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that when that greatest of all questions, the question of a life-companionship, shall be decided on its merits, pure and simple, and not complicated with the other questions, "Did she get a good home?" "Is he a generous provider?” "Will she have plenty of money?" then will come the first fair chance ever enjoyed by young manhood for the building-up of genuine character and conduct. For it is an immense temptation to the "sowing of wild oats," when the average youth knows that the smiles he covets most will be his all the same, no matter whether he smokes, swears, drinks beer and leads an impure life, or not. The knowledge on his part that the girls of his village or “set” have no way out of dependence, reproach, or oddity, except to say "yes" when he chooses to "propose"; that they dare not frown on his lower mode of life; that the world is indeed all before him where to choose; that not one girl in one hundred is endowed with the talent and pluck that make her independent of him and his ilk-all this gives him a sense of freedom to do wrong, which, added to inherited appetite and outward temptation, is impelling to ruin the youth of our day with a force strong as gravitation and relentless as fate. Beside all this, the utterly false sense of his own value and importance which "Young America" acquires from seeing the sweetest and most attractive beings on earth thus virtually subject to him, often develops a lordliness of manner which is ridiculous to contemplate in boys who otherwise would be modest, sensible and brotherly young fellows such as we are most of all likely to find in coëducational schools, where girls take their full share of prizes, and where many young women have in mind a European trip with some girl friend, or mayhap "a career."

Multiplied forces in law and gospel are to-day conspiring for the deliverance of our young men from the snares of the present artificial environment and estimate of their own value; but the elevation of their sisters to the plane of perfect financial and legal independence, from which the girls can dictate the equitable terms, "You must be as pure and true as you require me to be, ere I give you my hand," is the brightest hope that gleams in the sky of modern civilization for our brothers; and the greater freedom of women to make of marriage an affair of the heart and not of the purse, is the supreme result of Christianity, up to this hour.

There is no man whom women honor so deeply and sincerely as the man of chaste life; the man who breasts the buffeting of temptation's swelling waves, like some strong swimmer in his agony, and makes the port of perfect selfcontrol. Women have a thousand guaranties and safeguards for their purity of life. "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," is written in letters of fire for them above the haunt of infamy, while men may come and go, and are yet smilingly received in the most elegant homes. But in spite of all this accursed latitude, how many men are pure and true!

It is said that when darkness settles on the Adriatic sea, and fishermen are far from land, their wives and daughters, just before putting out the lights in their humble cottages, go down by the shore, and, in their clear, sweet voices,

sing the first lines of the Ave Maria. Then they listen eagerly, and across the sea are borne to them the deep tones of those they love, singing the strains that follow, "Ora pro nobis," and thus each knows that with the other all is well. I often think that from the home-life of the Nation-from its mothers and sisters, daughters and sweethearts-there sound through the darkness of this transition age the tender notes of a dearer song, whose burden is being taken up and echoed back to us from those far out amid the billows of temptation, and its sacred words are, “ Home, Sweet Home!" God grant that deeper and stronger may grow that heavenly chorus from men's and women's lips and lives. For with all its faults, and they are many, I believe the present marriage system to be the greatest triumph of past Christianity, and that it has created and conserves more happy homes than the world has ever before known. Any law that renders less binding the mutual, life-long loyalty of one man and woman to each other, which is the central idea of every home, is an unmitigated curse to that home and to humanity. Around this union, which alone renders possible a pure society and a permanent State, the law should build its utmost safeguards; and upon this union the gospel should pronounce its most sacred benedictions. But, while I hold these truths to be self-evident, I believe that a constant evolution is going forward in the home, as in every other place, and that we may have but dimly dreamed the good in store for those whom God for holiest love hath made.

