offer him marriage conditions which are themselves impure, unequal laws which are themselves a temptation, houses incompatible with health or decency, wages insufficient for the healthy support of home, and wife, and children; if that, broadly speaking, has been the marriage condition which society offers to wage-earning youth, what right has it to babble about "purity" in that narrower and more individual relation, while careless to provide it in its own larger domain?
If you have employments—such as that of bank-clerk or shop-assistant—which demand of those engaged a certain gentility of dress and appearance, but offer only a wage upon which (till a man is over thirty) domestic establishment at the required standard of respectability is quite impossible—if that is the social condition imposed in a great branch of middle-class industry—if you tolerate that condition and draw bigger profits from your business, and bigger dividends from your investments upon the strength of it—what right have you to demand of your victims an abstinence which is in itself unnatural and penurious, and therefore impure?
Yet what proportion of sermons, think you, have been preached during the last hundred years in churches and chapels against that great social impurity of underpaid labour, and underfed life which have between them done so far more to create prostitution than any indwelling depravity in the heart of youth?
