Page:Vindication Women's Rights (Wollstonecraft).djvu/251

Rh The two exes mutually corrupt and improve each other. This I believe to be an indiputable truth, extending it to every virtue. Chatity, modety, public pirit, and all the noble train of virtues, on which ocial virtue and happines is built, hould be undertood and cultivated by all mankind, or they will be cultivated to little effect. And, intead of furnihing the vicious or idle with a pretext for violating ome acred duty, by terming it a exual one, it would be wier to hew that nature has not made any difference, for that the unchate man doubly defeats the purpoe of nature, by rendering women barren, and detroying his own contitution, though he avoids the hame that purues the crime in the other ex. Thee are the phyical conequences, the moral are till more alarming; for virtue is only a nominal ditinction when the duties of citizens, hubands, wives, fathers, mothers, and directors of families, become merely the elfih ties of convenience.

Why then do philoophers look for public pirit? Public pirit mut be nutured by private virtue, or it will reemble the factitious entiment which makes women careful to preerve their reputation, and men their honour. A entiment that often exits unupported by virtue, unupported by that ublime morality which makes the habitual breach of one duty a breach of the whole moral law. Rh