Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/73

Our Loss of Nerve responsibility. We do wrong when we give her a plausible excuse for following the line of least resistance, when we blight her courage by permitting her to think that her moral welfare lies in any hands but her own. The choice between poverty and dishonesty, the choice between poverty and prostitution is not an "open question." It is closed, if human reason and human experience can speak authoritatively upon any subject in the world.

The injury done by loose thinking and loose talking is irremediable. When the State Senate Vice Investigating Committee of Illinois permitted and encouraged an expression of what it was pleased to call the "shop-girl's philosophy," it sowed the seeds of mischief deep enough to insure a heavy crop of evil. I quote a single episode, as it was reported in the newspapers of March 8th, 1913,—a report which, if inaccurate in detail, must be correct in substance. A young 57