Wise and discreet were those early Victorians, with their uncompromising ostracism of loose women. Apart altogether from such salutary expression of their condemnation of impure living, they were vastly too clever and far-seeing to admit persons of notoriously evil habit, peeress or actress, to association with their clean young girls, as modern mothers do; to meet and to mix freely with them socially or at Charity Bazaars, on Flag-Days, and so forth. With the result that girls all the world over have become increasingly lax and decadent in tone and manner, in dress and morale, from confusion of their young standards by social tolerance and recognition of such persons, as also from corruption by demoralising contact with and observation of such. Intolerance? Pharisaism? By no means! The strong and straight, uncompromising moral standards of its women serve as landmarks of, and impulse to a nation's progress. Clear and definite lines of demarcation between good and evil, between possible and impossible modes of conduct, point the moral of advance, and turn the scale in the upward direction for the weak, the hesitating, and the imitative. Dread of consequences went far, in less sophisticated days, to safeguard and foster womanly virtue. Modern expedients have, unfortunately, removed all cause for fear in this relation; permitting an impunity of action demoralising to the weak in will or principle, who require every possible aid and check to guide them aright. In simpler days, girls who had lapsed were steadied and strengthened in character and self-restraint by the compulsion to support, as too by their natural fondness for the unwanted child. Now the first step--having cost them nothing--predisposes to further backslidings. And both character and self-control degenerate increasingly. VII To weaken the marriage-bond by setting it for a term of years only, or by making it terminable by consent, would virtually destroy marriage and family-life. The fact that the bond would not be binding would make persons more careless even than they are at present in selection of the mate, and would thus multiply the number of mis-matings. Which would be still further to deteriorate species, since the finer types of children are born only of well-mated parents.