Street customs, manners and language are, to a very considerable extent, outward exponents of the moral condition within. It would not be possible to find any place in Europe now where women could be seen going about the streets in the condition as respects raiment which Josselyn, Winslow and Roger Williams seem to intimate was not unusual with the British females of their time; nor would a strumpet even, much less any decent woman, from a foreign land, be treated in the streets of any civilized city as Madame Riedesel describes herself as having been treated in the streets of Bristol in 1777. One cannot conceive of an adulterer or adulteress now doing public penance in a white sheet before a whole congregation assembled for the public worship of God, nor of a really respectable young married couple standing up under the same circumstances and confessing to the sin of fornication. Even if such a thing were done, it would be looked upon as rather suggestive than edifying. All the evidence accordingly indicates that, morally, the improvement made in the nineteenth century as compared with those that preceded it has been more than superficial and in externals only,--that it has been real, in essentials as well as in language and manners. So, while it would not be safe to adopt Burke's splendid generality, that vice has in our time lost half its evil in losing all its grossness, yet it is not unfair to adopt the trope in a modified form, and assert that, in the matter of sexual morality, vice in the nineteenth century as compared with the seventeenth or the eighteenth has lost some part of its evil in losing much of its grossness. FOOTNOTES: [1] History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, p. 231. [2] In 1839 the Rev. William P. Lunt prepared and delivered before the First Congregational Church of Quincy two most scholarly and admirable historical discourses on the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the gathering of the society. In the appendix to these discourses (p. 93) Dr. Lunt states that the earlier records of the church had never been in the possession of either of its then ministers, the Rev. Peter Whitney or himself; and he adds: "In a conversation with Dr. Harris, formerly the respected pastor of Dorchester First Congregational Church, I understood him to say that Mr. Welde, formerly pastor of what is now Braintree Church, had these records in his possession; but when he obtained them, and for what purpose, was not explained. They are probably now irrecoverably lost. As curious and interesting relics of old times, their loss must be regretted."