Horatio Robinson Storer

“ The licentiousness of the brothel is clear and open in its character; nobody defends it; every one is aware of its seductions and its dangers; the young man who enters the house of shame knows that he does it at the peril of reputation, and under the dread of disease. But the other form of licentiousness is secret from its very nature. It may be practised without suspicion; there is little fear of discovery or of shame. It lurks in the school, the academy, the college, the workshop, ay, even in the nursery. No age and no profession are without examples of the dreadful ruin it can accomplish. ”

“ Again, all of us learn the lessons of life by experience—sad experience, indeed, it too often is. Many a man would give even his own soul could his past life be restored to him, and its follies, its sins be effaced. Too often his soul is no longer his own to give: inextricably entangled in passion’s web, wound about and about with its myriad threads, there remains but the dead and worthless semblance of himself, that can be restored by nought save the boundless grace of God. Who would not gladly escape such risk, and welcome every premonition of danger? ”

“ But if she grieves or complains, she is perhaps confronted with the assertion that it is what she is made for; and with bitterness of heart and sorrow of soul, looking down through long weeks of heart-sickness and physical pain and unrest, to the dreaded, unknown crisis, to the after years of care, labor, and anxiety, and all to bear without hearty sympathy, what wonder that she is in despair, and little cares whether she live or die? Yet she must smile, and be cheerful to the world, and it never guesses all is not right at home. ”

“ The Catholic Church has always recognized the tortures so often accompanying a single life, when, exposed to temptation, as every man occasionally is, he endeavors to preserve himself therefrom. “Our strength is like the strength of tow thrown into the fire; it is instantly burned and consumed. Would it not be a miracle if tow cast into the fire did not burn? It would also be a miracle if we exposed ourselves to the occasion and did not fall.” According to St. Bernardine of Sienna, “It is a greater miracle not to fall in the occasion of sin than to raise a dead man to life.” ”

“ I was very slow to be convinced that any woman of decent character would consciously perpetrate an abortion; still slower to see how any woman calling herself pure minded could so degrade the sanctities of marriage as to make steady and persistent attempts to prevent impregnation,—and yet I had for many years felt sure that a great many so-called ‘female diseases’ were incited and developed by the luxurious and indolent habits of our women, which permit them, when neither cultivated nor philanthropic, to become conscious of every phase of gestative action or sexual excitement. ”

“ The marriage of very old people, permissible on platonic or economical grounds, is sanitarily to be disapproved, and in many instances is but the folly of the second childhood. Great disparities in age are almost always matches of interest rather than affection: the selfish greediness, the shameless yet impotent lechery, of old age joins itself well with that ambition or thirst for wealth which sells the young girl to her worse than slavery—this mating of youth to a virtual corpse. ”

“ No woman dreads her travail, as she dreads the loss of what she calls, in her unhappy ignorance and blindness, her husband’s love. O, that we could restore the happy simplicity of thirty years ago, when there were homes where we now have houses, mothers and housekeepers in the place of lady patronesses, fathers and husbands instead of loungers at the club! But the world moves onward, never backward, and you must ring the bugle call again and again, till it brings conscience and harmony into the irregular and ‘purposeless’ march. ”

“ A natural instinct, a great longing, has arisen in a boy’s heart, together with the appearance of the powers requisite to gratify it. Everything, the habits of the world, the keen appetite of youth for all that is new, the example of companions, the pride of health and strength, opportunity, all combine to urge him to give the rein to what seems a natural propensity. The boy does not know that to his immature frame every sexual indulgence is unmitigated evil. He does not think that to his inexperienced mind and heart every illicit pleasure is a degradation, to be bitterly regretted hereafter ”

“ They are not overtaken by temptation, for they seek it. With them the transgression becomes habitual, and the stain on the character is deep and lasting. The prevailing sentiment of the mind, the prevailing tendency of the will, is to sensual vices; and there are no vices which so deeply contaminate the soul of man, so degrade, so brutalize it, as these. The degree of debasement has in some men, even in some communities, reached so low as to suggest modes of indulging this appetite from which the common sensualist shrinks with horror, and which cannot be even named without loathing. ”

“ Storer’s arguments and statements are earnest, conscientious and powerful; but women, the chief players in this tragedy of life, feel that while the facts are in possession of medical men, their motives are not so well known and appreciated. Often they are of such a character as may not be repeated, even to the long-tried and trusted physician; for there are certain things of too painfully delicate a nature for woman’s lips to utter to a masculine ear, while to a sister sympathizer, perhaps, the whole story is freely poured out. ”

