have we already forgotten the natural loyalty of youth. how are we paying—our debt to them?
honour the dead, care for those who saved the homes: for, as we have here striven to show, never before has youth been in such dire need of sympathy, understanding, and help. too soon we forget that war blasts humanity, a state of war makes us all brutes, degrades every man, woman, and child, in every part of their nature, for all hours of their lives. youth, indeed, was rudderless through no fault of its own and, when least prepared, most needing a clear vision, it has been tossed into such a medley of mad notions as never before deluded mankind.
we were, indeed, at the approach of dawn; new light was breaking over the mists of victorian morality. to recover the real progress, which has been diverted into a mere riot of attack, we have endeavoured to gather [80]together, examine, and clearly state what the "new" morality really means and leads to, how it has come to be upheld. without denying in some the honest seeking of truth, we have sought to make clear where the teaching around us to-day is untrue, destructive of reality, and poisonous in its effect.
as now proclaimed, this teaching cannot escape its responsibility for much evil talk, thought, and emotion, for many black deeds. under its influence, thoughtless humanity is fast coming to believe and say that all love, or even comradeship, between the sexes without immediate physical satisfaction is hypocritical and unreal; that is, cramped by forced self-denial or an evidence of cold blood and incapacity for real love. the young live feverishly by this conviction: they flaunt their passions, their falls and their conquests, before the world. they jest at sin, sneer at restraint, and spare no thought for purity. kindness, courtesy, thought for others, are cast to the winds. at all costs, they must be themselves, and snatch the hour's joy.
such feverish disorder of emotion—the swooning delirium, sudden fires, and complete abandon of balance—is not natural to wholesome humanity; but, as we have seen, it can [81]easily be produced by suggestion. now that popular novelists casually produce drama and crude excitement by smart tales of such over-sexed human beings, an immense body of readers, without knowledge or experience to combat the falseness of the picture, have come to accept it as a normal record of real life. they are adapting themselves to its alluring thrills, modelling their lives to its pattern, and acting upon its teaching. from men and women, they may too soon become mere male and female, as god did not create them. the whole history of mankind, our centuries of growth from cave-man to the last word in civilization, have established truths which remain true. our right to be ourselves can never wipe out our duty to others. there is an eternal and infinite difference between right and wrong, and those who ignore this cannot escape the penalty. love is not lust. all that is finest and noblest in human nature has been built upon a pure and constant loyalty; of which the eternal symbol (however smirched and stained by folly or sin) is marriage and the home. character, which ultimately rules the world, grows straight amidst the influence of family life. the permanent ideal for man and woman; creating [82]new life, bearing and cherishing each new generation, is a complete union of the whole nature, spiritual and physical, whereof the spiritual bond must be supreme.
self-control, restraint, and, if needs be, sacrifice, are the highest expression of self.
if we may not refuse new light, we can never forget old truth. the foundations of morality have been established by our gradual emergence from that state of savagery, into which we were again for a few years submerged by war.
those who blot out the vision attained by centuries of man's upward fight, thereby confounding the ultimate issues of right and wrong, setting the body above the soul, are intoxicating and poisoning humanity as with a deadly drug.
