212 PLAIN FACTS FOE OLD AND YOUNG 



relating filthy stories, indulging in foul jokes, making 

 indecent allusions, is a most abominable sin. Such 

 habits crush out pure thoughts ; they annihilate respect 

 for virtue ; they make the mind a quagmire of obscen- 

 ity; they lead to overt acts of lewdness. 



But boys and youth are not alone in this. More 

 often than otherwise, they learn from older ones the 

 phraseology of vice. And if the sin is loathsome in 

 such youthful transgressors, what detestable enormity 

 must characterize it in the old! 



Foul Gossip.— And women, too, are not without 

 their share in this accursed thing, this ghost of vice, 

 which haunts the sewing-circle and the parlor as well 

 as the club-room. 



Masculine purity loves to regard woman as chaste 

 in mind as well as in body, to surround her with con- 

 ceptions of purity and impregnable virtue ; but the con- 

 clusion is irresistible that those who can gloat over 

 others' lapses from virtue, and find delight in such 

 questionable entertainments as the most recent case of 

 seduction, or the newest scandal, have need to purify 

 their hearts and re-enforce their waning chastity. 

 Nevertheless, a writer says, and perhaps truly, that 

 "the women comprise about all the real virtue there is 

 in the world." Certainly, if women were one-half as 

 impure as the masculine portion of humanity, the world 

 would be vastly worse than it is. 



Causes of TJnchastity.— Early travelers among 

 the North American Indians were struck with the al- 

 most entire absence of that abandonment to vice which 

 might be expected in a race uninfluenced by the moral 

 restraints of Christianity. Wlien first discovered in 

 their native wilds, they were free from both the vices 

 and the consequent diseases of civilization. This fact 



