Thomas W. Shannon

“ The truest bravery.—The boy who would expose himself to danger and death to save a girl from drowning or being crushed by a street car, is brave and deserves much praise. But he is not as brave and does not deserve as much praise, as does the boy who defends the honor and purity of a girl, not his sister. To positively refuse to allow a boy to talk about a girl in your presence in a way that you would not allow him to speak to your sister, is the courage of a knight. The good name of a girl is worth more to her than money, houses and lands. ”

“ The saddest thing in all this world is a human wreck,—a man or a woman, young or old, who is undone and who, in one or more walks of life, is a failure. There are so many of them! Mental wrecks, physical wrecks, nervous wrecks, social wrecks, business wrecks, character wrecks. The aspect of these derelicts is the more pitiable because of the possibilities before every well-born human being, who, with the endowment of intelligence and other gifts and powers bestowed upon him by a kind Creator, is capable of rising to heights of human perfection. ”

“ A young man has no moral right to demand purity of his sweetheart at the marriage altar unless he can offer her a pure life.
Danger of becoming an illegitimate father.—Finally, through illicit intercourse a young man is constantly in danger of becoming a father. An illegitimate father never loves, feeds, clothes, shelters, educates and trains his own child. Every instinct of nature demands this much of him. The child is blood of his blood, bone of his bone, life of his life; it is as truly his child as if it had been conceived in wedlock. ”

“ The great purity movement of this age, with its ever-increasing army of brave, determined and self-sacrificing authors and lecturers, is enlisting and marshalling an army of knights destined to overthrow this monster of savagery. All over this country thousands of brave boys and men are enlisting. This great twentieth century crusade against vice is summoning to its ranks every chivalrous boy and man and every good girl and woman. ”

“ Would it be wise for a young man to test the virtue of his best girl by using the methods of the seducer?—How would he feel if he knew that some young man was practicing the same test on his sister? Not very comfortable, if he had a spark of manhood about him. There is no excuse for or justice in such a test. Under the pressure of the seductive methods used, promise of marriage oft repeated, a pure girl might be induced to surrender her all to the one she loves and trusts. As a rule, such a young man would then refuse to marry the girl he has ruined. ”

“ For the first four years of adolescence there is a constant clash in her mind between the feeling of the girl that was and the woman that is to be. This is caused by the creation of a new life, the sex life, whose immediate functions is to change her from girlhood to womanhood. This new life is stimulating rapid growth and changes in many organs of the body, awakening the social nature, quickening every faculty of the mind and giving new impulses to the moral nature. No wonder that the girl does not always understand herself. ”

“ A perfect body essential to ideal motherhood.—The beautiful ideals of wifehood and the sacred ideals of motherhood can come in their fullness only to those who make themselves worthy. The broad-minded, sensible girl will not bind her young growing figure with a corset, pinch her undeveloped feet by wearing tight, high-heeled shoes, ruin her neck with high, stiff collars, expose her shoulders and bosom to the varying changes of temperature by wearing low-necked dresses, ruin her health and throttle her mind and soul in a cradle of ignorance. ”

“ Heredity in plant life.—There is operative in every sprig of grass, weed, vegetable, shrub, and tree two agencies—heredity and environment. What they are and what they are to be are wholly determined by these two agencies. In the past fifty and seventy-five years we have doubled the size, variety and quality of our vegetables and fruits. Nature gave us the wild rose, bearing a small bloom with five petals; nature and man have produced the large, shapely, fragrant, beautiful rose of the yard and garden, bearing from fifty to one hundred petals to the bloom. ”

“ There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher. There is a nobler character than that which is merely incorruptible. It is the character which acts as an antidote and preventive of corruption. Fearlessly to speak the words which bear witness to righteousness and truth and purity; patiently to do the deeds which strengthen virtue and kindle hope in your fellow men ”

“ The greatest evil.—Wonder is often expressed these days at the very rapid growth and rise of the movement known as “The Social Purity Movement,” or as stated from its negative side, as is done most frequently, as the movement for the “Suppression of the White Slave Traffic and Public Vice.” The real wonder is that the world has not risen long before this in one mighty, well-directed effort to stamp out forever and annihilate its one worst enemy; for impurity is and always has been the greatest enemy and most relentless foe of mankind. ”

“ This book is one of the most valuable ever written because it treats fully and wisely this question of personal and social purity; it points out the reefs, the bars, the snags, the icebergs, the shallow and dangerous places where human wrecks are made; it guides those who accept it as their pilot into the deep waters of an unobstructed channel where the voyage of life will be ever safe, successful, glorious. Here will be found an incentive to climb rather than to coast, an inspiration to struggle even against the current if in the struggle may be won some of the more valuable prizes of life. ”

“ Love is the strongest and at the same time the weakest, the most fickle; the most far-sighted and the blindest; the wisest and sometimes the most foolish, of human attributes. Love should listen to the voice of reason, judgment and will. ”

“ A good novel is one that is high in literary and moral tone, true to life and gives one a natural and true idea of noble manhood and pure womanhood; of their social relations in courtship, marriage and parentage. A good novel can be read by a girl to her parents or before a company of young people without embarrassment. A bad novel is one that is either highly sensational, intensely romantic, untrue to life, tainted with immorality, or in some way gives one a perverted vision of all the sacred relations of life. ”

“ To commit suicide, to murder her unborn child, to run away from home and give herself over to an immoral life only adds greater sins to the one already committed. Poor, weak, ignorant, confiding girl, her lot is now a hard one. If there were anything remotely akin to manhood in her betrayer, he would now do the only thing he can do that is right—marry her. If he refuses, then she should at once go to her parents and make the most humiliating confession a human being can make. ”

