Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/141

136 billowy expanse of beautiful, snowy, palpitating bosom, loses his seven senses and follows straight in old Adam's wake.

In the Chicago conclave, as in all my works, I pleaded for the female outcast, and held that she who through misfortune stepped aside and became a mother ere a bride, should not be held in less esteem than him who brought the trouble to her door. That it is but fair to remember our own weakness, and give the helping heart and hand. I think so still; and it was in allusion to what the leading woman of the convention said on that very point that I uttered the memorable sentence: "I will stand by this woman (naming her) in the utterance of such views until there's good skating on ice five feet thick upon the Lakes of Tophet!" and so I would, and whereever or whenever a wrong is to be righted and human justice dealt out as God's eternal is.

CVII. It is impossible for me to denounce as an unmitigated scoundrel and villain, any human being whose misconceptions of Manhood and human duty and obligation lead him to trample upon what most of us regard as holy; for we may not know the hidden causes underlying his actions. He is certainly a strange man who can justify his own or another's proceedings when lust is alone the prompter,—to first seduce every woman, married or single, that he can, and then publicly boast of it! Impregnating other men's wives; compelling men and women too to remain in ignorance as to the paternity of a given child, if such should be the issue of the "Passional attraction;" forcing an honest, hard-working man to support his harlotized wife, and the wandering "Lover's" bastards, and he, the "Wanderer," laughing at the man he has dishonored, and the wife he has degraded!—forgetting the last victims while in search of new ones; repeating the ghastly crime everywhere; encouraging his own wife to play the role of common cyprian; and scattering possible discord and desolation wherever his salacious footsteps fall! Supposing such a being to be sane, then such a thing in human shape, who would deliberately win the favors of any woman, save a very common courtesan, and then brag of it, to her shame and his own dishonor, is too small a specimen of the genus homo to be tolerated in society calling itself civilized. Savagery is his status,