In the nature of the case, the most that even Christianity itself could do at first, though it is the strongest force ever let loose upon the planet, was to separate one man and one woman from the common herd, into each home, telling the woman to remain there in grateful quietness, while the man stood at the door to defend its sacred shrine with fist and spear, to insist upon its rights of property, and later on, to represent it in the state. Thus, under the conditions of a civilization crude and material, grew up that well-worn maxim of the common law, "Husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband." But such supreme power as this brought to the man supreme temptation. By the laws of mind he legislated first for himself, and afterward for the physically weaker one within "his" home. The femme couverte is not a character appropriate to our peaceful, home-like communities, although she may have been, and doubtless was, a necessary figure in the days when women were safe only as they were shut up in castles, and when they were the booty chiefly sought in war. To-day, a woman may circumnavigate the world alone, and yet be unmolested. Our marriage laws and customs are changing to meet these new conditions. It will not do to give the husband of the modern woman power to whip his wife, "provided the stick he uses is not larger than his finger"; to give him the right to will away her unborn child; to have control over her property; to make all the laws under which she is to live; adjudicate all her penalties; try her before juries of men; conduct her to prison under the care of men; cast the ballot for her; and, in general, hold her in the estate of a perpetual minor. It will not do to let the modern man determine the age of "consent," settle

the penalties that men shall suffer whose indignities and outrages upon women are worse than death, and, by his exclusive power, to make all laws and choose all officers, judicial and executive, thus leaving his own case wholly in his own hands. To continue this method is to make it as hard as possible for men to do right, and as easy as possible for them to do wrong; the magnificent possibilities of manly character are best prophesied from the fact that under such a system so many men are good and gracious. My theory of marriage, in its relation to society, would give this postulate: Husband and wife are one, and that one is― husband and wife. I believe they will never come to the heights of purity, of power, and peace, for which they were designed in Heaven, until this better law prevails. One undivided half of the world for husband and wife equally; coeducation to mate them on the plane of mind; equal property rights to make her God's own free woman, not coerced into marriage for the sake of support, nor a bond-slave after she is married, who asks her master for the price of a paper of pins, and gives him back the change; or, if she be a petted favorite, who owes the freedom of his purse wholly to his will, and never to her right; woman left free to go her honored and self-respecting way as a maiden in perpetuo, rather than marry a man whose deterioration through the alcohol and nicotine habits is a deadly menace to herself and the descendants that such a marriage has invoked-these are the outlooks of the future that shall make the marriage system, never a failure since it became monogamous, an assured, a permanent, a paradisiacal

success.

These things are thus frankly uttered in your hearing by one who has reached the serene heights of life's meridian, and who may claim the prerogatives pathetically hinted at in these lines from Longfellow's Evangeline:

"Then there appeared and spread faint streaks of gray o'er her forehead
Dawn of another life, that broke o'er her earthly horizon,

As in the east the first faint streaks of the morning."

Goethe said: "Tis the sunset of life that lendeth me mystical lore," and in these days following my fiftieth year I feel myself to be in heart and purpose like an elder sister to the average member of my audience. Receive then these words, uttered in love and kindness by one who has gathered two thousand pupils around her in the schools, and who believes that the teachers of the nation can do more for its homes than they have thought by inculcating from early life the principles of equal education, equal rights, equal healthfulness in dress, and equal power in government for the two factions, man and woman, that make up the integer, humanity. Let us as teachers take our text from the New Testament, "There is neither male nor female in Christ Jesus," and train the young people in our Christian laureate's commentary, as given in his famous lines:

"Two heads in council, two beside the hearth;
Two in the noisy business of the world;

Two in the liberal offices of life,

Two plummets dropped to sound the abyss

Of science and the secrets of the mind."

The White Cross in education broadens out to my thought into the careful training of all our young people in the principles I have herein set forth. Inculcate in the minds of the on-coming generation broad, generous and noble ideas concerning the relations of men and women. This will be WhiteCross work upon the highest and most helpful plane. Young people holding these opinions will hardly give themselves over to base conduct, or a worthless career.

The twentieth annual report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that "in the employments in which the very lowest wages are paid women constitute over 70 per cent. of the workers, while in the employments that pay $20 per week women constitute hardly over 3 per cent. It is also brought to light that in the same occupations, standing side by side with men, women are paid less wages for the same work, or, what amounts to the same thing, a woman twenty years old or over is made to work for the same wages as a boy of ten."

