[116] Large numbers of the women in the Suffrage movement were of this type. Nor is it possible to exonerate such women entirely from a charge of jealousy of the young girl, when their efforts are obviously directed towards making her, like themselves, ill-adapted, discontented and physiologically miserable. [117] See _The Collected Works of Thomas de Quincey_, Vol. VIII, p. 349. The author proceeds: “Accordingly it is amongst the young men and women of this body that the most afflicting cases under this eccentric type occur. Even for children, however, the systematic repression of all ebullient feeling must be perilous” ... etc. [118] For an interesting discourse, uninfluenced by the recent psychoanalytical school, on the connexion between sexual and religious emotion, see Mercier, Op. cit., pp. 220-223. [119] Thus Dr. E. Jones argues (Op. cit., p. 217), “Civilization has reached, or is on the point of reaching, the limit, beyond which unguided sublimation can no longer be successfully maintained.” [120] See Byron’s letter to John Murray, Feb. 7, 1821: “The truth is that in these days the grand ‘_primum mobile_’ of England is _cant_; cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral; but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life. This is the fashion, and while it lasts will be too powerful for those who can only exist by taking the tone of the time. I say _cant_ because it is a thing of words, without the smallest influence upon human actions; the English being no wiser, no better, and much poorer and more divided amongst themselves, as well as far less moral, than they were before the prevalence of this verbal decorum.” This was written a hundred years ago, and is still true to-day. [121] Dr. Vintras and Parent Duchatelet both concur in representing English prostitution as about the most degraded and at the same time the most irrevocable. [122] Throughout this discussion I mean by prostitution not any form of illicit hetero-sexual relations but commercial and promiscuous unchastity. [123] Speaking of the prostitute Lecky says: “But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in their pride of untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame” (_History of European Morals_, London, 1899, Vol. II, p. 283). [124] Let all who doubt this consult the literature on the subject (even our own _Encyclopædia Britannica_, 9th and 11th editions), and also consult people who have been engaged in rescue work. [125] It is for this reason that a man who gives a girl an illegitimate child is really more kind and merciful than the man who seduces her while taking precautions to prevent issue. But it will take some time before the world can possibly be expected to see the matter in this light.