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Page 12
So much for the material results to the sex. What are the moral results?
One does not like to speak of them, particularly to those who do not and
can not know--to good women in whose innocent minds female immorality is
inseparable from flashy gowning and the painted face; to foolish,
book-taught men who honestly believe in some protective sanctity that
hedges womanhood. If men of the world with years enough to have lived
out of the old _r�gime_ into the new would testify in this matter there
would ensue a great rattling of dry bones in bodices of reform-ladies.
Nay, if the young man about town, knowing nothing of how things were in
the "dark backward and absym of time," but something of the moral
distance between even so free-running a creature as the society girl and
the average working girl of the factory, the shop and the office, would
speak out (under assurance of immunity from prosecution) his testimony
would be a surprise to the cartilaginous virgins, blowsy matrons, acrid
relicts and hairy males of Emancipation. It would pain, too, some very
worthy but unobservant persons not in sympathy with "the cause."
Certain significant facts are within the purview of all but the very
young and the comfortably blind. To the woman of to-day the man of
to-day is imperfectly polite. In place of reverence lie gives her
"deference"; to the language of compliment has succeeded the language of
raillery. Men have almost forgotten how to bow. Doubtless the advanced
female prefers the new manner, as may some of her less forward sisters,
thinking it more sincere. It is not; our giddy grandfather talked
high-flown nonsense because his heart had tangled his tongue. He treated
his woman more civilly than we ours because he loved her better. He
never had seen her on the "rostrum" and in the lobby, never had heard
her in advocacy of herself, never had read her confessions of his sins,
never had felt the stress of her competition, nor himself assisted by
daily personal contact in rubbing the bloom off her. He did not know
that her virtues were due to her secluded life, but thought, dear old
boy, that they were a gift of God.
A MAD WORLD
Let us suppose that in tracing its cycloidal curves through the
unthinkable reaches of space traversed by the solar system our planet
should pass through a "belt" of attenuated matter having the property of
dementing us! It is a conception easily enough entertained. That space
is full of malign conditions incontinuously distributed; that we are at
one time traversing a zone comparatively innocuous and at another
spinning through a region of infection; that away behind us in the wake
of our swirling flight are fields of plague and pain still agitated by
our passage through them,--all this is as good as known. It is almost as
certain as it is that in our little annual circle round the sun are
points at which we are stoned and brick-batted like a pig in a
potato-patch--pelted with little nodules of meteoric metal flung like
gravel, and bombarded with gigantic masses hurled by God knows what?
What strange adventures await us in those yet untraveled regions toward
which we speed?--into what malign conditions may we not at any time
plunge?--to the strength and stress of what frightful environment may
we not at last succumb? The subject lends itself readily enough to a
jest, but I am not jesting: it is really altogether probable that our
solar system, racing through space with inconceivable velocity, will one
day enter a region charged with something deleterious to the human
brain, minding us all mad-wise.
By the way, dear reader, did you ever happen to consider the possibility
that you are a lunatic, and perhaps confined in an asylum? It seems to
you that you are not--that you go with freedom where you will, and use a
sweet reasonableness in all your works and ways; but to many a lunatic
it seems that he is Rameses II, or the Holkar of Indore. Many a plunging
maniac, ironed to the floor of a cell, believes himself the Goddess of
Liberty careering gaily through the Ten Commandments in a chariot of
gold. Of your own sanity and identity you have no evidence that is any
better than he has of his. More accurately, I have none of mine; for
anything I know, you do not exist, nor any one of all the things with
which I think myself familiarly conscious. All may be fictions of my
disordered imagination. I really know of but one reason for doubting
that I am an inmate of an asylum for the insane--namely, the probability
that there is nowhere any such thing as an asylum for the insane.
This kind of speculation has charms that get a good neck-hold upon
attention. For example, if I am really a lunatic, and the persons and
things that I seem to see about me have no objective existence, what an
ingenious though disordered imagination I must have! What a clever
_coup_ it was to invent Mr. Rockefeller and clothe him with the
attribute of permanence! With what amusing qualities I have endowed my
laird of Skibo, philanthropist. What a masterpiece of creative humor is
my Fatty Taft, statesman, taking himself seriously, even solemnly, and
persuading others to do the same! And this city of Washington, with its
motley population of silurians, parvenoodles and scamps pranking
unashamed in the light of day, and its saving contingent of the forsaken
righteous, their seed begging bread,--did Rabelais' exuberant fancy ever
conceive so--but Rabelais is, perhaps, himself a conception.
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