What a leveling down is this! What a premium it puts upon vice-giving men more money to pay and women more temptations to be paid. What a cast-iron argument for the equal suffrage it affords, for when women vote they will oblige men who want office to legislate in their interest, and not to any sufficient extent before.

Now, let me ask you, brothers and sisters of the public school, how can you better build up the chivalric principles of the White Cross than by training your boys for a crusade against this savage injustice toward the world's working women? Twelve days ago I spoke before the International Sunday School Convention in Pittsburgh, pleading for four temperance lessons a year as the minimum of Christian instruction in favor of pure habits. They gave us two Sundays fixed and two optional, removed the lessons from competition with review Sunday, urged Sunday-school magazines to give to teachers a careful study of the temperance lesson, and teachers to teach temperance every Sunday so far as possible. As I went to that noble army of workers with courage, so do I come to you, and in addition to what has already been asked, for the more direct teaching of White-Cross principles as a personal lesson to each pupil.

Here in the midst of our civilization is a little child-of all the "original packages" on earth the most original-one never to be declared contraband in any commonwealth, no matter what else may be prohibited. And my contention is that the true teacher's office is to explain that little child to himself, and afterward go far as may be to explain the universe to him. I know we have reversed the process-beginning at the circumference rather than at the center, putting the macrocosm before the microcosm. But I believe the first object of the teacher is to orient the pupil concerning "Heart within and God o'er head," to teach him the divine truth on which is based his physical wellbeing. For as words are the carriages in which thoughts ride, so the human body is the soul's chariot, and that splendid Phoebus, the human soul, becomes

a dethroned charioteer unless he understands his vehicle. Let us make of him a Sir Galahad, whose daily life shall eloquently say, "My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure." For though man's forehead be lifted toward the stars, his feet are planted upon the earth, and a sound, pure mind must have a pure, sound body in which to dwell.

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, profoundly impressed with this truth, has, under the skilled leadership of Mrs. Mary H. Hunt, secured laws in all but eleven States requiring specific scientific instruction relative to the effect of narcotics and stimulants upon the human body, and has emphasized the importance of beginning this instruction in the primary grade. The National Educational Association and the various State and local associations have been our chief coadjutors in this holy fight for a clear brain. You are daily helping to bring the arrest of thought to millions of memories that are like "wax to receive and marble to retain"; working it into the warp and woof of youthful character that science is on the side of temperance reform; that each child should enact a prohibitory law for one—that one himself; declare that law constitutional in the supreme court of his own judgment and enforce it by the executive of his own will, worked, as I believe that will to be in everything that is good and true, by the blessed will of God.

Now let us broaden this teaching of the effects of stimulants upon the human body until it includes all those wholesome habitudes essential to the physical well-being and moral education of the child, and a noble chastity lies at the very foundation of this teaching. As it cannot be less desirable for man to be a water-drinking animal than for every other member of the mighty mammalia so to be, it is unlikely that the great law of continence and chastity, unbroken in their natural estate by any of the lower orders of warmblooded animals, and to an almost universal degree unbroken by one-half the human race, should make of any fraction of that race a dubious exception. It is, instead, the unnatural license of centuries that now takes on the semblance of a law, but is so far below the standard set in nature that it may well have been the origin of evil and foredoom of humanity to sin. A white life for two is the true watchword of our time; it is the moral of that strange book, Count Tolstoï's "Kreutzer Sonata "- -a book that has stirred the public mind more than any publication since Stead's Pall Mall Gazette disclosures. I am told that a widely circulated volume entitled "Tokology," by Dr. Alice B. Stockham, whose name I see on your program, suggested to Count Tolstoï, as he declares, the theme of this last story. While his anti-marriage theory will not be accepted by his readers, there is one sentence in this great author's recently published explanation of his motive in writing this tragedy, that goes far toward answering the popular newspaper charge against his sanity. He

says:

"If a pupil objects to drawing a straight line because his hand is weak and tremulous, shall we for that reason set him a crooked line rather than a straight one, as his model?"

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