New Ulm review. (New Ulm, Brown County, Minn.) 1892-1961, 1894-10-31
N, WEDNESDAY,, OCTOBER 81. 1894. WHOLE NUMBER s75

pomp and triumph of life. How many
of the men to be met in any fashionable
gathering have lived up to the standard
of sexual purity they exact from their
wives2 How many of them can look
back to stainless past? How many
can look into the eyes of the wives who
trusted them or the daughters who love
them, without a secret remorse which
cannot be measured? But fashionable
society makes wide distinction between
the male and female sinner. And this
is why the average estimate of women
by men of the world is so low. Get a
group of such men together, and they
will speak Of women in terms that they
would blush to have their mothers hear.
The false sentiment that the purity de-
manded of women is impossible to men,
is at the bottom of this vast social evil
this horror of the world. While men
are led to believe, and to act according
ly, that virtue, in the sense in which it
is expected of women, is not required of
them, what hope is there for social puri-
ty? The practical workings of this the
ory makes the one sex merely the prey
of the other. This brutal idea that man
the head of all intelligence-is at best
but little more than bundle of blind
instincts and of lawless appetites, at
whose mercy he is, which he is as power
less to control as the beast at his feet, is
the underlying impulse Of polygamy, of
all lascivlousness, license and barbarism
on the earth,
There is no law in the universe more
certain in its operation than that which
Furnishes sensuality. The man who makes
a god OF his belly feels the result in an
unwieldly body and stupid brain. The
man who lntoxicates his senses by the
use of stimulants, wears them out, and
poisons both body and soul. The man
and the woman who give themselves up
to sexual vice, never fail to win to them
selves moral corruption or induration,
and often bodily debility and disease
At the gate of this garden of sensual
pleasure the angel stands with sword,
and no man enters unsmitten Ct him.
The history of national decline and down.
fall is but detail of the effects of sens
uality. The free love doctrines and free
love practices of the present day, the
multiplication of cases of divorce, and
the shameful infdelities that prevail, are
all indications of the sensual tendencies
of the age. 1t is tendency which is do
ing more to undermine the character of
the American people than all the other
follies and vices to which they are addic-
ted.
To men and women who have prosti-
tuted and dulled their moral sense, the
appeal to conscience, to honor, and the
argument from religion and morals is of
little force. Those are motives which
they have ceased to regard. The appeal
must be made to their selfshness. The
teachers and preachers must insist upon
the universal fact, based on universal ex-
perience, that there is nothing in the
world that makes SO poor return for
its cost as sensual indulgence. "Cent
per cent d. we pay for every vicious in
dulgence," says the proverb, but it is too
moderate by half in it's estimate of the
expense; because no man ever traded ex-
tensively in this line without becoming a
bankrupt in happiness and in character
On one side of the account there is the
temporary pleasure which illicit 1ndul-
gence brings; on the other side are shame
and fear, conscious loss of purity, dead.
enlng of moral sensibility, the possession
of foul secret to be carried into all the
relations of life, disease and remorse, q
reduction of the capacity of enjoyment
and of the stock of vitality, or, what is
more than all these, hardness, brutality
and the formation of habits whose only
end is safety, self disgust and ruin. Il
IS not necessary to go into all the details
of the debit side of this account. They
may be found and readsof all men in
graveyards, in hospitals, in garrets and
cellars, in ruined families and ruined
hearts and hopes.
In this view this social vice rises into
the position of the scourge of mankind,
the mother of disease, the nurse of crime,
the polluter of society, the destroyer of
souls. Not until the world sshall rise
out of this swamp Of sensuality. rank
with weeds and rank with deadly vapors,