“ A thousand forms of disease may hang round the victim, embitter his existence, or destroy his hopes in life, which he never imagines to have had such an origin. But even farther than this: Providence seems to have stamped this vice with more than its ordinary token of displeasure, by rendering its votaries liable to that terrible disease from which so few of them ultimately escape. The effects of this disease, as is well known, are not always to be eradicated. They are not confined to present suffering. They may set a mark upon a man as indelible as that of Cain. ”

“ If she learns a way of escape, what wonder that she count herself happy to be rid of, not so much the pledge of a husband’s love, as of his selfishness, that has haunted her life! What wonder if she for a time forget her moral obligations in her extremity, and is indifferent to the life which is no longer a blessing! ”

“ Courteous to strangers, we should be still more so to our own, and so be most truly brave in fighting down and conquering ourselves. To aid us in such chivalrous work was one chief end of The Good Physician; himself master of self, and, therefore, free from sin. It is surely no slight labor to endeavor thus to evangelize, no slight gain can we but thus be chastened, for chasteness is only to be gained by strict self-chastening, which, fruit from a perfect blossom, is the sign of a fuller love thus gained to us, both human and divine. ”

“ Thoughtless, forgetting that if exposed to the same dangers or the same temptations they also might have erred, women too often give to us men the impression that they are themselves but hypocrites and whited sepulchres; too often the first step towards a woman’s ruin has been from mere curiosity to see if she were really the immaculate and unapproachable creature her words would proclaim her. A woman’s hasty and uncharitable condemnation of an erring sister may well serve as a challenge to the tester of souls. As for us, he that is without sin let him cast the first stone. ”

“ The only answer to this problem is for the boy to learn to possess his soul in patience, and through example and advice, and earnest, prayerful [Pg 35] effort, to compel his own self-control, till he attains that full and complete development of all his powers that distinguishes the man. How small the proportion of all my readers who can lay their hands upon their hearts and say, with perfect truthfulness, that up to the time of reaching their majority they had never, for the sake of selfish or illicit gratification, been guilty of any offence against purity! ”

“ It not unfrequently happens that, from the consequences of this vice, when carried to an extreme, not even repentance and reformation liberate the unhappy victim.
“Let no one say that we overstate the extent of this evil, or exaggerate its importance to the health and morals of the young. It is in vain that we attempt to stay the licentiousness of youth, when we leave, unchecked in their growth, those seeds of the vice which are sown in the bosom of the child. ”

“ He is impelled by that strong and almost irresistible instinct by which the future peopling of the earth is determined, while in the woman it is, to a great extent, the subsequently awakened emotion of maternal love, which, far stronger in her than that for simple congress, leads her in very truth to lay down her life for her children; for this in every household, where husband and wife live in accordance with the laws of their being, is the practical result. ”

“ It is a law of our humanity that man must know both good and evil; he must know good through evil. There never was a principle but what triumphed through much evil; no man ever progressed to greatness and goodness but through great mistakes. ”

“ Professor Storer’s writings are no inapt index to his own character. He is thoroughly alive to his duties; sagacious to discern the truth, fearless in asserting it. Progressive, without being too radical, he is still sufficiently conservative to respect the opinions of others, even though at variance with his own. Perhaps no American physician of his own age, holds at the present time a more prominent position in his profession. ”

“ All that the law, and still more tyrannical custom, grants to us, in our wives; all that they have, and all that they are, in person and in very life. And here let me say, that I intend taking no ultra ground; that I am neither a fanatic nor professed philanthrope; and that in loosing, as I hope to do, some of woman’s present chains, it is solely for professional purposes, to increase her health, prolong her life, extend the benefits she confers upon society—in a word, selfishly to enhance her value to ourselves ”

“ Is it not obvious that our success must be small indeed if we confine ourselves to means intended to check the overt indulgences of maturity in licentiousness in one generation, whilst those who are to constitute the next are left to the same fearful development of their animal passions, which must lead them on, by steps as certain as the grave, in the same career of indulgence? ”

“ To seek peace and mental quiet through a divorce is, as a general thing, but cowardice. To encourage them is, therefore, to [Pg 126] offer a premium for pusillanimity. Were marriages, or rather engagements, contracted less hastily, and never, as is sometimes confessed, from curiosity, coquetry, or for fun, much, very much evil and suffering would be prevented. Men and women are often but the silliest of children, playing with each other’s hearts as though they were toys, and sowing for themselves and for each other a harvest of life-long misery. ”

