Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/138

Rh rules, countersigns, and pass-words, with branches here and there all over the vast country, and members in nearly every considerable city, town, and village in the land. There are papers which advertise their regular meetings; albeit in a blind way, so that none but the initiate can understand. The principal idea that forms the soul of this infamous band is this: Young girls are by them supposed. while pure, and preceding, and just subsequent to puberty, or their natural advance into womanhood, to be endowed with the power of prolonging the life of him who shall first, by means foul or fair,—if it be possible that such an horror could—which it cannot, never can be, fair,—succeed in debauching her. It is supposed that two-fifths of her allotted term of life will, by the deed, be transferred from her to him; and that the life-stock thus obtained, can be, and is, shared by all others of the band, on the principle of magneto-vital transfusion, not of blood, but of Nerve-aura. Thus a band of forty would gain an average of one month's continued life beyond the allotted term of each, as the result of one outrage—but which they term by a gentler name. It is to this band that is to be attributed eight tenths of the child-rapes, which, by their ultra horror, so frequently shock the nerves of the people of the world. They are all sworn to secrecy, and the traitor is liable to sudden death by murder, the pistol, knife, or poison, at any moment. Perhaps their secret had never leaked out but for the confession beneath the rope, and in view of the fire that awaited him, of the wretch, whose summary, and I almost said—Righteous,—taking-off a few years ago, by an infuriated mob in the "West, is still fresh in the public mind. The crime, like that of Onan and the Pederasts, I regard as worse than murder, because it has none of the terrible motives for, or provocatives of those awful deeds, or ordinary rape: for this latter is seldom aided by the cruel knife, nor the dreadful climax crowned with inhuman butchery, as the latter nearly always has been.

Lust seems to be having a Saturnalia in these days; and in 1873 of the Christianic Era, a male human, through the Public Press, boasted that he went about the country seducing men's wives on "Principle"!! declaring he did no wrong! Onanism is mainly a physical disease; but the other crimes, including the boasting