Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/70

 but state sanction of vice; it is only "drilling, barracking and licensing vice" — procuring 'state-accredited instruments' for the most debasing use. Likewise, the society that assigns in its fold a recognised place and a decent position to professional lewdness—aye, confers on it the dignity of a caste and tricks it out with a 'catching' name, condemns itself as "procuress to hell." The future of a nation depends wholly upon its estimate of man—its hope of human possibilities; and the community that counts social impurity, not a temporary failing to be strenuously overcome, but a lasting frailty to be reduced to a custom, looks down upon man as an "appetite incarnate." Says an eminent medical authority, "As soon prescribe theft or lying or anything else that God has forbidden as prescribe inchastity;"* and what is public recogni-