Doubtless it is a melancholy task for the Historian to follow up and reveal the moral degradation of Peoples and Nations even to its most revolting details, and the Ethical philosopher might find not a few objections to raise against an undertaking of the kind. None the less is the Physician compelled to search out under all forms the traces of Vice in its most secret hiding-places, and so fathom the nature of the Disease in each individual case; and still more with Nations as a whole is he permitted,—nay! it is his bounden duty, to fix his eyes on their doings and those of each of their component parts. Thus only can he detect the nature of a Disease, which destroys the marrow of Peoples more surely and more terribly for this very reason that its genesis proceeds in secret.
The reproach that the Moral repute of Nations is hereby ruined, and the general mass saddled with the guilt of vices which of course only individuals ever committed, has no place here, for it is solely through the precise knowledge of the doings of these individuals that a due appreciation is possible of the danger that threatens the whole body politic from this source. Had not a false ideal of Morality hitherto restrained the individual, as it did the mass, from speaking out the truth, we should be much farther advanced than we are in the knowledge of a Disease, whose characteristic symptom it is that those who suffer from it endeavour, as far as they possibly can, to conceal its cause!
The imaginative son of the South, already of his very nature prone to attribute all that his unpractised intellect failed to comprehend to the influence of a special Deity, was bound to do this pre-eminently in the case of an act that is even yet to us moderns wrapped in impenetrable obscurity,—the act of generation and conception. How could he think of this Deity[12], that used his own body as its instrument and in so doing bestowed on him the highest pleasure of the senses, otherwise than under the shape of a Being equally alluring and loving, convinced that this Being must be infinitely more alluring[13] than even the beloved form that he held in his arms? “The young man’s fancy” craves a lovely maiden; the maiden needed a loving sister, into whose arms she could trustingly throw herself, who intuitively divined all her soft, sweet emotions, to express which she sought in vain for words, which she scarce dared to own to herself that she was conscious of, and understood them!