Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/48

 or the first preceptress of posterity, as the neglected drudge at the hearth or the unrivalled queen of the heart, either dooms a society to the suicide of self-exhausting vice or blesses it with increasing strength and stability. National vigilance, there-fore, is nowhere else more imperatively required than in demanding thorough honesty, whole-hearted sincerity, perfect gentlemanliness, in that attachment of soul to soul which, when genuine, makes man an apprentice to Heaven, but, when spurious, earns for him the prerogative of the brute. Social purity thus acquires an honoured place in that constellation of sublime virtues without whose guidance the horoscope of a nation's greatness can never be cast. "Believe me," says an authority on this subject, "the maintenance of purity in the relations of the sexes is vital to national greatness and prosperity. For in the relations of husband to wife, parent to child, through long gradations of mutual tenderness and support, each is bound to each, and all with golden chains