One of the interesting phases of this puritanism or phariseeism is his attitude toward women and their morality and their purity. If ever a people has refined eroticism to a greater degree than the American I am not aware of it. Owing to a theory of the doctrinaire acceptance of the Mary legend possibly (Mary-olotry, no less), the good American, capable of the same gross financial crimes previously indicated, has been able to look upon most women, but more particularly those above him in the social scale, as considerably more than human--angelic, no less, and possessed of qualities the like of which are not to be found in any breathing being, man, woman, child or animal. It matters not that his cities and towns, like those of any other nation, are rife with sex; that in each one are specific and often large areas devoted to Eros or Venus. While maintaining them he is still blind to their existence or import. He or his boys or his friends go--but---- Only a mentally one-sided nature or race such as the Anglo-Saxon could have built upon any such asinine theory as this. One would suppose that as they did, so they would have the courage to say, or at least cease this endless pother as to superior virtue. But no. The purity, the sanctity, the self-abnegation, the delicacy of women in America--how these qualities have been exaggerated and dinned into our ears, until at last the average scrubby non-reasoning male, quite capable of visiting the gardens of Venus or taking a girl off the street, is no more able to clearly visualize the creature before him than he is the central wilds of Africa which he has never seen. A princess, a goddess, a divine mother or creative principle, all the virtues, all the perfections, no vices, no weaknesses, no errors--some such hodge-podge as this has come to be the average Anglo-Saxon, or at least American, conception of the average American woman. I do not say that a portion of this illusion is not valuable, but as it stands now she is too good to be true, a paragon, a myth! Actually, she doesn’t exist at all as he has been taught to imagine her. She is nothing more than a two-legged biped like the rest of us, but in consequence of this delusion sex itself, being a violation of this paragon, has become a crime. We enter upon the earth, it is true, in a none too artistic manner (conceived in iniquity and born in sin, is the Biblical phrasing of it), but all this has long since been glozed over, ignored, and to obviate its brutality as much as possible the male has been called upon to purify himself in thought and deed, to avoid all private speculation as to women and his relationship to them, and, much more than that, to avoid all public discussion, either by word of mouth or the printed page.