The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons | Page 7

truly said:
"But oh! it hardens a' within, And petrifies the feeling."
Yes, it is exactly that; "it hardens all within"--hardens and darkens. It is as our Lord says: only "the pure in heart" are capable of divine vision. Only the man who has kept himself pure, who has never sullied his white faith in womanhood, never profaned the sacred mysteries of life and love, never fouled his manhood in the stye of the beast--it is only that man who can see God, who can see duty where another sees useless sacrifice, who can see and grasp abiding principles in a world of expediency and self-interest, and discern
"In temporal policy the eternal Will,"
who can see God in the meanest of His redeemed creatures. It is only the virginal heart that has kept itself pure, that grows not old, but keeps its freshness, its innocent gaiety, its simple pleasures. The eminent Swiss Professor, Aim�� Humbert, does but echo these words from the sadder side, when, speaking of the moral malady which is the result of impurity, he says:
"It does not attack any single organ of the human frame, but it withers all that is human--mind, body, and soul. It strikes our youth at the unhappy moment when they first cross the thresholds of vice. For them the spring has no more innocent freshness; their very friendships are polluted by foul suggestions and memories; they become strangers to all the honorable relations of a pure young life; and thus we see stretching wider and wider around us the circle of this mocking, faded, worn-out, sceptical youth, without poetry and without love, without faith and without joy."
Too soon and too earnestly we cannot teach our boys that the flaming sword, turning all ways, which guards the tree of life for him, is purity.
But thirdly, there are wider issues than the welfare, physical and moral, of our own boys which make it impossible for us to take up any neutral attitude on this question. We cannot remain indifferent to that which affects so deeply both the status and the happiness of women. We cannot accept a standard for men which works out with the certainty of a mathematical law a pariah class of women. We cannot leave on one side the anguish of working-class mothers just because we belong to the protected classes, and it is not our girls that are sacrificed. At least, we women are ceasing to be as base as that, and God forgive us that, from want of thought rather than from want of heart, educated women could be found even to hold that the degradation of their own womanhood is a necessity!
Take but one instance out of the many that crossed my via dolorosa of the anguish inflicted on the mothers of the poor. I take it, not because it is uncommon, but because it is typical.
At one of my mass meetings of working women in the North I was told at its close that a woman wished to speak with me in private. As soon as I could disengage myself from the crowd of mothers who were always eager to shake hands with me, and to bless me with tears in their eyes for taking up their cause, I went down the room, and there, in a dimly-lighted corner of the great hall, I found a respectable-looking woman waiting for me. I sat down by her side, and she poured out the pent-up sorrow of her heart before telling me the one great favor she craved at my hands. She had an only daughter, who at the age of sixteen she had placed out in service, at a carefully-chosen situation. We all know what a difficult age in a girl's life is sixteen; but our girls we can keep under our own watchful care, and their little wilfulnesses and naughtinesses are got over within the four walls of a loving home, and are only the thorns that precede the perfect rose of womanhood. But the poor have to send their girls out into the great wicked world at this age to be bread-winners, often far away from a mother's protecting care. The girl, however, in this case was a good, steady girl, and for a time did well. Then something unsettled her, and she left her first place, and got another situation. For a time it seemed all right, when suddenly her letters ceased. The mother wrote again and again, but got no answer. She wrote to her former place; they knew nothing of her. At last she saved up a little money and went to the town where she believed her girl to be. She sought out and found her last address. The family had gone away, and left no address. She made inquiries of the neighbors, of the