Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/90

 pleasure purchased with another's degradation. Be the fictitious theory what it may, in real practice no female is—no female can by custom be—a musician in calling unless she also be a 'public woman' in life. It is her fallen condition that makes her eligible for that profession. Those who hastily compare her to the music-hall singer of the west, besides implying that two blacks make a white, decide the question on the ground of mere decency, forgetting that a 'fast life' is there an unacknowledged and incidental weakness, but here an avowed and necessary pre-requisite. If Manu is justified in charging with destruction of life him who cooks the meat or him who eats it, no less than him who kills the sheep, does not the guilt or the shame of the dancing-girl's life fall to the account of those who accept her 'fallen' condition as the passport to her profession as a singer or dancer?—Moreover, music, that divine art which "stoopeth so low as to soften brute beasts, yet mounteth as high as angels,"