves
for life with rightly chosen men.
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