Page:Wrong and Right Methods of Dealing with Social Evil - Elizabeth Blackwell (1883).djvu/70

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CHAPTER IV.
THE REPRESSIVE SYSTEM, IN REFERENCE TO NATIONAL LAW.

The foregoing measures provide the necessary-means of checking social vice from the outside.[1]

But the measure which more than any other will attack the sources of evil, and produce radical and permanent improvement, is the protection of the young. This must be the work of National Law. The protection of the young from corruption destroys licentiousness itself. Whenever the young are educated in self-respect, and into the true human strength of virtue, then the unimpaired force of sexual passion remains as a powerful source of individual vigor, until it flows into its legitimate channel of


  1. The religious, educational, and economic reforms, which can alone destroy the evil relation of the sexes, are not touched upon in this work. Co-operation, in its widest sense, includes the Land Question, and is the true form of practical Christianity.
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