Far more injurious to her fair fame than the murderous attacks of the most dishonourable and unscrupulous enemy she has ever known was the stealthy undermining of her people’s ideals through the slow but sure rot which had begun to set in at the very core of her civilian life. That rot was eating its way through commerce and crumbling down every bulwark of society. Its ravaging microbes swarmed through every channel--the pulpit, the stage, and all forms of art. Through its influence the abominable crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah were re-enacted and condoned, both in the political and social world. By gradual and subtle process, step by step on the downward grade, the unthinking public were led by certain writers of the Press who are special pleaders for vice, to accept sensuality as the only meaning of love, and every town possessing a bookseller’s shop was flooded with published outpourings of sickly and degrading sexuality, insulting to the self-respect of men and women, old and young alike. Girls and boys hardly in their teens carried these vile books in their hands, and read and discussed them without shame. Their poisonous trail is over many a young mind, and the mischief they have wrought will take years of undoing. This kind of pernicious literature, coupled with a “sensational” Press, by which I mean that side of the Press which truckles to the baser inclinations of mankind, and flaunts pictorial representations of semi-nude women of the stage and of the demoralised portion of Society in the eyes of decent folk whether they will or no, is in a great measure responsible for the recklessness, extravagance, sloth, and selfishness which have disfigured social England for the past decade. Things were getting worse and worse; men who truckled to vice were paid with baronetcies as “hush-money,” women passing for “ladies,” lower than the lowest of street sinners, because they had education and opportunities which the street sinner has not, were praised as embodiments of all the beauties and all the virtues, and “home,” that dear possession of the faithful soul, was voted “dull” by the younger folk, because of its wholesome restrictions on harmful impulses and runaway passions.