Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/151

146 and I have quite enough experience to satisfy me that those who do, or who wink at, such deeds, are, many of them church-goers, full of deadly piety, who, behind the scenes, revel in debaucheries dreadful enough to shame a Satyr. Not a few of them are "Reformers," in public preaching perfect purity, but in private practising promiscuity, and the very ones—if male—with whom no decent, respectable woman could be alone with ten minutes, save at the absolute certainty of being insulted by the most villainous proposals.

In my Medical practice, and that of Teacher, three classes of persons mainly sought relief or counsel: 1st. Wives whose daily life was a living death; whose "homes" were tophets in petto; and whose "Husbands"—sic?—in one respect treated them worse than they did the dumb brutes in barn or stable—poor, waxen-faced martyrs, worse than sacrificed and slaughtered on the altars of a legalized sensualism, so low and mean, selfish, exacting, as to even shame the beasts of the field; and these wives human! 2d. Men and women whose hearts and souls yearned for affection which they found not; and which they were denied by those from whom they had the right to expect it!—people who were either fretting to death under the awfully galling yoke of a bad marriage; or who wanted advice to guide them to the desired haven—and heaven, of Marriage, as God intended it should be. 3d. But by far the largest class of callers and correspondents must be reckoned that vast mass of people whose entire gender-nature had been broken up, or down, and demoralized until they had become mere phantom men and women, incapable of realizing the sublime meaning of the words Sex and Marriage; and so disordered and diseased that Hope itself, with folded wing and fouled anchor, perched upon a bleak cliff on some island far away. O my God! what utter horror and blank despair have I seen gleam from the eyes of thousands!—victims all,—to vampiral depletion; nervous and vital exhaustion; impotentia, barrenness; diseases of uterus, vulva, ovaries, kidneys, prostate, heart, lungs, brain—the terrible personal hades outgrown from society, society, society, with its falses and shams; its money-marriages; its deceit and hypocrisy, denouncing the Wrong with the breath, but with act encouraging concubinage, cyprianism,