“ Knowing that they are endangering their wife’s life, that they are causing her health seriously to suffer, or to be ruined, they still persist in their demands for what at the best is but a momentary gratification, and when begrudged, becomes the most selfish and the basest of all pleasures; and this they do in the face of remonstrance, entreaties, tears. [Pg 108] Many a married man has, as I have said, virtually committed a rape upon his wife: though the crime may be unrecognized as such by the law, it is none the less this in fact, the element of consent having been wholly wanting. ”

“ In both cases, the Mormon and the amative socialist take to themselves a lion’s share; like some of the carnivora, who seem to kill for the mere pleasure of destruction, or who slake their thirst by a mere draught of their victim’s blood and then discard the disfigured carcass, so useless to them, these men play with their toys for a while and then throw them aside, heart-broken, dishonored. ”

“ Treating of similar topics with Michelet and Jean Jacques Rousseau, I would fain, while discussing the sphere, the charms, and the complaints of woman, the force and the claims of the passion of love, whether pure or illicit, and the unalloyed, unredeemable evils of purely selfish gratification, escape all semblance alike of approving sensuality and of condemning a rational yielding to natural laws—which last, as I shall be found to define it, must be considered a far different thing from the lustful appetite of a satyr or the nightly phantom of the ascetic, who is such from cowardice alone. ”

“ There are greater dangers to the infant in male than in female births, the boy averaging a little the larger, and therefore its body, and more particularly its brain, being subjected to a greater and more prolonged pressure. Thus it is that more boys than girls are born dead, and that more boys than girls die during infancy and early childhood, their nervous system not having entirely recovered from the comparatively greater shock to which it had been exposed. If then but one woman actually belongs to each man in a properly balanced community, what right has he to a second or more? ”

“ I am no apologist for vice. A habit of evil doing is one thing, and a slip, or even a momentary plunge into the mire, is a very different thing. The last, by its very taste of earth, may engender a longing, else unknown, for heaven. For myself I have little faith in passive goodness; that is, in us men. Those who have never been exposed to temptation, from staying quietly at home or through [Pg 27] accident alone, are the soonest to yield if the tempter comes. Having never tested their strength, they find it but weakness. ”

“ The parties tire of each other, the wife wearied by her husband’s unreasonableness, and the husband, still more unreasonable, complaining of the very weariness he has himself occasioned. Cases undoubtedly occur where disability for marriage originally existed, there being some physical impediment or some disenabling disease of body or mind, such as is adjudged by courts to be a sufficient bar. As to these, however, the progress of medical and surgical science has rendered it now possible, in many instances, to effect a cure, and to change the husband’s or wife’s disappointment into joy. ”

“ And if to their startled consciousness you go on to urge the loveliness which wraps that woman round who gives herself gracefully to this, the highest function of her life, not merely loving him who gives her children to her, but loving them so much that she would rather live on the simplest food, and wear the plainest dress, draped and crowned with this maternal honor, [Pg 139] than have all luxury and all power, about an unlovely and lonely way,—I think one often may, through woman’s very weakness, appeal to and touch the most sacred impulses of her nature. ”

“ Condemn them not utterly, for though they sin, they are sinned against. Don’t load them with all the guilt, for they are already overborne. Not that sin in one excuses sin in another, but it is harder to walk with a mountain in our way, than in a smooth, well-beaten path.
Dr. Storer says, if women would avoid consequences, they must make choice of time; but in the goodness and generosity of his heart, he fails to see that no choice is allowed them in many cases. They are not independent, but subject; and all teaching tends to keep them so. ”

“ By his own life and his own example every man can show his detestation of that depravity of spirit which would turn a woman’s purity into an offence, and would nail to the block of sensuality and licentiousness the wings of angels,—so much chaster are women than ourselves. ”

“ Surely they are in evil case, and their numbers are manifold. Thank God, there are yet some royal souls true to principle.
If Dr. Storer will perform as noble service for our brothers and husbands as for ourselves, and send the two books out hand in hand, they will bring him back a rich harvest of gratitude, and amendment in morals. Let women feel that they are honored and appreciated, really, for their worth, not for their convenience, and the mass will not attempt to defeat the purposes of their being. For those to whom fashion is god, I have not a word to offer. ”