“ For a father to annually spend fifty or more dollars on tobacco or drink and refuse corresponding amounts to his wife and children to be spent needlessly by them, is as dishonest, as for a member of a firm, or the president of a bank to misappropriate the funds of a partner or a depositor.
He is to furnish moral support.—For a man to build a reputation for honesty, truthfulness, sobriety and virtue and to possess a good character are of more value to his wife and children, as a home builder, than to be able to produce large earnings and to be free with the same. ”

“ In sacred and profane history, on the farm and in the shop, behind the counter and at the bar; in Congress and in Senate, on the platform and in the pulpit; we find some splendid examples of ideal manhood. But look at humanity in the mass. How few perfect men do you find in a community! Look at the enervated and stunted fathers, the nervous and sickly mothers, the puny and weak children, the poorly developed babies and dwarfed minds, the crowded reformatories, penitentiaries and asylums. Why are sixty-seven per cent. ”

“ The fairyland, of flowery visions, rippling streams of sentiment, poetic fancies of bliss and the lunar and stellar raptures of love, must yield, after a period of such experiences, to mundane realities where these beautiful dreams terminate and air castles are destroyed and life once more becomes real. ”

“ If the faint prophecies, of the approaching advent of their first-born, thrill their lives with hopeful and joyful anticipations, marriage will now have a deeper significance, the bonds of love and dependence become stronger and the pleasures of life more real. The supremest moment of marriage comes when the young husband, who for the first time, in the birth chamber, stands by his wife’s side, holding her hands in his ”

“ But sooner or later struggle comes, appetite craves, and passion cries out, and if they are unprepared for life’s real conflict, they go down, and another failure is recorded and another wreck left to float and endanger every other craft upon life’s seas, until human wreckage is becoming so enormous that it is a question in the minds of scientists and sociologists as to how long humanity can keep up its present pace and survive the centuries. ”

“ Here is a quality which is in the greatest measure a physical endowment, yet the average woman casting about for means of cultivating it never for one moment seeks for its acquirement through physical means. All sorts of devices and medicines and complicated and costly methods are believed in and followed, as though beauty were bestowed in about the same fashion that a poster is slapped on a billboard. Gazing at the stars, she sees not what lies to her hand. ”

“ You have not the shadow of a right to indulge in any bad habit that will cause your children to receive from you some form of bad heredity. Your unborn descendants have the individual, inalienable, absolute right to inherit from you the best physical, mental and moral possibilities of manhood and womanhood. There is not a man but has the paternal instinct deeply impressed upon his very nature. ”

“ If a girl delights in reading novels that condone, excuse, or advocate a girl receiving caresses,{228} kisses and keeping late hours at night with a beau, she will not likely greet her prince at the marriage altar with the rare queenly gift of unkissed lips. If she delights to read the novels whose heroine was angelic in all things, except in the insignificant item of personal purity, she too will be in danger of lacking that same element of character when she marries, should she be so fortunate as to become a wife. ”

“ Did not God in his early revelations to his chosen people honor fatherhood as much as motherhood in his relation to the training of children? In no other way has God bestowed larger capacity, power, honor and responsibility upon man than when he made him capable of fatherhood. Fatherhood—the giving of life to another—makes man a co-worker with God in the creation of human beings. This creative relation to children gives dignity, sacredness and immeasurable responsibility to fatherhood. ”

“ The independent girl who gets out into the world with her brother, shoulders the same burdens, masters the same difficulties, fights the same battles, acquires a poise and dignity, a freedom of action and speech, a knowledge of business and economy that give her an attractiveness that the idle fashion-plate girl on the bargain counter of the marriage market cannot compete with. ”

“ Parents can form only a part of their child’s environment. Society as a whole furnishes the environment of a child. No individual, no class of men, no lawmaker, no municipality, county, state or nation has the shadow of a moral right to place by vote or official act, or permit by passive toleration a lascivious picture, a vile book, a questionable resort, a place of vice, a saloon or a gambling den that may lead a boy or girl to ruin. Whoever assumes that right is an enemy to the social and moral well-being of society. ”

“ Ever since the days of savagery, when man could swap, exchange or sell his daughters in the same way that he could his property, society has been accustomed to a double standard of morals—purity and temperance for woman, do as you please for boys and men. In the days of savagery, the value of a girl on the marriage market was determined by her being pure. ”

“ These organizations are being formed throughout Canada, and there are some being formed in the United States. The world has never offered such a grand and great opportunity for boys to become knights as it does in this century. In the days of chivalry, the young man who gave his life to protect the honor of a lady was a truer knight than the man who gave his life on the battlefield to protect his country. It takes a higher form of bravery and manhood to protect the virtue of girlhood and womanhood than it does to face whizzing bullets, booming cannons, and exploding shells. ”

“ While we may differ as to some minor particulars, we are agreed that the violation of the laws of sex is the most prolific source of wrecked manhood, and that a pure life is the only possible road to perfect manhood. I have tried to lead you to loathe and abhor all forms of sexual impurity and to form a purpose as lasting as life and as strong as death, that you will never again violate the laws of sexual purity. ”

“ You cannot understand now how much your mamma suffered in bringing you into this world. Then, both your father and mother have made many sacrifices for you and are deeply interested in your future. If you should make a shipwreck of life, I am sure that their old days would be spent in grief. How can you repay your parents for all their sacrifices? If you will keep your thoughts, words and actions pure, every time your parents see or think of you, they will be thrilled with joy and appreciation. ”

“ It appeals to every true man and woman to help carry its standards to victory, and then when ignorance shall have been abolished by knowledge, vice eradicated by virtue, disease displaced by health, and darkness dispelled by light, there shall be ushered in that Day of Days when man shall be supremely happy because he is pure. ”