And their conscience is more tender. But there is one temptation to which they too often yield. With them the great dangers are vanity and the thirst for admiration, which often become a sort of diseased excitement--what drinking or gambling is to men. Here is the weak point. Yielding chiefly to this temptation, scores of women are falling every day. Vanity leads them to wear the extravagant, the flashy, the immodest, the unhealthy dress, to dance the immodest dance, to adopt the alluring manner, to carry flirting to extremes. Vanity leads them, in short, to forget true self-respect, to enjoy the very doubtful compliment of a miserably cheap admiration. They become impatient of the least appearance of neglect or indifference, they become eager in pursuit of attention, while men always attribute that pursuit to motives of the coarsest kind. It is generally vanity alone which leads a married woman to receive the first disgraceful flattery of dissolute men. Probably nine out of ten of those American women who have trifled with honor and reputation, whose names are spoken with the sneer of contempt, have been led on, step by step, in the path of sin by vanity as the chief motive. Where one woman falls from low and coarse passions, a hundred fall from sheer levity and the love of admiration.
To counteract this fatal influence young women must be taught to respect themselves, to be on their guard against vanity and its enticements, to cherish personal modesty in every way. The married woman who is quietly working by example or by precept among the young girls nearest to her, seeking to cherish and foster among them this vital principle of pure personal modesty in dress, in language, in reading, in tone of voice, in countenance, in manner--the natural outward expression of true modesty of heart--is doing far more for her country than if she were to mount the rostrum to-morrow and make a political speech eloquent as any of Webster's.
Sensible women may always have a good measure of political influence of the right sort, if they choose. And it is in one sense a duty on their part to claim this influence, and to exert it, but always in the true womanly way. The influence of good sense, of a sound judgment, of good feeling may always he theirs. Let us see that we preserve this influence, and that we use it wisely. But let us cherish our happy immunities as women by keeping aloof from all public personal action in the political field. There is much higher work for us to do. Our time, our thoughts, our efforts may be given to labors far more important than any mere temporary electing, or law-making, passed today, annulled to-morrow, in obedience to the fickle spirit of party politics.
THAT WORK IS TO PROMOTE BY ALL WORTHY MEANS THE MORAL CIVILIZATION OF THE COUNTRY.
Toward this work legislation, the mere enacting of laws, can do but little. We have all heard of the shrewd mind who considered the songs of a people as more important than their laws. The moral condition of a nation is subject to many different influences--of these the statute book is but one, and that not the most important.
No mere skeleton of political constitution can, of itself, produce moral health and strength. It is the living heart within which does the work. And over that heart women have very great influence. The home is the cradle of the nation. A sound home education is the most important of all moral influences. In the very powerful influences which affection gives them over the home, by teaching childhood, by guiding youth, over the men of their family, women have noble means for working good, not only to their own households, not only to the social circle about them, but to the nation at large. All these influences they can bring into action far more effectually by adhering closely to that position which is not only natural to them, but also plainly allotted to them by the revealed Word of God. In no position of their own devising can they do that work half so well.
Political and social corruption are clearly the great evils to be dreaded for our country. We have already gone far enough in the path of universal manhood suffrage to feel convinced that no mere enlargement of the suffrage has power to save us from those evils.
