Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/25

20 beauty as a trap to catch male gudgeons; who look on all men as fair game, to be lied to, and played on, generally to the tune of rustling silks, and crisp bank notes; and whose utter heartlessness belies the index of their sex. There's quite as many heartless shes as hes in the world; only that one soulless woman is a greater danger to the world than a dozen scoundrelly men; for her sex gives her points of advantage denied to all of the opposite gender. A good, true woman is a diamond; a bad and heartless one worse than Milton's Satan. Sitting near me in the eating-house where I dined yesterday, were four grave men, deliberately traducing their mother's sex. They went into paroxysms of what they called "Fun" anent pregnancy, menstruation, and sexive matters generally. They, and millions like them everywhere, in every bar-room, hotel, stable, store, grocery, consider it "smart" and manly to, even before young boys, habitually blaspheme Deity and dishonor the mothers that bore them, by irreverent, flippant and obscene speech concerning the sex. Poor wretches who disgrace the forms they bear by speaking of woman as if she were nothing but a target for filthy tongues to hurl their venom at; or, at best, as destined victims to their own abominable lubricity; mere extinguishers of the bale-fires rioting in their own veins,—the venomous fever-passions of their own gross natures, and far more ignoble than those of the four-footed dogs that run our streets. It made me sick; it always did—to listen to the outrageous talk going on everywhere about women, whenever two or more human males of the "civilized" kind happen to get together for an hour. Even stately officials, fathers of families, do; and if not, at least often allow it in their presence, which is almost as bad. So almost universal is this foul talk, to be heard everywhere, at any time,—ribald, coarse, obscene, and altogether devilish,—that it is no wonder that the public mind is debauched and totally demoralized.

It is a curious fact that people will talk smut, laugh heartily at coarse jokes and improbable stories concerning the eternal God's method of peopling the worlds, and filling up the starry domes beyond the grave, when of all human deeds it is the most sacred,